That Space between Perceptions

by Shellsanne

It's the roadtrip to hell. On their way to Minnesota, where Will hopes to prove he's not a killer, he & Lecter stop at a remote diner. For Will the stop is a nightmare of terrifying visions and what seems to be his spiraling loss of sanity. For Lecter it's the last chance to convince Will he's a killer and to win his total trust. But his mindgames may push Will too far this time...

That Space between Perceptions

By Shellsanne

Fandom: Hannibal

Characters: Will and Hannibal

Spoilers: This takes place in Season 1, Episode 13; it's the missing piece between Will asking Lecter to drive him to Minnesota, and their arrival the next morning at the Hobbs house.

xxx

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xxx

Strains of Bach's Violin Concerto in D drifted silkily from the speakers.

The selection of classical music playing over the Bentley's stereo seemed progressively more soothing, more soporific as the hours passed. Will was certain that wasn't coincidental. As the blur of open highway rolled hypnotically toward him, he was finding it ever more difficult not to drift away on the lulling arias and delicately seductive sonnets chosen supposedly at random by the entertainment system. If not for the relentless throb at the back of his skull, or the nightmarish images that flashed with jagged intensity through his mind whenever he felt himself slipping from consciousness, sleep might have taken him by now.

But he must have been hovering at its edges because when Lecter switched off the ignition and the compartment fell into sudden still silence, he snapped wide awake with an unpleasant jolt.

"Where are we?" He couldn't remember when he spoke last and his voice sounded graveled and thick. "Why are we stopping?"

"It's been nearly five hours since the last stop," said Lecter in a breezy, matter-of-fact tone, as if commentating on a Sunday drive in the country, rather than a desperate, breakneck race across six states in the height of winter. "I need to stretch my legs, and you need to eat." And without waiting for consent from his traveling companion, he was out of the car and swinging the driver's side door shut, closing Will inside alone.

Will shivered in the silence. Feeling bleary and disoriented, he blinked a few times to clear his vision and squinted through the windshield. A light snow was falling. What state were they in? Ohio? Indiana? The white-blanketed expanse of flat, unremarkable field stretching into a hazy, early evening sunset gave little away. Considering the angle of the sun, and the few brief stops they'd made since their precipitous departure from Baltimore, he guessed they were maybe halfway there.

Only halfway…

Across a snow-frosted parking lot of maybe a dozen cars loomed a brightly lit diner, the neon banner above its door promising FAST FOOD, FRIENDLY SERVICE. And above that what appeared to be a smiling cow in a chef's hat waving a sign that read Open 24 Hours!

"I'm not hungry," Will mumbled.

He didn't move at first, sullenly staring straight ahead, but Lecter strode through his line of sight as he crossed the front of the car from his side to Will's. He watched the doctor pull his coat collar up against the chill, a fine mist of white already dusting its dark fabric, and then stand at the passenger-side bumper, perfectly still, perfectly straight, looking far more sharp and invigorated than Will felt. Watching him wait there, Will thought he looked implausibly dapper for the driver in a spontaneous, no-rest roadtrip.

He sighed, then grudgingly shambled out of the car.

The cold hit him first, unexpected and piercing. For a moment it took his breath away. But it was the protest of limbs stuck too long in one position, stiff joints and cramped muscles, that forced him to move. He stomped his feet a few times, then bent over in a long stretch, allowing the chill to revive his senses, shaking his arms out as he rose.

It was the aroma that hit him next. He glanced at the diner, its wafting smells of bacon and hickory smoke and grilled meat making his stomach turn. He could see a number of bobbing heads inside. It appeared to be a popular place, or maybe just the only place to eat in what looked to be the middle of nowhere. He wondered about the people inside—weary travelers, long-haul truckers, families out for a cheap meal, children crayoning on paper dinner mats—dull, ordinary people doing dull, ordinary things, and he wondered how he could possibly blend in. How he could ever be ordinary again.

If ever he had been.

"I can't," Will said.

He turned back to the car, a little startled to find that Lecter had moved up quietly behind him. Will stepped back from him, slapping at his arms for warmth.

"You know what, doctor, you go, do what you need to. I'll wait for you out here."

Decision made, thought Will. He wasn't waiting for Lecter's approval. But as he reached for the car door to haul it open again, Lecter deftly reached across him and pushed it shut, the Bentley's chirp an instant later informing him the doctor had just locked its doors, locking Will out of the hiding place it offered.

"As you wish," said Lecter as he pocketed the fob. "But you'll catch your death out here."

And as he brushed past him, he cast his erstwhile patient a satisfied look, then strode off toward the diner.

Will sighed miserably, and after a moment of pointless defiance, followed him.

x

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x

"Do you want me to be seen?"

Will slid into the booth across from Lecter, still a little furious at being dragged into such a public place against his wishes. They'd played it safe until now, stopping only at service stations and roadside rest-stops, paying cash for what little they needed, keeping their heads low, moving quickly. Rendering the past ten hours mind-numbingly monotonous but blissfully uneventful. Will was a wanted man, but there was no one chasing them. The FBI was undoubtedly checking flights and roads around Baltimore, but it seemed unlikely they would search for him here, in the barren outback of the Midwest.

Unless he was spotted.

Lecter regarded him with the practiced patience of his vocation. "I want you to be alert and coherent when we reach the Hobbs house. For that you'll need food, sleep, and hydration. I want to spare you a relapse, Will."

Will inhaled a deep breath, trying to smooth the splintered edges of his nerves. Lecter's answer was right of course. It was one of the reasons he'd asked Lecter to drive him to Minnesota. Not only couldn't he trust his own driving in his present condition, he needed the doctor's calm, detached guidance, the reassurance of practical advice grounded in a stability that Will couldn't claim for himself these days.

He shifted uneasily, his eyes darting around the bustling and over-bright room. His senses felt overwhelmed. Not just by the smells but the sounds. The clink of dishes, the tinny din of music from overhead speakers, conversation, laughter, the occasional shout from the kitchen, a baby crying somewhere. There were so many people. A family of four in the booth ahead of them, an elderly couple in the booth behind. Groups of others along the windows, sitting along the counter at the front of the diner and filling at least half of the booths in the dining room, waitresses and busboys rushing between kitchen and customers, bodies crushing in on him, a cacophony of sound and chaos of sight that he knew wasn't entirely real—

"Will."

The sound of his name spoken quietly against the melee somehow reached and focused him, and in that instant the diner's volume dipped to a tolerable level, the number of people no longer pressing in on him. The spell broken. Lecter was watching him with concern.

Will nodded an I'm okay to him.

They both knew it wasn't true of course.

The diner was American fifties retro-style, narrow and elongated at the front to accommodate a long service counter lined with silver, floor-mounted stools, backed by the kitchen, then opening onto a much larger dining room, boasting slick vinyl booths in cherry red with white piping, silver laminate tables, retro Coca-cola signs on the walls and framed photos of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Buddy Holly. On the back wall sat a light-strobing Jukebox. It was a colorful, bubbly, atmospheric place. And it was bright.

Everything was so bright.

"I feel like I'm on display."

"You're not. Besides, the authorities are looking for a desperate lone man on the run. Not two friends sharing conversation over a meal." Lowering his voice slightly, Lecter added, "I only wish it were a meal I could provide for us myself."

That's when their waitress arrived, an earthy, heavy-set, middle-aged woman who looked chronically tired but attractive in a way that suggested she might have been a knock-out in her twenties. She carried a pad of paper, and with her long dark hair scrunchied back, you could see the small pen jutting from behind one ear.

"Hello, gentlemen, my name's Sam, I'll be your waitress on this chilly evening. Can I get you boys a bowl of our hearty meatball soup as a starter to warm you up?" She plucked the pen from behind her ear. "Finest meatballs in the tri-state, guaranteed."

Lecter winced slightly.

"No," said Will.

"Yes," said Lecter, smiling at Sam and gesturing toward Will, effectively overruling him. Will uttered a low grumble of protest, but their waitress didn't seem to notice.

"One Meatball Special," she said with a glance at Will and a scribble on her pad. Her attention was back on Lecter then, all smiles and flirty swivels of her hips. "And what about you, sir?" She leaned in closer with a slight thrust of her cleavage. "Can I tempt you with something meaty?"

She's hitting on him, Will thought dismally. In another place and time, and if his head wasn't throbbing quite so much, he would have found it amusing. He somehow doubted that Sam was the doctor's type.

Lecter was still smiling at her. "Tempting though that is, I'm afraid I'll have to settle for something to keep me awake for the long journey ahead. Just a coffee."

"Two," said Will.

"One," said Lecter. "And a bottle of mineral water for my friend."

Will shot a barbed glare at the doctor, and the waitress cast Will a doting smile.

"You obviously have someone looking after you, sweetie." Then she turned and winked at Lecter. "Back in a flash, boys."

The doctor unfolded his paper napkin—imprinted, Will noticed, with that same smiling cow in the chef's hat—and carefully positioned it onto his lap before finally glancing up into Will's glower.

"I am not a child," said Will somberly.

"Nor are you well. You're not thinking clearly enough to make decisions that support your recovery. So I'm making them for you."

Will continued glaring a moment longer, then felt his umbrage wilting as he realized that, once again, Lecter was making sense, and this was the reason he wanted him here. To challenge his blinkered mindset. To keep him on his game.

The realization didn't make him feel any less patronized though.

He slid across the booth.

"Where are you going?" asked Lecter.

Will stopped.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said through clenched teeth. "There I go again, making decisions all on my own. I need to relieve myself, doctor. What do you suggest I do?"

Lecter merely looked on lightly as Will headed off toward the restrooms in a fervor of indignation.

x

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x

The men's bathroom was a confined space with a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, blinking sporadically and casting a pale hue over a sink, a pair of urinals, and three stalls. He thought it was empty at first, then noticed that the stall door in the middle stood closed.

He twisted the faucet knob marked cold as far as it would turn and let cold water jet against his swollen left hand, where the thumb he'd dislocated that morning in order to slip his fingers from a handcuff bracelet

was that only this morning?

throbbed mercilessly. The icy blast was soothing, momentarily numbing the pain to a dull ache. He leaned over the sink, cupping water in his hands and splashing it against his face, then again, and again, until his cheeks were stinging from the cold. He needed to stay focused, alert.

