The Hunger by Whitley Strieber Page B

years.
    “I’m dying, Miriam. Dying! Yet you go gliding along, perfect and untouched. I know you’re much older than me. Why are you different?”
    Now her face clouded, she seemed about to cry. “John, you invited me into your life. Don’t you remember?”
    This was too much. He launched himself toward her, growling his rage, his arms extended toward her neck. Miriam had always been able to move fast, and she slipped away easily, retreating to the hallway. On her lips was a sad half-smile. The one thing that gave him hope was her eyes. They were glazed with fear, swimming with what could only be sorrow. As he approached her she turned, quick as a bird.
    He heard her feet drumming down the stairs, then the front door slammed.
    He was desolated. She had left him. Now he regretted his attack. Yet he hadn’t been able to stop himself, the urge was so sudden. Sooner or later she was bound to come back, though. She couldn’t bear to Sleep in hotel rooms for fear of an intruder or a fire. This place was so thoroughly equipped that a match couldn’t smoulder without being noticed, nor a burglar touch a window. No, this was her haven and she would return.
    John would be waiting.
    For fifteen minutes he lay on the bedroom floor trying to reach Sleep. But the hunger was there, insinuating itself into his veins, making him tremble with need.
    He pulled himself to his feet and went downstairs, paused at the door to the library. Books and papers were strewn about. Miriam was normally obsessed with order. He slumped down behind her desk, thinking that he might prolong his strength if he didn’t move so much. It was going to be damned difficult if he had to eat in broad daylight, and in this condition.
    There was a magazine lying open on the desk. The Journal of Sleep Disorders . Some project of Miriam’s. It was laughable, Miriam’s silly faith in science. The magazine was opened to an article with the wildly exciting title of “Psychomotor Dysfunction in Abnormal Dreaming Response: The Etiology of ‘Night Terrors of Adulthood,’” by S. Roberts, MD, PhD. The article was an utterly meaningless mass of statistics and charts, interspersed with sentences in the incomprehensible language of technology. How Miriam managed to make anything of such material was a mystery to John, and what she expected to do with it was just as obscure. Science, which so involved and excited her, seemed fearful to him, the work of the mad.
    John pushed the magazine aside, staring blankly. He had begun to hear a sound, a sort of high-pitched noise like a siren. It was a moment before he realized that it was coming from inside his right ear. It peaked and then died. In its wake was nothing: the ear had become deaf. He had to act, the deterioration was now very rapid.
    He went to the daybed, a place where he had Slept many times, and lay down. He closed his eyes. At first there was bone-tired relief. Again he did not Sleep. Instead, bright geometrical shapes began to appear before his eyes. These resolved into burning images of Miriam’s face, of Miriam standing over him during the agonizing time of his transformation.
    His eyes opened almost of their own accord. Other faces had been about to replace Miriam’s.
    The sound of a raging crowd evaporated into the soft morning air. Where, after all, do the dead go? Nowhere, as Miriam said — or is there a world beyond life, a world of retribution?
    “You can’t blame me,” he growled.
    He was surprised to hear a voice answer.“I’m not! You can’t help it if they forgot!” Alice.
    John turned his head. She stood frowning, her violin case in her hand. She was here for her music lesson. Her odor, rich beyond description, poured into the room. “Good morning,” John said as he clambered to a sitting position on the side of the daybed.
    “I do music with the Blaylocks at ten. But they’re gone.”
    She did not recognize him.
    “Yes, yes — they had some kind of a bank meeting. They told me —