A season to all things, and to all things a season.
This is an ancient, pre-Biblical aphorism-Judeo-Christian appropriation and loathsome popular music notwithstanding. It began as a kind of helpless explanation offered in a time when all men's backs were bent by circumstance, and has shown a jagged tenacity as civilizations swell and wane.
To Dr. Hannibal Lecter, now forty-eight years of age, if the concept of luck were anything but a semantic abstraction, he might consider himself fortunate to exist at a point in which it is possible to be a man over whom the seasons hold no sway. On whom even time has a halfhearted grip.
Such exemption has a cost, and it requires constant vigilance. Born to privilege, but remade by what Hannibal considers his true origin-amid shadow and threat in the concrete hell of his home country-vigilance is his birthright. He also accepts with calm and dignity that his way is laid over the still-bent backs of those who remain bound to season. They turn their faces upward in vain; their groans accompany his footfalls. A man must take one path or the other, but his is clear enough to have been almost foreordained.
Hannibal knows hubris as an idea, a word, but cannot equate it with his own trajectory, because he does not see himself as moving. He watches equinox and solstice not strung along a thread but all condensed to a point, indistinguishable. He forgets to judge the passing of years as each subjugated body, while blessed with its own singular wound pattern, relents and falls in the same manner before his feet.
In the end, it is Will Graham who proves to be both interruption to the cycle, and the key to its permanence.
The seed is planted in autumn that year, in defiance of nature, but Hannibal's undertakings bear wild, red fruit even as the rest of the world withers. They are refulgent both with poison and with promise.
He is receiving a visit from a colleague, Dr. Bedelia DuMaurier, when he first hears of William Graham. Not his full name, not yet, but the outline of the man begins to form in his mind. A sketch. The idea is pleasing in and of itself, but also as a shape that begs to be filled, with shadow and intimation-strokes so deft and gradual the image appears as if carved from the inside outward. Hannibal was a surgeon after all, and sometimes cannot help but see collections of organs given incidental shape by skin and features, but still crying to be excised and put to purposeful and elegant use.
"I'd like to solicit a professional opinion on a patient, Hannibal," Bedelia says.
It is Hannibal's observation that Bedelia has begun, unconsciously, to second-guess her own therapeutic techniques. Meetings such as this, under the pretense of technical consultation, have occurred more frequently since she was attacked by a patient in her office several months ago. She had fought back, and was not badly wounded, but she had called Hannibal even before emergency services, presumably so she could place a familiar face with the hands that tended her wounds. The patient was apprehended the same day, and briefly institutionalized, but then was released into the custody of family. Far too soon, in Hannibal's opinion.
"An unexpected request," he says nonetheless, balancing the rim of a wine glass just below the ridge of his lower lip. "Are you seeking to refer someone?"
"No," says Bedelia, "I'm seeking an analysis. An informal one."
"Do you wish me to read the case files?"
"At this point I'd prefer to have you respond to my impressions," she says.
"Ah. A singular case, then?"
"In a way. Perhaps by way of the patient himself rather than the condition or symptoms."
"And what is the condition?" Hannibal asks. He sips from the glass as Bedelia pauses, using her own enjoyment of the wine to justify hesitation. Hannibal lets it pass unremarked upon. The Château Yquem swirls in his mouth and slides down his throat. He can taste it with his pulse, regular and even. The fluids inside him hide their conveyance, both of pleasure and necessity, from all outside notice.
"He is an empath," Bedelia says, "to the extent that his empathy has become disordered. The patient's interactions with others entail not only emotional force, but transference."
"He personalizes."
"Yes."
"Rare," Hannibal says, "but not unprecedented." His impulsion is gentle, but despite her damage Bedelia's perception is far too acute to miss it.
She smiles. "He works as a criminal profiler. With the FBI."
"I see."
Bedelia sees that he does, and Hannibal knows she is satisfied. The outline begins to fill, minute curls of detail bleeding into it in amounts small enough to tantalize but not to satisfy. A criminal profiler, with unusual empathy. Even absent an underlying illness, in his head will already be a stew boiling over with horrors.
The potentiality is lovely.
Bedelia's expression when she looks at Hannibal suggests she knows he is enraptured. The two of them are far too much alike. Perhaps dangerously so, even with Bedelia in her compromised state. They spin in a tight tracery of mutual recognition. The fate of any objects in binary orbit, whether imminent or protracted, is collision.
