The Hunger

by Whitley Strieber

  “Thank you, ma’am. Now I hope you won’t worry instead of kiss me.” Her eyes at last seemed happy. He kissed her lips, puckering them with the heels of his hands.

  With an annoyed little jolt he realized that she was staring past him, at the damn monitor. “My God, Tom, what did she just pick up?”

  It was a book. Tom knew it perfectly well. “Was there a copy in the patients’ lounge?”

  “Of my book? My book? Certainly not, it’s not for patients.” She looked wildly around the room. “This is crazy! What kind of game is she playing?”

  Miriam lay reading, her bottom lip caught prettily between her teeth, her eyes avid with concentration. Sarah put her head down on the desk and let out a long, racking sigh, almost a sob. Tom leaned close to her. “I’m too tired for games,” she said. “A stupid woman and her stupid games.”

  “Honey, why don’t you just knock off. Go home or go back to the lab. Let me deal with Mrs. Blaylock alone.”

  “I ought to be here. I’m the expert.”

  “This place is loaded with good doctors. Me, for example.”

  Sarah sat up, shook her head. “I accepted the case,” she said, “I can’t think of one valid reason to abandon it.”

  Miriam closed her copy of Sleep and Age and lay back. The bed was tolerable, but best of all was this wonderful feeling of safety. Her own house was a superbly designed refuge, but a hospital with its large staff and twenty-four-hour operation was almost as good. No night clerks drowsing while fire spread up the stairwells as in a hotel. No robbers prowling the halls or defective wiring electrocuting the unwary bather. Hospitals were safe enough for a Sleeper. Even after burying John in the tunnel, she did not feel completely comfortable at home. He must yet die more completely, he knew the house’s security system too well. She relaxed into welcome peace. Maybe this time she would dream as she once had, of the sylvan blessings of long ago, or of the endless promise of the future. The unquiet dreams were most frequent during bad times. Her Sleep was more persistent when she was tense. She might need it as often as every twelve hours at the height of a crisis instead of every twenty-four. The harder things got, the more it interrupted.

  She snuggled down into the bed, smelling the starched sheets, quivering with delight at the safety and thinking of Sarah, poor girl, who was about to walk through the fire.

  The patient interrupted their conversation; professionalism demanded that personal matters now be put aside. The electroencephalograph, monitoring brain waves, was showing a pattern characteristic of drowsiness.

  “There goes a roll,” Sarah said as the electro-oculograph jiggled. Mrs. Blaylock’s eyes were rolling into her head, an indication of stage one sleep. Sarah cleared her throat and swigged some coffee. Tom had to admire her. She was bursting apart inside and he damn well knew it. But you couldn’t tell it now. That was a pro. The alpha-wave arrhythmias that indicated dozing sleep appeared. Then the skin galvanometer jumped and the heart rate increased.

  “Oops. Must have gotten stuck with a pin. She wearing any pins?”

  “The electrodes must be bothering her.”

  After a moment the electro-oculograph indicated left-to-right motion. “She’s reading again.”

  Sarah shook her head. Tom wished he could find some way to lighten Sarah’s mood. “At least she respects your work. She’s reading it.”

  “I wish I knew more about her, Tom.”

  Behind them Geoff Williams from the blood analysis lab cleared his throat. “I hope I’m not disturbing any lovey-lovey, dears, but I have a problem for you. You got the wrong blood.”

  “What wrong blood? What’re you talking about?”

  “The blood you gave me marked 00265 A-Blaylock M.? It isn’t human blood.”

  “Of course it is. I took it out of that patient right there.” Sarah pointed at the monitor.

  Geoff pulled out his computer printout. “You’ll note from the machine’s attempt to analyze it that something is amiss.” The sheet showed the blood’s ID and then a list of zeros where the component values should have been.

  “Machine’s on the fritz,” Tom said, turning back to the monitors. “Another roll,” he said. “She’s trying again. Sweet dreams, dearie.”

  “No computer problem, Doctor. I ran the test program and then ran other bloods back to back with yours. You did not give me human blood. Whatever this is, the machine cannot analyze it.”

