The Hunger (8 page)

An awful shudder coursed through her body. That was it, rape in the night. You heard about it on the news, talked about it in the office. She fought the wild terror, tried to keep her cool. The intruder turned on her bedside lamp and shined it in her face. He wasn’t going to allow himself to be seen.

The blade of a surgical scalpel appeared in the light, hung there a moment, and was withdrawn. Francie felt tears pop into her eyes. A strange, low noise filled the room.

“Shut up!”

She hadn’t realized she could make such a sound. Desolation filled her. Nevertheless, her mind kept working, trying to come up with some appeal that would save her.

It smelled as if there were something dead in here. She was aware of movement behind the light, then she could feel him at work on her nightgown. By looking down her front she could see his hands as he used the scalpel to cut away the cloth. That awful instrument could only be for one purpose; she just knew he was going to kill her. When she felt his hands pushing away the nightgown, exposing her nakedness, she moaned in misery — but also felt a horrible, unwanted tingle. This nightmare had another aspect. She began to anticipate seeing him, she visualized his sweating body plunging into the little pool of light. It made her angry. She had never imagined she could feel this debased, this betrayed.

As he bent toward her she caught a glimpse of him. At that moment Francie Parker, twenty-two years old, the frequent object of male desire, capable of eighty words a minute on an IBM Selectric, saw something that instantly and utterly shattered her.

The shock stopped her heart. All that escaped of the wild cry her mind had formed was a gurgling sigh.

When she died like that, before she should have, he growled his rage and stabbed wildly, hoping to get her before the last second.

He failed. Then he took her as best he could, keeping at it until she crackled like paper.

At four o’clock on a wet morning, Sutton Place was empty. Elegant windows were dark. Nothing moved except when an occasional gust of wind from the night’s storm stirred some bit of paper or a broken leaf. Behind one window in one of the charming little houses that line the east side of the street a figure stood, absolutely motionless. Miriam was rigid with concentration, feeling the eerie echo of a distant
touch
. It was a facility she shared only with her own race, and some of the higher primates. Man, while capable of learning
touch
from an adept, was normally mute. But this
touch
was real, pulsating on the darkness.

One of her own kind?

Since the bloodbath of the Middle Ages the remaining members of her race lived solitary lives, each wrapped in his own longings and tragedies, an autumnal species too frightened of persecution to dare to foregather.

“We are not evil,” she thought as the strange
touch
rose higher and higher, “we also are part of the justice of the earth.”

Fifty years ago she had seen one of her own kind, a tall figure alone at the railing of the liner
Berengaria
, looking toward her on the dock. For an instant they had
touched
, sharing their private hungers, and then it was lost, the ship’s whistle sounding, the wake disappearing in the moonlight, journey without end.

Her tragic human companions were her only comfort. They could not conceive of the loneliness that drove her to transform them, to create her own image within them.

She loved them — and had destroyed each of them.

It could not continue, not any longer. She could not stand to live with Alice, knowing all the while that she was going to end up like the others, like John.

The
touch
interrupted her thoughts again, running like thunder in the mountains, as huge and wild as night.

So it was an animal. And it was in agony. Absolute agony. The kind that would be felt by one deprived of Sleep. But there were no transformed animals.

Or were there?

Sarah Roberts, blindly experimenting, might have accomplished some rough approximation of transformation. So one of her beasts was meeting its end in a filthy cage. She felt the lost forests in its
touch
, the wide leafy spaces and the strength of the iron bars.

Her eyes widened, her hands snapped to the bars that protected her own window, closed around the cold iron. The window, its frame and the whole wall shook.

Soon after dawn Tom Haver opened his eyes. He had been trying not to wake up, but it was no use. The room was suffused with dull light. He looked at the clock. Seven-ten. Past time to get up. He swung out of bed and lurched in for his shower. The night had been spent sleeplessly in a fog of strategies, trying to find some way of extending Sarah’s appropriation. Every road led back to the Budget Committee and Hutch.