Awake.

He was reaching for the paper-towel dispenser when he caught his reflection in the mirror over the sink. He winced.

Will hardly recognized the face that stared back. Drawn and gaunt beneath a shadow of several days' stubble, fine lines of stress knitting skin too pale to be his own, pools beneath his eyes so dark they looked like bruises, hair in matted disarray. But it was his eyes that troubled him most. They looked stony and remote. They looked

dead

like they belonged to someone else.

Who am I turning into?

He ripped a sheet from the dispenser and dragged it over his face, wishing in some dark corner of his mind that he could simply erase himself. He fumbled in a jacket pocket for his bottle of aspirin and pried it open with trembling fingers. It was empty. Cursing under his breath, he tossed the bottle in the wastebasket. Then he closed his eyes and stood there quietly, trying to focus inwardly, on his breathing, on the vibrating hum of a nearby phone, on anything to still his racing thoughts.

On the fifth hum it stopped.

There was a creaking sound. He opened his eyes, remembering he wasn't alone in here. In the mirror he could see the middle stall door behind him very slowly opening. He could see the blood dripping from behind the door, pooling beneath it, and reaching in a thin trail across the floor to his feet.

Will spun around, scrabbling for his holstered gun. The door fell open wide.

Abigail stood in the frame of the stall. She was soaked in blood. It poured from the wide, gaping slash across her neck, it gushed from the crevice at the side of her head where her left ear should have been, pasting her hair in thick, viscous strands to her chest, and running in inky rivulets down her body. Her skin ashen and waxy, it hung like strips of peeling wallpaper in places where the flesh was deteriorating. She was decomposing. A dead thing dressed in crimson, she looked at Will with a shy, child-like timidity.

Will stood frozen in place, unable to react, unable to think, a tripped wire in his mind short-circuiting all thought. He heard his sidearm clatter to the floor.

Abigail stepped toward him. There was a cellphone in her hand. She glanced down at it with a small frown, then up again at Will.

"Caller ID withheld," she said. "I don't know who it is."

She outstretched her arm to him, the phone in her bloodied palm, offering it like a gift.

"But you do."

Will couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't look away from her.

"No…" he managed, his dry throat tightening around the word. "I don't."

She stepped yet closer, closing the space between them, her eyes wide and innocent and imploring.

"It's for you, Daddy."

Her image rippled in Will's tears. "Abigail…"

"All of it. All for you. Right from the start." She tilted her head questioningly, stretching open the ragged slit in her neck like a gaping mouth. "Can't you see?"

Will backed into the sink, its corner wedging into his spine, as she moved toward him. "I don't…Abigail, I…"

"Even me. He's saving me for you, you know."

"I don't understand…" His voice barely a whisper now.

She smiled at him sadly. "You will."

And then she pushed the phone into his hand, folding his fingers around it, her touch cold and leaden. "And then you'll do the right thing."

The world shifted then slightly, its colors blanching, everything's definition and structure blurring for a moment. He thought he might be losing consciousness. But he stared at her, wanting to stay, wanting to understand what the right thing was, and dimly aware that the phone in his hand felt different, somehow wrong…

She looked down at the object in his hand and frowned.

"He's waiting, you know."

And then she looked back up at him, her eyes filled with tears, and when she spoke again, it was no longer with the innocence of a young girl, but with the dark, jaded gravity of having lived too long, having seen too much.

"No matter how much time goes by, or how many miles separate you, it won't ever change."

She leaned in very close to him now, her blue lips nearly touching his, the smell of her decay toxic and nauseating, the chill of her body prickling his skin.

"He'll always be waiting for you, Will."

The sink behind him shoved itself with a forceful jolt into his back.

Except it wasn't the sink—

"Hey!" It was a man's shout, slightly intoxicated. "What the hell…?"

—it was the restroom door at his back, and he was sitting on the floor, its tiles slippery with customer urine. The blood was gone.

A fist pounded on the door behind him. "Hey! Is someone there?"

In his hand was his Glock 17, its barrel pointed upward, its muzzle pressed beneath his chin.

"You're blocking the door, asshole!"

x

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x

Lecter was waiting for him back at the table, looking relaxed and urbane, one arm draped casually over the top of the seat. His gaze tracked Will as he crossed the dining room and returned to his seat, making him feel vaguely targeted, a deer caught in the scope of a rifle.

Will slid into the booth. On the table before him was a large bowl of soup, a basket of bread, and a bottle of Evian. Beside the bottle was a tall glass of water, freshly poured. Will grabbed the glass, downing half its contents in one gulp, quenching the sandpapery dryness in his throat, as Lecter looked on in a strangely satisfied way.

"This came fast," said Will. He dipped his spoon into the soup, gave it a perfunctory stir, and took his first bite of the Meatball Special. "Not very hot though."

Lecter's eyes were still trained on him. "Not surprising. It's been sitting there for a while. You were in there for a quarter of an hour. I was about to come check on you."

Will blinked at him, confused.

"Quarter of…? No. No, that's not…" Lecter was looking at him as if fascinated by a hairline crack in a favorite crystal vase. His words evaporated in his throat.

"You've lost time again."

"No. No, no." He was thinking fast now, and thinking of their deal, the single condition of this journey on which the doctor insisted. Should Will's physical and mental condition take a dramatic turn for the worse, Lecter would either change course for the closest available hospital or return Will to Baltimore. The trip to the Hobbs house in Minnesota, and whatever answers it may offer in salvaging Will's sanity, his life, would be aborted.

"That's not what happened," he said in quick recovery. "I didn't lose time, I…lost track of time. I was feeling a little carsick. I didn't realize how long I was in there, that's all." He dunked his spoon into the thick broth again, a little too quickly. "I'm feeling better now."

Doing his best impression of a man enjoying a meal, he eagerly delved in, shoveling in food he could barely taste. "Even have an appetite."

But Lecter's gaze was palpable, boring into him. Will swallowed a lump of something that might have been meat but his tastebuds were too numb to corroborate. He set his spoon down, and looked up.

"Which…you're ruining."

A subtle smile tipped the doctor's lips as he glanced away. "I'm sorry. Professional habit."

"Watching people eat?"

"Watching people pretend."

Will plucked a wedge of sourdough from the basket. "Aren't we both pretending?"

Lecter looked directly at him again, intrigued.

Will took a bite of the bread and tried to smile. "'Friends sharing conversation over a meal'?"

"I'm not pretending."

"You're not even eating."

The doctor's smile lost its subtlety now. Glancing down at Will's dish, he seemed genuinely amused. "Can you honestly blame me?"

Will scoffed. "But you're making me eat this."

"When have I ever made you do anything, Will?" The sudden sharpness of his tone caught Will off-guard. "I'm a fervent believer in choice. In free will. This adventure we're undertaking was your decision, as is my presence here with you. Or have you forgotten?"

The doctor looked down at his coffee, swirls of steam rising from its surface. "All I'm doing now is encouraging you to fight off the infection that might otherwise cut our journey short."

Will was impressed by the way Lecter's words managed both to reassure him that he was under a doctor's care and to obliquely threaten him should he refuse to comply with doctor's orders. All under the guise that Will was in full control.

He conceded. He had little to argue with, and no rational reason to—Lecter was, after all, helping him at considerable risk to himself—other than a creeping wariness that undoubtedly had more to do with being a fugitive framed for multiple homicides than it did with Lecter choosing his meal. He looked down and resumed his force-feed.

He certainly didn't feel in control…

He was too aware of his surroundings, of the looks he knew he was attracting. The man who'd been banging on the restroom door—and eventually forced his way through in a surly bluster of expletives—sat three booths over, hunched so far across the table in conversation with his female companion that the red visor of his Cardinals baseball cap nearly touched her forehead. They both furtively glanced his way as they spoke. At the table behind Lecter, where a family waited for their meals, a boy of about eight had stopped fidgeting in order to stare intently at Will, in that irritating way that only children manage to get away with. Not a big deal, he told himself. These were normal things. It was a diner. People gossip. Kids stare.

Like the dead girl in the bathroom.

He re-filled his water glass, gulped half of it back. He stared down at his soup but tried to concentrate on sounds of normalcy. People chatting, Jailhouse Rock thumping over the speakers, someone dropping a plate—

And then you'll do the right thing.

He could still feel the cold perch of the Glock beneath his chin…

Someone nearby laughed too loudly. Will flinched.

All of it. All for you. Right from the start…

Did he do all of this himself? Had all of it been him? Was he a killer?

And then like a slap in the face: He'll always be waiting for you.

It was then that he felt the rifle scope targeting him again, Lecter's gaze pinning him, reading his every thought, and like an animal of prey he found himself frozen, unable to move, to breathe, to even look up.

"How's your soup, hon?" chirped a female voice.

Will recoiled, his spoon clattering to the table, soup splashing over the Formica.

"Oh dear!" exclaimed Sam, standing just over him, far too close. She reached into a pocket of her apron. "I am so sorry! I didn't know I was sneaking up on you. Let me get that."

Sam took a cloth to the spill and began readily mopping it up. She smiled down at Will. "My, you do scare easy, don't you, sweetie?"

Over her circling hand, Will glimpsed Lecter's rapt expression, his eyes locked on Will's.

"Yeah. I guess I do." He tried, and failed, to smile back at their waitress. "I'm sorry."

"Now don't you worry about it," she said brightly. "I'll have a fresh bowl for you in no time."

"No! That's not necessary. Really."

She paused, clearly unsatisfied, and directed her next question at Lecter, as if he were the responsible adult. "Well, how 'bout the dessert menu then?"

"No, no…" Will shot a pleading look at Lecter.

"Just the bill please," said Lecter, politely to the rescue.

Sam looked genuinely disappointed. "So soon?" She cast Will a look of motherly worry and sighed. "Well, I suppose that's for the best, hon. But don't you worry. I'm sure your friend will take good care of you."

With a last swirl of the dishcloth, and a coquettish wink at Lecter, she breezily hastened off.

Lecter's focus on Will hadn't wavered, despite Will's inability to maintain eye contact. He could feel the doctor assessing his every move. He looked down at his hands and, noticing their tremble, tucked them under the table. Then realized grimly that Lecter had seen that move too.

When the doctor finally spoke, his tone was unexpectedly gentle. "Where were you just then, Will?"

