The Hunger (19 page)

What gave this woman the right to make her feel so awful about herself!

Sarah snatched her hands away and went back to the control room. The moment she entered it she realized how very alien Miriam Blaylock really was. This seemed such a welcoming, familiar place, cozy with a purpose she appreciated. There had been something in that cubicle, some indefinable thing, that reminded her in an odd way of the evil in Methuselah’s cage. As in the cage, there was a dirty scent in the cubicle, but sweet rather than sour — and the raw seductiveness beneath the cloak, almost of majesty, as wild as Methuselah’s rage . . . A demon — if such a thing existed — would, like Miriam, be too beautiful. Methuselah had been another manifestation of a demon’s evil: naked and real, screaming hate even as he died. But Sarah didn’t believe in evil. Rather she believed in the shadowed inner world of man, where to lose is to win and to win is to fail to see the truth. “She’ll have a night terror, all right,” Sarah said. She was absolutely certain of it. No one like Miriam Blaylock could pass a night without one.

Tom was amazed at what he had seen on the monitor. There was something between Sarah and Miriam. His own reaction to Miriam Blaylock was now established: she was not the kind of patient he liked to treat. And he wished he hadn’t gotten Sarah involved. She didn’t need the kind of psychological warfare that the Miriams of the world indulged in. “That’s a rich little bitch in there. I don’t like her.”

Sarah nodded. Tom could see how upset and distraught she was. She had been ever since she had first seen Mrs. Blaylock. The poor girl was terribly insecure as it was. Put on the pressure and she lost all perspective.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” he said. Tom had decided to let the coolness Sarah had shown him earlier dissolve of its own accord. The mature thing would be to make himself accept it. He knew that he wasn’t more than average as a lover, not good at all as a friend, but he wanted to give Sarah what he had. To keep the interest of one such as she, Tom had accepted that he would have to concede many things.

Sarah leaned her head against his shoulder. “You’ve gotten awfully laconic.” It was an opening, and Tom almost threw his arms around her with gratitude.

“I’m worried about you, darling. You seem upset.”

Sarah nodded at the monitor. Miriam lay reading a magazine. “I am.”

“What don’t you like about her?” He thought of the murmured conversation between them, the strange gesture of the holding of hands.

“She’s — I don’t know how to express it. Perhaps the old definition of a monster, the Latin one.”

Tom smiled. “I have no idea what it is. To me a monster is a monster.”

“A divine creature. A
thing
of the gods. Irresistible and fatal.”

Tom looked again at the monitor. It seemed a great distance between the gods and the woman with
McCalls
in her hands. “I just don’t like her,” he said. “Bored, selfish, rich, a little on the compulsive side, judging from the fastidiousness of her clothes. Probably collects dicks like shrunken heads.”

He was delighted to make Sarah laugh. It always relived him, like discovering that a gift has been appreciated beyond one’s expectations. “Sometimes,” she said, “you have a way of cutting through that’s just priceless.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Now I hope you won’t worry instead of kiss me.” Her eyes at last seemed happy. He kissed her lips, puckering them with the heels of his hands.

With an annoyed little jolt he realized that she was staring past him, at the damn monitor. “My God, Tom, what did she just pick up?”

It was a book. Tom knew it perfectly well. “Was there a copy in the patients’ lounge?”

“Of my book?
My
book? Certainly not, it’s not for patients.” She looked wildly around the room. “This is crazy! What kind of game is she playing?”

Miriam lay reading, her bottom lip caught prettily between her teeth, her eyes avid with concentration. Sarah put her head down on the desk and let out a long, racking sigh, almost a sob. Tom leaned close to her. “I’m too tired for games,” she said. “A stupid woman and her stupid games.”

“Honey, why don’t you just knock off. Go home or go back to the lab. Let me deal with Mrs. Blaylock alone.”

“I ought to be here. I’m the expert.”

“This place is loaded with good doctors. Me, for example.”

Sarah sat up, shook her head. “I accepted the case,” she said, “I can’t think of one valid reason to abandon it.”

