Labyrinth of the Burning Heart

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By Jstarz9237 and Aine Deande

Chapter 10

The Dark Island

One need not be a Chamber--to be Haunted--
One need not be a House--
The Brain has Corridors--surpassing--
Material Place--

--Emily Dickinson (poem #670)

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Sunday, August 26, 2001


Cold water was poured into the saucepan almost carelessly and the hand withdrew quickly, knowing that the marriage between oil and water would once again be rejected. And indeed, the drops of oil danced about like furious imps and sizzled in their hurry to jump out of the pan. Cahlin gave the smoking saucepan the merest of glances, concentrating all her attention on the yellow bell pepper that was rapidly degenerating into slices under her sharp knife. A flick of her wrist and all the slices were tossed into the saucepan. Cahlin hovered about the range like a fairy, adding chopped onions, dashes of salt and pepper, and various other spices in small increments.

If there was one thing that Clarice could not complain about during her captivity, it was the food. Cahlin had observed that, barring the pale face caused by lack of sunlight, Clarice had a much healthier tone in her skin and her face was fleshing out nicely. Too many meals of pizza and liquor, Cahlin chided silently.

As the water level in the saucepan went down, Cahlin shifted through her supply of plates, finally emerging from the cabinet with a large silver platter in her hands. The timer on the oven chimed. Putting on protective gloves, Cahlin slid a pan out of the oven, breathing in the scent of roasted meat, seasoned and cooked to perfection. She had, after all, learned from the best.

Quickly the two chops of meat were placed on the silver platter along with the sizzling bell peppers. Cahlin then walked over to a nearby drawer and removed a small object. After bending and testing its strength, she slid it firmly into a piece of meat and covered the wound and the rest of the meat with a dark, thick sauce. As a final thought, Cahlin turned to the table in the center of the kitchen where a tall vase stood, overflowing with flowers. With scissors she clipped a tiny white cluster of three flowers, ignoring the petals that fluttered to the table at this intrusion. She set the flowers carefully on the side of the platter, safe from the juices of the meat and vegetables. A feast fit for Nero. The flowers looked so small and forlorn, belying their significance.

In the Victorian language of flowers, the white chrysanthemum is the symbol for truth.

Cahlin turned back to the bouquet on the kitchen, breathing in the varied scents. A faint smile appeared on her face as memories, buried in gritty catacombs like so many cobwebs, shook off their dust and demanded attention.

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She had never known the name of the town where she had grown up. The one wooden sign that bore the name of the place had long since faded under the everlasting sun, leaving only the last four letters visible: --ergo. It must have been fate's idea of a sick cultural joke. Life moved with the sluggishness of molasses, ten years stale within its tinted glass jar. Rachel distinctly remembered the "mud days" of summer where the dirt roads dried up so much that the sky would dump brown rain to replenish the filth.

Ergo, as the town came to be called in her mind, was located twenty miles from the Maryland border and five miles from Harpers Ferry, where John Brown had staged his disastrous raid that would eventually foment the Civil War. She lived in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, a tiny crescent-shaped county attached to the main state by a thread and then tossed out of mind like an annoying hangnail.

The Cahlin family lived on the east end of the main road, and the boundary between their backyard and the woods beyond was lost among rolling green hills. The house was two stories tall with a perfectly square foundation and a woodshed roughly attached to the building as an afterthought. The mailbox in their yard was carved into the shape of a Holstein cow and was painted in faded black and white. The box stood half a foot higher than the neighboring mailboxes and leaned far enough into the road to annoy the mailman immensely. For this reason and for others, neighbors generally disliked the Cahlins.

Rachel's father had perished a month after Margie was born when he had driven their only car off the road in a drunken stupor and into an oak tree. Both their father and the car were determined to be beyond repair. Their mother dealt with their new-found poverty by pretending it did not exist. She never left the house without wearing every piece of jewelry she owned, bobbing her head and curtsying at imaginary admirers. Rachel and Margie both grew talented at inventing reasons to avoid her.

The majority of both their childhoods were spent among the hills between their house and the woods. The games they played upon the green sward were enough to convince the neighbors that the entire Cahlin family was a lost cause.