Before the soup spilled, Will knew he meant.

While he was lost in thoughts of rotting bodies conveying messages from the grave, of nearly blowing his head off in the restroom.

"What?" Will shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know. Nowhere."

"You can stop pretending now."

Over Lecter's shoulder, Will could see the walls of the diner begin to slide inward, as if melting, closing in around him a crazy, funhouse mirror distortion.

"I'm not pretending, I'm just…" He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. "I'm hot. They've got the heat cranked too high."

As the walls melted, the cherry reds of the retro décor seemed to intensify and deepen, the color of the booths swelling and spreading across the diner's tables, spilling like blood across its floors.

The diner's bleeding, his mind offhandedly informed him.

"Will…" The concern in Lecter's voice unmistakable.

"Someone should say something. It's like a furnace in this place."

"Why don't you finish your water? It will help."

Will briefly shut his eyes against the diner's contortions. It wasn't real, he knew, no more real than Abigail had been. But he needed to get out of here. He didn't need water, he needed space, he needed air. Where the hell was that waitress with their bill?

Bypassing the glass this time, he seized the Evian bottle and knocked back its remaining contents. It'll cool him, he supposed. Was that what Lecter meant?

And it was then, as the last drops passed his lips, that he noticed for the first time the briefest hint of an aftertaste… Not a bad taste, and barely noticeable, but there nonetheless. Vaguely chemical.

Will set the bottle down and looked across the table at Lecter, feeling his chest tighten around the thrumming beat of his heart.

"How?"

Lecter tilted his head slightly in question.

"How will the water help?"

The doctor didn't respond with words. He wore an expression of clinical detachment, an air of professional hubris. I know what's best for you, it said.

"You didn't…" Will glanced down at the empty, suddenly suspicious Evian bottle. "What did you do?"

"You're becoming agitated," Lecter said quietly, unfazed by Will's mounting distress.

Will leaned forward and lowered his voice to an exasperated whisper. "What did you do?"

"We have a ten-hour drive ahead of us. I've ensured that during that time you'll get the sleep you need."

Distress shifting swiftly into rage. "So you…drugged me?"

"Yes," replied Lecter. Light and matter-of-fact.

"Why? Why would you—?"

"When did you sleep last?"

"No, no, no, that's not an answer!"

"Try to calm down."

"Well, soon enough I won't have to try, will I!"

Heads were turning now, eyes around the diner darting their way, a nervous look from their waitress across the room. The staring boy in the next booth leaned forward, elbows on the table and chin in hands as if engrossed in his favorite TV show.

Will struggled to lower the volume if not the venom of his voice. "What the hell happened to free will, doctor?"

"I have as much right to exercise it as you do. I saw the opportunity to help you and I took advantage of it."

"You had no right to drug me!" shouted Will in as near a whisper as he could manage.

Lecter leaned back, matching Will's fury with consummate calm. "I disagree. As your doctor I had every right." He paused, then added softly, "As your friend even more so."

Will didn't know how to respond to that. He was too angry, his nerves too frayed, to make sense of it. And yet he couldn't deny how rational and logical Lecter sounded, how completely unreasonable and overreactive he sounded by comparison. Surely everyone in the diner had made that comparison, even if they were oblivious to the argument's context. He was aware once again of the looks he was getting. He needed to calm down, he knew that.

He leaned back in the seat

thick crimson seeping from the cushion beneath his weight, dripping to the floor…

and tried to channel his thoughts.

"It's just… I have to stay focused. Alert. I have to be able to think. To plan."

"You asked for my help, Will."

"I can't afford to–to lose my—"

"Now I'm asking you to accept it."

Will stopped. He looked up at Lecter now, derailed by the compassion in his voice, the solidity and assuredness of his tone, a steady rock of reason in Will's erratic torrent of emotion and surging hallucinations.

His friend offering help.

Neither of them spoke for a while. Conversation in the diner was beginning to return to normal as people's attention drifted back to one another and away from the pale, disheveled, sweaty guy who looked like he might be off his meds.

Will exhaled a long, unsteady breath. "You know, I take sedatives nearly every night. You could have just asked me."

"Would you have consented?"

"No."

Lecter smiled lightly at him. "Which is why I didn't ask."

Their waitress was heading toward them now, chip and pin machine in hand, but Will's relief was thwarted when she stopped at the family next to them, dad's waving arm diverting her attention. He sighed unevenly.

"I'm finding it uncomfortably warm in here. Do you mind if I…?" He glanced toward the doors at the diner's entrance, dimly aware that in that moment he was not just asking for Lecter's permission but genuinely needing it. As if he could no longer trust his own thinking over something as simple as leaving the table.

"Go," said Lecter. "I'll meet you outside."

Will struggled to his feet, careful to avoid stepping in the blood puddling beside their booth.

"And Will…"

Will paused, glancing back at him.

"Don't wander off."

x

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x

He kept a normal pace as he headed for the entrance. Around him, the vibrant reds of the diner's color scheme—the booths, the curtains, the aprons that the waitressing staff wore—liquefied and spilled, oozing down the walls and windows, expanding across the linoleum checkerboard floor in thick, oily pools. He gingerly skirted them. He didn't rush. A young blonde waitress balancing a tray of gourmet burgers in her upheld hand smiled distractedly at him as she approached, the blood from her apron sluicing down her stockinged legs. He gave way to her and politely smiled back.

This wasn't real.

Nor was the dizzying funhouse morphing of the diner's walls, the way the picture windows dripped toward the floor, as if the diner itself were sliding down into the earth, twisting and funneling into a Dali-esque otherworldliness. Reality overflowing its borders, losing its cohesion. Yet Will had the surreal, paradoxical sensation that it was the diner itself that wasn't real—its colors, its music, its pantomime of activity, its very structure, all just an artful trick of the light, a pretty façade that could no longer hold. And so it was changing, transforming, its lies melting away to reveal the horror that lay beneath.

Will didn't want to be around for the final reveal.

But he didn't hurry. The distortions skewed his balance, and he feared colliding with the counter, or a table of diners, if he tried. Or his legs might simply give out beneath him in a mad dash for the exit. And then he'd be trapped here.

Stepping outside into the harsh embrace of cold, the doors closing behind him, brought the transformation to an instant halt. It was like a switch had been flipped. The snowscape around him was stable, still, and wonderfully ordinary. Reality had found its bearings and resumed its natural shape.

He slumped against the diner's wall, breathing in slow, deep lungfuls of painfully cold air, and felt his mind begin to settle, to quiet. Perhaps the effect of Lecter's sedative beginning its work. He would fight it for as long as he could of course, but if it took a barbiturate to dismantle his latest hallucination, he was grateful for it.

It was dark now, a half-moon wedged high in a starless night sky. Lights from the diner cast a glow over the parking lot. There was no one here, no one scurrying from their car to escape the cold, no diners drifting in or out, no one to exchange forced pleasantries with. He was alone, and there was something profoundly comforting in that. Answers in the Hobbs house were waiting, but he was happy for Lecter to take his time in paying the bill.

Don't wander off.

He pulled his coat tighter against the chill, aware now of feeling vaguely chastised by the psychiatrist's odd admonition. As if he were either too fragile or too dangerous to stray from Lecter's view. He wondered which it was.

That's when he heard it.

It came from the woods bordering the far side of the parking lot, and it sounded like a woman's scream.

He hesitated for a full second, wondering if he could trust his senses, if this might not be another sadistic twist of his fevered imagination, when another scream pierced the night. This time it formed his name, and the cry was Alana's.

He pulled the Glock from its holster and broke into a run, racing, sliding across the ice-slicked tarmac, dodging parked cars, then tromping through the barrier of snowdrifts that edged the woods, plunging through thick snow as if in slow motion.

As he entered the dense thicket there was another cry, close by now. He halted, gun raised high in outstretched arms, leveled toward the dark just ahead. He moved forward through the trees as quietly as possible, though snow crunched beneath his boots and his heart jackhammered in his ears. Just ahead, between the give of two massive oaks, lay the body.

For a flickering, horrific moment, it was a woman's body, and the face was somehow Alana's, black hair strewn in a cloud around her head, black blood pumping out of her abdomen. Will choked back a cry, and then the darkness wrapped itself around the shape and transformed it into something new, something much smaller…

An animal of some sort, a large fox. It was still alive. It lay limp on blood-soaked snow, its hide torn open at its mid-section, its life literally pumping out of a particularly vicious wound. Large, razor-sharp incisors had pierced the skin, shredding the fur and gouging into the muscle and tendons, taking an enormous bite out of the animal's organs. The fox's eyes were wide and terrified. The sound it made was both heart-breaking and excruciating, a desperate, plaintive whine of agony that tore into the quiet night.

Will stepped closer, looking down at the pitiful creature. His hand steadying with the sense of purpose, he leveled the muzzle of his gun at the fox's head, and he fired.

The shot rang out in the night.

And from somewhere nearby in the cloistered darkness of the trees, something responded.

Will couldn't see or hear it, but he could feel its gaze trained upon him, watching him, targeting him. Everything stopped. It was as if sound and air had been extracted from the moment, sucking the woods dry of its life. And Will was part of that frozen moment, poised in an agonizing wait for whatever came next. The presence watching him from the shadows was too close. The snowdrifts were too high, too difficult to run through. He would never escape it. He stared into the darkness ahead of him and waited to meet the fox's fate.

A dry trig snapped in that darkness beneath an unseen weight, its soft crackle an explosion in the silent night.

It's coming.

Will's arms swung upward as he began backing away, gun aimed into the dark. He could almost hear it now….the low, rumbling bass of its growl, the thick, graveled snarl of its breathing. Something large and powerful and inhuman. Something waiting in the dark for Will, preparing to lunge, to rip, to feast…

Another dry snap, and this time Will fired. And ran. Backward at first, then turning to tromp wildly, frantically, back through the snow. Not thinking, not planning, moving by pure instinct, fueled by the adrenalin of fear. It was behind him, he could feel it, could hear its footfall crashing through the snow behind him, the ground trembling in its wake, he could smell its rank breath, the stench of sweat and blood and death that hurdled after him like a freight train, bearing down on him, closing in as he ran.

