Hunger and Thirst by Richard Matheson

it!
    His hand flopped on the bed.
    Fallen. Beaten.
    And his lips drew back suddenly as a tortured sob contorted his face beyond the resemblance to a human face.
    “No, no, no, no, no…”
    All resolve left him. The strength of body gone, the strength of mind sapped too. As if he had converted even brain energy into fuel for his muscles.
    Wrinkling skin encased his eyes and tears ran down his dry cheeks. His pale lips shook and he cried as though his heart had broken. Wept like a helpless, frustrated baby, his lips forming a twisted square of flesh, his chest jerking with fitful sobs.
    The tears ran into his mouth.
    In the first moment of sudden excitement at feeling moisture, he sucked at them eagerly.
    But they were salty and they made him gag and cough. Then a load moan collapsed his chest and he cried in hopeless pain, in anguish, his body a throbbing mass of twisted muscles, raw and numb and aching.
    “Mother.” He sobbed it again and again,
    “Mother.
Help me
.”

7
    Something thumped down on the floor.
    He opened his eyes in fright and looked down.
    It was a cat, a scrawny, brown-striped cat. It had come in through the six inch opening in the window. It was crouching on the floor looking at Erick in suspicious fear, leveling its yellow-green eyes at him.
    It extended one paw, still looking at him, then took a cautious step into the square of sunlight on the splintered, dust-coated floorboards. Its wide orbs of eyes never left him. They were two untrusting moons.
    Erick stared at it.
    In the first half-waking moment, he thought it was a visitation. He was too groggy to be sure. He forgot where he was. He blinked at the cat and heard an elevated train grind to a stop at the station. Was that the ghost of a cat?
    He blinked.
    No, it was a cat. A real cat. He saw it now as he blinked away the crust of sleep.
    The cat was advancing into the room, eyes wide and still very suspicious, ears flattened back on its head, looking as if it really lived in that room and had just come back from a weekend trip to find this strange usurper in his quarters.
    It moved another step and one dirty paw pressed down on Ava Gardner’s face. The cat lowered its head and sniffed in momentary speculation at the magazine. Erick saw the black nostrils dilate. Then its head sprang up again as though he had moved threateningly. It jumped to the side, looking at him.
    “What do you want?” he asked.
    He spoke seriously as though the cat would answer back–I’ve just dropped in to borrow a cup of sugar.
    The cat looked at him warily with the never-ending fear of harm from all strangers that tenement cats had. Erick ran his gaze over its gaunt mottled body from the tip of its bleak nose to the tip of its straggly tail.
    The cat moved across he rug as if stalking a mouse, eyes always on him. He didn’t know what it was looking for.
    It belonged to the old woman in the next room, the old, thin-lipped woman who was a desiccated and frayed bit of ancient bone and skin. She had lived in the house for years and years. She had a large sitting room. It had the only easy chair in the entire house.
    Once Erick had looked in there the door was slightly ajar. He had seen her sitting in the easy chair in an old red patterned wool wrapper and staring down at the street. He had seen her bony ankles, the tallow-white skin of her calves knotted with purplish, bulging varicose veins. She had sat there without moving, the breeze ruffling her flat, gray hair, her dried-up old lips puckering and flattening as though she were preparing kisses for some spectral lover.
    Her cat had been on the fire escape sunning itself that day.
    Now the cat was in his room. It was moving around like a four-footed house detective looking for clues. It sniffed and it pried. And always it kept looking at Erick with its suspicious yellowish eyes.
    He thought – I’ll write a message in blood and put it in the pussy’s teeth and the pussy will carry it straight to the old lady and