"Turn the boat, men, turn it!" screamed Rachel, swaying upon her grassy deck and tugging at her bonds woven from tender young saplings. "Can't you hear their song? It's beautiful…" Her face contorted with mock agony. Sailor Margie gamely ignored her, paddling onward with her birch oar. Her ears were stuffed full of candle wax scavenged from the dinner table last night. With barely a twinkle in her eye, Rachel would switch stories, yodeling a battle cry to the sky as Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons. Rarely, Margie would steer the game into her own scenarios, her favorite scene involving Frodo Baggins suffering from the bite of a Mordor blade.

But it was Rachel who had found the battered volume of Greek mythology in the attic. Rachel who read and reread the stories every night, blocking out the sound of her mother singing Charlie Daniels Band at the top of her lungs. By the time that the limp pages had disintegrated from all the attention, Rachel was hungry for more. She barricaded herself inside the town's tiny library for days on end, with Margie bringing her a sack lunch at mealtimes. When Rachel returned home, the rolling hills behind their house became the treacherous crags of Mt. Olympus, the snowy wastelands of Siberia, or the aquatic grandeur of Atlantis. Margie would listen with the eagerness of a Confucian scholar as Rachel regaled her with tales of alien lands.

Rachel did not care for worldly tales. She could not bear to read anything that did not send her millions of miles away from Ergo. She had once read the first few chapters of Grapes of Wrath and then spent the next month teaching herself Latin in the attempt to drown her disgust. And she didn't stop there. Rachel developed a fascination with the Classical and Romance languages and was able to speak Latin, Greek, French, and Italian semi-fluently by the time she turned fourteen. The word "prodigy" was never spoken around the sisters, even when Rachel and Margie held their covert conversations that shifted from English to Italian to Greek. Instead, the neighbors preferred to whisper of demons and speaking in tongues.

Being ostracized by all residents of Ergo bothered them only at Christmas, the only time they ever went to church. The preacher would rage about the damnation of witches and heretics, all the while stealing sidelong glances at the Cahlin sisters. Then they would escape out among the Christmas snowfall, perhaps heading home to tend to Margie's roses. She had cultivated a bed of the blood-red flowers yearly since Rachel had read her The Little Prince. The roses occupied a permanent place upon the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Margie had recently saved up enough money to buy several years' supply of hybrid tea rose seeds, and when they bloomed, there was nothing in all of West Virginia that could compare to the sight. Their mother never seemed to notice them. Her blank eyes would stare out the window while she washed dishes, even when the sunbeams shone through the translucent rose petals and scattered shadows of red upon her face.

When Rachel was twelve, by process of dirty jokes, whispered secrets, and nasty songs, she learned of sex and had spent nearly an hour relating the information to her sister. It might have been around this time that the sisters began to grow apart.

Two years later, they left Ergo for the first time, riding the five miles to Harpers Ferry in the back of a hay truck. Wandering into the noisiest and liveliest building in town, they unwittingly descended into the Underworld. Margie shrank away from the blinking strobe lights and free-flowing alcohol, but Rachel was hypnotized… the gyrating bodies and pulsating music surrounded her and embraced her like a mother. Margie was reminded of the young Clytia with her first glimpse of Helios, the sun god. The nymph had been hopelessly smitten by the sight and was transformed into a sunflower, destined to spend the rest of her days following the sun's slow and steady journey across the sky.

When a gangly teenager asked them for a dance, shouting to make himself heard above the music, Rachel grasped his hands and followed him into the seething mass of bodies with a laugh of someone happily surrendering to madness.

For days afterwards, Margie watched every evening as the same car pulled up to their house. The driver would embrace her sister before taking her away and returning her well after midnight. After a year, the car changed. Then it changed every month, then every week. In Ergo, the whispers and gossip grew. Their mother retreated ever further into her own world. Margie turned all her attention to her roses, choosing to leave her sister to her own devices and ignoring her nagging feelings of dread. This year's bed of roses wilted and grew limp for several weeks before blooming more fully than ever before, as if they suspected they would never have the chance to flourish again.

When Michael Bermuda first appeared in Ergo, he appeared suddenly, as if he had fallen from the heavens. Rachel had been in the kitchen, washing dishes and staring through the streaked glass into the front yard, a little bit of her mother's faraway look visible on her face. One moment the view of the yard consisted of brown grass and a single black raven pecking for scraps of food by the curb. The next moment the raven had let loose a most unpleasant screech and flapped off into the sky and Michael Bermuda was standing by the mailbox, shading his eyes against the bleak winter sun.

