The Hunger (12 page)

He sat down beside the rumpled clothes that hid the remains of Alice Cavender. The perfume was strongest here, it must have been something she was wearing. Gently, he touched the red T-shirt with its decal of Beethoven.

The perfume faded as quickly as a departed mood of love. It left him feeling as if he were already dead. He sighed. There was an ugly chore just ahead that wouldn’t wait. If Miriam found any evidence of whom he had taken — he couldn’t allow that.

He forced himself to pick up the little bundle and carry it down to the basement.

Miriam had walked the streets, sorrowing at the ugliness of what John had become. Despite her caution he had nearly . . . she couldn’t even think about it. She was going to have to capture him soon. As soon as she dared. Even with his present weakness he was still too strong.

She returned home after an hour, unwilling to expose herself more than necessary to the random accidents of the city streets. When she turned the corner onto Sutton Place she stopped in surprise and stared. There was smoke rising in a thin trail from her chimney. John was burning evidence, and in broad daylight. The fool must have hunted right in this neighborhood, he hadn’t had time to go farther away. No doubt he had taken some local child.

Toward the end they always lost all caution. She wanted to be angry at him, but she pitied his desperation too much. She ought to count herself lucky that he bothered to destroy his evidence at all.

Although she did not relish the prospect of confronting him, she was going to have to re-enter the house. It was hers, after all. And it was a safe place to Sleep. Somehow, John would have to be restrained. She could not allow him the freedom of house and streets much longer.

She marched up the front steps and went in. The rumble of the furnace was audible. The poor man. At least it told her his whereabouts. The high-pressure gas lines that fed the thing couldn’t be left unattended.

She paused in the hall, savoring for a moment the peace and life of her house. To her it was like a well-rooted rose bush, lively and enduring. Soon it would contain a new voice, that of Alice, light and golden. Miriam’s tiny infirmary was prepared for the transfusions. The approach to Dr. Roberts had begun. The good doctor herself would in the end be Miriam’s assistant. For an instant her mind remembered John as he had been and she experienced a quick sinking of the heart. But she pushed it aside.

She began to move toward the library. The pomander was too sweet, it was getting rotten. And the ceiling needed some plaster work; the house had settled a little recently. She had to prune her roses. It would soon be a necessity as well as a pleasure. And she was crying all over the hall rug. There was no use trying to stifle her feelings. Her despair broke through in a torrent.

John, you loved me.

You loved even the sound of my name.

He had been so happy with her, always laughing, always full of delight. She sank into a side chair and rested her chin in her hands, shut her eyes tight against the tears. She wanted so for him to hold her once again. She had been his prize, his adored one. In the end that was all that mattered, that was life itself, to be needed.

His aging was so ugly, she couldn’t remember that the others had been that ugly.

There had been such good times.

The night she first met him, for example. She had only recently returned to England. She hadn’t seen one of her own kind in twenty-five years. In those days she still hoped that they had migrated to America, seeking a less organized community. She was miserable with loneliness, an unwanted creature in a world she could not love.

That night it had been cold, the rain pounding and the wind blowing. She was toying with Lord Hadley, a foolish old man. His estates were vast and full of itinerant workers and others of the dispossessed. She longed for the freedom to roam unhindered in such lands. She had accepted his invitation gladly. And this glorious young man had appeared at dinner. He had about him all the important signs: the arrogance, the determination, the intelligence. A predator.

She had drawn him to her feet that very night, to teach the poor inexperienced thing a few secrets. The rich hunting of the estate could wait now that she had the opportunity to possess its heir.

She had taken rooms in the town of Hadley and visited him each night. Two weeks later she had started his infusions. If only she had known then how weak he really was; he had been intended to last the longest. Look at him now.

In those days she used india-rubber tubing and the hollow needles made for glassblowers. It was a great advance over the past method, in which she simply used her mouth and hoped for the best. Although she knew nothing of immunology then and would never have thought to test him for tissue rejection, John had not died. His wound had become infected, but that always happened. He had gone pale, but they did that too. Unlike so many, he survived. Together they had depopulated Hadley. The old Lord had hung himself. The estate had reverted to the wild.