He paused in the door to the bathroom and looked back at her. There came to him a feeling so strange and tender that it seemed as if it had entered from another personality, not his own. He found that he wanted very badly for her to succeed.

He went about his shower in a sort of fury, lathering himself, rinsing, drying, all the while wretched for her and angry that he must suffer on her behalf.

When he opened the door the smell of breakfast drifted faintly in. None of the usual singing, however, arrived with it. She was not such a cheerful riser today. He wished that he didn’t feel so sorry for her; it reduced her, enlisted a kind of professional distance. A doctor’s habit to withdraw one’s emotions from the reality of pain.

“Happy meltdown,” she said when he arrived in the kitchen.

“Meltdown?”

“What’s happening to my lab is the equivalent of a reactor meltdown. Reaches critical mass and sinks to the center of the earth. Buried. Gone.”

There were a hundred encouraging lies he could not tell. “I’ll call you as soon as the meeting’s over,” was all that came out.

Once again he was cheating her. Why not simply let her know how he felt? Why was that such a frightening thought? Emotions confirm things, that was the trouble. Death, for example, always seems like a lie, a game of disappearance, until one’s grief makes it true.

The phone rang. Tom blinked at the intrusion, snatched up the handset. A strange, whispering voice asked for Sarah. Her face puckered with details of concern; she was obviously hoping that some miracle had happened at the lab. “Luck,” Tom said as he handed her the receiver.

She grabbed it, her expression now avid. After a long pause she murmured an assent and hung up. Swallowing the last of her coffee, she ran into the bedroom. “More trouble with Methuselah,” she said as she pulled a raincoat from the closet. Her eyes were cold, bright.

“He’s not dead?”

She glanced away. “No,” she said with unnatural loudness, “something else.”

“Who was that on the phone?”

“Phyllis.”

“She sounded like a zombie.”

“Thirty hours on the job. I don’t have a very clear idea what’s going on over there, but —”

“Maybe there’s some hope. A last-minute breakthrough. Am I right?”

She laughed, a sniff, a toss of the head, and then strode past him without a further word. The front door slammed. He located his own raincoat, crumpled amid jeans and coat hangers on the closet floor. By the time he reached the elevator bank she had gone.

Alice was listening less than carefully as Miriam read to her from
Sleep and Age
. That didn’t matter, the girl’s mind was wonderfully absorptive. Miriam glanced at her, full of the pleasure of being near her. Miriam loved her sullen intelligence, her youth and haunting beauty. “ ‘The key to the relationship between sleep and age appears to lie in the production of the transient protein group associated with inhibition of lipofuscins. At the molecular level the buildup of lipofuscin is responsible for the loss of internal circulation that leads to cellular morbidity. Thus, it is the prime factor in the overall process called “aging,” being responsible for effects as subtle as the reduction in the responsiveness of organs to hormonal demands and as gross as senile dementia.’

“Why do you think I read you this material, Alice?”

“You want to test my boredom threshold?”

“What if I told you it might mean you would never get old. Never get gray hair. Stay young forever.”

“Not thirteen!”

“No. It wouldn’t interrupt the process of maturing, only getting old. Would you like that — staying twenty-five or so forever?”

“For my life? Sure.”

“And your life would be forever. You should thank Doctor Sarah Roberts. She’s discovered a great secret.” It was extremely tempting to go on, to tell Alice the truth: that she could choose immortality right now, that Miriam could confer it.

If Dr. Roberts’ data were correct, she might even be able to make it a lasting gift.

Alice sighed. “I’m not sure I’d want to live forever. I mean, it’s not all that great, is it?”

Miriam was surprised and a little sickened. Never for a moment had she considered that Alice would hold such an opinion. The will to live was universal. Her own race, as ancient as it was, had fought valiantly through the persecutions of the Middle Ages, had fought despite their low birthrate and probable extinction. The very last of them willed only one thing: to continue. “You don’t really mean that, do you, Alice?” There was anger in her voice, anger she had not intended.

