The Hunger (16 page)

Now he felt really wonderful. He might as well be flying above the roadway, above the lawns, above the trees — flying and free.

Others only thought they were alive. They never knew
this
! His heart was beating perfectly. If he looked at a building he could hear the sounds behind the windows. People talking, TVs going, vacuum cleaners roaring. And he could hear the clouds like a great song, not meant for the ears of man.

Sirens were rising to the north and the south. A patrol car came blazing up the roadway.

John spent the rest of the morning in the Metropolitan Museum, lingering for hours in the costume exhibit, looking at the bustled dresses and frock coats, remembering his own time, so utterly lost and far away.

It was a relief when the interview was completed. Miriam was beginning to feel a need for Sleep. She returned to the house in her rented limousine. A test — called a polysomnogram — was scheduled for tonight. And Sarah Roberts would surely be there.
Must
be there. Night terrors indeed. If they knew the real depths of fear they would not be able to live. Mankind was in the bland middle of the emotional spectrum. Miriam lived at the extremes.

She was let out of the car.“I’ll need you again at six-thirty,”she said as she went up the front steps. The Sleep was coming upon her, right on schedule. She heard a faint tinkling from inside the house. The telephone. She fumbled with her keys and rushed in. A bad moment to take a call. Her time awake was now limited.

“Miriam?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Bob.”

For a moment she was blank. Then it came back. They hadn’t seen the Cavenders for months. “Oh, hi! It’s been a long time. I hardly recognized you.”

“Miriam, we’ve lost Alice.”

She doubled up as if she had been hit in the stomach. Then she straightened and took a deep breath. “How long?”

“Since yesterday when she left for your place.”

“She never came here, so far as I know.”

“Amy saw her go in.”

“She came in here?” Miriam’s mind turned to John, to the — no. No matter what state he was in, he would never do that.

“She usually comes home for lunch after she sees you. Yesterday she didn’t.”

A trembling shock coursed through her. “She’s not here.”

Not in the hallway, not in the music room. Oh, don’t let it be, not in the furnace.

Don’t hurt me this much, John, please!

“I know that. I just wanted you to be on the alert.” He paused. There were a series of stifled grunts, the sobs of a man who doesn’t know how to cry. “On the alert,” he said again.“I’ll call you with any news.”The line clicked, the cutting of the wire of life. The phone slipped from Miriam’s hand, banged on the oak floor. She closed her eyes. Snarling pain gripped her temples. Ice-cold air seemed to enclose her. She craned her neck like a woman seeking to rise from the bottom of the sea.

She ran her hands along the fabric of her suit, bowed her head. When her clock tolled one, she looked, startled, at its ancient face.

Impulses raced through her mind: kill John, kill herself. She rejected them both as beneath her. He was helpless in his actions, driven by forces beyond his control. And she had no intention of voluntarily giving up life.

Bit by bit she regained her composure. There came into her heart a new feeling toward John. His suffering mattered less to her, his potential for destruction more.

How dare he take Alice. She belonged to Miriam, not to him. Rage blazed up in her. It was lucky for him that he was not home. At this moment she would have faced knives, guns, tearing claws to get at him.

Yet he had given her all of himself that he could give. For love of her he was paying an exorbitant price. He was losing much more than life, facing an end more terrible than even the worst death. She could not let herself hate the damnable creature.

She was alone again.

In all the world there was not one friendly soul, not one being with whom she could share anything.

She ran into the library, the place where she habitually did her planning and thinking. “ALICE!” With a moan she yanked the heavy drapes closed and sank into her desk chair. The only sound in the room was the steady tinkle of the old Roman water clock.

Her whole future had been planted in Alice. The possibility of losing the girl had simply never occurred to her. Oh, what plans she had made!

She had always loved her life with joyous intensity. Over the years she had ruthlessly blotted out every memory of her family, had shaken off all the tragedies, and pressed ahead. She had seen humanity rising out of the muck, had learned to respect it as the rest of her species never could, had come to anticipate the future with zest, especially now that overtones of barbarism were re-entering human culture.