The diner was just ahead, and as he lunged from the last snowbank bordering the parking lot onto its tarmac, he slipped across the ice, losing his balance and crashing down on one knee. Feeling that thing's presence just behind him he whipped his arm around and fired, again and again.

It was all happening so fast that he couldn't see anything, and he felt disoriented and a little stunned by the change of lighting in the parking lot, the neon banners no longer glowing above the diner's door, the lights from within strangely dim, making it so much darker than it was before, everything a crazy, chaotic, nightmarish blur. Sliding and stumbling to his feet—wondering from a corner of his fevered brain where all the cars had gone—he shambled toward the front doors of the diner. If he hadn't downed the creature behind him with those last shots, he must have at least knocked the wind out of it, buying him a few moments, a chance to escape it. He slammed frantically against the diner's window-paneled front door, throwing his weight into the brass handle that opened it.

Nothing happened.

It seemed frozen into place. He pushed again; it refused to budge.

He used his fists to pound desperately, deliriously against the glass to get someone's attention, because there were people just on the other side—diners and staff and his psychiatrist—and surely they must see him, must see the terrifying scene playing out from their windows, but in the dark beyond the glass he couldn't see any of them. He beat furiously against the door, while at the edge of his vision he watched the thing behind him rise to full form from the shadows of the tarmac and advance toward him. He leveled his gun at the lock on the door, fired off a round into the mechanism, then kicked at the broken lock and shoved the door open, slamming it behind him and throwing the full weight of his body against it to hold it closed. He shut his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

A massive weight crashed against him from behind, rippling through his spine, thundering through the walls, threatening to shatter the glass. Will didn't move. He couldn't. There were people inside, and he would protect them for as long as he could.

Through the glass he could hear heavy claws scraping against the door, and a low-pitched, feral snarl. It must have moved in close then, seeking an intimacy with its prey, because through the glass Will could hear it pressing close, its breath a low, guttural, monstrous sound with a rumbling vibration so deep that he could feel it in his teeth, in his bones. Through the glass, it was breathing into him.

And then, abruptly, everything stopped.

For a moment he could hear nothing, except for his own choking gasps for air. He could hear nothing outside, nothing launching an attack on the door, nothing moving, nothing breathing.

Seconds drew out into nearly a minute and nothing happened. There were no sounds. In fact, he realized now with a queasy dread that the silence was deafening.

Will opened his eyes.

He was alone in the dark, empty interior of the closed diner. And from what he could see, it had been closed for a very long time…

He took a step away from the door, shellshocked senses shifting his focus from the dangers outside to those within.

It was freezing in here, and nearly pitch-black. Will raised his gun, the flashlight mounted on its barrel searing an LED beam through the darkness ahead of him.

Cobwebs hung in crystalline ropes from the ceiling. Frosted webs stretched between the long service counter and the stools. Further inside he could see tables covered with dusty plastic sheets, broken beams jutting down from the ceiling where the roof appeared to be caving in. Rats had left droppings on seats smeared with something dark. On the floor, checkered tiles furry with rust and mold lay in broken, disheveled pieces, the floorboards beneath rotting with water damage.

Water? thought Will. Or blood?

He hadn't moved yet from the entrance. It wasn't the darkness of the interior that held him back, or even the shock of the new nightmare his mind was offering up, but the smell. So acrid, so real, he could taste it in the back of his throat. The cloying smell of mildew. Stale, dank air. Overpowered by something else…something reaching from deeper within the diner. The putrid stench of rotting meat. The metallic odor of blood.

Shielding his nose with the back of his hand—an act of futile instinct—Will forced himself to move, wading deeper through the cloistered stillness, into the dining room. Where the bodies were.

It was the blonde waitress with the distracted smile he spotted first, the last person he'd made any form of human contact with on his way out. She lay sprawled across cracked tiles on her back, eyes wide in glazed surprise, arms open at her sides as if welcoming him. Where her apron had been, her abdomen was sliced open, the skin carefully peeled back and pinned like a butterfly's wings to reveal the empty cavity of her pillaged mid-rift. Her internal organs sat neatly piled on the tray of dinner plates beside her body.

He recognized the family next, the little boy who'd been ogling him. They sat around their table just as he'd seen them last, tucking into their meals. Except this time various pieces of their bodies had been removed and re-positioned on their plates. Where the boy's eyes had been, the sockets festered with squirming maggots, his eyeballs staring back at him from his soup dish. Dad's forearm, carefully detached, lay on his own plate in a bed of spongy greenery that might once have been lettuce. A dark, bloodied organ, perhaps a kidney, on his wife's plate. The family had been dead for a very long time.

The booth he'd occupied wasn't empty. Sam sat slumped in his seat, gaping at him with a slacken and weary expression, as if tired out from a long day's work. Her blouse removed, her chest cut open, her heart carved out and presented before her on a dinner plate garnished with sprigs of parsley.

Something meaty, thought Will, and a delirious riff of laughter escaped him.

He recognized his basket of green, mold-encrusted sourdough in the center of the table.

A few booths over sat the guy in the baseball cap. His partner's torso had fallen forward and her head was lodged in her plate, as if so famished she'd dispensed with utensils. But it was her baseball-capped partner that held Will's fascination. Though its reds had liquefied and molten into a gluey paste on the man's skull, the cap was still the last recognizably human remnant of his body… His face and torso mercilessly ravaged, skin flayed, appendages cut away, organs removed. His killer seemed to have taken particular delight in disassembling his body, then stacking its parts in buffet-style piles across his table.

Will began slowly backing out. But he took in every detail.

The diner was crowded with eviscerated corpses displayed to dine on their own entrails. The floor was thick and sticky with their congealed blood. Carefully flayed skins, dissections of organs, severed limbs wrapped in cling film, bodies carved and dissected, sliced and diced. But there was a surgical neatness to the savagery, the bodies sculpted and displayed with meticulous precision.

That was the design. His fellow diners sitting where he'd left them not twenty minutes ago, their own body parts on plates in front of them. And he couldn't help noticing that the more creatively sculpted bodies belonged to people who had been at least marginally impolite to him in some way.

The final reveal.

Is this my design?

Will doubled over violently, an unseen fist punching him in the gut, and retched into the nearest booth.

Everything fell very still and silent then, apart from the sounds of his own ragged breathing. It was as if all life but his had ceased, as if the world he once knew had abandoned him here to his own dementia, his own murderous ideations, his own hell.

Behind him, on a gust of icy air, the front door opened. Will pivoted around, crouching, gun aimed high.

His psychiatrist stepped inside, brushing a dusting of snow from his coat, the door falling shut behind him. His eyes didn't seem to require adjustment to the dark. He leveled them on Will, indifferent to the weapon drawn on him, and sighed.

"I asked you not to wander off."

Will stood upright, the gun in his outstretched arms still fixed on Lecter, the words spilling from his mouth sounding unhinged even to his own ear.

"Where are we? What is this place?"

"Lower the gun, Will."

"Where did you bring us?" His shout an explosion in the stillness.

Lecter raised his hands, not in fear of Will but in a show of placation. "We're in a diner in Indiana. We stopped here. It's 7:15 pm, and your name is—"

"No, no—" One hand fell from the gun long enough to wave wildly across the breadth of the foyer. "—not this diner. This is not the diner we walked into!"

Lecter stepped toward him. Calmly, almost dismissively, he said, "The very same."

Will hoisted the Glock higher to solidify his aim, and stumbled backward from him. "Tell me what happened here. What happened to these people?"

"They came here for a meal."

"Tell me what happened!"

"Lower the gun, Will," Lecter said again, louder this time, sternly.

A new thought struck Will. "And where were you? Where did you come from?"

Lecter spoke as if comforting a frightened child. Or a deranged patient. "I was outside. Where we agreed to meet. Do you remember?" He stepped carefully closer as he spoke. "I assumed you'd gone back to the car, so I went there to find you. When I couldn't I returned here."

"How did you get past it?"

Lecter stopped. His voice calm and measured, his eyes glinting with curiosity. "Get past what?"

"No. No, no, don't do that. You must have seen it. It was right outside!"

"There's nothing outside, Will."

"You must have seen it! There must be claw marks on the door—just—just look at the door!"

"What did you see?"

Will staggered backward, his arms feeling weighted down by something much heavier than the gun, his aim faltering. The floor beneath his feet rocked slightly. "Please don't look at me like that. Like I'm out of my mind. Not here in this—" jerking his head toward the darkness behind him, "—this abattoir."

That's when it occurred to Will that the doctor couldn't see the horror on display just behind him. It was too dark inside, and his attention was on Will. "You haven't seen it yet…"

"Listen to me, Will." He was moving forward again, hands still raised calmingly. "Focus on what I'm saying."

"You don't know what's back there."

"You're experiencing another episode. You need my help."

"I need your help, yes—I need you to come further inside, I need you to look—see what that—that thing outside did!" Desperation and impatience battling for the doctor's attention, Will could feel all composure spiraling away from him. He knew how unstable he looked, how overwrought he sounded, but it didn't matter. He simply needed Lecter to move inside, to look around and see the nightmare surrounding them.

But the room was beginning to dip and sway drunkenly, as if conspiring with the nightmare to keep it secret, and he had to grab for the counter's edge to brace himself. Lecter moved in swiftly then, and Will felt the doctor's hand close over the gun, over his own hand trembling in its grip, and push it gently to one side.

"We'll have to notify authorities," Will whispered to him. "We have to call the police."

"Yes," said Lecter, a little sadly. "Perhaps it's time we do just that. And take you home."

"What…?"

The pressure Lecter applied to lower Will's gun was so delicate it was nearly imperceptible. "You're frightening these people, Will."

Will gaped at him. "What people? There's no one here but—" He swept an arm out and turned to the dining room, eager to finally make Lecter see, and even as he was turning he noticed the way the light was shifting, raising, as if curtains had just lifted on a stage.

The brightness hit him with a palpable force, the searing flash of a floodlight in a dark room. Momentarily blinded, he blinked back a shower of tiny, shimmering lights that danced on his retinas as he struggled to focus on the tableau coalescing before him.

It looked almost exactly as it did when they first arrived. Atmospheric and colorful, black-and-white checkered tiles, silver tables and cherry-red booths garnished with half-eaten meals, a flashing jukebox on the far wall, everything so clean and so painfully bright. The unsettling smells of cooked meat, the tinny waft of piped fifties music. Everything the same apart from the people.