Miriam closed her copy of
Sleep and Age
and lay back. The bed was tolerable, but best of all was this wonderful feeling of safety. Her own house was a superbly designed refuge, but a hospital with its large staff and twenty-four-hour operation was almost as good. No night clerks drowsing while fire spread up the stairwells as in a hotel. No robbers prowling the halls or defective wiring electrocuting the unwary bather. Hospitals were safe enough for a Sleeper. Even after burying John in the tunnel, she did not feel completely comfortable at home. He must yet die more completely, he knew the house’s security system too well. She relaxed into welcome peace. Maybe this time she would dream as she once had, of the sylvan blessings of long ago, or of the endless promise of the future. The unquiet dreams were most frequent during bad times. Her Sleep was more persistent when she was tense. She might need it as often as every twelve hours at the height of a crisis instead of every twenty-four. The harder things got, the more it interrupted.

She snuggled down into the bed, smelling the starched sheets, quivering with delight at the safety and thinking of Sarah, poor girl, who was about to walk through the fire.

The patient interrupted their conversation; professionalism demanded that personal matters now be put aside. The electroencephalograph, monitoring brain waves, was showing a pattern characteristic of drowsiness.

“There goes a roll,” Sarah said as the electro-oculograph jiggled. Mrs. Blaylock’s eyes were rolling into her head, an indication of stage one sleep. Sarah cleared her throat and swigged some coffee. Tom had to admire her. She was bursting apart inside and he damn well knew it. But you couldn’t tell it now. That was a pro. The alpha-wave arrhythmias that indicated dozing sleep appeared. Then the skin galvanometer jumped and the heart rate increased.

“Oops. Must have gotten stuck with a pin. She wearing any pins?”

“The electrodes must be bothering her.”

After a moment the electro-oculograph indicated left-to-right motion. “She’s reading again.”

Sarah shook her head. Tom wished he could find some way to lighten Sarah’s mood. “At least she respects your work. She’s reading it.”

“I wish I knew more about her, Tom.”

Behind them Geoff Williams from the blood analysis lab cleared his throat. “I hope I’m not disturbing any lovey-lovey, dears, but I have a problem for you. You got the wrong blood.”

“What wrong blood? What’re you talking about?”

“The blood you gave me marked 00265 A-Blaylock M.? It isn’t human blood.”

“Of course it is. I took it out of that patient right there.” Sarah pointed at the monitor.

Geoff pulled out his computer printout. “You’ll note from the machine’s attempt to analyze it that something is amiss.” The sheet showed the blood’s ID and then a list of zeros where the component values should have been.

“Machine’s on the fritz,” Tom said, turning back to the monitors. “Another roll,” he said. “She’s trying again. Sweet dreams, dearie.”

“No computer problem, Doctor. I ran the test program and then ran other bloods back to back with yours. You did not give me human blood. Whatever this is, the machine cannot analyze it.”

Sarah looked up at him. “You know, I seem to remember a time when blood analysis was done by hand, when it was between a man and his centrifuge.”

“I did it by hand too. Here’s what I found.” He thrust a sheet of numbers at them. “It isn’t a human type as far as I’m concerned. It has a whole extra component of leukocytes, for one thing.”

“Could a human being survive with it?”

“It’s a better blood than ours. Very similar, but more disease resistant. The cellular material is more dense, the plasma less. It would take a strong heart to pump the stuff and there might be some minor capillary clogging, but whoever had it in their veins could forget about sickness if their heart was strong enough to pump the stuff.”

Tom gestured to the screen. “We have a patient right before our eyes who is clearly thriving with it in her veins. Before we draw any further conclusions I think we’d better retest.”

“Of course.”

“It’s her blood,” Sarah snapped. “I didn’t make a mistake.” Tom blinked — he was surprised at the ferocity in her voice.

Geoff must have heard it too, because he paused a moment before speaking again, and then went on very gently. “This cannot have come from that patient, Sarah. If it did then she isn’t a human being. And I can’t believe that.”

“It could be a congenital defect, or a hybrid.”

Geoff shook his head. “First off, we’re dealing with a very dense blood. A human heart could pump it, but just barely. The component mix is all off. The counts don’t make sense. Sarah, it cannot be human blood. The closest would be one of the great apes —” “It’s not from one of my monkeys,” she said woodenly. “I don’t make mistakes that simple.” Her voice lowered. “I wish I did.”

She took Geoff with her and got another sample. Mrs. Blaylock had fallen asleep only a few minutes before. When the needle entered her arm her lips parted but her eyelids never flickered. Tom watched the graphs for some sign of disturbed sleep. After taking samples from rhesus monkeys Sarah must be a true expert. Certainly it wasn’t waking up Mrs. Blaylock.

