Clarice Starling finds herself somewhere she never expected to be again. Down in the dark where you give it or you don't. At first, everything is dark and she does not understand. She can see nothing at all, an open-air blindfold. But she can smell the mustiness and she can hear the screams, and suddenly she knows where she is. After all these years, she is back in Buffalo Bill's basement, playing his desperate, deadly game.
She can hear the scrape of his shoes, but can see nothing. The little .38 they gave her is held out before her, her eyes wide, her pulse pounding. Catherine's screams echo in her ears, throwing her off and making it hard to track the bastard.
All the same, she is the Clarice Starling of old, young and strong and deadly serious. He may shoot her but she will die fighting every step of the way. In the velvety darkness, she hears him cock his revolver behind her snick snick, and she wheels, arms and head and body all turning like a turret, finger tightening on the trigger (smoothly, dammit, Starling, Brigham reminds her, don't pull that trigger, squeeze it,), and then there are two muzzle flashes a few feet in front of her, blindingly bright in the darkness. Cordite hits her nostrils and her ears ring from the reports. Glass shatters and sunlight pours in, and just as she did before she flinches. The gun is still out, but she shields her eyes with a bicep like a movie vampire struck by sunlight.
She looks over her outstretched arms, expecting to see the dying form of Jame Gumb before her, the stalks of his night-vision goggles making him resemble the insects he sought to emulate. But he is not there. In front of her there is simply nothing.
She runs and glances down into the pit, and in the faint light that penetrates its depths, eyes reflect redly up at her, as if the pit contains a demon. She stares down into it and shakes her head, puzzled.
There is a winch hooked up nearby, and Clarice lowers it into the pit, one hand on the winch's release handle and the other firmly on her gun. Her ears strain for the sound of her opponent, but there is nothing.
"I got it," comes a voice from the pit, and Clarice begins to crank it up. It goes easily, far more easily than she remembers. In short order, a hand places itself on the top of the pit and the figure inside scrambles out. Clarice blinks her eyes.
It is not Catherine Baker Martin in the pit, but Susana. She wears the same ragged jumpsuit and looks bedraggled the same way Catherine did, but it is her daughter. Clarice stares blankly at her, not understanding. Buffalo Bill had most of a foot and probably sixty pounds on Susana; the girl is small-framed and petite the way Clarice is.
What the hell was he gonna make out of her, a sock? Clarice thinks incredulously.
"Are you all right?" she asks. Susana tilts her head and stares at her bloodlessly. Then she shakes her head.
"Are you hurt? Where?" Clarice asks, searching her for visible signs of injury. None are present, just as there were none before. "Did he hurt you?" she repeats.
"He didn't put me in the pit," Susana answers enigmatically. "You did."
Incomprehension fills her. What is Susana talking about? "What?" she asks dazedly.
"He didn't put me in the pit," Susana repeats, and looks at her with no gratitude. "You did."
Clarice swallows nervously. Well, there is simply something wrong here. The girl is hysterical, or deluded, or something. This can be dealt with later. For now, she knows what she will do. Get the victim outside, get to a neighbor's, and have the neighbors call the police. Whether she will return to the battleground or wait for the calvary to arrive with heavy machine guns is not important right now. The victims must be saved.
She turns to run to the basement stairs, pushing her daughter ahead of her. What she sees makes her stop dead. Barring the way is a set of stout iron bars. In looking at them she can tell they are firmly locked shut.
Clarice wheels to look behind her, and the world wheels and spins with her. She is no longer in Buffalo Bill's basement; she is in a basement hallway she has been in before. A chair awaits her at the end of the corridor, and in the dim fluorescent light she can see reflections from a Plexiglas wall.
A wave of horror hits her and makes her shiver, like being sucked under a cold tide. She takes a sudden deep breath. This isn't right. Susana does not belong here, and neither does she. And she knows whom her audience is with.
She doesn't quite understand why she walks down the hall, but one reason is largely apparent. To be honest, she has nowhere else to go. Her feet carry her down to Dr. Lecter's basement cell against her volition, as if he can control them even despite his confinement and constraints.
And he is there, standing in his cell, but even so this is not right. Dr. Lecter stands there and observes her as coolly as he did all those years ago, but this is the wrong Dr. Lecter. He is older, dressed in a beautifully cut suit tailored to his slim frame. In one hand he holds an ebony cane with a gold head. She remembers that: she gave it to him for his birthday once.
No, not even that was right. The alternate personality he constructed gave him that. She had not.
"Hello, Clarice," Dr. Lecter says. "Come to make amends?"
Clarice blinks. "What are you talking about?" she says.
Dr. Lecter chuckles. "Why, to come back to me," he says. "So that we can be a family again, just as we once were."
Clarice's lips twist. "You...you brainwashed me," she seethes. The knowledge that Dr. Lecter cracked her like an egg has long been a sore point for Clarice Starling. She had spent her life fighting for the lambs; she had never meant to become his plaything.