None of them were moving. They stood huddled and cowering along the back wall of the dining room, terrified faces staring in open-mouthed gapes at him. They were all there. Their waitress Sam stood toward the front of the crowd, a laminated menu drawn up protectively over her chest as if to deflect bullets. The family from the next table, the little boy who'd been ogling him, baseball cap guy and his date, the blonde waitress, the truckers, the children, the people who'd wandered in to escape the cold and were now very sorry they had—all grouped together and crouching slightly and staring at him as if he were some feral animal that had clawed its way in from the cold.

Will felt the slide of cooling metal through his fingers. He felt the warmth of breath in his ear as a voice said softly, "I'm going to take this from you now."

He could hear a child's whimper, and the shaky whisper of a female reply. "Stay behind me, baby…"

And then Will's world began to white out, as it did earlier that evening in the restroom, the colors bleaching, the lines of definition dissolving. As the room tilted and the floor rose up to meet him, he could hear gasps from the onlookers, and he could feel strong hands on his shoulders, an arm at his back, breaking his fall and supporting him, and it occurred to him in that instant between wakefulness and white that he didn't want to be supported, he didn't want to be saved

just let me fall

but the arms were determined, first carrying him, then gently lowering him into a red bloom of vinyl

isn't this where I threw up?

its garish color wrenching him back from the comforting lure of unconsciousness.

"Everything is alright," a familiar voice sounding very far away reassured him

oh, everything is spectacularly not alright…

but he realized a moment later that the reassurance wasn't actually directed at him. He blinked his eyes open and with a concerted effort kept them open, kept them fixed on the surreal, dream-like scene unfolding before him in a kind of grayed-out slow motion.

Lecter had turned toward the crowd of frightened diners and was effortlessly addressing them. Sound was strangely muffled, as if the volume on Will's reception had been turned down, but he could hear the calm reassurance of Lecter's voice, his unfaltering poise and self-confidence. He caught a handful of words and phrases

federal officer

post-traumatic stress

his psychiatrist

under my care

en route

medical facility

the treatment he needs

that swirled and mingled and ran together, making little sense to him, but he could see the faces in the crowd—Sam and ogling boy's dad and baseball cap's date—nodding gratefully at the doctor, risking quick, furtive glances at Will, some of them shaking their heads in actual sympathy for the man who'd apparently just been waving a gun at them. At one point, as she listened intently to whatever Lecter was saying, Sam's eyes teared up and she placed a hand over her chest as if her heart were breaking with compassion…

It was all too much for Will.

A part of him wanted desperately to let go, to stop fighting, to sink into the sweet oblivion of nothingness that unconsciousness offered, if only for a little while, for now, because he was so very tired… But a larger part of him knew there were no guarantees of nothingness, not for him, no certainty of what might await him in the dark alleys of his own subconscious, and so he held on. He forced himself to stay awake.

He could just about distinguish Lecter's features as the doctor turned back to him, his face swimming hazily into view as he dipped down to eye level with Will.

"Are you ready to go now, Will?" he asked mildly, almost casually.

And then a subtle but unmistakably amused smile touched his lips. In a hushed voice, for Will alone, he said, "I think we've overstayed our welcome."

He slid an arm behind Will and helped him to his feet. Will didn't resist. He wanted nothing more than distance from this place.

He swayed slightly once on his feet, but he was steadied by the paternal hand Lecter placed on his shoulder as he turned back once more to the diner-ful of onlookers. He bowed his head ever so slightly in a show of humility and graciousness. "My sincere apologies again to all of you. And my gratitude—" glancing very deliberately back at Will, "our gratitude—for the compassion you've shown."

Finessing the crowd, Will thought numbly.

And as they turned toward the exit, he caught a final glimpse of the upturned faces in the group, everyone watching the courageous doctor who disarmed the madman and saved them all, and who was now tasked with carting the offender off to the nearest cracker factory, and for a surreal moment he felt certain they were about to burst into applause for their hero.

x

---

x

The air's icy grip snatched him back fully from the brink of unconsciousness. It sharpened his senses, demanded his wakefulness.

Pausing outside, he stared across the parking low towards the woods. He heard Lecter close the diner's front door behind them, and he felt a swell of relief at the sound of its damaged hinges clamoring into place to separate him from the madness inside. From whatever it was that had just happened in there.

A chill wind stung his face and cut a swathe of clarity through the haze shrouding his thoughts. With a little effort he was able to focus again. Able to reason.

"Was it a hallucinogen?" he asked calmly.

The doctor turned to him, a faint furrow creasing his brow. "I'm sorry?"

"Your standard-grade pharmaceutical opiate or…something more exotic?" Will slowly met his eyes now, holding in check the accusation and hostility he could feel roiling within him. "What exactly did you spike my Evian with, doctor?"

Lecter sighed. He didn't respond at first, allowing silence to stretch as his expression darkened with concern. "You're looking in the wrong corner again, Will."

"Just answer me."

"To what end? If I tell you it was a mild sedative you won't believe me."

"No. I won't. Not after—" He caught himself, unwilling to share the full extent of the horror show that had been playing tonight in his own private cinema, even if it had been drug-induced.

"Not after everything you've experienced tonight," Lecter finished for him quietly. "Is that because you experienced nothing unusual before you swallowed the drug? No sensory anomalies, no disturbing visions…" He paused very briefly, as if considering a new thought. "For example, while you were in the restroom?"

Will's simmering anger went suddenly cold. He felt derailed, not only by the idea that Lecter somehow knew about his meeting with Abigail's corpse, about the barrel of his own standard issue aimed at his head, but by the simple logic of his question. The timing didn't make sense. Will's horror show was well underway before his doctor medicated him.

Lecter leaned in closer. "The ingestion of a psychotropic substance impairs clear thinking in the most lucid mind. In your compromised state it could induce another seizure, even a full psychotic break, one potentially too powerful for me to pull you back from." He dipped his head to catch Will's eyes, to re-claim contact. Gently he said, "Consider what you're suggesting, Will. Would I do that to you?"

Another simple question. The clarity of which shone a stark, merciless light on the absurdity of Will's accusation. The confusion in his thinking. The deterioration of his mental state.

What was he doing? What was he thinking? Turning on the only person in his world still willing to help him, to remain at his side as he descended into hell, to be dragged along for the ride…

"No," he whispered raggedly, feeling what little remained of his energy sinking through his body, the embers of his briefly reignited focus quashed by guilt and self-reproach. He dragged a hand over his face. "Of course not. I'm sorry."

"No need for apology," said Lecter. "Paranoia and delusion walk hand in hand."

Will would have laughed if he had the energy. "Into the sunset of insanity," he murmured.

"I can't take credit for your hallucinations, Will. But I can help you interpret them if you allow me to. If you stop hiding from me."

Which was what he'd been doing since they arrived here tonight. Hiding in plain sight, desperately trying—and failing—to cover the tracks of his instability, fearful of being carted back to what awaited him in Baltimore.

Lecter was studying him, his eyes bright with curiosity. "What have you seen tonight?"

Shadows shifted almost carefully in the diner, as if those inside were wary of movement, and terrified of venturing outside just yet. The snow had stopped falling, the breeze carrying it had died. It was very still out here now. To Will it felt like the world around them had simply stopped, perhaps to create this last space for him. The last opportunity he might ever have to be still, to breathe, to bask in the deception of safety. There was no room to hide in this space, and no reason to. He was tired of pretending, and he could no longer ignore the insistent desire to share his horror with the only person he knew capable of hearing it.

"There was something in the woods…" he said softly. "It came after me. I could hear it. I could feel it… but I couldn't see it."

"An animal?"

"More than animal. Less than human. I don't know what it was, except…"

Lecter waited, watching with rapt attention.

Will looked up at him and shrugged. "Evil," he said in a tone sounding paradoxically blasé. "It chased me. Out of the woods, across the parking lot, all the way to this door."

He glanced at the door, noticing the lack of scratches, the claw marks in the glass panel he'd been so certain would be there. What he saw instead was the bullet-riddled brass casing around the door handle, the ruined lock, the splintered wood of the stile where he'd kicked the door in. He felt a wave of confused humiliation and the temptation to withdraw from the story that elicited it.

Lecter seemed to sense it. "And then?" he coaxed.

"It was right behind me. So close I could feel its breath on my neck. It was closing in for the kill. It trapped me inside."

"You believe it wanted to kill you?"

The comment was less a reflection—that well-worn therapy tool of rewording and repeating what the patient had just said—than a mildly puzzled question. As if he'd detected an inaccuracy in the storytelling. It prompted Will to re-consider, to re-imagine what had actually happened. He stared at the glass panel where the claw marks should have been, where his shoulders had been pressed flat against the other side, then raised a hand to reach out to it. He stopped just short of touching the glass, his palm hovering an inch beyond it, as if feeling for warmth. It was only when he heard himself answer the question that he recognized the depth of its truth. "No."

Will allowed his eyelids to slip shut and his mind to fall into a trance-like receptivity. The present moment fell away, the world around him receding into an earlier timescape, a strangely parallel reality where the parking lot was empty and the diner immersed in darkness, and as his imagination colored the scene and his awareness sharpened to a knife-point acuity, through eyes that weren't his own he saw himself pounding on the door, then firing into its lock and kicking it in, and as the presence that wasn't his own rushed forward through the night, the door swung and slammed shut, and the presence stilled then, watching, waiting…and then very slowly approached the door, seeing himself on the other side, his own back pressed against the glass, his own breath misting the panel, and the consciousness that he shared in this parallel reality turned its full attention on Will, leaned in very close, close enough to hear him gasping for breath, to feel his body heat radiating through the glass, to know the terror in his mind, and only then was it satisfied.

"It doesn't want me dead," Will whispered. "It just… wanted me to go inside. It wanted me to see the carnage, the bodies it's been feasting on… feasting on themselves. It wanted me to know the ecstasy of consumption. And maybe the vulgar of excess, of gluttony. Those people disgusted him. They were all inferior. Insignificant. Nothing more than props for an elaborate joke that I was meant to share in. They were all on meticulous display for me. All of it…for me."

just like she said

The connection faltered then, like an electric short in his empathic circuit. He strained to focus on the snapshot images still vivid in his memory.

