That night, she dreamed of his voice.
She stood in the middle of her gardens under a full moon that was practically close enough to touch, and she could feel its pull on her blood, her skin, her brain. It was common knowledge that the insane got even crazier at the full moon. The lunar body was not just a draw on animals.
Maryann stood under its feverish yellow gaze, feeling drugged. Her heart hammered, but her body was encased in molasses: cloying and sticky to body and mind. All of her gaze was filled with the giant orb, oppressively swallowing her attention in its beams.
Then, a presence behind her. Footsteps padding closer with the authority of a hoof, but the genteel nature of a paw. Closer, closer, finally standing just beyond touching.
Maryann could feel the heat of his tall, lean frame like a woodstove, could hear the slide and murmur of the thoughts inside his skull, could trace the raking of his eyes on her exposed neck, the crown of her head, the curve of her spine. The sound of his even and wraithlike breath gave him away, somehow: as identifiable as his accent. She knew who it was without a intelligible word.
"Lovely," came the sweetly accented whisper, titillating through her like summer brooks through melting peaks. It caressed her skin like fine mist. Try as she might, she could not turn to regard him, and he faded away like fog, taking his heat with him.
In his absence, cold seeped into her body. Another presence strode up behind her with all the arrogance of a king's approach. It felt like a glacier pressed against her back. No, no no. Not you, she thought. She knew this presence: he stalked her nightmares every time she slumbered. But she could not move to avoid him.
He seemed to be staring at the moon, too, which loomed drunkenly close and slipped maniacally along her synapses like violin strings tripping acid.
"Baa, baa, black sheep," breathed the apparition behind her, the telltale ghost of air expelled over her bare shoulder.
Maryann's entire body erupted in gooseflesh.
Maryann thrashed awake, nerves blazing, slapping at her prickling arms and breasts. She thought the goosebumps were insects for a fearful moment, but then wrenched her brain completely back to reality. Her scarred foot was on fire, but it was all in her mind.
She was in her bed, the covers flailed to the floor. The cats stared at her from their posts in the room: Jinx on top of the dresser next to the door, and Juju atop the headboard. Their yellow eyes reminded her of the dream moon.
Luna's real counterpart lit up the night beyond the curtains, and Maryann stumbled out of bed to push them aside. Full, just like in the dream, but not nearly so close. She could manage its insane pull from this distance.
Exhaustion was strong, so strong: like she had not slept in days. The half-empty NyQuil bottle on the bedstand indicated otherwise.
Just a dream from cough syrup, Maryann thought, crawling back under her comforter. Not even a bad one, not really, compared to what it could be. At least Hannibal was in it. It almost counteracted the other man...
It took her several jolting rejections to trust sleep enough to claim her once more, as the dream moon with its insane pull threatened to devour her again.
In a psych ward some miles away, the next day, the crazed moon claimed its final belated victim.
Able Gideon uses a fork tine to slip his cuffs, then his fist to break a nurse's throat (oh, how blessedly his knuckles split), then pursed lips to "Shh, shh, shh" her choked screams of agony and terror, then his thumbs to blind her (soft squish of rods and cones from under her retinas), then an IV stand's pole to impale her to the floor.
Drunk on the sight, the scent of blood. Every atom of his body sang, finally.
Like a bird constructing a nest, or a spider its web, he diligently puts every stick-like object he can lay smeared hands on through her corpse. For the first time in two years, Gideon feels alive again. His humors finally feel balanced, bathed in the humors of another.
Hannibal worked hard to cultivate an air of trustworthiness. When Jack Crawford showed up to talk shop about the quote-unquote Ripper, Hannibal recognized an opportunity to sow discord.
The maneater wanted to know more about this doppleganger, who would dare to imitate his body of work. In fact, the Ripper persona that lay but a beck away in his darkest recesses had a tie to the FBI head knocker in front of him: Hannibal vividly and fondly remembered Miriam Lass, the little teacher's pet of Jack a decade ago, and every bloody thing he perpetrated on her.
