The Hunger (10 page)

He was here because he was desperate and this was fast. The people on the streets now were more ruined than he was, too damaged to compete with the dirty glittering mob of the early night — or, perhaps, with him.

Then he saw what he was looking for, sitting in the window of the Mayfair Pancake House. The Mayfair was the hub of the neighborhood and John knew it well. In times past it had been a nickelodeon. A man would buy a paper flower and hold it in his lap while the latest epics from Union City jittered across the screen. When a girl took the flower he had a date.

His victim came out, having been summoned by his tap on the glass. She sidled to him like a dog, her face looking upward and to the right. “Ain’t I great,” she said. “Twenty bucks. You don’t see the bad side.” Her good profile was pure Cincinnati. But she had only half a dream — acid had melted the rest of her face into a glaring scar.

“Five bucks all the way,” John said.

“Hand job money if you come fast.”

“Ten bucks, that’s my offer.”

“Mister, you don’t look at the goddamn scar. I got my moves down. You never see it.”

“Ten.” They had to be bargained with; he would end up getting attacked in a dark hall if he bore the scent of the victim.

She grabbed his groin. “Fifteen.”

He pulled away.

“Anything for fifteen,” she hissed. “You can do anything.”

He hesitated. They stood as still as cats.

“SM,” she said, “beat shit outa me.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Man, you don’t want extras?” She came close again, her half-face smiling. “I thought you wanted extras. I’ll go ten, just a fuck.”

They went through a doorway on Forty-third Street, down a gray-painted hall disfigured with graffiti, up some low stairs to a damp-smelling lobby. A black man slumped in a broken chair. John put the ten dollars in his open hand.

They went up a steeper staircase. She stopped before a tall wooden door. The room was tiny: a dresser, a folding chair and a lamp with a melted plastic shade. The bed was a mattress on the floor with a wadded yellow sheet on it. “The laundry ain’t been in this early,” the girl muttered. “Get your clothes off, we got ten minutes for ten bucks, that’s house.”

Blaylock took off his hat. Even though the room was deep in shadow, its window overlooking an air-shaft, the girl could see enough of him to be startled.

“You got somethin’, man?”

“I’m well. Just thin.”

She moved slowly away. “What’s the matter with you?”

He took his scalpel out of his pocket. The girl was grimacing as if in pain, backing toward the window. “Come on, honey,” John said. “You belong to me.”

Her good eye widened, the good side of her mouth twisted. Her hands came fluttering up to her neck. From her mouth there was a sort of barking sound, midway between terror and madness. When her back touched the wall she crouched down, bark bark bark, like a whispering dog. The eye kept looking around and around, unable to focus on the face before her.

John raised his scalpel with swift expertise and plunged it in behind her collarbone. It popped through the viscera and just touched the artery. In an instant he was upon her.

At last. This.

He felt life filling him again, purple and rich. He knew he could now walk the streets without attracting attention, no more decayed than any other old man. In the past he had felt the hunger perhaps once a week. Since this — whatever it was — degenerative disease started, his need had risen and risen. When would he be hunting again? Six hours? One?

Now the Samsonite briefcase came into use. Inside was half a gallon of naphtha and some simple incendiary materials. He laid the girl — so light — on the bed and soaked her with naphtha. Then he put an ashtray full of butts beside her. Carefully, he poured potassium permanganate crystals into a matchbox and soaked them in glycerine. In three or four minutes spontaneous combustion would cause the potassium to catch fire and explode the naphtha.

After placing the matchbox in the ashtray, he left.

The fire would be a furious one. Ten minutes from now only bones would be left. If the fire went much beyond that everything would be destroyed.

When John reached the street dawn was already beginning. A few day people were about, a girl in a white leatherette car coat clopping toward the W. T. Grant Building, a young man with a shade of moustache getting out of a cab. The second edition of the
Times
was being tossed off a truck at the corner newsstand.

