Legs stiffening, arms stiffening, neck a brittle column running with maggots chewing, chewing!
Head a swelling, bursting balloon!
I thirst, I thirst!
A roman soldier pressing a sponge to his lips. The bitter, acrid soldiers drink touching his lips, in his mouth tasting like blood and pus.
Oh my god, the pain!
The shrieking, howling, tearing, twisting pain! The agony. The white agony!
GOD SAVE ME!
Breaths tore from his cracked lips. Hot air sucked back into his failing lungs, burning, scorching. The sky was” black, thunder shook the clouds. Something was burning. A frightened soldier jabbing at his side. Shooting pain in his back, blood dripping, spinal fluid emptying.
GOD!!! Please. Oh please. Please! Shrieks from the hillside. Women weeping. The earth trembling. The skies splitting open with light and thunder, the earth parting, swallowing. He was throbbing on the cross, crying out to the heavens …
The room swept around him.
No. No! NO! He tried to howl Save me! Save me! I want to live. End my pain! I want to live, I want to live!
LET ME LIVE!
Crushing walls shuffling in on hating feet. Crushing ceiling falling down. The bed shaking. The building shaking. The earth, the world shaking open for him. He screamed and tried to fling up his arms. NO!!!!!
Suffocation. He couldn’t get any air in his lungs. Someone was holding him under in a vacuum. No air would rush in. Sudden shuddering breaths jerked in his chest, his eyes grew wider still, his blackened dried up tongue touched his lips.
He was falling, falling, falling away.
MOTHER!!
Silence.
The silence of a forest in the still of morning.
The crackling silence of a polar night.
The silence of the grave.
Silence before the word. Breathless still preceding breath itself.
Mindless wastes of land sky. Palpable lack of all life and sound. A green silence.
No sound enough to stay itself from being swallowed up in the gigantic silence. A great ball of vegetation spinning in mists of silence.
Silence of the sky.
The creeping, flooding, crushing silence of the swinging planets, of the system, of the galaxy, of the endless black rocking universe.
Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. SILENCE. SILENCE. SILENCE.
SILENCE. Silence, silence, sil …
* * * *
The sun came up early and it was a lovely morning.
The temperature was 63 and the humidity was 85 and the wind was from the East.
A little after 10 o’clock, a department of sanitation truck flushed the streets clean.
AFTERWORD
RICHARD MATHESON
What I seemed to be involved in, as I read, was a form of psychological time travel; a journey which took me back fifty and more years to encounter my nineteen to twenty-three-year-old self.
I found the encounter to be as discomfiting as it was intriguing.
Literally, I regretted that I was compelled to meet that person again and to have to face the fact that he was not completely a fictional character at all but me as I had very much been at that time.
I doubt if many authors have gone through this sort of experience. How many of them have written a deeply personal novel at the age of twenty-three, put it out of sight and mind, then had to read it half a century later.
It was, as I have said, discomfiting, dismaying even. Because I was being given the opportunity—conceivably the punishment—of being plunged back to a me I had virtually forgotten. A me I have outgrown. A me that I could understand perfectly but did not particularly care for.
As a writer, I am able to appreciate that, despite my manifold flaws, I was able to see through them and not present them in a glossy manner. I saw myself, psychological warts and all. Not bad to observe as a writer. Bad to observe as a remembering human being.
Not that the novel is completely autobiographical. My mother did not die as she does in the story nor was our relationship as presented. My brother-in-law was a perfectly decent chap, my sister a kind and generous person. There was no Lynn in my life and many major incidents in my life did not occur as portrayed.
Because even then, while pouring out much of my immature emotions and attitudes, I was beginning to develop the inner knowledge of the writer that life is not only stranger than fiction but is, more often than not, considerably more monotonous in its structure. Our lives rarely fashion themselves into well-formed stories. They are discursive, erratic, at times dramatic to be sure but, on far more occasions, prosaic and run of the mill.
Still, enough of the novel reflects my life to disturb me deeply.
Looking back, I was forced to recognize the selfishness in my younger self. The almost total self-involvement. The cruelties and thoughtless actions of that forgotten young man—forgotten until I had to read the novel.
Every young man at nineteen most likely resembles the character of Erick Linstrom. But, in fifty years, one is able to overlay any memories of that younger self with the helpful blurring of time. One is able to chuckle and shake one’s head and say, “Yeah, I was a jerk then. Boy, was I a jerk.”
But to be suddenly dropped through time to see that you are alive again …
It was like meeting my own ghost and wishing, in vain, that I could exorcise him.
—Richard Matheson
Hunger and Thirst Page 56