"There were cobwebs. Everything in a state of decay. And the smell… as if it all happened a long time ago…" He tried to swallow back the tremor from his words. "Or as if the monster's been feasting like this for a very long time."

"Perhaps it's been hungry for a very long time," said Lecter quietly.

Will's eyes fluttered open. He felt groggy, disoriented, and a little sick. "It wanted me to admire its work. I was meant to see it."

"Of course you were. What you experienced was a projection of your own subconscious. A glimpse into your psyche." Lecter paused for a moment. "Or perhaps an awakening."

"An awakening…of what?"

"Your true nature."

If Will could have trusted his own judgment right then, he might have felt unsettled by how genuinely pleased the doctor seemed with his interpretation of the vision. As it was, he felt too shell-shocked, too exhausted to even register the blow that Lecter's words should have dealt. They rolled in on a strangely lulling blur of perception, their edges dulled, and Will suspected the sedative was taking fuller effect. He was once again grateful for it.

"This is why we're here," Lecter continued. "You embarked on this trip in pursuit of the truth about yourself."

"Yes, but not… not here." The diner seemed to be pressing against the walls of his imagined safe place. "In Bloomington. Where I was with Abigail last. Where I might be able to reconstruct what happened."

"You may not have to wait that long. Your mind seems impatient to reconstruct it for you here and now, in your visions. Even as you resist them."

Will softly huffed. "Resistance hasn't exactly been an option."

"When you were barricading the door, you were separated from your monster by a transparent pane of glass. You had the opportunity to turn and see his face, yet you chose not to."

A knot tightened in Will's chest. His memory flashed on the heat he could feel through the glass, on the sense of malevolence pressing in on him...unseen. "It didn't feel like a choice."

"Those we resist never do."

Will couldn't speak for a moment. When he did his voice sounded too tinny and far away to be his own. "Why would I choose not to see it? Why would I do that?"

Lecter didn't answer at first. The pause seemed deliberate, almost calculated. "Why do you think?"

Will shivered, the cold sinking through the dried sweat in his shirt, creeping into his bones. He tried to break eye contact with Lecter but felt somehow ensnared in his gaze. "What I think is…" He swallowed back the sickly sense of dread tightening its fingers around his throat. "I think I made it this far, got through the door, got inside… but I didn't actually get away. I think the monster caught up with me in there. I think it got inside my head. I think it's just playing with me now. Skewing my thoughts. Altering my reality."

Lecter studied him, considering. "Your monster didn't get inside you, Will. He was always there. Always a part of you. The difference now is that you're beginning to allow yourself to see him." He smiled with disarming reassurance. "This is progress."

Will wanted to protest the word, wanted to be angry, wanted to defend himself, because Lecter's devastating insinuation couldn't possibly be true. He couldn't accept it. But he could find nothing of any substance within his arsenal to appeal it with. Nothing to support his innocence, let alone his sanity, nothing but a horrible blankness. Even the desire itself to fight back was receding into that blankness, ebbing beneath a wave of soothing and increasingly seductive drowsiness that was silkenly immersing his thoughts.

"Now," said Lecter, placing a hand on Will's shoulder and steadying the slight sway of his body. "You need sleep. It's time to go."

Will edged back from his touch. "Where? Where are we going?"

From inside came the clink of dishes and the soft murmur of voices, the stirring of life. Snow spiraled around them on a thin breeze. The world had begun moving again. Will's safe space closing.

Lecter was watching him with a querying look, and he was waiting for something. Waiting for clarification, Will realized, and he shook his head to clear his thoughts, to fight the medicated torpor.

He tried to smile. "See, I thought the deal was, if I turn out to be homicidally insane, you'd turn that car right around." Glancing briefly toward the diner's door. "In light of everything…I assumed that's what you would do. Take us back to Baltimore. Not continue on."

"The question was never your sanity. But the danger your condition might pose to yourself or others."

"It can't honestly still be a question."

Lecter spoke calmly and measuredly, as if explaining something that should have been patently obvious. "No one in the diner was ever at risk. In your mind you were protecting them."

"What about you? I held you at gunpoint. Was I protecting you?"

"I was never in danger."

"Is that right." Will stared at him in blatant disbelief. "So you trust me."

The doctor's expression was inscrutable. He held Will's eyes for a beat, then reached into his coat and retrieved Will's gun from an inside pocket. He offered it to him with the barrel pointed down, its grip turned to Will.

Will hesitated. As he reached for the weapon he was certain it would feel too light in his hand, certain Lecter had emptied the chamber. And a little stunned to feel its weight hadn't changed since it was taken from him in the diner. It felt heavy, and cold, and comforting.

It made no sense. How Lecter could trust him when he couldn't trust himself was beyond his understanding. Questions tried to form in his mind, but their words kept sinking into that lulling blankness before they reached his lips.

"Only one question still remains," said Lecter, as if reading and clarifying his thoughts for him. "And it's for you to answer, not me."

Will wrested his focus from the gun with what seemed enormous effort. The doctor was watching him, a troubled look darkening his face. Almost gently he asked, "Are you a killer, Will?"

The blankness offered up no words.

Lecter tipped his head subtly to one side, assessing his patient from a new angle. "Are you able to answer that yet?"

Only that morning he could have. His awareness had been so deadly sharp, his belief in his own innocence so unequivocal.

Silence lingered. The blankness surrendered no answers. Will slowly shook his head.

"Then we continue on," said Lecter.

There was no blame in the comment, no judgment, just a calm and permissive acknowledgement of where things stood. And Will realized in that moment that the rules of their roadtrip, the conditions, had just shifted. Or maybe they were never what he thought they were. Maybe he had underestimated Lecter's determination to see him through this. The depth of his friendship. Because in spite of all evidence demanding he should, the doctor hadn't given up on him yet. And as they headed across the snowy tarmac toward the car, Will felt a mix of relief and profound gratitude toward his companion.

x

---

x

They walked slowly side by side, Will a little wobbly and Lecter reaching out every now and then to steady him. They followed the punctured trail of footprints in the snow that Will had left in his delirious flight from a figment of his imagination. They were halfway across the parking lot when he saw it.

A dark stain in the footprint-crushed snow, just ahead of them. In the diner's dim glow, it might have been oil, or mud from someone's shoe, but Will didn't think so. He pulled away from Lecter and crouched down, gingerly touching the stained snow and rubbing it between his fingers.

"It's blood…"

He stared down at the trail of scattered splotches that led across the snow and angled off sharply into the woods.

"I shot at it…" he said softly, realization slowly dawning, "…and I hit it."

In an instant he was back on his feet, fully awake, alert, and flooded with adrenalin. He turned excitedly to Lecter. "I hit it! I hit the sonofabitch!"

Before Lecter could respond Will seized his arm and dragged him in a half-run along the trail of blood through the snow, across the parking lot, and toward the trees beyond.

"I am not crazy, Doctor Lecter!" shouted Will, one hand clutching the doctor—who was surprisingly compliant with the sudden change of events, allowing himself to be pulled haphazardly across the slushy asphalt—the other raised high with the Glock leading their way. "And I can prove it! I hit that goddamn thing! I'll show you!"

Their speed slowed as they reached the edge of the parking lot and the steepening bank of snow that rose to meet the trees. They trudged sluggishly through the densely packed drifts, ducking icicled branches and pushing past ice-laden shrubs, Will leading the way, Lecter complacently allowing himself to be led.

Light from the diner filtered hazily through the thicket, and as a breeze stirred its branches, it cast the small clearing just ahead in a dim, shifting glow. They paused here, their breaths clouding in the chill. Will released Lecter's arm as he scanned the snow, momentarily losing the trail in the shadows.

"This way. This way." He circled the clearing, searching. "It has to be close now…"

"It is."

Will spun around. Lecter stood near a patch of scrub oaks, and there was a body at his feet. A deer lay dead in the snow, several bloody holes piercing the hide of its carcass, one through its antlered head. Its glazed brown eyes stared lifelessly up at Lecter.

Will shuffled dazedly toward it, not quite certain what he was seeing. Believing, just for a moment, that they'd stumbled onto some hunter's kill.

And of course they had.

"I hit a stag," he said in a soft whisper. He could feel his sense of reality dismantling again, crumbling. The latest shock to his system a minor one compared to all the others this evening—it was just an animal he'd killed, a confused animal had strayed into his line of fire—

Is that how Abigail died? Did she stray into my line of fire?

yet he could feel the imminent cave-in pressing in on him, the crushing weight of undeniable truth. He could feel something inside him, the sinewy thread that had held the hopelessness in check through these past weeks, unraveling and snapping.

He dropped to his knees beside the animal. He touched a hand to its bloodied fur. He gently stroked it.

"I shot at a monster…and hit a stag." An odd little chuckle escaped his throat. "I guess I missed." The chuckle dissolved into a broken peal of laughter, an overwrought, exhausted, caustic sound that rattled through his chest, making the muscles in his diaphragm hurt, before finally fading into erratic, hitched breaths.

Lecter stood across from him, the dead deer between them, and silently watched.

After a while Will climbed to his feet, gun still in hand, knees aching from the ground's frozen touch. He exhaled a deep breath.

"You were right, doctor. The monster was never out here." He turned the gun's barrel inward and waved it toward his head like a pointed finger. "It was always in here."

Something sparked in Lecter's eyes then that Will had never seen there before. Something like genuine fear. "Will…"

"Which is why I keep missing."

"Please put the gun down," Lecter said quietly.

Will glanced at the gun in his hand, flashing on the cool press of its muzzle against his skin as he woke on the floor of the restroom. Thinking he could have saved himself a lot of trouble tonight.

"I think I was led to this place," he said. "To this diner, to these woods. To this moment. I think it's all been designed for me. Just like she said."

"She?"

He looked up at Lecter. "So that I can hunt the killer down." Then he smiled haggardly, raised the gun, and pressed its muzzle to his temple. "I just need to get my aim right this time."

Lecter stood very still, his body bristling as if caught off-guard. Another first, Will thought. But he wanted to be clear, he wanted him to understand.

"See, it's not too late," Will told him. "I can still kill it. That thing in my head that makes me so unique. That, that animal that preys on me…"

"What are you doing, Will?"