The thing that struck Rachel first about his appearance was his posture. Leaning back slightly at his hips and supported unnecessarily by a black cane, he seemed to lead himself simultaneously with his groin and his head. He was hunched over slightly, as if he expected the world to stoop to accommodate him.

Even from far away, Rachel could see that his clothes were expertly cut and tailored; he was wearing black shoes and a tan business suit that blended well with the withered grass. He was looking up and down the street now, finished with his examination of their mailbox. A flying saucer parked in their front yard might have looked less out of place than him. From the direction of Harper's Ferry, the faint toll of a church bell could be heard on the breeze.

The front door sighed lazily as Rachel walked down her disused driveway toward him. Her hands were wet and slightly soapy. Michael Bermuda lifted his head to meet Rachel's golden eyes. His face was not unpleasant to look at; his features were comprised of well-tanned skin and sharp angles that made him look like a bird of prey. He could have been handsome were it not for his eyes. Brutal, piercing green that caused those he looked upon to smolder rather than blaze. Rachel's first impression was that his eyes were flashy, cheap, and shallow. Over the following weeks, however, she came to realize that almost everything about Michael was merely a front. Beneath the paper-thin sparkle of his green eyes was a dull opacity like polished aventurine that hid his soul with a shroud more impenetrable than death.

Introductions were brief. He spoke with a soft, perfectly-clipped tone with a hint of New Jersey accent. He was 28 years old and his father's funeral was currently tolling the church bells in Harper's Ferry. Michael was now the sole owner of their pharmaceutical company based in Baltimore. Rachel asked few questions, a spark of ravenous hunger apparent in her eyes.

"The pallbearers were boring me. Each one felt the need to give their own unique opinion of how great a man my father was." He yawned. "Did you know that it is possible to count the number of hairs in someone's beard?"

"Did you love him?"

"My father? What does it matter, he's pushing up daisies now. At least he should be, if they've stopped yapping long enough to put him in the ground."

Rachel should have been offended by his self-absorption, but she found it impossible. There would be many more times when Rachel would choose to blind herself with her emotions. The rest of their conversation faded out of memory. But she remembered when he had turned on her, grasping her hands in both of his and forcing her eyes to stare into his. They knew each other then; they saw their past and possible futures. They saw the iron cages built around both their souls; their detachment from their places in society. Fear, love, lust, hate. They would come to know all of those, in the following years, and come to depend on them for their own impossible existence. In the realm of psychology, the term "symbiosis" does not carry the meaning of "living together". Instead, it defines a mutual parasitism, both parties unable to live without the agony of the other.

Margie watched the interaction in the front yard from her window. She could hear no dialogue, but she didn't need to in order to figure out what was happening. What was happening yet again. But this time... this time as the man took her sister's arm in his and led her down the road, she felt as though something large were pulsating within her mind, intent on dashing through the walls of her skull. She felt like shrieking with madness.

During the weeks that followed as Michael courted her sister, Margie could not prevent the way her skin prickled every time he drew near. Rachel's room began filling with exotic gifts of love. Quills made from peacock feathers. Jade pendants depicting every animal of the Chinese zodiac. Rain sticks filled with polished grains of rice. And always the dresses, each one more exquisite than the one before. After barely a month, the ring was presented. A surprisingly lightweight platinum band supporting a small diamond that betrayed its grandeur whenever the light hit it, as it would then glow with the fire of a thousand suns.

Her sister and mother managed to make the house shake to its foundations that day. Margie had been forced to sit in the living room with the most unwelcome guest as mother and daughter screamed at each other for nearly an hour, storming from one room to another. Margie kept track of their progress by watching the pattern of dust raining down from the trembling ceilings.

"How dare you? How dare you do this without breathing a word of it to me? And now you expect me to welcome him into the family!"

"I'm eighteen, mum, I can do whatever the hell I want--"

"You watch your mouth, young lady!"

Margie had observed Michael's face as they listened to Rachel and her mother rage. His face had never changed from the expression of amused confidence he had worn when he had strolled into their house that day, dressed to attend a presidential banquet. For once, their mother wasn't being a fool, Margie thought. She could feel the aura surrounding Michael as well as Margie could.

Rachel fairly skipped downstairs a few minutes later, a light suitcase in her hands. Michael's gifts had been packed and carted off the day before, as Rachel had expected this unpleasantness to happen. She plopped the suitcase into Michael's hands, laughing as she turned toward Margie. "Well, that's it then. I'm finally free of that bitch." Her eyes blazed with something that Margie had never seen before. Margie looked at the strange face before her with something beyond sadness in her gaze. Then she turned and walked up the stairs without a word, intent on comforting her mother.

