The Hunger (25 page)

Tom seasoned and lit a cigar. Now was a good time for his one shot of the day. He reached up and opened the window so that Sarah wouldn’t complain too much.

But she didn’t complain at all. Tom was surprised to see that she was asleep. So suddenly, poor, tired Sarah. He got his raincoat from the hook on the door and covered her with it. He would let her sleep, call Rush in an hour or so. There was no need to hurry. This latest discovery propelled him into a very strong position. Obviously the Blaylock project should be under a special administrator. He had no illusions about getting Hutch to resign, but he was sure that he could capture for himself management of the project, and take Gerontology along with it. That would leave Hutch on the trailing edge, administering the conventional parts of the clinic, the parts that were of absolutely no interest to the Dr. Rushes of this world.

Tom sucked his cigar, inhaling deeply, feeling the warmth of the smoke in his lungs. He exhaled. All forbidden, all dangerous. It was so typical of the human predicament that something as pleasurable as a cigar would have to be so damn unhealthy.

Largely to stop feeling guilty about the cigar he turned his mind to the more puzzling aspects of Miriam Blaylock. She had certainly had a hell of an effect on Sarah.

There was something about Miriam that recalled Granny Haver after her husband and all of her friends were dead. Granny had seemed as bright and spry as ever, laughing all the time, raising her flowers, baking pie after pie. And yet, if you really looked at Gran Haver — looked beyond the tantalizing hints of former beauty and the present ruins — you got a hell of a chill.

Late one winter she screamed horribly. Tom’s first waking thought was fire. By the time they had gotten upstairs she was dead, not of fire but of something else. Her eyes were wide, her hands like claws. Had she had a nightmare, died of fright?

Tom had helped his father carry her to the parlor. The wind had howled and he had felt presences. A nightmare — or a night visit?

Afterward he had always assumed that Gran Haver had died with some hidden thing on her conscience. That scream had been her last utterance on earth, her first in hell.

“Who are you, Miriam?” he asked softly, chuckling to himself. ‘OK, scientist,’ he thought, ‘here you are ready to believe that she can hear you, read your mind.’

Well, why not?

What was “this world”? The hospital? This office? The warm taste of the cigar? What, really?

Tom reassured himself that he was grounded in the practical. It was possible that this planet did indeed hold two species who were superficially similar. The perfect predator would be indistinguishable from his prey. That would be beautiful. Once in college someone had asked the question, what if the essence of reality is belief? That which is believed is real. What if real witches flew on wings of belief through the nights of fourteenth-century Europe and consorted with demons in a real hell? Or if the gods really walked among the Greeks?

Or Miriam Blaylock among us?

Sarah believed in Miriam, that was the source of her fear. Perhaps Miriam was what you wanted her to be —
whatever
you wanted. Perhaps that was the definition of a monster.

S
WABIA:
1724

It is freezing cold in the carriage. A candle guttering in a socket is the only light. Thick fog chokes the way. Trees pass like shadowy towers, their branches swishing down the sides of the coach.

Across from Miriam sit her three sisters. Her brother is in her arms. She found them in Paris, half-starved, subsisting on the flesh of diseased beggars, constantly on the run. The girls huddle in their broadcloth cloaks, their faces the color of stone. Her brother leans stiffly against her. She touches his cheek, wiping away the dew that has settled there.

Her hand snaps back, she comes fully aware. Trembling, she touches him again.

The skin is like a mask stretched on a skull. And the mouth is opening.

She screams, but the sound is choked by a violent lurch of the carriage. The driver has whipped the horses up. Wolves stand beside the road, dozens and dozens of them. The horses bolt, the carriage careens.

Without a word, their faces fixed in grief, Miriam’s sisters open the door and throw out their brother’s body.

Miriam protests. They are not yet animals! She unlatches her own door and jumps from the carriage. Her silks splash in the muddy road. The carriage sways off.

Suddenly, quiet. Ten feet away lie his huddled ruins. She can see the blowing breath of the wolves. There is such serenity in their faces. That, and death. She can smell it in the wet air, an exhalation of demons. One of them dashes up and worries her brother’s filthy gabardine cloak.