"But you did not come here to discuss your patient's empathy, or his profession," Hannibal says.
"No," she says. "I came to discuss his dreams."
"A very Freudian approach" Hannibal says. "Could it be you who is regressing?" He knows that she knows he is teasing. At the edges of their professional lives, where protocol is thinnest, they have entertained a sort of flirtation. Purely verbal, of course. Both are far too restrained-Bedelia by nature, Hannibal by painstaking construction-even to extend the interplay to gestures or glances. Their movements around one another belie their course utterly; they are economical, sedate.
When they met, Hannibal respected and mirrored Bedelia's disdain for frivolity. She was a lovely blankness, an artist's model to which Hannibal could apply his strata of affected emotionality.
Without knowing exactly what it entails, Bedelia appreciates the homage he pays to her with his pointed meticulousness. But he is entirely his own creation. He does not merely imitate, but transcends the original. Both more and less than human, he is a shape that contains a shape, and assumes yet another.
"My patient has the same dream every night," Bedelia says. "Or, actually, I should say a series of escalating dreams."
"Escalating?"
"That's the way he describes it. A few months ago, he told me of an occasional recurring dream in which he is looking at a tree on a hill at twilight. A bare tree, in winter, even though there is no snow on the ground. In the dream, he hears a noise behind him, and he turns to look, but nothing is there. It's when he looks back at the hill that the tree has become a stag. And that he is suddenly unsettled, because it was only him watching the tree, but the stag is capable of watching in return."
"And the escalation?"
Bedelia sips at the very lip of her glass, then sets it aside.
Hannibal watches the droplet swell and hang on the edge of the glass, not quite heavy enough to fall.
"He now dreams of walking," Bedelia says. "Just walking down an unending road in the dark. This dream is much more frequent. Nearly every night. At first he was alone, but he began to hear something walking behind him. Each night it seems to come closer. Mr. Graham-my patient-tells me he knows that it is the stag following him."
Hannibal does not even nod. It would be improper in context, because he knows the seemingly unintentional mention of the patient's name is a strike in their bout of verbal coquetry.
"He says it's come close enough that he can feel its breath on his shoulder," she continues. "The culmination, what made him so agitated, was the fact that the night before our last session, he became certain that if he turned to look at the animal, he would find it had a human face. The prospect terrifies him."
"Except for the frequency, perhaps, it seems like a common enough anxiety dream," says Hannibal, who cannot in all his years remember having dreamt at all. "An arresting idea certainly, but not so remarkable that it warrants undue consideration." Parry, riposte.
Bedelia gives him a hard look.
"But, of course, you don't think it's undue, or else you would not have come to me," Hannibal says, after an indulgent pause. "So, tell me, what is the exacerbating factor? Is it perhaps a case of his, your profiler?"
Bedelia smiles the smile she reserves for Hannibal-or so he imagines-reserved and void of sincerity. Prodding.
"The absence of one," she says.
"Hm."
"Graham tells me he was happy to dream of the hill and the tree, because it meant there was another angle to explore in an ongoing case."
"It must have been ongoing for quite some time," Hannibal says.
"They're chasing the Chesapeake Ripper."
"Ah. And what has changed?"
"The Ripper has stopped killing. There are no more trails for him to follow."
"And so his anxiety mounts. There is no one to fill the night with terrors, so he must do it himself," Hannibal says.
And by sheer will alone he stops the trembling of his fingers. The air has thickened, the scents within the room now carrying the bright metallic note of the unexplored. He won't allow his eyes to slip closed when in front of Bedelia, but he settles the rim of his wine glass gently against his upper lip and breathes in possibility.
"What a crushing burden," says Hannibal, "especially to impose on oneself. I understand your desire to see it relieved, for Mr. Graham's sake. But I don't believe this is something I can help you with."
"I'm not asking for help, Hannibal. Only an opinion."
"In my opinion, then, despite aggressive intervention, your patient may require something that neither you nor I can provide."
If Bedelia hears the untruth of it, her rational mind will override the knowledge, simply because it is unfathomable. Hannibal's smile is knowing and sad. That Bedelia cannot fathom, even after having known violence-embraced and wrestled with it-provides him a buffer to her scrutiny. He sees a world where all things are possible-has done so many with his own hands-and by that grace it is he, not Bedelia, whose sight is limitless.
