The Wild by Whitley Strieber Read Free Book Online Page A

furious wife? "Really, Bob, if you want to try it with strangers, why not just call an escort service?" Then the diminished relationship. Fifteen years of loyalty lost to a bad dream.
    The maid had left her cart overturned in the hall. Bob, moving awkwardly, trying to keep all four limbs coordinated, went out and sniffed one of the slowly turning wheels. There was a click behind him. He didn't need to look. Of course the unseen hand of nightmare had closed the door.
    He sniffed the handle, smelling a strong odor of the maid's hand, mixed of sour skin smell, cigarettes, mints, and body shampoo. He shrank back, thinking that he really couldn't handle sniffing a doorknob. It was part of the perfection of the illusion that he had just automatically done that instead of trying to open the door.
    He thought: Probably I only feel like this. What I actually look like is a naked man sniffing a doorknob and I've got to stifle this peculiar behavior!
    I'll be calm, straightforward. I was going for the shower and took a wrong turn. Honest mistake. No big deal. Just please God don't let me start barking again!
    The worst thing about this experience was that it didn't have the logic of dream or hallucination at all, it had the logic of life. He wished to God for Cindy.
    When he heard the elevator bell ring and the doors roll open, a powerful and unexpected instinct asserted itself. He cowered back down the hall, seeking some darkness. Excited voices came toward him. "I swear it's the biggest dog I ever seen." What was this? Was the maid part of the dream, after all, or was he shifting the sense of her words into his own delusional system?
    "How he git it into de hotel, dat what I got to know."
    "Ask the guest. He must have smuggled it in."
    They came around the corner and stopped dead. "Aw, God. It got out." Bob looked up at them. A wave of sensation made him shudder, almost as if there were tiny creatures running on his skin. He felt frightened and dismal. He certainly seemed to be naked on all fours in the hallway of a hotel.
    "Its creepin' along, look out."
    "We gotta get the police, I ain't gonna touch nothin' that big." Hearing this, Bob cracked. Terror whipped him. He screamed and ran for the fire stairs. "Holy shit, it done got some speed on it!" Bob raced down the corridor, his claws catching on the rug.
    "We can't let that thing out in the hotel, they'll fire us both!"
    "Come on, woman, help me! We can head it off."
    The yellow lights glaring down, the beige elevator doors, the confusing twists and turns of the halls, Bob might be in a maze of some kind, the lights too bright, the ceilings too high, the smells all wrong.
    He saw writing on a door: EXIT. He threw himself against the bar until the door gave way into the fire stairs.
    "That thing's got a mind of its own, it just opened that door."
    Down, up, which way to go? Bob heard himself whimpering. He made a solemn vow: When I get home, if I ever do, I will call Monica and make an appointment. I will do this no matter how good I feel at the time. Frantically, he sought reasons for his predicament. Was it the salesman in the bar? Some kind of drug in his drink to make him a more pliant buyer? When he was selling, he had often wished for drugs of some kind. Just a nice little powder in the damn fool's steak sauce, and he becomes silly enough to buy the damn bonds. "Go out among the people, young man, and rape them." Fatherly advice from Charlie Decker, his boss in the bond office. Charles Decker: killed himself with a fingernail file.
    Quite arbitrarily he started up instead of down. It was not long, though, before he heard voices behind him. "How high is it?" "Go up to fifteen. You're gonna head it off." "Come on, where's that elevator when you need it?"
    Bob was having trouble working his body. If he thought about it, his back legs and his front legs stopped working together and he went to scrabbling. Trying to make his mind a blank, he moved up the stairs. His mind went back to