The sisters would not speak to each other again for five years.

And throughout all this, Michael Bermuda never stopped smiling.

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True to his nature, Michael lost no time booking them onto a cruise ship that propelled them across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Mediterranean. Thus began the most blissful period of Rachel's life. It lasted about a month; during which Rachel stared and stared at the foreign shores and listened to the hustle and bustle of passengers from every corner of the earth squabbling, laughing, enjoying the pleasant May breeze upon the deck and watching the world slip by. The month passed before they reached their destination on the island of Cyprus, not far off the coast of Greece.

Cyprus's landscape is one of infinite contrasts, from its fertile central plain to the cool vine-clad foothills; the majesty of the cedar valley in which wild indigenous moufflon roam; mile after mile of sandy shores with secluded beaches to seek out, and hundreds of villages to explore each with its own tradition and charm.

They were married with great pomp and circumstance in a large, airy church with a view of the rolling sea. As the incense burned and white doves fluttered among the rafters, Rachel looked off toward the shoreline and thought she could see Aphrodite, the goddess of love, rising from the foam and spray with the light of Olympus in her eyes.

They spent the rest of the day in a marketplace, making their way through the throngs of giggling children that reached up in awe to touch Rachel's white silk dress. She later impressed her husband by bargaining with a particularly stingy shopkeeper in flawless Greek. The old man finally smiled, showing two rows of perfect teeth. "Okay, the lady wins. Here." And he pressed a gold chain, light as spun sugar, into her hand.

Before retreating to their villa, Michael and Rachel decided to dine in the prestigious, world-renowned restaurant Efharisto. The name meant "Thank you" in Greek. Michael knew the proprietor and so a special table with a view of the ocean was ensured with no particular difficulties. Rachel took the opportunity to taste youvetsi: braised lamb in tomato sauce, herbs and white wine with pesto, topped with Feta cheese. Michael ordered mousakas – tender slices of baked eggplant and freshly ground lean lamb sauce, topped with a creamy sauce she could not identify and freshly grated cheese.

The villa that Michael had rented rose in two stories of terracotta walls, the complexion of the material reminding Rachel of wind-swept beaches. Inside, the walls were painted to look like the beach outside, and numerous windows opened to the darkened majesty of the sighing sea. Rachel had a hard time believing that they really stood inside an enclosed space. White French doors opened to a verandah with a pool set in the very middle.

The bedcurtains and sheets carried beige and earth-toned colors. On the dresser beside the bed, stood Retsina, a traditional Greek wine treated with pine-tree resin, and Rachel let out a gasp of delighted surprise upon seeing it. There was also a bottle of Boutari, the local Cyprus wine, and two ready glasses. Rachel was especially fascinated with this crimson-colored wine, which was made from xynomavro, a red wine grape discovered in the early 1970s and grown near Mount Olympus. It was a younger wine which could be rustic, but when aged it developed a delightful, rounded and fruity character and was surprisingly soft on the palate.

Rachel was so drunk upon the novelty of it all however that she barely remembered the exquisite taste of the wine. The smoldering embers that were both their eyes. The laughter and kisses turning into moans and the sound of ripping fabric. She sensed the heat inside her that grew and grew and then Michael's voice, vibrating against her chest but seemingly coming from miles away.

"Couldn't wait until marriage, could you?"

She would have answered if her mind had not been wrenched apart in that instant. They made the most violent love that night, again and again, until Rachel could barely breathe. Those hands moved over her body, touching, caressing, raping, tearing, clawing... A hand mashing her head down sideways as an inexorable weight savored its possession, shoving her face into the mattress.

"Don't look! You hear me? You do what I say and you don't look at me, you bitch!"

She choked upon the taste of the fibers in the mattress, shuddering under their weight.

"I'll teach you what you should have waited for. This...and this..."

The reek of expensive wine filled her nostrils. It was sheer madness and she could do nothing but watch and feel as nerves exploded in her brain. The next morning he kissed her senseless, crooning, "Did you know that I love you so much, baby? I do. I love you, I love you, I love you... "

She believed him. Oh, how she believed him then.