Dr. Lecter chuckles and shakes his head. "Did I?" he asks. He steps forward, and the world whirls and shimmers again. His clothing ripples and changes, shifting from a blue jumpsuit to a white T-shirt and pants. His cell changes, as well; now there are the iron bars and sawhorses with flashing lights separating them, and the room is large and airy. Susana is still beside her, only now dressed in a similar suit to what she wore then. She is one of Chilton's and Krendler's helpers, the nameless agents helping drag her away from the modular cell they had set up for Dr. Lecter in the courthouse. Clarice turns and breaks away.
"Oh, and Clarice? Your case file," Dr. Lecter says, but what he holds out is not the heavily marked-up folder that they had given him on Buffalo Bill. She pulls away from her tormentors and runs forwards to the boundary marked by the sawhorses. But what is in Dr. Lecter's hand is not the case file. Instead he hands her a set of couture magazines.
These magazines are not the ones she used to buy occasionally in Buenos Aires. Those were a pleasant hobby, nothing more. She used to show them to Susana, who used to cut them out and make paper dolls out of them. At the time she'd considered it harmless fun, a mother-daughter activity. They'd compared their opinions of the outfits. Once she had awakened, she had despised the activity. What a terrible mother, rotting her child's brain with all that froufrou.
No, these magazines that Dr. Lecter hands her are older than Susana. They were the magazines she bought and hid in her underwear drawer in her duplex in Virginia, the ones that had seemed such a delicious perversion to her. How had he gotten them?
She takes them, and then they are on her again, dragging her to the door. At the door, the courthouse shifts and she is suddenly in the midst of a bunch of suited men, walking calmly into a Quantico meeting room. Susana is there, sitting on the right in a sober blue suit. There is a card clipped to her lapel that Clarice connects with the DOJ lackeys. The door closes. Krendler, Sneed, all those wolves and jackals all gathering to kick her while she was down, but it is Susana who stands up, holding the magazine in her hands.
"Agent Starling, isn't it true that you placed this ad?" she demands, waving a twenty-five-year-old copy of Vogue.
Clarice shakes her head and looks over at Sneed. There he is, the piece of crap, with his F-Bird grinding away in his pocket and his stupid tiepin microphone that fooled no one with an ounce of brains. Then she looks back at her daughter. Why is Susana now her inquisitor?
"I didn't do it," she says, and shakes her head. "I never saw it before."
"Aren't these yours?" Susana queries again. "How do you account for the fact that these are the same magazines you used to show me when I was a little girl?"
Clarice bolts upright in her chair, driven by the need to defend herself as well as sheer bafflement. Time and space and the entire goddam planet seem to have gone crazy. She turns to see Dr. Hannibal Lecter sitting next to Sneed, dressed in a simple gray suit.
"Obviously she is lying," Dr. Lecter agrees. "A pleasant lie is worse than the unpleasant truth."
"It's still a lie," Susana says, and suddenly draws a pistol from under her suit jacket. Clarice jumps.
"Susana, what the hell are you doing? I'm your mother--," Clarice gasps, but the gun is swinging to bear on her. Clarice looks at the men here to sit in judgment on her: are they going to let her be executed here and now?
A great gout of flame comes from the barrel of the .45, and there is a loud boom she connects with the old .45, and Clarice --
wakes up sitting up in bed, her comforter a big soft lump in her arms, her body sheened with cold sweat. Her breath wheezes in her lungs. But she is whole and unmarked, and this is not some mythical FBI conference room but her own bedroom. Her daughter may be missing, but she is not planning to shoot her dead.
As her pulse begins to settle, she stares about her nice, clean, safe little upper-middle-class bedroom. Glowing green numbers tell her it is 2:00 AM. She gets up and pads into her bathroom. The light seems bright and she flinches. Her own reflection in the mirror is somewhat wan and haggard, but that is only to be expected given the circumstances.
The urge to go look in Susana's room is strong, but she knows perfectly well that Susana is not there. She also knows perfectly well that she has managed to freeze most of her emotions in order to work on the disappearance as a case, and entering Susana's room will threaten the delicate balance.
The dream seems vivid to Clarice, and she shakes her head for a moment. Seeing Susana in Bill's pit, now that was disturbing. The rest....well hell, she's been under stress. It's amazing what her mind will come up with. All it means is that she has to find her daughter. That's all it can mean...can't it?
...
The only sound in the bedroom is the quiet tick of a clock. He can hear his own breathing, if he pauses to concentrate on it. Susana's is deep and regular, reflecting her deep sleep. He stands still, watching her sleeping form. Dr. Lecter needs to keep exceptionally quiet so that she does not stir. Like him – and like her mother – she is a light sleeper.
He suspects she would be troubled if she awoke to find him watching her. That does not bother him; he can stay very still when he wants to, as still as he was when embraced by the straitjacket and hand truck back in the asylum. All he wants to do is watch. When Susana was a baby, he would occasionally do just this: stand there and watch her sleep. He had spent hours doing it, sometimes until it was very late.
But now maintaining quiet is important; she will be perturbed if she awakes and he is there. He takes a few moments to observe her face. With her eyes closed, her resemblance to Clarice is strong. Stronger, he thinks, than her similarities to him. Her hand displays little scarring, and he is pleased. Her eyes are the strongest biological tie between them.