  Sarah looked up at him. “You know, I seem to remember a time when blood analysis was done by hand, when it was between a man and his centrifuge.”

  “I did it by hand too. Here’s what I found.” He thrust a sheet of numbers at them. “It isn’t a human type as far as I’m concerned. It has a whole extra component of leukocytes, for one thing.”

  “Could a human being survive with it?”

  “It’s a better blood than ours. Very similar, but more disease resistant. The cellular material is more dense, the plasma less. It would take a strong heart to pump the stuff and there might be some minor capillary clogging, but whoever had it in their veins could forget about sickness if their heart was strong enough to pump the stuff.”

  Tom gestured to the screen. “We have a patient right before our eyes who is clearly thriving with it in her veins. Before we draw any further conclusions I think we’d better retest.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s her blood,” Sarah snapped. “I didn’t make a mistake.” Tom blinked — he was surprised at the ferocity in her voice.

  Geoff must have heard it too, because he paused a moment before speaking again, and then went on very gently. “This cannot have come from that patient, Sarah. If it did then she isn’t a human being. And I can’t believe that.”

  “It could be a congenital defect, or a hybrid.”

  Geoff shook his head. “First off, we’re dealing with a very dense blood. A human heart could pump it, but just barely. The component mix is all off. The counts don’t make sense. Sarah, it cannot be human blood. The closest would be one of the great apes —” “It’s not from one of my monkeys,” she said woodenly. “I don’t make mistakes that simple.” Her voice lowered. “I wish I did.”

  She took Geoff with her and got another sample. Mrs. Blaylock had fallen asleep only a few minutes before. When the needle entered her arm her lips parted but her eyelids never flickered. Tom watched the graphs for some sign of disturbed sleep. After taking samples from rhesus monkeys Sarah must be a true expert. Certainly it wasn’t waking up Mrs. Blaylock.

  Tom was about to turn away from the graphs when he paused. A thrill, as if of danger, had coursed through him. He found himself wishing that Sarah would hurry up and get out of there. When she did return he nodded toward the readout.

  “There’s nothing right about her pattern, is there?” she said promptly.

  “I’d say she was in coma except for those voltage bursts in the delta wave.” Delta was the indicator of conscious mental activity. “It’s like a dead brain that’s somehow retaining consciousness.”

  “Isn’t that a very muted sleep spindle in alpha?”

  “It could be background noise. A passing radio cab, for example. We’ve had that problem before. It’s too low-level.”

  “Respiration’s almost nil. Tom, it’s quiet in that room. So very quiet. It’s rather horrible.”

  “Don’t go in there again.”

  He felt her eyes on him. “OK,” she said softly. This time she put her hand in his and they looked steadily at each other. There was no need to speak.

  LONDON: 1430

  Yellow light filters through the curtains. She had drawn them against the noise and stench of the street. Although it is May, sullen, cold rain sweeps from the sky. Across Lombard Street the bells of St. Edmund the King ring the changes. Miriam has been almost mad with the damp, the filth and the endless ringing bells — and the fact that Lollia has been taken to the torturer.

  She rushes out into the garden behind the house to escape the ringing. But here resoun
d the bells of St. Swithin’s across the reeking waters of the Lang Bourne. Rats slither away as she moves among her beloved roses. Six of the plants are already aboard ship, these others must be left behind. She sobs as she paces, horrible images of that poor, wonderful girl lying in a rack, her hands bulging purple in iron pilliwinks.

  They have overstayed here; long ago they should have left London, left England. There are places in the wild east of Europe where it is still possible for Miriam’s kind to thrive. They had been planning, considering and suddenly here was Lollia, captured as a witch.

  A witch, of all the superstitious blather!

  “Lady, farthing, please farthing.”

  She tosses some copper to the ratcatchers who have begun to creep up from the Bourne. Swarms of them live off the rats of the open sewer. She has seen them devour rats raw. She has seen them drain the blood of rats down the throats of their children.

  She has heard their songs: “He that will an alehouse keep, sing hey nonny nonny . . .”

