Free A wasteland of strangers by Bill Pronzini

that, too, fades and I'm able to get up, shower, dress, do all the things that begin another day, that lead to another night.
    The bed was a mess this morning, the sheets stained and even torn in one place, smelling rankly of the Hunger. Him, too, last night's fodder for the voracious mouth. Here for two or three hours, and then gone again in the early-morning darkness. Night phantom, incubus. Strange, but when I closed my eyes I couldn't picture his face or remember his name, even though I know him as well as I know anyone in Pomo, even though he's been in my bed before. Instead, it was Neal's face I saw, Neal's lips and hands and body I remembered.
    Before I showered I wadded up the sheets and pillowcases and the bathroom towel he'd used and took them out to the garbage. The girl would be in to clean today and she would remake the bed, but I didn't want her to have to handle the Hunger's dirty leavings. Some more residue of propriety, I supposed. And a pathetic residue at that: I seem to care more about a cleaning woman's feelings than I do about my own.
    So I sat alone on the porch and watched the clouds race across the sky, creating patterns of light and shadow on the lake's surface, on the brown and dark-green hills, and drank more coffee to ease the dull hangover pain behind my eyes, and thought about Neal. The first night we'd met, at the party to celebrate the opening of a new winery in the Alexander Valley: the shy daughter of a Ukiah farmer and the handsome real-estate developer with hair that was already starting to silver even though he was only a dozen years older than my twenty-three. The first time we went to bed, and how patient he was with me ... the evening at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco when he asked me to marry him ... the month-long honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean ... the day this house he'd built for us was finished and the way we'd celebrated, naked in bed, drinking Mumm's, pouring it on each other's body and then licking it off. . .
    Those, and so many more memories. But I wasn't allowed to be alone with them this morning. Other thoughts intruded, another face appeared in my mind's eye—not the face of last night's incubus but the ugly visage of John Faith. An effort to block it out did no good; instead it was Neal's image that blurred and turned to shadow and faded away.
    The Hunger wasn't satisfied. I'd known it in the shower earlier, when the mouth began to stir again inside me. For some reason it still wanted John Faith. Another surrogate like all the others, another incubus . . . or was he? The Hunger seemed to sense a difference, something to do with the part that remained hidden from me. It wanted Faith—that was enough for me to know now.
    It wanted him and so I would have to find a way to feed it what it craved.
    I left the porch, the lordly view, the warm memories of Neal, everything that had once meant something, and went to do the Hunger's bidding.

    Audrey Sixkiller
    I KEPT BLANKING out on my class notes, on what the kids were saying and doing. Usually I have no problem maintaining order in my classes; today I couldn't even maintain order in my own mind. The prowler last night had shaken me more than I cared to admit. That, and not being able to reach Dick until after three, and then not being able to sleep again after he left. Zombie woman. I probably shouldn't have come to school at all, but at dawn it had seemed more important not to give in to the anxiety, to plunge right back into my normal routine. Now I wasn't so sure.
    Well, I could still take the afternoon off. Hang on until noon, then go home and regroup in private.
    I wondered if Dick had found out anything. Chances were he hadn't. He'd said he would have a talk with John Faith, but if the man was guilty he would hardly admit it; all Dick could do, really, was to try to scare him into leaving Pomo County and not coming back. And if he was innocent, there was nothing to point to anyone else. Dick had come back this