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The door creaked and opened, and Clarice turned her head to see what entity had come to visit her in her coerced exile. Not that she didn't know who it would be. . . And yet, every time she saw that halo of red curls and the face of the woman whose smile was but a mixture of honey and venom, her heart sank back into its black pit wherefrom it had just leapt with hope.

Cahlin entered with the silver platter in her hands. The golden chain about her neck gleamed in the faint lamplight. A question. "Did you sleep well?" No answer. Cahlin shrugged and placed the platter at a dresser by the bed. She lifted her hand to rub her reddened eyes still smudged with black ash.

"Your dinner."

Clarice blinked, looked at the meat at her side. It surely looked edible. Yet, somewhere in the back of her head, an alarm bell was ringing, loudly.

"What is it?" she asked bluntly, then flinched as she heard Cahlin's laugh, booming out of her chest like a wind orchestra.

"One does never ask, Clarice. . . it spoils the surprise." Again, that uncanny likeness to Dr Lecter's words. Clarice had long ago given up on trying to needle information from her captor: it was clear that whatever connection she had to Dr Lecter, how and why, was to remain information she would either willingly submit to Clarice's knowledge-hungry mind or kept a secret for the sake of splendid torture and banal amusement. Her sense of humor was also uncomfortably like the Doctor's.

Yet, something was again nagging at the back of her brain, along with the alarm sirens still wailing throughout. Meat. . . It could be anything, Starling, anything at all. What makes you think…?

"Is it lamb?" Again, the question seemed extracted from her mouth, reluctantly pried out of her. Had she no control over her own actions any longer? But her mind was dreary, still blurred by the drugs and numbed by her hunger. Still, she had to know.

"Lamb?" Cahlin tasted the word in her mouth, tasted liquid iron. "Lamb, hmmm…" She smiled, again causing Clarice's stomach to contract in that strange concoction of longing and dread, half memory to the past and half fear for the future, if there was one for her left. She waited on Cahlin's impending clarification.

"Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. What's it to you, Clarice? Afraid of some dead meat? Tsk, tsk… I very much doubt your daddy would have been proud of that."

Starling wanted to scream, wanted to jump up and dig her nails into the smiling face of the woman who was so impudently attacking the memory of her father. A woman seemingly not much older than herself. The handcuff kept her in place, but in her mind she was seething, boiling with black rage, ready to spit out an equally wounding remark…

Then stopped. She stopped thinking, and even her breath stilled in her throat for a moment. Slowly, she raised her head once more to the sight of her nemesis, her eyes clear of anger and filled only with a curious look of confusion.

"My father…" Clarice pondered her next words, then plunged right in front of her train of thought like only a deep-roller would. "What do you know about my father? And what makes you think I'd be afraid of that… of…" She stopped, deliberately now, and her eyes were once again ablaze with fire. "What is it you know about me."

It wasn't a question, and so Cahlin didn't respond to her statement as such. She simply cocked her head to the side, doing a not wholly awry impersonation of an innocuous child.

"What makes you think I know anything about you? Or rather…" Here, a corner of her mouth went up in a little smirk. "What makes you think I don't? Surely, little Starling, you realize how… futile… how pointless it would be for me to take a hostage and not have a clue as to whom I'm dealing with. There are ways in which one can obtain all the information you'd want about a person. Surely you as an FBI agent must know of these methods."

Starling conceded, unwilling to admit too much to this woman. If she were wrong about her suspicion and Cahlin did indeed not know of the episode with the lambs and all that came from it, she did not wish to incidentally reveal that information to her kidnapper after all.

And yet…

A voice in the back of her head, nagging.

Remember now… not two days ago… the needle, going into your flesh… the fresh longing in your body as you woke up hours later, numbly aware of something having happened to your body, in your mind, the time that you were out… remember… She is lying, she is holding back...

Remember Dr. Lecter, talking.

And then she knew.

"You drugged me," she stated, as sure of the fact now as she was of anything, as she was of herself. "You drugged me and then you questioned me about my life, about my father and possibly about Dr. Lecter." A beat, stretching. "You know about the lambs."

Silence. Then, Cahlin brought her hands together and applauded, shortly yet effectively.

"Bravo, Clarice. One step closer to your epiphany."

And her hand disappeared into her pocket to take out the fine syringe.

"Now… where were we?" she asked not five minutes later, with Clarice once again bound with a plethora of rope to the bed. She had not planned to drug her quite this soon, rather enjoying the look of utter horror on her captive's face as she realized the true contents of the meal she had prepared for her. She heard once more her words, pushed through clenched teeth:

"I will - not - eat that."