If Hannibal Lecter had known that this Mr. Graham gave presentations to students at the FBI Academy and, occasionally, elsewhere-in a halting monotone that made him the subject of either mockery or suspicion-he might have tried to attend one. As an interested party. He had passed himself off before as a medical examiner; he certainly had the requisite knowledge.
In truth, Hannibal doesn't even know the man's first name, but it is not something he needs to parlay Bedelia into relinquishing with another night of veiled courting. He has everything he requires to initiate contact with Graham. Though it will hardly be an initiation; they have been speaking with one another for nearly two years.
Even more, the communication is done in the intimate cipher of familiarity, read and understood at once by those who know its symbols. The pleasure of the connection for Hannibal is already heavy, but he wants nothing more than to deepen it. Alone in his office, he closes his eyes at last, visualizes a lone tree at the crest of a hill. It has no leaves, nor will it ever. It is static, seasonless, perfect. When he opens his eyes again, the path unfolds before him. It has always been there, of course, and is littered with his footprints, yet it winds over a half-obscured horizon. The partial concealment excites him most of all.
The young woman is moaning still when he navigates below her scapulae, between ribs, first manually then with the whittled points of the stags' antlers that make up the altar. His offering, his overture.
The construction itself had been difficult, entailing binding the thorny, amputated racks together with baling wire-double-gloved for the sake of discretion-so that they would stand steady even on shifting ground.
The woman, with long, dark hair, not plain-looking yet not of captivating beauty by any stretch, had blown the smoke from her foul clove cigarette into Hannibal's face at a café, when he politely requested she move on so he could enjoy his espresso con panna. The newly sharpened points of a long-dead buck slide through the flesh of her abdomen with much more ease, slowing only when the supple skin of youth, still underlaid with fat, tents before breaking, as if her pelvic bone had sprouted thorns.
Appropriate, Hannibal thinks, and allows himself to be briefly aroused.
She does not bleed much now, having done most of it in Hannibal's shower as he cut a semicircle below her ribs and into the peritoneum to remove her liver.
The skin surrounding her lips is blue. Pressing on her sternum to complete the impalement, Hannibal feels her heart stop beating. The heat of her body leaves in curls against the pre-dawn sky.
He takes off the gloves, folding them neatly one inside the other, and prepares for the two-mile walk back to his car, unburdened and expectant.
The discovery splashes across the online news outlets, with the degree of headline sensationalism depending on the reputability of the source. Hannibal does not read the articles themselves; he knows his meaning is taken.
And he waits in his home for the inevitable: another visit from Bedelia. The risk that she may go to the authorities first is really no risk at all, calculated or not. Hannibal balances his plan on the fulcrum of her burgeoning self-doubt, and he is not disappointed.
She comes, unannounced, at ten-thirty in the evening, long after the street has gone quiet. This does not concern Hannibal; he is quieter still than the restless Baltimore night. For as attentive as he is to the infliction of agony, he prefers that it received with the silence of resignation and despair, rather than with protest. He eschews disarray; he is precision drawn to a point. The needle of his intent is so fine as to be invisible until it pierces the unguarded eye. As the doorbell chime sounds, he thumbs a button on the tiny remote next to his hand, and the first carefully placed notes of Chopin's Nocturne No. 2 in E-Flat swim forth from the speakers of his Blaupunkt sound system. When he rises from his seat by the fireplace, he hopes that Mr. Graham is asleep and dreaming of the solitary tree and watchful stag. Always watchful.
"Bedelia," he says. "What brings you to my door at this hour?"
"Questions, Hannibal." There is something aside from indignation that moves through the stony set of her face. Bedelia is masterful at obfuscation even still-after all she was one of his tutors, if inadvertently-but he identifies the sweet and dark undercurrent to her affect within seconds of her stepping into his foyer.
It is terror. And the sudden satisfaction of his knowing branches through him, sparks his fingertips like matchheads. He breathes deeply into it before speaking again.
"Anything I can answer for you, I will," he says.
"Thank you," she says. "May I sit down?"
"I'll join you in the parlor with a glass of wine."
"No," she says. "Thank you. It's very late, and I won't be staying long."
He tips his chin, acquiesces. For a moment he lets himself admire her courage, so sweetly and utterly undermined by her lingering disbelief.