  Occasionally, the King’s men come and kill some of them. But they multiply in the benighted ruin that is fifteenth-century London. Everything is wrong here. Death and disease stride through the populace. Houses burn nightly and the rains bring the roar of buildings collapsing. The mud is always ankle deep and full of rotting garbage. The streets are sewers. Wild pigs, pickpockets and cutpurses seethe in the markets. At night come the cutthroats and the shrieking mad. Over it all there hangs an endless brown pall of peat smoke. The city does not rumble as Rome did or clatter as did the marble streets of Constantinople, but rather it breathes a great moan, as winter wind coming down a moor. Occasionally, amid a flash of silk and the rickrack of a gaily painted coach an aristocrat passes by.

  The sundial tells her that four hours have passed since Lollia was taken away. The bailiffs will be heard in Lombard Street soon, bearing their burden in its black muslin shroud. Then Miriam must be ready, for Lollia will have “confessed.” Oh yes, Miriam has seen them at their art of torture. Beside it the other arts of this age are but pale shadows. Men are skinned amid jovial crowds, their parts tossed as souvenirs to putrid children. The victims howl out any calumny or sorcery, whatever is wanted of them.

  Miriam cannot find the depth of her contempt. She goes through the night streets with real pleasure, a thousand times more dangerous than the quickest knifeman, stronger, faster and more intelligent.

  Her belly is always full. Or was, until the soldiers of King Henry began to organize a competent night watch.

  Lollia was netted like a plunging doe in the Crutched Friars by St. Olave and dragged off to the gaols. She had been a child of the streets, a Byzantine Greek whom Miriam discovered in Ravenna in the Clothmakers Market near the Palace of the Emperor, working as a weaver of linen. How long ago that was! Nearly a millennium. Miriam had been staggered by her beauty, uplifted from her despondence at the loss of Eumenes. As Rome died they went to Constantinople but left when the old, familiar signs of imperial decline began to appear there as well: whole quarters deserted, palaces left to ruin, arson and corruption and wildly escalating prices.

  London had been a good choice — populated, chaotic, growing. They had come with nothing but a single Venetian gold ducat and six Burgundian pennies.

  The ducat bought them a year’s lodging. To obtain more money they scavenged the palaces of the aristocrats.

  A hundred years of love and prosperity passed like a winking dream.

  Then Lollia changed. Her youth evaporated. She ate weekly, then daily and of late every few hours. Recently, she had been going on night-long frenzies, giving herself up to the hunger until she becomes bloated. And her beauty, once so great that it made men bow their heads, has dissolved into memory. She has grown horrible, her voice shrilling through the house, her eyes agleam for blood. And now she has been captured, dragged gnashing and growling to the Assizes. Miriam raced down Eastcheap to Tower Street — just too late.

  She waits for whatever they are going to bring home. She cannot look at the gowns, the street-worn slippers, the brown ringlets Lollia had bought for her hair. They lie now in a little paper box beside her wig fork. Miriam gathers handfuls of coins from their cache, pouring them into a leather pouch and lashing it under her breasts. She will take a boat from Ebgate down to the docks. Because of Lollia’s certain confession, all of this is lost, and Miriam also will be seized if she waits too long. Three days ago she placed her chests aboard a Genoese galley, all except Lollia’s. The ship sails tomorrow or the next day and she will be on it. But she will not leave without Lollia. To keep them safe has been her promise to all, and to herself.

  The girl’s resting place is ready, a squat box of oak and iron sitting in the middle of the room, its newly rubbed wood smelling faintly of fish oil.

  If Miriam cannot escape, she will be burned at the stake.

  Now she counts her coins — fifty gold ducats, three gold pounds, eleven ecus d’or. It is enough to keep all of Cheapside for a year or support Cardinal Beaufort for a week.

  They come.

  She bites her tongue when she hears the blaring crumhorns of the Waits that precede the cortege. This must work, it must!

  If only she could leave Lollia — but she would never forgive herself. There is a powerful morality in her relationship to her lovers. By vowing never to abandon them, she gives herself the right to deceive them. She rushes into Lombard Street, pushes wildly through the crowd toward the squat figures with the black-shrouded body on their shoulders.