He was a delighted child in those days. They went to London to join the bright social whirl of the declining Regency. God, how times had changed.

John. She remembered the time he had burst in on her disguised as a policeman. And the time he had chosen their victims in Glasgow and the next morning she discovered it was the Lord Mayor and his wife.

They used to ride to hounds. He had taught her that there was a thrill in challenging fear. She had accepted a little bit of the lesson to please him. How fine he had looked mounted, his boots gleaming in the morning sun. She remembered the mad dash of the horses, the smells and the noise and even the unaccustomed sweetness of danger. He had once leaped onto her horse at full gallop and tumbled them both off into a ditch — and made love to her with the bracken bobbing about their thighs and the huntsman’s horn echoing in the distance.

She sighed and tried again to forget. Nostalgia was useless — she had to get down to that basement and deal with the poor man.

TOM SAT IN HIS OFFICE in the gathering dark. Although it was late he was crackling with energy. Hutch had just turned down Sarah’s application for a funding review. Even better, he had ordered the project closed down, its records sealed.

Battle was joined. Tom could now challenge Hutch directly by demanding a Board of Directors’ meeting himself. If Hutch was reversed it would break the old man’s authority. Tom could then move in on him, shoulder him aside. Welcome to the next Director of Sleep Research.

He took out a cigar and held it between his lips, then put it away. One a day was his limit. If he smoked this one he would break that limit and force himself to confront his own iron rule: smoke two and go without any for a week.

He saw a shadow appear on the frosted glass of his door. The knob rattled. “When’s the review?” Sarah asked as she entered. “We’re ready to go.”

“Not tonight. The board goes home early.”

“Board? You mean the Board of Directors — of the Center? I thought we were dealing with the Budget Committee.”

“We’re not. Hutch blocked a committee review. I’m left with no alternative but to go to the board itself.”

“I’m not prepared for that.”

“Don’t quaver so when you talk, my dear. You’re prepared — brilliantly so, knowing you. And you can prepare me.”

“I’ve never even
seen
the board.”

“I have. They’re formidable as hell. Exactly what you’d expect of three world-class tycoons, a retired governor and two Nobel prize winners.” He smiled. “Pardon my intimidation. I’m just challenging you to do better than your best. Give me what I need to impress the hell out of them.”

“Yes, sir.” She snapped off a ragged salute.“Shall I get a new dress? A permanent?”

“You just get the data. I’ll confront them alone.”

“Thank God!”

“Confidence.” He leaned back, being careful not to allow the old chair to fall off its base. It was going to be quite a pleasure, and a deserved one, to allocate himself some decent furniture. Part of Hutch’s psychology was to make sure he had the worst office, the most decrepit furniture in the whole clinic. Transient interns rated better space.

“You seem curiously happy.”

“I should be. I think this might get me the directorship. If the board starts dictating policy to Hutch, he’ll have to go. There’s already board sentiment to that effect, I suspect.”

“Tom, you’re using me again.”

“You’re useful, lover.”

She laughed, shook her head. Tom disliked the moral tone of her position. Operating to mutual benefit wasn’t using somebody, not in the way she meant. “I’m saving your career.”

“To further your own.”

That was unfair. He felt wronged. “I’m getting what we both want, Sarah. That’s all that’s important.”

Her eyes were closed, she looked pained. “It’s just that I don’t like this side of you. It scares me. I don’t like to think you walk over people.”

“Then delude yourself. I don’t mind.”

“Tom, I guess what scares me is that I love you so much. I feel so vulnerable.”

He wanted to hold her, to somehow reassure her. They sat silently, the space between them making movement seem impossible.

“What if you fail?” she asked in a flat voice.

“Now who’s the betrayer?”

Her hand went to the desk between them. She must want him to hold it, he could see the sparkle of tears in her eyes. “We both have a lot to lose,” she said. “You’re making this thing into a life-or-death crisis.”

“It’s been that all along. I’m just trying to use it to our advantage.”