The question disarmed him. Not its words, but the emotion that carried them. They were asked not with the dread of what was about to happen, nor the calculated delicacy of talking someone back from the edge. Those he would have expected. This was genuine wonder, confusion. As if there was simply no room in Lecter's mind for this particular eventuality. The look on his face wasn't exactly fear, but discomposure, a subtle rippling of perpetually calm waters that Will found unnerving, because something about it was wrong, something discordant that would have seized his attention in any other circumstances.

But here and now it was too late, and he was simply too exhausted to care. He shut his eyes. And cocked the gun with a loud snap. "The right thing," he answered.

"How is this the right thing?" He heard the crunch of snow as Lecter stepped closer. "Did it prey on Abigail? Did you kill Abigail, Will?"

He knew it was a distraction tactic, that Lecter was trying to stall him, but he struggled with the question nonetheless. He desperately wanted the answer, but the blankness was devouring him. "I…I don't know, but…"

"What about the others? The copycat killings. Did you murder them all?"

Will had known the answer just that morning. It had been clear, fierce, resolute. No, he wanted to say, he wanted to shout it to the world in thundering defiance, but the word spiraled away from him as he grappled for it.

"If you intend to execute their killer," said Lecter, "you'll have to face him first."

Will's world swam in the darkness behind his eyelids. He felt weightless and dizzy. He felt the icy touch of the trigger beneath his index finger and the comfort of knowing how little it would take, a barely perceptible twitch of energy, for this nightmare would end, and there was a sudden calming clarity in knowing that with just the slightest pressure he would finally be free—

"Will. Look at me."

The stunning sharpness of the order shattered Will's clarity. His eyes blinked open to see Lecter standing opposite him, facing him. Looking both concerned and incensed. Like his plans had somehow gone awry and he held Will responsible.

"Are you prepared to face yourself?"

Trapped in the blankness, Will couldn't respond. He watched as Lecter determinedly stepped over the carcass, closing the space between them. Will took a stumbling step backward, the frozen trunk of the scrub oak behind him blocking his retreat.

"You're holding a gun to your head but you still can't admit to the killings. How is this the right thing?"

"It's what she wants…"

"What who wants?"

The world swam, and Will shut his eyes against it. He knew if he didn't do this soon he might pass out, his opportunity lost. "…what she asked for."

"Open your eyes, Will." That steely, inexorable ferocity again. "Look at me. Tell me who asked for this."

His finger found the trigger again.

The slightest pressure…

"Abigail."

Saying her name momentarily stilled the world's spin. There was a beat of silence. Everything seemed to stop.

"Abigail?" echoed the doctor, sounding surprised, incredulous. Her name punctuated the stillness in a jarring, unexpected way. It was with a weary curiosity that Will hesitated, and let his eyes flicker open.

Lecter stood before him. He wasn't moving, but there was something about his stance, about his demeanor, that suggested he was fighting the urge to recoil. When he spoke his voice was spiked with disappointment and bitterness, dropping to a lower register and barely sounding like this own. "Your selfishness is staggering."

"What..?" The hand holding the gun faltered and dipped slightly.

"This isn't Abigail. This is you. I'm as connected to her as you are. Considering what I did for her, more so. I have a right to know what happened to her, to understand her fate." His voice breaking with emotion, his eyes brimming with tears. "And you would deprive me of that…take whatever is left of her from me. You of all people."

The gun dropped to his side. Will looked down at it, feeling lost and a little disoriented, feeling as if he'd just stepped back into his own body after someone else had hijacked the controls, set him on a course of self-destruct, then abandoned him to his downward plunge. Except no one had. This was all him. Everything that had gone catastrophically wrong this evening was all on him. And as the instant crystallized into the full realization of what he had just been about to do, he wondered how he could go on defending his role in Abigail's disappearance, in the murders of all the others.

"My God," he said in a broken, barely audible whisper, "I'm sorry…"

In his peripheral vision he could see Lecter watching him steadily, and he felt an overwhelming sense of relief that the doctor hadn't backed away, that he wasn't on his cellphone to the police. That he was still there with him. "I'm so sorry."

Silence filled the space between them. Will wasn't sure for how long; it could have been seconds or minutes. He wanted nothing more than to relinquish control and succumb to the deepening waves of sedation that rolled into his consciousness, luring him into their promise of nothingness. But Lecter was watching, waiting, looking placated now, or maybe satisfied

that his ploy worked?

certainly relieved, and Will felt desperate for his alliance, for his stability. Never had he felt more alone.

"I'm sorry," he stammered yet again. "I don't know what I'm doing." He pressed a hand to his forehead, rubbing at the throb behind his brow. "It's this place…I've let it get into my head and…infect me…"

He realized then that he was waiting for Lecter's help, for an interpretation, for an answer. But there was nothing forthcoming.

"Please. Can we just leave now?"

"When did Abigail tell you that taking your life was the right thing to do?" Lecter finally said. "Was it just before you…"

killed her? thought Will in the doctor's pause.

"…before she died?"

"Do we have to do this now?" Will asked.

"Yes."

Will shut his eyes, the pressure behind them intensifying, the drug-induced insistence for sleep blurring his thoughts. He released a deep breath and glanced up at Lecter.

"It was earlier tonight. When I was chatting with her in the men's room." A humorless smile quirked his lips. There was clearly no need to pretend any more. Then softly, unconvincingly, he added, "We don't know she's dead."

"But she spoke to you in a vision. The way Garret Jacob Hobbs spoke to you."

"Yes."

"Your subconscious disguised as delusion."

Will massaged his forehead with the hand still holding the gun. "I'd really like to leave now…"

"What else did she say to you?"

Moments must have stretched in silence, because Lecter's tone was sharp and insistent again. "Will."

"She said…I knew who was on the phone. The tip-off call that her father got."

The doctor glanced at the gun. "Do you?"

Swallowed by the blankness. Will struggling to answer.

"Did you make that call, Will?"

"No."

"And yet your subconscious is suggesting otherwise."

"Is it…?"

"Did she say anything else?"

"Nothing that made sense."

"Tell me."

Will sighed. His gratitude toward Lecter waning with his patience. "She said all of this has been for me. And that he'll always wait." He shrugged. "Whatever that means."

"What do you think it means?"

"I don't know. I'm tired, I'm cold, and your drug is seriously messing with my head. Can we please get out of here?"

"When you tell me what you think it means."

"I don't know what it means! Do we really have to have a therapy session out here in the middle of frozen fucking nowhere?"

"Out here in the frozen fucking nowhere is where you've chosen to attempt suicide," said Lecter. "It seems fitting."

The comment stung. Will had no doubt it was meant to. There was a wounded anger in its trajectory, as if Will's breakdown had been a personal affront to the doctor. Though veiled beneath the polished exterior of detachment, Lecter's shift in mood was apparent, his worry for Will causing a hairline fissure in his flawless composure, which made it all the more glaring. And all the more unsettling to Will.

He stared into the trees gathered at the clearing's edge, their gnarled, skeletal limbs twisting through the darkness toward an indifferent sky. Threads of guilt and shame tangled with his thoughts, entwining and dragging them in a downward spiral.

"Maybe it means I'm at the center of everything. Like the evidence says."

Lecter had stolen up beside him, and he stood very close now, his voice low and calm. "And…who is 'he'"?

"I don't know. I don't care." Too weary to suppress the irritation in his own voice.

"Make a guess."

"Someone who thinks I'm worth waiting for apparently." Too weary to suppress the flippancy. "Maybe the ghost of Gareth Jacob Hobbs. Or Satan. Or you. I really don't…" A question flickered now from the blankness in his mind, an electric spark in the vast darkness. Brief and bright and somehow, at once, both hopeful and horrifying.

And then it was gone. Quelled by the sudden weight of Lecter's hand on his shoulder, the question interrupted, the spark snuffed out.

Lecter was peering at him closely. "You won't be conscious much longer. Let's get you back to the car. Hand me your gun."

Will blinked at him, unsure he'd heard him correctly. "What?"

The doctor offered his free hand, palm upturned. "I'll keep it safe and return it to you when we get there."

He hesitated. "I can't do that."

"Then I can't get us there."

The hand on his shoulder gently squeezed, bringing Will's attention back into focus. "I'm still trying to help you, Will. And you're still withholding your trust."

"This isn't so much helping me as disarming me." His words were beginning to slur. "Again."

"You've no need to be armed. There's no monster in these woods. The only threat here is you."

"I'm not a threat. You said so yourself."

"You've turned that weapon on everyone you've encountered tonight, including a roomful of diners and your only ally." He glanced down at the bullet-riddled carcass at their feet. "And an unfortunate white-tailed deer."

"But you said….you said no one was in danger."

Lecter leveled his attention on Will now. It felt fierce and intractable. "I was wrong. I made a mistake that I won't make again."

"So did I. Look…" He took a concerted step back, pulling free of Lecter's grip, needing space to squarely face him. "I know what just happened. But I give you my word—"

"I won't allow you to take your own life, Will."

Will's promise faltered in what sounded strangely like a threat.

"Good," he managed uneasily. "But…that's not my intention. What I was about to say—"

"It's not an option. It's the only choice that's not open to you. Do you understand?"

Even through the rising tide of sedation flooding his mind and saturating his perception, what Will understood was that this wasn't an appeal from a concerned friend. It was an order. Cold and exacting and unconditional. And it gave him the unnerving impression in that moment that his suicidal misstep had broken some cardinal rule in a game he hadn't realized he was playing.

the only choice that's not open to you

Because death by his own hand forfeits the game. Ends it without finishing it. And Lecter wouldn't allow that.

Which was crazy, Will knew. But a chill, surreal sensation was creeping over him, the feeling that he was the only one who was ever at risk in this game. The only one that mattered. Because nothing else here was real. Not the diner or the people in it, not even the stag—they were all just props and game pieces being maneuvered across a gruesome, desolate landscape of a game board, over which he and Lecter were the opposing players. And he was losing.

Or maybe just losing his mind. Maybe none of this was real. Maybe it was all just a stunningly elaborate hallucination churned out of his overwrought brain as it simmered in the heat of another fever. Maybe he was still in the car, and they were still driving, and the music drifting from the speakers had finally seduced him, and he was merely in the clutches of a nightmare along some dark highway dissecting state lines in the night.

Maybe this is what it felt like to finally go mad.