  She has a fistful of silver. It will take at least two silver pence to get Lollia’s body and another one to save herself. In one man’s hand she sees a flutter of seals — the writ ordering that the body of one woman called Miriam, accused of being a witch, be brought with all haste —

  “I have silver,” she says over the roar of the Waits, “silver pennies for my poor mother!”

  “Oho, pretty, we’ve got to take thee too!”

  “I have silver!”

  The big man with the writ comes up and jolts his hand down on her shoulder. “The King cannot be bought with a scrap of money.”

  The Waits have stopped. All is silence. The crowd is fascinated as Miriam pleads for her life. She displays two silver pennies on the palm of her hand.

  “That’s what you have?”

  “It is, all in the world.”

  “Then three it must be!” And he laughs, the whispering cackle of a man with diseased lungs.

  “All my monies in the world,” Miriam wails. She takes out another little coin and holds the three in cupped, trembling hands.

  They are snatched up and Lollia is dropped onto the stone stoop of the house. The Waits melt into the throng, the bailiffs march away, the writ is lost in the mud of the street.

  Miriam can hardly bear to unwrap the shroud. Lollia is bright red, tongue like a purple, blistered flower, eyes popping half out of her head.

  They have boiled her in oil. Some of the stinking stuff still clings to her distended flesh.

  And there is a tiny noise, the sound of skin breaking as her hands slowly unclench.

  “It’s a nightmare,” Tom murmured.

  Sarah was mesmerized by the racing graphs. “I know,” she said distantly. The blood had astonished her. Tom was no doubt waiting for some error to emerge, but Sarah knew that the sample Geoff was testing now would only confirm the unbelievable. Her mind rang with the question, what is she, what is she! It made her almost dizzy, her own voice shouting in her head, confusion threatening to become panic.

  “I’m going to wake her.” Tom started to get up.

  “Don’t! You — you’ll disturb the record.”

  His eyes searched her face. “She’s obviously suffering —”

  “Look at the graphs! You don’t want to disturb a unique record. We don’t even know if it’s a nightmare. It might be a dream of paradise.”

  “The REM readings are consistent with a high-intensity nightmare.”

  “But look at res
piration and skin conductivity. She’s practically comatose.”

  Sarah was relieved when Tom’s eyes returned to the monitors. Their place right now was here, recording phenomena. Mrs. Blaylock’s extraordinary sleep pattern continued to flicker across the displays. Sarah tried to add it up — low-intensity delta waves, alpha waves curving as in a trance state. This was the intercranial activity pattern of an injury victim or perhaps some kind of meditation master. “Let’s do a zone scan,” Sarah said slowly.

  “You think there’s something we’re not picking up?”

  “We’re getting too many nil readings. Yet her eyes are moving as if she was in an intense dream.”

  “Maybe it’s the hippocampus. You can get intensive hallucinatory effects when it’s stimulated. They’d cause REM.”

  “That’s a good idea, Doctor. But to pick up electrical activity from that deep we’re gonna have to move our electrodes.”

  “So let’s do it.”

  “You’re elected, Thomas. You told me not to go back in there alone, remember?”

  “OK.” He started for the door, then paused. “You’re better at placement than me, darling.”

  “One on each temporal bone and two side by side just above the lambdoid suture. If we can’t read the hippocampus from there we need a probe.”

  “How the hell can I get to the lambdoid suture? I’ll have to lift her head.”

  “Tom, the woman is immobilized with some incredibly powerful equivalent of dreaming sleep. She’s not going to know if you lift her head.” Sarah felt her stomach turn. The very idea of being near that creature again made her feel queasy. This brain activity was no more human than the blood.

  Tom left, but there was a long pause before he appeared on the video monitor. He wasn’t hurrying. She watched him move the electrodes. At first the graphs went absolutely straight. No pickup. Sarah was adjusting electrode sensitivity when all hell broke loose. The four electrodes were switched into two different needles in case pickup was better from one region than the other. But it didn’t matter, the voltage surges were tremendous.

  “God damn,” Tom said as he returned.