Hannibal ushers Bedelia into the sitting room, low-lit and wrapped in music that eddies around the fixtures with each piano trill like a living thing. He smiles, crosses one leg over the other, palms resting on the worsted of his slacks. It is an invitation and also a provocation, demonstrating to her that of the two of them he will not be the one to dispense with the pleasantries. He will force her to do so.
"Frankly," she says, after a pause. "I'm troubled."
"Does this have anything to do with the patient who attacked you in your office? Quite a traumatic event, I'm sure."
As strained as she is, Bedelia understands immediately that the remark is a taunt, after the fashion of the rhetorical game they share. She is appalled, and fails to hide it for the barest sliver of a second, but then it is gone. Bedelia refuses to be drawn easily into emotional outburst. That mortal assumption, again, that the scales are untipped.
"I'd prefer to talk about my current patient, Hannibal."
"Which?"
"Will Graham."
Will, Hannibal thinks. An ironic name, considering the inherent passivity of empathy. Still, to be so receptive as to invite the force of an outside personality-dozens of them-to intermingle with and suffuse his own, perhaps this Graham sees a kind of purity in complete relinquishment. The idea appeals to Hannibal on a visceral level. He is accustomed to defiance, struggle sometimes to the last breath. Someone capable of unqualified surrender could either bend to him untouched, or slip like smoke through his fingers. A man unused to trepidation, Hannibal believes he could savor either prospect with equal relish.
"I see," he says. "Have his nightmares gotten worse?"
"Don't play with me, Hannibal. You read the newspapers."
"The development in his case, then," Hannibal says.
"I need to ask you very frankly if you've told any of your patients-anyone else-about the conversation you and I had regarding Will Graham," Bedelia says.
Oh, no, Hannibal thinks. Evasion, and clumsily done, at that. An eleventh-hour attempt to rationalize away gnawing doubt. The sturdy cord of his patience snaps, the ends flutter, lifeless.
He shakes his head. "Bedelia."
"I am running out of explanations, Hannibal." Desperation has now reached her voice. "Coincidence doesn't cut it. The dream; that girl, mounted like she was, displayed like that. No one reached into Will Graham's head, into mine. I don't accept it."
"Then I am afraid," Hannibal says, "we have nothing more to talk about."
He sees her recognize, in the breath of silence that hangs between them, that she is going to die. From the speakers, Daniel Barenboim picks out a deliberate series of notes, clinging to the tempo's very edge, making them sigh.
Hannibal permits himself a brief moment to grieve the intellectual loss, the degradation of his and Bedelia's interaction. The term over which he had known her had been educational.
Then she is up and out of her chair, tottering as the heel of her pump skids on the wood floor. Hannibal hopes it won't leave a mark.
With one hand, he grabs her wrist, and with the other, guides her head by its shining blonde hair in a swift arc to the edge of the table. The sound of her fracturing skull is muted; she barely releases a breath as she falls, dazed beyond hope but not unconscious.
From his breast pocket, Hannibal removes a pair of nitrile gloves, unpowdered. At his feet, Bedelia breathes in whining gasps. She attempts to turn over, but only succeeds in sinking her cheek into the pool of blood that is blossoming below it. Hannibal takes a moment to fold the rug over twice, cradling Bedelia's head as he uses the rug to pillow it. It won't do to give the blood a chance to permeate the fine veneer. Around them, the piano piece ends, and another follows on its heels, this one in a major key.
Hannibal stops to retrieve a small object from a locked drawer in the secretary in his study's antechamber before returning Bedelia to her office. It is a short drive, and the blood from her wound has thankfully begun to slow. He uses her keys, places her inside, regretting the indignity of having to hammer her skull against the lip of her desk. This time, afterward, she makes no sound.
Her eyelids flutter as he presses gloved thumbs to her larynx, leaning with his weight into the task. The hyoid bone breaks almost immediately, and still he presses. He hears only his breathing, deep and even. Silence reigns in her office as he sits back on his heels.
Tucking the gloves away, Hannibal removes a vial from his coat pocket, and uses a pair of forceps to lay a single hair-harvested from the floor of this very office after Bedelia had torn it from her attacker's head-on the lapel of her suit jacket. He does not return her handbag; he will burn it later.
Two deaths in quick succession, and all to reap a promise. But such a promise is Will Graham that Hannibal thinks it more than earned.