In one mad instant John had taken the future away.

Tears she would not allow, even for an extinguished love. She and Alice were made to be together. And now instead there was this pit. A black pit. The room around her was cold. The paneling, grown rich with years, frowned ominously, making the dark even blacker.

She opened the curtains. It was such a bright day, the storms of dawn blown on their way. Her petunias were thriving, choking the window box with at least a hundred blossoms.

She found that she could not bear to look at the street, it could not seem more empty. She shook herself — the Sleep demanded her.

She didn’t want it now, not after this. It doomed her to terrible dreams, she was sure of it. How could she bear this! She groaned and ran out of the room. Her body was slowing down, her eyes growing heavy. Where could she go? Not the attic, not enough time to get all the way to the top of the house.

The floor waved beneath her feet. She couldn’t Sleep here! But it was intractable, nothing would stop her. In moments she wouldn’t be able to lift her arms. She thought of the basement. It might still be possible to make it down.

With long, shaking steps she went to the door. There was a place, uncomfortable but safe, that John had hopefully forgotten that led to the secret tunnel they had built to the East River. Years ago it had been destroyed by the FDR Drive but the basement entrance and the section under the garden still remained. She hoped she could find the right stone in the basement floor.

By the time she got there the world around her had receded as if to the end of a long corridor. She knew that she was still moving but she was absolutely out of contact with her body. Her hands felt the slate floor of the basement, pushing for the slight looseness that would tell her she had found the place.

Looseness — somewhere . . . she felt something hard and cold hit her. Hard and cold and wet . . . she had fallen to the floor. Sleep came, and dream . . .

The lamp was bobbing, flashing in her eyes with the roll of the ship. As it creaked, water spurted in between the planks.“Father?” The lamp shook wildly and then fell to the floor, plunging the little cabin into green half-darkness. What was happening? When she had gone to bed the sky had been clear, the wind just strong enough to snap the sail.

What was that horrible shrieking?

She got up and wrapped a cloak around her silk tunic. “Fa-a-ther!” The ship began shaking from side to side as if it were being worried by a sea monster. Miriam staggered to the cabin door, pushed it open.

Wake up! You’re in danger!

The door . . . was so hard, so hard — but she pushed it open and struggled out into the raging green hell of the storm.

The voice of the wind mixed with the deep thunder of the waves. Perhaps twenty feet overhead great clouds seethed. There was no mast, no sail, only a deck strewn with tangles of rigging and bits of red sailcoth. Sailors, naked, lashed together, staggered here and there on what task she did not know.“FAAATHER!”

Powerful arms grabbed her from behind. He took her to his bosom, pressed his mouth against her ear. “This ship is doomed,” he said, “we’ve got to save ourselves, my daughter.”

“The others —”

“The other ships made landfall in Crete. A great disaster has occurred. I did not foresee it. An island has exploded. I think it must have been Thera. You must go to Rome now, leave the east alone. Greece will be in ruins —”

“Father, please help me, save me!” She clung to him with her legs and arms and sobbed into the wrenching wind.

His head turned. “It’s coming,” he said. She felt it rather than heard it, a deep pulsing throb like the heart of a giant. At first there was nothing to see in the black mist, then, far up in the sky, a white line appeared. Her father’s arm clutched her until she could hardly breathe. His face terrified her, it was wretched with anger, his lips twisted into a grimace, his eyes glaring horribly.

“Father, is that a
wave
?”

He only clutched her more tightly.

The ship began to rise, its prow lifting higher and higher. There commenced a great fusillade of explosions as the hemp lashings that held it together snapped and the boards sprung straight. The hiss of water rose from the hold, and with it the hideous screaming of the oar-slaves. Sailors threw themselves to the deck. Behind them, on the low forecastle, the captain was staggering about trying to organize another sacrifice to Nereus, god of storms.

The ship rose higher. It felt as if it had taken wing. Behind them the surface of the sea shook and boiled. Before them the great black leviathan bore on.