The black man paced like a lion in a cage, coiled, tumultuous. He was wrapped up in his frustrations about his wife and her newly revealed cancer; haunted by the phone voice of his previous student pleading for help; bouncing off a proverbial wall with Will's declaration that Abel Gideon is not the Ripper; at a loss as to who it might be instead.
I'm right here, seethes the darkness inside the psychiatrist. He performs his duty as confidante admirably. "Tell me Jack, what are you afraid of?"
Within a few hours of Jack's serene departure, he had scrounged Miriam's cell phone housing her epitaph, and found her severed arm in the hidden panel of his basement freezer, though he left it there for the moment.
Jack's tautness seemed to have transferred to Hannibal: he was ready to growl with anger. This Gideon person had the audacity to pretend he was the Ripper? Hannibal raged mutely as he dialed a disposable cell phone untraceably, held Miriam's up to it, played back her recorded, desperate last words.
Time to resurrect the one, true Ripper, and remind Jack and the rest of the FBI who was Michelangelo, and who was the unrefined dilettante.
He resketched the Wound Man that started this chain of events so many years ago, to calm himself, then burned the sketch in his kitchen sink.
Dr. Alana Bloom was Mesopotamia in the arid world of criminal investigation and psychological profiling, whereas Dr. Frederick Chilton was a landfill. Hannibal invited them both to dinner at his home to assess the impact his haunting phone call to Jack made, as well as the status of the faux Ripper investigation.
Still angry over the TattleCrime article written on Gideon by Freddie Lounds (he knew he'd regret not murdering the bottle redhead), Hannibal took it out on Chilton with his usual scalpel-like precision. He deduced accurately Chilton planted the thought in Gideon's head that he was the Ripper. Alana looked at him with some awe, and trepidation.
Chilton left early in a fluster, and the two let him go with the scraps of his pride. Hannibal took special delight in knowing he embarrassed Chilton professionally and socially in front of one of the few females in the field.
Now, he could show the fair brunette his garden in peace. Even as he plucked a baby arugula leaf to thoughtfully savor and handed another to Alana, he marveled at how the human male, even one of his education and intelligence, could still act territorial over prospective females. He viewed it as more principle than practice, however: a tip of his hat to the inner Neanderthal that lurked even deeper in his mind than the Ripper.
"God, my heartrate has gone down just looking at this garden," chuckled Alana, the picture of femininity. "You are quite fortunate, Doctor Lector."
He felts no compulsion to correct her usage of his title, not like with Maryann. His gardener was a tan Gaia: a fertile Mother Earth to Alana's cool and feminine Artemis.
It came to his attention, as he walked Alana to her car, that he would never have shown Chilton his garden, so carefully tended by Maryann's hands. The sanctity of the space was not violated by Alana, another female. Chilton would have sullied it with his ignorant, unappreciative presence: with the imprints of his shiny shoes in the dirt.
Hannibal had had enough of what is his being sullied.
It was not good enough. Though Will and the team knew Gideon is not the real Ripper, Hannibal decided to update his persona with an elevation, a one-up sure to keep them spinning for another several years.
In the dead of night, he awakened Jack (who is undoubtedly sleeping next to his cancerous wife, their bond renewed) again with the long-dead Miriam's recording. This time, he placed the call from an old observatory, and left Miriam's cell clutched in her severed hand.
He spared no pity for her, even latently. The stupid girl had been chasing him, and the impression had been like a dikdik chasing a leopard. Hannibal had rectified the natural order with a twist of his hands.
After he arranged the scene, Hannibal sat back on his heels for a moment, a smile lifting his lips. This has been quite fun, jerking Jack's chain and bringing a murder to full circle, symbolic close. By connecting the Ripper completely with Miriam's disappearance, he incited the full degree of horror and awe he sought. One noose, years in the making, finally drew taut.
The hand was actually the same one that held the phone to her ear, some years ago. The symmetry cheered Hannibal's beast.
But he wasn't done: not by a long shot. The Ripper needed a facelift, a modernization. The question now was merely how and when.
Maryann had no clients to tend for two days, which was both boon and curse. It gave her time to think about Hannibal's visit, which wasn't good in this instance. She spent the days obsessively cleaning the garden up and scrubbing down her little house.