"Oh?" Cahlin had questioned. "I thought we had just determined how ridiculous the notion is of being terrified of mere food? Meat won't bite you, you know - nor should it scream all too loudly." But Clarice's face had acquired sort of a closed, stiff determination and she had refused to say more.

"Suit yourself." Cahlin had conceded for the time being, filling the syringe with straw-colored liquid. "Just so you know though, this will be the last meal you shall receive from me." She had paused effectively, then added: "Permanently."

"Either eat your incubus, or let the hunger eat away at you until there's nothing but skin left on your body. Which should provide easy flaying for me - " Here she had stopped to enjoy the shock creeping over Clarice's pale face. Ah. So easy to affect.

Yet once more, the iron backbone of Clarice Starling had been evident in every tremor of her next words. "Do with me as you must. However, I will not condescend to being some sort of guinea pig for you to play with. If you wish to prey on my fear, forget it. I refuse to be frightened by you or… that." She had nodded at her dinner. "I also refuse to change who I am merely for the benefit of entertaining you. I won't eat a bite of it, I'd rather die than…"

"Ah," here Cahlin had interrupted her, "But you will die, Clarice Starling. Don't you doubt that for a second. Indeed, I enjoy playing with you, as I enjoyed playing with all of my victims. It provides the necessary entertainment for what would otherwise be a normal butchery. But I was only trying to do you a favor."

"A favor?" It sounded like Clarice would rather choke on the word. "Nothing you do to me could ever be considered a favor…"

"You're a fool, Clarice," Cahlin had said with a lethal monotony in her tone. "You're a fool and a coward and you should be grateful I haven't killed you already... do not deem me an idiot. I am not Jame Gumb, I will not fail in bringing you down. My plans for my victims never fail to come to fruition, sooner rather than later of course. However…

"If you are so determined not to eat a bite of what I have so graciously prepared for you, that's fine with me. Nevertheless, you are being impudent, not to mention rude, to your hostess. The choice to eat is, of course, your own. But I stand with what I said earlier. You shall not receive another meal. Oh, not that I'd let you eat rotten meat…" She had waved away Clarice's horrified expression.

"That would be below my manners. But every meal from here on will consist of only lamb, lamb, lamb. I am doing you a favor, little, foolhardy Starling. Achilles knew that it was better to die a hero than live a coward. And I am ridding you of your demons… until all that remains is me. Me. I shan't tolerate any other fear to consume your soul, as you have succeeded in gaining my respect. Yes, little Starling…" She had repeated, in response to Clarice's snort of disbelief. "Respect. Hannibal himself said you were a warrior. Act like one."

And with that, she had injected the needle into Clarice's vein, ignoring as she always did her cries of protest and pain.

She sat now, on the edge of the bed Clarice was chained to, watching with malicious delight as the drugs overtook her system, worked its way into her head, clamping down with claws stronger than visible bonds, binding her within the horrors of her own mind. She was writhing on the bed now like a serpent would, thoroughly dead to the world.

It was time to acquire some more useful information from her, and Hannibal's, favorite plaything.

"Where were we, little Starling? Ah, yes…" She reminded herself and her companion, licking her lips ever swiftly with a movement of her tongue, expeditious like a snake's.

"I recall we were discussing your incubi the last time we chatted, no? Don't bother to gratify me with a response," she continued in her parody of a poised and courtly manner of speech, watching as Clarice's facial features contorted with old, ever painful memories.

"I do not wish to embark on your tedious recollections of your traumatized childhood just now. In fact, I have a more mundane matter to ask of you." She let her voice drop to a tantalizingly low whisper, barely perceptible by the ear.

"I want you to tell me how to contact Dr. Hannibal Lecter."

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Clarice Starling remembered this feeling all too well. It was a sensation of floating, of drifting with the current, flowing in still water. Being nothing, needing nothing, only enduring the stillness, the heavy air that bore no technical weight, that only served to immerse her deeper and deeper into nonexistence.

Flowing, flowing…

A question, asked outside of herself. She strained to comprehend the meaning, not knowing why she bothered, yet deciphering its meaning out of habit.

"Tell me… contact… Lecter."