“That’s what I hate about you! You use everything. Me. Even yourself. Sometimes I see you as so — so dark and frightening. You’re somebody I don’t know, somebody who would do anything — too much — to get what he wanted.”

They had often had versions of this conversation. Originally, Tom had dismissed it as the histrionics of an insecure woman but recently had begun to suspect that it was more deeply felt than that. Sarah’s insecurities did not extend to her career, despite its precariousness. Tom wondered how long they would last as a couple. Would she leave him over such an issue? He reached out and took the hand. He knew that she was waiting, but for what he was not quite certain. Probably she wanted him to protest, to deny the truth of what she had said. It was like Sarah to see a truth and try to enforce a more palatable illusion in its stead.

“It’s the way I am,” Tom said. “I won’t deny it. I want his job. It’s that simple. I’m better qualified. And I’ll get it too. He won’t be able to stop me.” Saying the words offered him a satisfactory illusion of confidence. Actually, what he was conscious of was fear. He might get himself fired or, worse, might end up stripped of all power, condemned to be Hutch’s batboy until the old man died.

“Let’s go someplace and drink. It’s that time.”

“This is you talking? Leaving the lab at seven P.M.? Maybe you
have
given up.”

“They’re running statistics on the changes in Methuselah’s blood composition. There’s nothing for me to do.”

“You have computer access? I thought that’d be cut off by now.”

“Charlie broke the codes. We’re patched in through his home computer.”

Tom smiled. You couldn’t help but be proud to work with people such as Sarah and her group. She wasn’t one to be stopped by something as minor as having her budget cut and the door slammed in her face.“How can you get the memory space? Won’t the computer alert the Programming Group?”

“It’s an assembly from dozens of different files. A little here, a little there. Not enough to notice — from any one file.”

“How much space do you have?”

“Ten thousand K.”

He burst out laughing. It took a supplementary request to the Programming Group, six weeks’ wait and a special budget allocation to exceed 500 K. So much for bureaucracy! “How is this getting billed, for the love of God?”

“It’s going on Hutch’s personal account. The effective cost is eighteen hundred dollars an hour.”

“I hope that’s not true. He’ll end up going to jail for stealing computer time.”

“That would be delicious. Unfortunately, the truth is more prosaic.”

“May I know?”

“Nope.”

He could respect that. She was into a substantial bank of Riverside’s enormous computing power. The fewer who knew, the better. Not to mention the safety there was in ignorance.

They didn’t talk on the way down in the elevator. The lobby was quiet as they crossed to the door. He hailed a cab on York Avenue. “How about making this a catered affair?”

“Chinese food?”

“It’s a deal.” He couldn’t face some depressing bar right now. He wanted Sarah very badly. The thought of losing her came cold into his mind. He loved her so much. Right now he wanted to slide across the seat, to put his arm around her, to melt the barrier between them. During the day she was so crisp and professional and cool. At night he wanted another Sarah, one who would shelter him. He watched her gentle, tense face, the soft curve of her bosom, smelled her faint perfume and longed for her.

The harsh words she had spoken in his office returned to mind now. ‘You use everything. Me. Yourself.’ Was it really true? Did he have to think that about himself? If it was true, it was not something he could help.

“I love you,” he said softly so the cabdriver wouldn’t hear. Public intimacies annoyed Sarah.

She smiled briefly, allowed him to cover her hand with his.

“Love solves problems,” he said.

She was silent a long moment. “It survives them.”

He wished so very much for her happiness and success. She had made an extraordinary discovery, he was sure of it. He wanted her to taste the sweetness of recognition, to receive all the benefits such a thing could bring. “I want to help you, Sarah,” he said, “I want to so badly!”

She smiled broadly. “I wish Hutch could hear you. He’d be terrified.”

“Left side or right side,” the cabdriver asked.

“Building on the left. The high-rise.”

The big blue “Excelsior Towers” sign glowed in the deepening night. An elderly woman with a dog came out, the spiderlike creature trotting along beside her. Alex seasoned a cigar at his post by the door. He lit it, took a deep puff. Tom watched with the avidity of the denied, envied the man his indifference to his health. They got out of the cab.