Every garden bed, from the Shakespearian to the Moon Garden (her skin prickled uncomfortably) was weeded, remulched, deadheaded, and pruned back.
The paths were weedy, with sprawls of crabgrass splaying through the gravel, and she judiciously killed them with vinegar from a backpack sprayer.
Sunup to sundown, for two days, she vented every nervous emotion into the ground, sweated out all her anxieties. "He's going to come here," she steeled herself. "He will see all of this. He will see you."
But she was angry, too, though Hannibal did not deserve it. Okay, maybe he did. Why did he have to invade her small slice of the world? Was his own not big enough? On some level, she reveled in the attention of a man, even so platonically presented (and subconsciously implied as more). But why was it at the cost of her secret phobia?
"Get over it, already," she said softly into the petals of a dahlia, clearing her mind with the scent. "One traumatic event does not a trend make. Put it away."
And so she did. Heeding her own advice, she came to monumental grips with the fact that Doctor Hannibal Lector, with his model's cheekbones, deliciously suited frame, and Nordic accent was going to invade her realms.
"Lovely," echoed the dream voice in her head, the roll of L's and flick of the V. It made her heart flutter a little each time.
It made her want to suck his tongue, to see if she could taste the inflections, the syntax.
"Stop it!" she demanded of her libido as she mowed the grass. "He's coming for business." A hot cup of chasteberry tea did little to help her.
The day of Hannibal's afternoon visit, with every blade and leaf and pebble on her property in place, Maryann turned her attention inward. She soaked in a tub of herbs and water just shy of scalding. After sanding down her feet, she returned to the tub for a thorough sugar scrub that left her skin glowing and smooth.
She took a razor to everything that needed it, and then some. "Getting ahead of myself, I think," she muttered. "Put the razor down, Maryann."
Dripping nude before her closet, Maryann tried to decide what would be the ideal attire. What article of clothing subtly imsisted 'I am receptive'? What manner of dress assuredly showed the potential she felt growing?
"Not work clothes," she chastised the hangers, sliding them aside. "Dress? Pfft, one of my four dresses?" The idea appealed, but the quandary was her distinct lack of anything really appropriate. "Too much." The Infinity Dress that had been her bridesmaids dress in college was far too formal. She was going to show him around the greenhouse, for God's sake. "Not enough." The coral maxi dress wasn't suitable for tromping through gardens. She'd worn it all of once; it wasn't really her color.
Her phone rang on the bed, and after a moment's hesitation, Maryann answered it. "Hello?" she hoped she didn't sound naked.
"Good afternoon, Maryann." Good Lord, the things that voice did to her... "It's Hannibal. Are we still on for tonight?"
The gardener swallowed, sitting on the bed. "Yes, yes we are. Looking forward to showing you around."
"I am excited for the chance to see your world," he replied. "I will see you in a few hours, then."
"A few hours," she agreed, smiling as though he were in front of her.
"Sudie," he said, and hung up.
Maryann sincerely hoped the naughtiness of chatting in the buff did not render in her voice. As she chucked the phone back to the coverlet, a slip of dove grey in the back of the closet caught her eye.
"Oh, yeah!" she exclaimed, extracting the dress with renewed discovery. A querying sashay before a mirror later, and she was convinced. "Couldn't ask for better," she declared.
Flipping her hair over to towel dry, Maryann resurfaced to find the cats had snuck into the room on silk paws. "Oh, no you don't," she scolded without venom, plucking the dress to safety. "Am I overreacting, guys? Hannibal might just want to keep things professional, or friendly. Am I wanting something that's not in the stars?" Maryann grunted in beration and pounded her fist against the doorframe singularly. "Dammit, Doctor Lector. Not Hannibal."
That would mean his single-minded battle to see me outside my employment duties meant nothing to him. Which my gut tells me isn't true.
In retrospect, the man had seemingly gone into their phone conversation with a Plan A and a Plan B. Since she'd refused to come to him, he would come to her. Flattering. Flattering and flustering.
"Why else would he be so dead-set on meeting me like this?" she asked the mirror, pulling the dress over her head. Critically eying the outcome of her choice, the gardener murmured. "Well, I'll know more in a few hours. One way, or another."
