The Hunger was as frozen as my physical form was, but its mirror eyes gleamed.I want to devour you. All. Everyone.
“Sure, I get that,” I said. “You got an empty you can’t fill. But tell me. Suppose you did that. You got to eat me and everyone else on this rock. Then what?”
Confusion entered its tone.What?
“Suppose you get everything you want,” I said. “You get to eat the whole damned world. You’re still going to be trying to fill that empty place. Only there’s going to be nothing left to put in there, is there?”
The Hunger dwelled on that for a moment.Ah,it said at last.Linear time. The feeding ends those lines.
“Right,” I said. “Exactly. And when it does, what is going to be left for a Hunger to nibble on? Forever and ever and ever?”
Its thin lips quivered, ever so slowly peeling back from pale teeth.That is the nature of the Empty Night.
“Sure,” I said. “But think about it. Wouldn’t you rather spend more linear time feeding?”
It seemed to dwell on that for a moment.
“Work with me,” I said. “Do it my way. And yeah, maybe you don’t get to gobble up everything all at once. But you get to keep feeding. And feeding. And feeding.”
Yes,came the hideous, hissing answer.
“Right, okay, follow along,” I said. “What happens if Thomas dies? You don’t get to eat then, either, do you?”
Again, the thing considered, as though it had encountered an entirely new thought it had to wrap its mind around. I could sense its attention shift to Thomas’s battered body.
My portal closes. I am consigned to the Outside once more.
“Not much to eat there, is there?” I noted.
There is emptiness. Hunger.The tone of the voice shrank.Nothing else.
“But you could stay here, yeah?” I took a breath and put gentle emphasis on the next words. “For as long as you can keep Thomas alive.”
It simply stared at me in silence. I had to hurry this along. I was getting tired. Feeding this thing was as different from satisfying Lara’sHunger as feeding a finely bred racing greyhound and a friggin’ elephant.
I wish to continue feeding,came the answer from the thing, finally.To feed and feed and feed. For centuries and centuries of your time. The Empty Night will come. But I wish to take my pleasure of the mortal realms until then.
“Sure,” I said. “Why burn down the candy store when you can keep getting more treats? Good,” I said. “That’s a human concept, called sustainability. I mean, we’re still working on it, but this conversation is going really well.”
I could hear the hysterical giggle bubbling out of my voice. I was in direct mental contact with a Lovecraftian horror. Which probably wouldn’t be recommended by the American Medical Association. I could feel things shredding inside my head as the Hunger continued to draw energy out of me. I’d be racking up insanity points with every single exchange with the thing.
“So, here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m going to put you and Thomas back together. And you’re going to help him.”
This portal is failing,the Hunger said, with faint contempt.Body, mind, and spirit. Hollowed out. Ruined.
“He’s human,” I said. “He can be renewed. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. And you and I are going to fight together again. To heal him. And you get to keep on feeding.”
The Hunger’s eyes flickered and shimmered, mirrors shining more brightly, and I could see my body, clenching my staff, struggling to stay upright in one, and Thomas, eyes beginning to roll back in his head, in the other.
“I mean, what are your options?” I demanded. “He goes, you go. He stays, you stay. What do you say?”
And time almost stopped. Everything depended on this. There’s a rule that applies to just about everything there is: You are what you eat. You eat healthy, you are healthy. You eat junk, sooner or later, you’re living in junk. This Outsider was a primal spirit of pure, devouring hunger.
But it had been feeding on humanity. For years. Humans are weirdand complicated and contradictory, but they pretty much all operate under the same drive as every other living thing on the planet.
Survival.
The desire to live. Grow. Reproduce. Protect offspring. Pure, animal, instinct-level drives that sometimes let us do incredible things, go beyond the boundaries we normally face, defy darkness, despair, self-destruction—sometimes even death itself.