Nobody noticed him. For now. His whole body was relieved as if of gravity itself. Later would come desolation as the new blood died, but for the moment he felt as if he could leap up into the spreading sunlight. As he proceeded along Forty-third Street the last of the night people crept away. There sighed from them all a weariness completely at odds with the spring dawn slipping down the office towers. They dragged themselves away while pink clouds glided westward in a luminous sky.

A fire engine blared past, the firemen clinging to it. Their faces were bored and determined, frozen with the expression common to men who are intimate with death.

Manhattan began to come alive more rapidly. People were pouring out of the Seventh Avenue subway, coffeeshops were getting crowded, buses were swinging past with windows darkened by the crush of passengers.

John could feel her in him. Her past seemed to whisper in his veins, her voice to jabber in his ears. In a sense, she haunted him; they all did. Was the hunger satisfied by their being or just their blood? John had often wondered if they knew, if they felt themselves in him. From the way he could hear them in his mind, he suspected that they did. Miriam angrily dismissed the notion. She would toss her head and refuse to listen when he brought it up. She would not accept that you could
touch
the dead.

As he walked he counted the hours since last he had closed his eyes. Thirty-six at least. And during that short time he had needed three victims. Their energy was some compensation for the lack of Sleep, but it couldn’t go on forever. Each one had less impact than the last.

He found that he could almost hate Miriam if he wished, she who had made him. It was not so much the fact that she had lied to him about his life-span as that she had trapped him in an isolation even more awful than her own. He had come to terms with his cannibal life, accepting it as the price of immortality. Even for that the price was high. But for this? His hunger had cheated him. For this he had paid too much.

He went on foot to Sutton Place; there was no percentage in risking a cab. When he turned onto the street there were shafts of sunlight between the buildings, well-dressed people hurrying to work, cars pulling up before elegant foyers, doormen whistling down cabs. The innocent brightness of this world assaulted his conscience, made him feel the blackest shame. Their own little house with its green shutters and marble sills, with its red-brick facade and window boxes full of petunias, contrived an atmosphere of warmth and joy. A repulsive falseness. It seemed to John like a newly cut tree, its leaves still robust, the message of death not yet risen up the trunk.

“Morning,” Bob Cavender said. He was a naturally ebullient man, the Blaylocks’ neighbor, Alice’s father.

“Morning,” John said, affecting a slight accent.

“New on the block?” Cavender did not recognize this suddenly aged version of his neighbor.

“Houseguest. Staying with the Blaylocks.”

“Oh, yes? Good people. Music lovers.”

John smiled. “I am a musician. With the Vienna Philharmonic.”

“My daughter’s going to love you. She spends half her life at the Blaylocks. She’s a musician too.”

John smiled again and delivered a courtly Viennese bow. “We will meet again, I presume,” he said.

Cavender passed on down the street, trailing a hearty goodbye. How normal men could maintain their confidence and good cheer amid the chaos of life was one of the most fascinating mysteries that John had encountered. The Cavenders of the world never realized the truth of generations, how short was their time and brief their ways.

There was a hush inside the house. Miriam had opened a pomander jar and the front hall was full of its rich scent. John went upstairs. He was eager to examine his face in a mirror. But when he got to the bedroom he hesitated. A deep, dead cold spread through him. He stood in the sunlight beside the pink-curtained window, terrified of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, afraid to take another step.

For so long he had been balanced at the age of thirty-two. Along with the sudden aging of his body there had come a black flood of confusion as his brain atrophied. The assurance of youth was rapidly evaporating, and in its place was this preoccupied stranger, rapt only to the betrayal of the flesh. He found himself unable to remember dates, names, events. Things were colored by an unsettling newness, even things he must have seen many times before.

A tiny sound broke the stillness, the drip of a tear on the floor. “Coffin,” he said. His voice had changed so, deepening into age. All the years he had cheated were taking their revenge on him at once.

At the end of the last century he had visited a medium, planning to take her when the lights were out. But just as her fingers twisted down the gaslight something awful happened. With a sound like a tearing curtain dozens and dozens of different faces appeared in her face, like a crowd at the window of a burning house. All were known to him — his victims. The medium screamed, her eyes rolling, head lolling.