Lecter was waiting for a response, as patiently as ever.

he'll always be waiting for you

"I understand," Will said softly.

"Then we're in agreement."

The doctor's image blurred and, just for an instant, tripled. Yet even through the distortion Will could read his hesitation. "But you still want the gun."

"Only if you're willing to surrender it."

Sleep's insistence was so potent now that he felt able to stand on his feet only by pure force of will, and he was certain Lecter could see that.

"Why not just take it? Like you did before."

"Because I want it to be your choice this time." There was warmth in the doctor's expression now, compassion. And something akin to reverence. "Your reality isn't being altered, Will. You simply perceive reality in all its exquisite potential, in what might be alongside what is. Your empathic gift offers you a buffet of possibilities to taste and to savor. All you have to do is choose. But you've been hovering between perceptions, stranding yourself in the space in between, terrified of choosing the wrong reality. Have you fallen prey to a master manipulator or to your own delusions? Are you the hero or the villain of this story? Am I a threat to you or your friend?"

Will felt at once dizzy and captivated, like he was being led in a spiraling, hypnotic dance with no control over where it might lead. The doctor leaned closer. "I want you to reclaim your power, Will. I want you to make a choice."

In that moment of enervation and thrall, sinking fast now beneath the tidal force of Lecter's drug, Will felt an almost visceral need to surrender to his last remaining ally, to simply let him take over. He was so desperately tired. He couldn't deny the legitimacy of the doctor's entreaty—he'd crippled himself with indecision, with fear—nor the truth in Lecter's prognosis. His perceptions were unreliable—

was that what Lecter said?

they were skewed with exhaustion and short-circuited by the evening's series of shocks, and he wanted all of this to be over now. He wanted more than anything to stop fighting. To let the doctor guide his course. He didn't even care anymore which way the car turned when they left, whether it took them on to Bloomington or back to Baltimore.

Yet there was something, a last queasy knot in his gut, that wouldn't quite allow him to let go.

"Let's clear all the previous questions, shall we?" Lecter was reading him again, peering into his internal struggle and utterly unfazed by it, his voice low and soothing. "There's only one that matters now."

Are you a killer, Will?

He dipped his head into Will's line of sight and let the moment draw out.

"Do you trust me, Will?"

Images from the past hour flickered chaotically through Will's mind like slides from a broken projector, photographs flashing on the screen of a courtroom wall. Evidence of his diminishing control. Snapshots of his sanity so relentlessly spinning away from him that he had held a roomful of people at gunpoint. That he had nearly taken his own life. Proof that Lecter had stopped him. That Lecter had been his only solace. His only friend.

Will noticed for the last time that night the way Lecter was calmly waiting for him. Waiting without waiting. As if it were only a formality.

All part of the game.

No pressure, no impatience.

He felt his fingers tighten around the firearm in his grip, once again aware of its comforting weight, the reassuring touch of its icy frame. He lifted it slowly, and he placed it in Lecter's hand.

Lecter offered him a gentle smile, and as he watched the loaded gun disappear into the doctor's coat, Will felt his knees buckling beneath him, saw the snow rushing upward in a blinding white blur. The doctor's response was once again swift. He slid an arm of support behind Will's back, effortlessly catching him, then draped Will's left arm over his own shoulders, and hoisted him upright.

Fighting to stay conscious, Will uttered a small, embarrassed moan. "…m'sorry, lost my footing…"

"I noticed," said Lecter mildly, guiding and half-carrying him through the trees toward the parking lot.

Will made a futile, apologetic attempt to pull free. "It's okay, I can walk…"

"No need, Will. I have you now."

He had neither the strength nor the cognizance to resist. And as his consciousness faded, he heard himself say, "Thank you, doctor."

x

---

x

It was the shivering that snatched him back from the brink of a dream.

Not so much a dream as a collection of disjointed, hazily glimpsed images—faces and gore and ravens and the bronze stag in Lecter's office—fragments of his psyche trying to organize themselves into an impossible whole. And that's when his eyes snapped open.

They were inside now, in the safety of the car's interior, but the cold had seeped beneath his skin and sunk into his bones, and the shivering was uncontrollable. Shudders welled up from deep within him.

They kept him awake. Refused him entrance into sleep's sanctuary. He felt cheated.

But the deep, hypnotic thrum of the Bentley's idling engine promised escape from this place, this garishly bright pit-stop in the middle of nowhere. At least he had that.

They waited in silence for the windshield's heat conductors to melt the layer of ice that obscured their view outside. It didn't take long for heat to begin rising in luxurious waves from the vents on the floor, filling the cabin, and its embrace against the chill in his body felt heavenly, almost intoxicating, to Will. The shivers were subsiding now. He was content to be swaddled and lulled and lured to sleep by the warmth. He willed sleep to take him. He tried to slump into the leather seat's plush contours, tried to force himself to relax. But despite the warmth and the comfort, despite his surrender to it, sleep eluded him.

Before they left Baltimore, Lecter had the foresight to pack winter emergency supplies, and tonight, after helping his semi-conscious passenger inside the car, he'd retrieved a wool blanket from the trunk and tucked it around him. He then secured the seatbelt around the outside, effectively sealing Will in. Immobilizing him. He wondered if that was deliberate.

It didn't matter. He had nowhere to run.

He wondered where his gun had disappeared to.

But that didn't matter much either. It was safer out of his reach.

He wondered how long Abigail had lived after the first cut. How long she remained conscious as she bled out. If she willed sleep to spare her from the pain and the terror of impending death.

Will didn't think he deserved to ever sleep again.

He must have been broadcasting his thoughts, because Lecter touched a button on the console then, and with a low hum Will's seat reclined a few inches backward.

"You don't have to do that," Will murmured.

"You're still fighting the effects of the sedative." Lecter cast him a stern sidelong look. "I want you to stop."

"Believe it or not, I'm trying."

"Therein may lie the problem."

Will sighed. "I know…"

"You're clutching your thoughts as if you need their sustenance," Lecter said quietly. "You don't. Let them go, Will. Let yourself rest."

Just for now, Will thought, bargaining with himself. Maybe he could let them go just for now. And with that suggestion, he let his head loll back and his eyes slip shut, and allowed himself to drift along with the purr of the idling engine. His lids flickered open again briefly as the ice shielding his view splintered and thawed, revealing in a melting blur the parking lot and the diner's dark structure beyond. The promise of FAST FOOD, FRIENDLY SERVICE barely visible now, the letters lost in a collage of shadows above the door. He closed his eyes, finally receding into waiting sleep.

And then opened them again. He squinted at the banner above the door. The neon sign had been turned off. The diner was dark. The parking lot empty. The place looked deserted, lifeless. Like it did when he was being chased from the woods.

But that was just a dream…

Maybe everyone had cleared out after he and Lecter left. Maybe they'd decided to close early after a madman pulled a gun on them.

wasn't it?

"Doctor Lecter…" His words were a slur drifting in hazily from a thousand miles away.

"Yes, Will?"

"Why no police?"

The briefest pause. "Were you expecting them?"

A question to his question. A psychiatrist's trick. Will would have felt irritated if he could summon the energy.

"Well…crazy man waving a gun around in a packed diner…" He struggled to shift his head, to turn to his companion. "Yes."

Lecter gave a small, dismissive shrug. "It would seem no one called."

"All those people? Not a single one of them hit 9-1-1 on their cell?"

"I took care of them."

The pause was much longer this time. Lecter stared ahead through the windshield's latticework of heated lines crisscrossing through the ice, dripping into one another, the scene beyond forming in a nebulous swirl, as if the diner was still deciding on its final shape. Will watched it through the melting ice, feeling empty, feeling numb.

I took care of them.

"How?"

"You were there. You saw what I did." The moment lingered. Then, almost lightly, the doctor added, "Did you not?"

"Yeah…"

Will fixated on the diner, on the images of two scenes stamped on his memory. In one of them Lecter was speaking to wide-eyed diners as they huddled at the far wall, assuaging their worries, paying for damages, deftly "handling" them. No doubt dissuading them seeking help from the outside world. And in the other, the diners sat for dinner, the rotting remains of their half-consumed bodies displayed in grotesque, flamboyant artistry, an attestant to the artist's mockery of his subjects, to his arrogance, to his evil. Here the diners were beyond help from the outside world. As hidden from it as the artist.

One of the scenes wasn't real, Will knew. He just no longer knew which.

A last shiver rose from the base of his spine.

"I saw," he said, so quietly he barely heard himself.

The windshield wipers swished away the remaining vestiges of ice. The view was clear now.

"I think we're ready," said Lecter.

Will was still staring ahead, but he could feel the doctor turn to him, he could feel the intensity of his focus, and when he spoke his tone resonated with the engine's hum: low, mesmeric, compelling.

"I want you to sleep now, Will. Close your eyes. Let go."

Later, after his life's spectacular crash and burn left him sitting alone in one of the highest-security prison cells in the country amidst the charred fragments of his former self, Will would think back and wonder if the doctor had sensed his doubts in that moment. If he decided to shut them down with his quasi-hypnotic suggestion.

It wasn't necessary, Will knew. He felt no resistance to the doctor's order, no hesitation. He let his lids fall shut, unwilling to see any more, unwilling to allow his mind to make any more connections. Unable to sustain any more shocks this night, or even to dare glimpse the questions he could already feel forming just beneath the surface of the blankness. Waiting to rise into his consciousness. Demanding to be answered.

But right now, he couldn't allow himself to care. Tonight he had chosen his reality, and in this reality, just for tonight, he welcomed the numbness, the darkness, the shutting down of his thoughts and his perceptions. He had chosen to trust the man beside him. His therapist and confidante. His friend. And despite those questions, those doubts, stirring just below his awareness—or maybe because of them—what he craved now more than anything was the relief of nothingness, the nirvana of choicelessness. The chance to hover one last time in that space between perceptions, where he didn't have to choose, where he didn't have to look.

Maybe Lecter was right. Maybe he was, after all, staggeringly selfish. Because all he wanted right now, maybe for the last time he could ever hope for it, was just a few hours of sightless, dreamless, blameless peace.

As the vehicle cruised seamlessly onto the interstate highway toward Minnesota, the reprise of Bach's Violin Concerto in D drifted in over the speakers, and this time sleep took him.

xxx

---

xxx