The Hunger by Whitley Strieber Page B

elegance of the side table. On it were gold candlesticks. They still enjoyed that courtly old light and often lit the house with it.
    She heard, distinctly, the soft hiss of a door opening across a carpet.
    The house was so still that she could sense the faint rustle of her own dress as she breathed. She stood in a corner of the room. To her right was the hallway and the front door. Ahead the arched doorway into the dining room. She knew now that he had come up the basement stairs and must be at this moment standing between the pantry and the dining room. Then she heard a sound, a much aged voice, singing. “Sweetest songs of saddest thoughts, of times we’ve lost and loves forgot.” The voice sank to a mutter and stopped. That song had been a popular tune of his youth. She remembered well singing it with him.
    Then he came into the light. She concealed her surprise; he was naked. “Please,” he said softly. “Please, Miriam, help me.”
    The firm, young body that had so delighted her was gone. In its place was this thinned form, with liqueous pouches were muscle had been.
    “Look at me, Miriam!” He sounded so pitiful, she hated to hear him.
    “Put your clothes on.”
    “They don’t fit!” Now he spat the words. Sudden rage was one of the most common characteristics of the disease. This time it declined as quickly as it had risen, leaving him only his despair. Before the reality of his suffering, Miriam’s thoughts seemed to move slowly, her body to be stilled. Hesitant, not sure he would be tolerated, he came to her. His breath was so foul that she turned her head aside. Her mind, revolted by the ugliness, used as an antidote an image of Alice’s bright face, of her creamy young skin. As his lips touched hers she took solace in this image.
    “Don’t you enjoy me? Please try.” His face, spotted, sunken, bearded with hard white stubble, bobbed before her like the glowing image of death itself. He squeezed her shoulders, his hands sliding up to the base of her neck. “ You’re just as young as ever. You look marvelous.” Suddenly he stepped back, blocking the door to the hallway. “Don’t leave me,” he said. His eyes were wide. “Don’t leave me!”
    She stood, head bowed, wishing that — just once — she dared surrender herself to another being. But she remained wary. The rage may come upon him again at any moment. Her throat was still a little raw from yesterday’s episode. She looked up, met his eyes. “I won’t ever leave you, John, not ever.”
    “Miriam —” He sobbed, wretched, obviously furious with himself for being so blatantly emotional. She could no longer ignore the plea in his voice. Against her own best judgment she went to him, put her arm around him, and guided him to the leather library sofa.
    He leaned his head against her shoulder. “I’m so old. How did I get so old?”
    “Time —”
    “ What time? It’s been two days!”
    “A great deal of time concentrated in a small space.”
    He looked at her, eyes stricken. “Where does it end?”
    This was the hardest part. How do you face it, the fact that the seed of death, hidden deep in the body, has started to grow? She could not speak. Overcoming her revulsion, she stroked his head, held his hand. There was a low, awful sound from his throat. “I loved you,” he whispered. “I trusted you so.”
    It hurt most terribly.

3
    JOHN RUSHED BLINDLY down Eighth Avenue, heading toward Forty-second Street. It was four the next morning. He wore an overcoat, a wide-brimmed hat to shadow his face and carried a Samsonite briefcase. Energy was leaving him like light from the sky. He kept the hatbrim snapped low over his face. Occasionally, he attracted some interest from a dark doorway. A boy woke up long enough to make a few disinterested sucking noises, a thin girl muttered again and again, “wanna bj, wanna bj,” like a grotesque machine, stopping the instant he had passed her doorway.
    He was here because he was desperate