Read Online The Hunger by Whitley Strieber - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Whitley Strieber
Ads: Link
instrument could only be for one purpose; she just knew he was going to kill her. When she felt his hands pushing away the nightgown, exposing her nakedness, she moaned in misery — but also felt a horrible, unwanted tingle. This nightmare had another aspect. She began to anticipate seeing him, she visualized his sweating body plunging into the little pool of light. It made her angry. She had never imagined she could feel this debased, this betrayed.
As he bent toward her she caught a glimpse of him. At that moment Francie Parker, twenty-two years old, the frequent object of male desire, capable of eighty words a minute on an IBM Selectric, saw something that instantly and utterly shattered her.
The shock stopped her heart. All that escaped of the wild cry her mind had formed was a gurgling sigh.
When she died like that, before she should have, he growled his rage and stabbed wildly, hoping to get her before the last second.
He failed. Then he took her as best he could, keeping at it until she crackled like paper.
At four o’clock on a wet morning, Sutton Place was empty. Elegant windows were dark. Nothing moved except when an occasional gust of wind from the night’s storm stirred some bit of paper or a broken leaf. Behind one window in one of the charming little houses that line the east side of the street a figure stood, absolutely motionless. Miriam was rigid with concentration, feeling the eerie echo of a distant touch . It was a facility she shared only with her own race, and some of the higher primates. Man, while capable of learning touch from an adept, was normally mute. But this touch was real, pulsating on the darkness.
One of her own kind?
Since the bloodbath of the Middle Ages the remaining members of her race lived solitary lives, each wrapped in his own longings and tragedies, an autumnal species too frightened of persecution to dare to foregather.
“We are not evil,” she thought as the strange touch rose higher and higher, “we also are part of the justice of the earth.”
Fifty years ago she had seen one of her own kind, a tall figure alone at the railing of the liner Berengaria , looking toward her on the dock. For an instant they had touched , sharing their private hungers, and then it was lost, the ship’s whistle sounding, the wake disappearing in the moonlight, journey without end.
Her tragic human companions were her only comfort. They could not conceive of the loneliness that drove her to transform them, to create her own image within them.
She loved them — and had destroyed each of them.
It could not continue, not any longer. She could not stand to live with Alice, knowing all the while that she was going to end up like the others, like John.
The touch interrupted her thoughts again, running like thunder in the mountains, as huge and wild as night.
So it was an animal. And it was in agony. Absolute agony. The kind that would be felt by one deprived of Sleep. But there were no transformed animals.
Or were there?
Sarah Roberts, blindly experimenting, might have accomplished some rough approximation of transformation. So one of her beasts was meeting its end in a filthy cage. She felt the lost forests in its touch , the wide leafy spaces and the strength of the iron bars.
Her eyes widened, her hands snapped to the bars that protected her own window, closed around the cold iron. The window, its frame and the whole wall shook.
Soon after dawn Tom Haver opened his eyes. He had been trying not to wake up, but it was no use. The room was suffused with dull light. He looked at the clock. Seven-ten. Past time to get up. He swung out of bed and lurched in for his shower. The night had been spent sleeplessly in a fog of strategies, trying to find some way of extending Sarah’s appropriation. Every road led back to the Budget Committee and Hutch.
He paused in the door to the bathroom and looked back at her. There came to him a feeling so strange and tender that it seemed as if it had
As he bent toward her she caught a glimpse of him. At that moment Francie Parker, twenty-two years old, the frequent object of male desire, capable of eighty words a minute on an IBM Selectric, saw something that instantly and utterly shattered her.
The shock stopped her heart. All that escaped of the wild cry her mind had formed was a gurgling sigh.
When she died like that, before she should have, he growled his rage and stabbed wildly, hoping to get her before the last second.
He failed. Then he took her as best he could, keeping at it until she crackled like paper.
At four o’clock on a wet morning, Sutton Place was empty. Elegant windows were dark. Nothing moved except when an occasional gust of wind from the night’s storm stirred some bit of paper or a broken leaf. Behind one window in one of the charming little houses that line the east side of the street a figure stood, absolutely motionless. Miriam was rigid with concentration, feeling the eerie echo of a distant touch . It was a facility she shared only with her own race, and some of the higher primates. Man, while capable of learning touch from an adept, was normally mute. But this touch was real, pulsating on the darkness.
One of her own kind?
Since the bloodbath of the Middle Ages the remaining members of her race lived solitary lives, each wrapped in his own longings and tragedies, an autumnal species too frightened of persecution to dare to foregather.
“We are not evil,” she thought as the strange touch rose higher and higher, “we also are part of the justice of the earth.”
Fifty years ago she had seen one of her own kind, a tall figure alone at the railing of the liner Berengaria , looking toward her on the dock. For an instant they had touched , sharing their private hungers, and then it was lost, the ship’s whistle sounding, the wake disappearing in the moonlight, journey without end.
Her tragic human companions were her only comfort. They could not conceive of the loneliness that drove her to transform them, to create her own image within them.
She loved them — and had destroyed each of them.
It could not continue, not any longer. She could not stand to live with Alice, knowing all the while that she was going to end up like the others, like John.
The touch interrupted her thoughts again, running like thunder in the mountains, as huge and wild as night.
So it was an animal. And it was in agony. Absolute agony. The kind that would be felt by one deprived of Sleep. But there were no transformed animals.
Or were there?
Sarah Roberts, blindly experimenting, might have accomplished some rough approximation of transformation. So one of her beasts was meeting its end in a filthy cage. She felt the lost forests in its touch , the wide leafy spaces and the strength of the iron bars.
Her eyes widened, her hands snapped to the bars that protected her own window, closed around the cold iron. The window, its frame and the whole wall shook.
Soon after dawn Tom Haver opened his eyes. He had been trying not to wake up, but it was no use. The room was suffused with dull light. He looked at the clock. Seven-ten. Past time to get up. He swung out of bed and lurched in for his shower. The night had been spent sleeplessly in a fog of strategies, trying to find some way of extending Sarah’s appropriation. Every road led back to the Budget Committee and Hutch.
He paused in the door to the bathroom and looked back at her. There came to him a feeling so strange and tender that it seemed as if it had
Similar Books