He watches her shoulders rise and fall as she sleeps, and for a moment he is reminded of Clarice in the bed ath the house on the Chesapeake. In these past eleven years she has grown up far too fast for Dr. Lecter's liking. He remembers her as a little girl, the five-year-old girl-child she was when Clarice took her away from him. Lying in the bed is a young woman.
In the bedroom there is a mirror, and despite the low light in the room he can make out his own reflection. His eyes reflect the poor light redly. Dr. Lecter wears the same white shirt and jacket that he wore today shopping in Asunción. The dark jacket against white shirt reminds him of a vampire standing over the maiden's bed, and he smiles coolly at his reflection. Calmly his lips shape the word Nosferatu, but there is neither voice nor air behind them.
Purchases fill the room around them: a new television, a DVD player, a laptop, and a new stereo. She had been excited and grateful. He supposes Clarice had refused to spoil her as gleefully as he had when she was a child. Even then, after her therapy, she had objected, claiming that Susana would never learn the value of a dollar if she was given everything. Dr. Lecter did not understand then, and he does not quite understand now. He had always liked very much to shop, and he had denied Susana no more than he had ever denied himself.
Tomorrow the cable company will come and wire Susana's room for cable and Internet. Dr. Lecter has learned a fair amount about the Internet via the chat rooms and websites of the hacker community. There are those who would be surprised at that, but in the hacker community Dr. Lecter has found several things he liked very much.
He has found people of intelligence and curiousity, seeking interesting problems to solve and opportunities to build their skills. It is true that their personal habits and diet are rather far from his own fastidiousness and gourmet tastes, but still, kindred minds are a rarity. He has also found ways to employ the Internet to accomplish his own goals, and along the way he has been able to slake his own curiousity. Now, he understands a great deal about TCP/IP, the lingua franca of the Internet, and how he can use it. In some ways, computer programming has been an entire new world to him. Dr .Lecter has no interest in creating worms or viruses solely to be destructive – such things tend to draw the interest of law enforcement. However, he does appreciate the knowledge of how to appear to come from one place while actually being in another.
Should Clarice attempt to use his online peregrinations to track him, she will find a difficult time of it. He has learned how to cover his tracks and she will not have an easy time of it. But she will be on the case, he has no doubt of that.
As he watches his daughter sleep, he considers.
The sensible thing to do would be to start more intensive therapy right away. In his cabinets are plenty of drugs. Hypnotic drugs, euphoric drugs, light soporifics. He has extensive notes that he took while speaking to his daughter online, and in carefully studying her behavior he has a fairly good idea what makes her tick. In some ways, she has become more common than he would like. Her tastes in clothing are not his own; she turned up her nose at dresses both in Buenos Aires and today in Asunción. Dr. Lecter prefers more elegant clothing.
Her tastes in music are enough to make a grown man cry; no classical or philharmonic interests there. Electric guitars played by long-haired men in tight pants; it is plebeian and revolting to the doctor's tender ears. Still, such thngs can be changed with time and care.
He is well aware of what more intensive therapy will require. Drugs and hypnosis will help her along the path to acceptance, smoothing the way and making it easier for her. He is determined that she undergo as little emotional trauma as possible. Even so, the bond between mother and daughter will need to be frayed, if not sundered entirely. Fortunately, she is sixteen, and at that age fighting with her mother is to be expected. It serves his purposes well.
But there is part of him that does not want to go to more extreme measures just yet. Today was a great deal of fun. It reminds him of when she was young; if he discovered she wanted something he would usually give it to her, delighting in the thought of seeing her happy. Perhaps a few more days, then he will start in with psychotherapy and hypnosis and an appropriate drug regimen.
He realizes that he spoiled her then and does so now. Why is another matter, one which speaks deeper to him. He remembers Mischa in the garden, a chubby two-year-old who was unafraid of him and put her pink hands on his face, like the kiss of small starfish. Six decades later, Susana did the same. Dr. Lecter blinks twice and summons the image of Susana at age two, toddling into the living room where he read. She had beamed to see him and held up her arms to be held. Once installed on his lap she had patted his face with a gleeful smile and complete lack of awareness that anyone had ever done this before her, completing the circle effortlessly. She had maroon eyes like his own instead of blue, but other than that, much the same. Her babyish chortle had been high-pitched and pleased and very much like Mischa's. Then he had needed no drugs or hypnosis; she had been daddy's girl from her birth and would have so remained, had Clarice not awoken and taken her away from him.
It is his hope, now, that the therapy will be short-term, and that he can quickly recover the small girl who loved him with all her heart and soul. If he can awaken the small girl within the young woman, then the unpleasant parts will be very short-term and the results very satisfactory.
Even now, he wants to take a bit to observe the young woman she has become. Once therapy starts, she will become something else, and Dr .Lecter is not quite so eager to transform her as he once did her mother. The though of Clarice Starling is not without pain, even eleven years after she left him.
Susana stirs, and the doctor's reverie is frozen for a moment. He stares down at her silently and is satisfied when she does not move again. Calmly he pads from the room, silent in his socks, and turns to watch her for just a moment more from the hallway.
A few more days. Then he will start therapy. But only after a few more days.