She drives it off, drags her brother from the sucking mud. Bearing him in her arms, she begins to plod down the road. Her heart is dull with hopeless sorrow. Ahead the carriage has stopped, rising enormous in the fog. She can hear the driver singing some lament of his wild Carpathian people.

Without a word she returns to her place, hugging the withered remains close to her. Her sisters sit bowed, their shame too great for them to bear looking at her.

A little before noon they arrive in a village. The driver climbs down and doffs his filthy cap. “Zarnesti,” he says. Miriam hands out a silver florin, holding it between her fingers so that he can take it without touching her.

Zarnesti is a poor place deep in Swabia. They have come here following rumors that their kindred have found a measure of safety in these wild regions. The village reeks, it is sick and starving. There are wattled houses here and there and in the center a church made of logs. Behind the church is a long building, an inn. On all sides the forest threatens. In the shadows of the closer trees there are ruined cottages. Miriam’s sisters cross the clearing, their cloaks trailing in the muck. They are followed by hungry pigs.

Miriam leaves her brother in the carriage and hurries to catch up with his sisters. They are so desperate that she is afraid they will ignore her careful plan of attack.

They are negotiating with the innkeeper, their high voices mingling with the screams of birds in the forest. The innkeeper grovels when he is given a gold penny. He pulls back a greased cloth that covers the doorway, and the four of them stoop to enter. The odor forces Miriam to breathe in gasps. She sees that her sisters’ nostrils are dilating toward a young woman who is stirring a stewpot. Wicks gutter on the two tables in the room; the walls are slick with grease. When she notices them the young woman drops her spoon and comes over. She is covered with boils. Her mouth hanging open, she knees before them and stretches out her arms like a supplicant. She is asking to take their cloaks.

One of her sisters inclines her head, her eyes avid. Miriam frowns furiously. Would she really take this vile thing?

Her sisters ignore her. They move like shadows in the smoky darkness. Silently she pleads with them. Their hearts do not feel her
touch
. They continue searching the darkness for hidden treasure. Knives and eyes and teeth gleam in the flickering light.

It is a dance, Miriam moving from one to the other. Both turn away.

A shout of furious pain is suddenly stifled. The innkeeper has been taken. Then the coachman, too late in rushing for the door. Then, in a filthy corner, they descend on the girl. But something is wrong. A struggle starts, the girl squeals and skitters, knocking one of the wicks to the floor, spreading coals across the dirt to roll under her attackers’ dresses.

While they are jumping away from this danger she tears a hole in the wattled wall. Her gray form bobs among the ferns as she disappears into the forest behind the inn.

Now they must hurry, before she raises the alarm. All of this country lives in terror of their kind. Packs of them have been ranging through Swabia, Transylvania, Hungary, Slovakia, falling on villages and taking whole populations. They Sleep in graves to deter the superstitious, who will not approach a graveyard at night without much priestly preparation. When a village is depopulated they pull it down and throw the remains into the river, going on to the next town up the road.

Rumor has spread through the mountains. The whole region is obsessed with them.

It is a bad time for their kind. They had grown used to anarchy in the centuries that followed the fall of Rome. Now that government is returning to Western Europe they have been forced to the hinterlands.

Not a day passes that they do not have news of disaster. Ancient names are dying, names taught Miriam by her father: Ranftius, Harenberg, Tullius. All Europe is inflamed against them. Idiots creep about with crosses and garlic, spouting bad Latin.

Idiots though they be, the Inquisition is winning. Not a town west of the Oder has not burned at least a few.

The church bell begins to peal.

There is a horrible shriek at the door. Miriam’s sisters, now wild to escape, throw back the greasy cloth. A crowd of thirty or forty people is outside, standing around the overturned brougham. Her brother is being handed among them, his clothes being ripped from his body.

Suddenly, there is a shaft of light — other villagers have broken into the rear wall of the inn. Miriam moves quickly. She digs herself into a pile of hay in a corner. The roar of excited voices fill the room.