He had run from that horrible place, literally staggering with fear. A day later the
New York Evening Mail
published an item to the effect that the body of Mrs. Rennie Hooper had been found in her parlor. Her fingers were still on the key of the gas lamp. They assumed it was heart failure. Miriam insisted there was no
touch
with the dead. But she wasn’t human, she didn’t know anything about the relationship between a man and his dead.

The dead world glowered forth at him. Suddenly, an image of the whore exploded into his mind’s eye, her flesh blackening in the flames.

His stomach twisted until it felt as if it were ripping out of its body and he clamped his fists to his eyes, willing with all his strength that the vision of death before him, of deliverance into the hands of his victims, would dissolve. But it did not, rather it focused and confirmed. He realized that the demons of hell were not demons at all but the men of earth without their costumes.

To Sleep in safety, Miriam had gone to her attic room. John might well be able to penetrate the security system around the bed. She huddled on the hard floor fighting a nightmare. But it came relentlessly on, bursting through the Sleep like fire through straw, grasping her mind, forcing it to see:

A foggy morning near Ravenna. She had come here with the other citizens of property, when the Emperor fled Rome fifty years ago. Dew lies on the marble sill of her bedroom window. From deep in the fog comes the singing of rough-voiced Vandals on their way to raid the Imperial Palace. They move slowly through the mist, marching along just beyond the herb garden, their horned helmets making them look enormous. They will not pass this great house without plundering it, not even on their way to the palace of Petronius Maximus.

Keeping her voice steady, she calls Lollia. The girl comes swiftly across the marble floor, her slippers hissing on the stones. Miriam does not need to speak. “It is finished,” Lollia says. “He hasn’t made a sound in hours.” Miriam takes Lollia’s white face in her hands and kisses her full on the mouth, feeling the trembling fervor of a kiss returned. “My love,” Lollia says softly, “the barbarians —”

“I know.”

Miriam drops her nightclothes on the floor and strides naked across the room. The smell of the oil lamp guttering on her night table mingles with the sharp scent of the leather cloak she removes from her chest. She dresses in traveling clothes, aided by her lover, who has kindly taken the place of the dead servants.

Then Lollia goes off to her own room to change. They have hidden the horses and carriage in the Peristyle. Distantly, there is a crash, the sound of merry laughter: the Vandals are at the stables. Miriam races across silk carpets, her cloak swelling behind her, and goes down the stone stairs to the basement where in olden times slaves attended an elaborate furnace. With the coming of inflation those slaves were sold, and the dying convulsions of the Empire diminished the amount of coal available. As for the slaves who remained — Eumenes saw to them.

Miriam had stationed Lollia beside the great oak door all night. Only an hour ago had she reported silence. Now Miriam feels safe in opening the door. She throws back three bolts and pulls with all her strength. Slowly it swings wide.

She screams.

The shriveled
thing
attached to the door by its finger and toe nails is unrecognizable as Eumenes. The room reeks of new blood. On the floor are the husks of his last five victims. Around him is a puddle of blood, having run out through his dead digestive system. His skeletal form is gouged; at the end he was terribly weak, his victims were almost too much for him.

Miriam swallows, forces self-control. She grasps the thing by its shoulders and peels it off the door.

Her ancient and beloved companion, her Eumenes. Odysseus returned at last, neither dead nor alive, somehow still attached to this ruined corpse — a spirit perhaps unwanted among spirits and forced to remain in the dead house of its body.

She pulls his knees to his chin and forces him into a box of the hardest wood, feeling the quivering pulsations of his body. The box is fastened by brass and reinforced with iron. Hefting the precious burden on her shoulders, she mounts the stairs. She will never abandon him, she murmurs, never, never. In the hallway Lollia is dancing with agitation. She is a simple girl, accepting without question Eumenes’ “sickness,” never imagining that she must one day follow. The elegant rooms are filling with smoke. The girl’s eyes dart toward the rising Gothic shouts. Despite her terror she helps Miriam; together they take the chest to the carriage. They throw open the gate and Miriam snaps the reins.