“We must jump! We’ll have to swim.”

He dragged her to the side. She had swum only in the Nile, never in an ocean. And this — it would swallow them!

Her father ignored her frantic protests.

John will come! Wake up!

The dream held her as surely as if she were bound to a rack.

The bubbling, inky water closed over their heads. Even beneath it there were noises, a deep boo-o-om bo-o-om. Was there really a sea god down there bellowing his anger?

Her head popped to the surface. She felt her father’s arms come around her again. Not ten feet away the ship slowly upended and fell backward with a tremendous explosion of foam. It wallowed, its black bottom exposed briefly to the air, and was gone.

They were swimming on the side of an enormous wall of water. And they were being swept higher. The white line at the top had grown to a maelstrom of roaring breakers.

They came rapidly closer. In them she could see fish and branches of trees and bits of wood. Her legs drove like pistons but the current grabbed at her, pulling her down and down. Her head was in a vise, her hands grasping water. She was ripped from her father’s arms. It got cold and dark. Great creatures were moving in the deep, their cold flesh sliding against her. Her arms and legs thrashed but still the powerful flow dragged her down. She was being crushed, like the death of stones inflicted on her kind by the Phoenicians.

Something had grabbed her hair. It yanked her so hard she saw flashes. The current lost its hold on her. Even though she knew she was rising — it was getting warmer and lighter — her mouth was going to open in a moment and she was going to breathe water. She would die.

She clamped her jaws shut, finally clapped her hands over her mouth and nose. Perhaps the sea-thing that was dragging her upward would break the surface.

And then she was tumbling in the white water, gasping gulps of wet air, swimming like a demon. She heard her father’s own ragged breath in her ear.

He was the thing that had saved her.

Then she was through the breakers. Before her was a limitless plain of water, rolling gently. She understood that she was now on the back of the enormous wave that had destroyed the ship. On the horizon there stood a vast black pillar of cloud full of red cracks. Enormous tendrils of lightning coursed ceaselessly through it. It grew steadily, a great dark finger poking into the sky.

“Father,” she gasped, trying to point.

She swam in a circle.

The empty waters did not look back.

“Father! Father!”

Please, gods, please, we need him. We have a whole family! Please, gods, we cannot survive without him.

You cannot kill him!

She pounded with her legs and slapped the water with her hands and spun around and around. She screamed for him.

A shadow rolled in a low wave not far away. She dove after the snatch of blue, beside herself with terror and grief.

Then she saw it, the vision that would never leave her again: his face, mouth distended, eyes bulging, disappearing into the abyss.

“Please! Ple-e-ase!”

A wind like a Titan’s breath burst from heaven and the waves came on.

The salt water made her throw up again and again. Her father, her beautiful father — the family’s wisdom and strength — was dying. She dove beneath the waves seeking him as he had sought her, swam deeper and deeper until she felt that ice-cold current — into which
he
had plunged without regard for his own life, to save his daughter.

She was the oldest, the others needed her now. Alone in Crete, their Akkadian barely passable, they would certainly be destroyed. Her life was precious. She must choose to preserve it. Her father would certainly have demanded it. As hard as it was she closed her mind to him.

She turned toward the dim gray light of the surface and swam. Once there she began to plan her own salvation. The very morning they left she had taken food and Sleep, so she knew that she could go on for at least three or four days.

She opened her eyes in a chilly dungeon smelling of damp stone. Her mouth tasted awful, she had vomited in her Sleep.

The dream had left her sullen with grief, remembering her father’s face in the waves. “I could have saved him,” she said into the darkness.

“But it’s too late now, isn’t it?” screeched an answering voice.

John!

Something gleamed before her eyes, then she felt the cool pressure of a blade against her throat.

“I’ve been waiting for you, my dear. I wanted you to be awake for this.”

Tom glanced at the admission recommendation on top of the pile. Dr. Edwards had quite properly marked it for special handling. Procedure required Tom to initial any priority admissions. The clinic had a waiting list three months long.