The girl reacted.“You sound funny, Miriam. I wish you’d act normal.”

Miriam did not reply directly. Instead she returned to the book. “‘The mystery of how and why lipofuscin inhibition declines as a cellular system ages is the core of the problem. We have determined that the duration and depth of sleep are related to the amount of lipofuscin produced, with deeper sleep producing the greater level of inhibition.’”

“OK, I guess I’m supposed to ask a question. Why are you so strange?”

Miriam laughed at the audacity of it, felt herself flush. “You have a lot to learn. A lot. Just don’t doubt me. You’ll find everything I do is for a purpose.” Alice smiled, her face suddenly filled with an innocence so beautiful that Miriam involuntarily
touched
her.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Alice clasped her hands around her knees and giggled. “You and John really are strange. You make me feel weird.”

John’s name, intruding so suddenly, broke Miriam’s mood. She got up and put the book away, then went to the bay window that overlooked the garden. These cool, wet springs favored the strains of roses she had developed in Northern Europe, but not the Roman and Byzantine ones. They would require careful attention if there wasn’t some warmer weather soon.

She longed to be among them now, pruning them and forgetting her tragedies. If only John had lasted a few more years the discoveries suggested in
Sleep and Age
would have saved him. Miriam had hoped once to find an antidote for John and apply it before it was too late. She was convinced that some substance such as lipofuscin must be responsible. In her own body the immunity was permanent, but in a human being the Sleep only delayed it for a time. Then all the familiar symptoms appeared: Sleep ended, and with its termination came rapid aging, desperate hunger, destruction.

Her throat was tight, she could not help but sink into the grief of the situation. She forced her mind back to her roses; once she had created an arbor all the way to the river. They had had their own dock then and kept a pretty red-and-black steam launch with a furious little brass engine. What fun it had been pounding along in that hilarious boat with its clattering steam valves and gushing torrent of black smoke . . .

They had gone on fine afternoons to what used to be called Blackwell’s Island. When evening fell they hunted couples in the woods.

Miriam heard Alice shift in her chair. Thank God for her, such an ideal replacement. She had a truly predatory psyche, something that was rare in humankind. John’s unexpected decline greatly increased her significance. As had been the case with them all, it would be unwise to explain very much to Alice. A confrontation would eventually occur, but it must wait for the right context. The truth was somewhat horrible to them, of course, but that was only part of the problem. More than inducing them to accept its ugliness, she had to teach them to see its beauty.

They had to want what Miriam had to give, to want it as they never wanted anything before, with their minds, their souls, every cell of their flesh.

Miriam was good at helping people discover their true lust for existence. Layers of inhibition had to be sloughed away until, unexpectedly, the subject found his deepest craving exposed to the raw light and air. Then the ancient instincts would come pouring forth. Beside them all aspirations, all experiences, would seem embedded in dark amber, utterly dead, not even worth the forgetting.

It was a beautiful and undeniable truth. If she wished to possess one of them, she had only to
touch
, to caress and cajole. Eventually, the savage inner being would rise to the stroking and Miriam would own somebody new. “It’s a marvelous afternoon, isn’t it?”

“It’s OK.”

The flat little reply ignored all the magics in which Miriam knew how to swim. It saw only passing time, the hours. The magnificent secret was context. Miriam perceived time as a vast caravan containing the richness of all moments, luxurious with the soft hours of the past and the fair future too.

It was tempting, very tempting, to take a first step with Alice this very moment. But prudence must reign, John came first. And the question of the science . . . Miriam must make her approach to Sarah Roberts, must find the link that would complete her chain. There was a matter of responsibility, after all. She drew them with a promise of immortality. The full truth was hidden until they could not turn back. For all these years the lie had been a clanging note. Now it might be changed, made harmonious with the whole. Alice would be the first one to join Miriam forever and fully.

The first one. She looked at the soft blond features in a rapture of the most poignant love. Alice came to her and they stood arms entwined at the window that overlooked the garden.