Heartsick and terrified, Miriam huddles in absolute stillness. The voices drown the frantic shrieking of her sisters.

Protect them, her father had said.

How can she face his memory now? And what of her mother, who died during the birth of the triplets? Was her death pointless?

Miriam is stronger than the three of them together because she has for a long time been better fed. But is she strong enough to free them from these maddened villagers?

The voices have become joyous as the villagers loot the carriage and rob the captured sisters. They are finding a few pitiful gold pennies, to them the treasure of kingdoms.

Suddenly men and women bustle over and pull away some of Miriam’s cover. She prepares herself to face them, but they rush off. The straw is to start a fire. They have not noticed her.

Against one wall of the inn stands a great iron spit, used no doubt when this village had porkers large enough to roast. There is crackling as the straw blazes up around logs.

Realizing what is going to happen, Miriam’s sisters begin to bellow her name. “MIRIAM! MIRIAM!” A part of her is secretly glad that they do not know where she is hiding. She tells herself over and over that she cannot save them, she cannot prevail against fifty people. She lies amid the fleas and lice, feeling rats run over her from time to time, listening as her siblings bawl their pleas for help.

She has never been so needed. Again she remembers her father. He was a hero.

She begins to remove the straw, starts to sit up. But she freezes, the spectacle before her is so awful. Her youngest sister is naked. They lash her to the spit. Then she is laid across the flames.

A great sizzling starts, like parchment burning. She shrieks and shrieks, her urine steaming into the flames, her head shaking, her hair smoking and red with fire.

They damp the fire and slowly begin to turn the spit.

Her screams continue a long, long time. After an hour her voice breaks and all that issues are hisses.

Miriam’s other two sisters slump in a corner, tied as tightly together as two geese on market day.

It is night before all three are roasted.

Miriam has bitten her lips raw to keep from screaming. Her whole body buzzes with the pain of a thousand flea bites. Until late at night the room is filled with the sharp odor of cooking flesh and the gay shouts of the crowd. Of course they are gay, they have captured gold and been sated with her sisters, more meat than they have eaten in years. As dawn threatens, the villagers drink their foul black beer and have their couplings. Then they sleep.

Miriam bursts from her hiding place and runs. She lifts her brother’s body from the mud where it has been thrown and carries him into the forest, rushing as fast as possible through the trees, wild to escape this horrible place. Her heart aches for her lost sisters, but she dares not even approach their bones.

Soon she is in a dawn-filled glade. Flowers bob at her feet, the Carpathian massif rises in the clear sky. Before that majesty she shouts her grief. The sound is absorbed.

She is flooded with an agony of loneliness. Perhaps she should deliver herself to the villagers. But she cannot go back, cannot give herself to the flames. The beauty of life remains. Let the dead be their own heroes.

With her brother in her arms she sets out to cross the mountains, intending to seek a better land beyond.

JOHN HAD WAITED to return until Miriam was gone. It was the safest way. It was easy to defeat the electrostatic barrier. He came in through the disused tunnel he had used for his escape. He had a mission here. He went through the silent rooms. Scattered around the library were newspapers, all containing sensational stories about his crimes. He sneered at her caution. This was a big city. The police had a long way to go before they brought him to ground.

He paused, shut his eyes. Another hallucination was beginning. This time a healthy girl of about fourteen swam into view before him. John ignored the delicious figment, impatient with this latest side effect of his desperate hunger. She stepped forward, her smell filling his nostrils. It was maddening; he swiped angrily at the empty air. The hunger cloyed and strained within him. Soon he must take to the streets again.

He went upstairs, paused in the door of their bedroom. Although he was on his way to the attic he wasn’t in any hurry. There was something to be savored in how he intended to harm her.

Tom had coaxed Sarah out to a celebration after his conversation with Sam Rush. She had wanted to stay with her lab group, but he had managed to convince her that the project could go through its next phase without her in attendance. Her failure to get Miriam Blaylock to return to Riverside had stopped much of the work anyway. Without a subject, they couldn’t very well make observations.