Tom was about to turn away from the graphs when he paused. A thrill, as if of danger, had coursed through him. He found himself wishing that Sarah would hurry up and get out of there. When she did return he nodded toward the readout.

“There’s nothing right about her pattern, is there?” she said promptly.

“I’d say she was in coma except for those voltage bursts in the delta wave.” Delta was the indicator of conscious mental activity. “It’s like a dead brain that’s somehow retaining consciousness.”

“Isn’t that a very muted sleep spindle in alpha?”

“It could be background noise. A passing radio cab, for example. We’ve had that problem before. It’s too low-level.”

“Respiration’s almost nil. Tom, it’s quiet in that room. So very quiet. It’s rather horrible.”

“Don’t go in there again.”

He felt her eyes on him. “OK,” she said softly. This time she put her hand in his and they looked steadily at each other. There was no need to speak.

L
ONDON:
1430

Yellow light filters through the curtains. She had drawn them against the noise and stench of the street. Although it is May, sullen, cold rain sweeps from the sky. Across Lombard Street the bells of St. Edmund the King ring the changes. Miriam has been almost mad with the damp, the filth and the endless ringing bells — and the fact that Lollia has been taken to the torturer.

She rushes out into the garden behind the house to escape the ringing. But here resound the bells of St. Swithin’s across the reeking waters of the Lang Bourne. Rats slither away as she moves among her beloved roses. Six of the plants are already aboard ship, these others must be left behind. She sobs as she paces, horrible images of that poor, wonderful girl lying in a rack, her hands bulging purple in iron pilliwinks.

They have overstayed here; long ago they should have left London, left England. There are places in the wild east of Europe where it is still possible for Miriam’s kind to thrive. They had been planning, considering and suddenly here was Lollia, captured as a witch.

A witch, of all the superstitious blather!

“Lady, farthing, please farthing.”

She tosses some copper to the ratcatchers who have begun to creep up from the Bourne. Swarms of them live off the rats of the open sewer. She has seen them devour rats raw. She has seen them drain the blood of rats down the throats of their children.

She has heard their songs: “He that will an alehouse keep, sing hey nonny nonny . . .”

Occasionally, the King’s men come and kill some of them. But they multiply in the benighted ruin that is fifteenth-century London. Everything is wrong here. Death and disease stride through the populace. Houses burn nightly and the rains bring the roar of buildings collapsing. The mud is always ankle deep and full of rotting garbage. The streets are sewers. Wild pigs, pickpockets and cutpurses seethe in the markets. At night come the cutthroats and the shrieking mad. Over it all there hangs an endless brown pall of peat smoke. The city does not rumble as Rome did or clatter as did the marble streets of Constantinople, but rather it breathes a great moan, as winter wind coming down a moor. Occasionally, amid a flash of silk and the rickrack of a gaily painted coach an aristocrat passes by.

The sundial tells her that four hours have passed since Lollia was taken away. The bailiffs will be heard in Lombard Street soon, bearing their burden in its black muslin shroud. Then Miriam must be ready, for Lollia will have “confessed.” Oh yes, Miriam has seen them at their art of torture. Beside it the other arts of this age are but pale shadows. Men are skinned amid jovial crowds, their parts tossed as souvenirs to putrid children. The victims howl out any calumny or sorcery, whatever is wanted of them.

Miriam cannot find the depth of her contempt. She goes through the night streets with real pleasure, a thousand times more dangerous than the quickest knifeman, stronger, faster and more intelligent.

Her belly is always full. Or was, until the soldiers of King Henry began to organize a competent night watch.

Lollia was netted like a plunging doe in the Crutched Friars by St. Olave and dragged off to the gaols. She had been a child of the streets, a Byzantine Greek whom Miriam discovered in Ravenna in the Clothmakers Market near the Palace of the Emperor, working as a weaver of linen. How long ago that was! Nearly a millennium. Miriam had been staggered by her beauty, uplifted from her despondence at the loss of Eumenes. As Rome died they went to Constantinople but left when the old, familiar signs of imperial decline began to appear there as well: whole quarters deserted, palaces left to ruin, arson and corruption and wildly escalating prices.