Oh, does she want to know *that*? Clarice felt a sudden urge to giggle, glad as she was that she wouldn't have to release private knowledge about herself this time. She opened her mouth, or thought she did, yet no sound emerged from her lips…

She tried harder. Mumbling, now. "Aaa… aaa… new… newwww… Doter… 'ter…"

A sigh, of irritation perhaps? Straining again, this time the words are more distinct.

"How did you communicate with Dr. Lecter?"

Oh, but that's easy. I was trying to tell you before. Again, that strange impulse to relieve tension in her body with laughter. She wondered if what she were feeling was real or imagined, all she knew for sure was that it felt… out of place. She attempted once more to make herself discernible to her inquisitor, wanting nothing more than to appease this person, whose voice sounded so much like the Doctor's. . .

"Aaaad… newspapaah… A… A… Aaron…"

This wouldn't do, Cahlin rapidly realized. Apparently in her haste she had injected a little too much of the drug in Clarice's bloodstream. One syllable at a time would have to be the trick to obtain the facts she was after.

"What medium did you use to communicate through?"

She was fairly certain Dr. Lecter and Clarice had been in touch *somehow* over the past ten years. No matter what scenario she thought out, it seemed highly unlikely for Dr. Lecter to be the kind of person to pine away for a woman (Cahlin found her hand twitching at the very thought) if there had been no encouragement, no form of communication at all. She doubted *very* much Dr. Lecter would have come all the way back to the States, risking imprisonment all over again, and possibly the needle this time, had there not been.

"How did the two of you communicate? Telephone? Letters?"

This seemed to educe a more distinguishable reaction from Starling. Tongue clacking, she was able to say, "No. Phone. Letter… yes. He… me."

"Dr. Lecter wrote to you?" Cahlin prompted. Yes, that did seem like the way. It would have compromised eager Special Agent Starling's career had it been discovered that she were communicating with an escaped felon. And if that were so, the revelation of this would have been all over the news. Since Cahlin had been keeping close watch on all things Lecter-related since his escape, it seemed highly unlikely that sensational news would have slipped her attention. Another way then.

"How did you respond to these letters? You couldn't have done so out in the open, loyal as you were and are to the F.B.I…" She drew out the word like only Dr. Lecter had done before her, and Clarice shivered involuntarily. That had been the wrong approach, Cahlin knew instantly: her drugged opponent stayed determinedly silent.

Hit by a sudden flash of insight, she added: "What medium were you advised by Dr. Lecter to make use of for - possible - responses?"

Here, she had struck gold. Clarice's face lit up, glad she was able to give a straight answer this time, without offending either herself or Dr. Lecter. "News… paper. The… ads."

"You were told by Dr. Lecter to place an ad in the newspaper?" Despite herself, Cahlin allowed her feelings to take over for the moment as a surge of warm admiration for Dr. Lecter flooded her heart. Ever the brilliant one, Hannibal. Of course, the ads. The perfect solution to an otherwise compromising position for our mutual acquaintance. Yet…

"A codename was probably required. What codename was used?"

Again, a clear answer. Now Cahlin understood what she had meant before. "A…A… Aaron. A. A. Aaron. Top of page."

Ah. Naturally. "And what code was used to ensure the message was from you?"

Clarice was positively smiling now. "Hannah… my horse."

"Interesting," Cahlin dismissed the tedious information about her captive's old pet, and went straight to the point. "What newspapers, magazines?"

This took Clarice a while to answer, as though thinking cost her more effort than usual. Which was of course rather logical, since she was drugged to the hilt. Eventually, Cahlin had them written down on the notepad she'd kept nearby, along with the codenames.

Chicago Herald-Tribune. National Enquirer… China Mail. You sure thought of everything, didn't you Hannibal? Again, she couldn't suppress a small, genuine smile. Not that the dupe at her side, who was currently drooling on her dirty T-shirt, would notice, anyway.

"That will be all for today, Clarice." She stood up, but before she left the room decided to leave Clarice with a reminder of the past... something to occupy her time with as long as the drugs wouldn't wear out. Her voice turned back into Dr. Lecter's sibilant hiss.

"Clariiiiccccee…" She drew out the last syllable of the name, as she imagined Dr Lecter would have done. The effect was immediate: Clarice's body went slack under the bonds and she lay motionless, hanging on her next word, whatever that might be.

"Are the lambs still screaming, Clarice?"

And with this, she closed the door. But long before she had reached the end of the hallway, the screaming of Clarice Starling had begun to fill the air, charging it with a taste of age-old sadness and forever reflected failure.

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