Sorry it took me so long to put up this chappie. Been really busy. Exams, holidays, friends, etc. Many apologies. I am really sorry about the Italian (It is awful, I know…) – I'm only taking Spanish and have enough trouble with that. Had lots of advice from friends for this chappie: my friend Laurel, the Grand High Poohbah, and others. Thanks! Enjoy the chappie!
Clarice stood, on the stairs, watching sadly and longingly at the scene in front of her…the echoes of the yelling in her head…the grunts of the men…disgusting chaos and disorder. It all seemed like a whirlpool of memory…and she was helpless. They disappeared though a door out of the foyer, like a sick parade.
She tilted her head and sat down on the stairs, thinking. The helplessness was what bothered her most. Helplessness she hadn't felt for years, since she was a little girl.
Another flashback: but this was not from the events that took place in this house in Lithuania, unoccupied besides herself and the ghosts. This memory was not foreign or strange to her, yet it was no less disconcerting.
A ten-year-old Clarice shivering in the cold night air. She was freezing. She was a curious sight to behold. Her eyes were wide; she looked very frightened, running though the woods, trying not to stumble, and she was carrying a small lamb.
She had dressed in the dark and neglected to find a jacket or sweatshirt. She was so cold. Turn back now? No. Time takes no prisoners. She just wanted to run for miles to escape the scene that had just burned a special place amongst her memories. An ugly memory that would haunt her for a long time.
The sound stayed with her most, and for a while she had thought that the lamb she was carried had still been crying. Had it been? How long had it been screaming? How long had she been running? It was a rhetorical question.
She raced though the trees into the road. It was a country road, empty and quiet. She didn't know where she was going, but that didn't occur to her either.
The bright car lights blinded her momentarily. She stood there just like a deer in the headlights, lamb still screaming in her arms.
The broad-shouldered sheriff who was only handsome because carried the authority of the sheriff at his young age pulled over to the side of the road and looked concerned and suspicious at the same time. He looked fairly similar to the "good ole' boys" Mama used to have over for dinner a lot when she was a kid. The other police officers from her daddy's work.
"What're you doin' out here on a night like this, darlin'?" he asked her as he wrapped his jacket around her shaking form. The lamb screamed on. Could he not hear it?
She didn't respond, simply knelt with a confused and terrified look on her face, wondering why he could not hear it's very obvious screams. "You alright, miss?" he asked.
She thought she should run. Thought she must do something. But she couldn't move. Her legs felt like someone had run molten lava though her calves and the lamb by her side was furiously trying to scurry away. She was vaguely aware of the sheriff using his radio, receiving conformation that the little girl had been missing. That she'd run away from her warm bed to this road only a few miles away.
"S'ok, darlin, it's OK…" he muttered as he pulled her to her feet and put her and the lamb in the front seat of the patrol car, while he obviously didn't know what to do with the animal.
OK? NOTHING WAS OK. Wasn't that what her father had said before he went out that night and never come back? It was simple. No, not simple; laconic, but it was simply that.
She did not answer any of his questions, though she knew this was disrespectful, that her daddy would have been angry with her for not answering. She stared out the window. Right now she didn't care. Never had a drop of self pity flowed in her veins, but she couldn't help being mad at her father for leaving her here, without anybody.
Don't look; don't look, the shadows breathe…
Damned few SNO BALLS after that. Nobody would come home to her ever again.
"Now why on earth would you run away, darlin'? Gave your aunt and uncle quite a scare, you know."
The lamb cried until they reached the ranch, pulling up the dusty gravel road.
With the look of a condemned woman, she climbed out of the car, cradling the lamb in her arms. She was silent. He aunt and uncle were on the front porch. Her aunt ran out and grabbed her tightly, pulling her close, while her uncle spoke in furious tones to the sheriff.
After the sheriffs tail lights faded in the distance, her aunt took her upstairs and put her to bed. But Clarice did not sleep. Her aunt and uncle argued and yelled, and he announced that she would be sent to the Lutheran Orphanage in Bozeman. He was unaware that the ten year old he would drive to the orphanage the next morning, listened on the stairs.
Clarice heard a whine from the barn and went back to her room and observed though the window. Her uncle walked to the barn where they had tied up the lamb she had tried to save. She could not see it, but she heard the gun's long echoing BAM. And the screaming abruptly stopped.
A tear rolled down her cheek as she glanced up at the constellation Orion.
If she were climbing a mountain in this house, her emotions would be her avalanche. If she were swimming in the ocean, her personal feelings would be her whirlpool. Did she subconsciously see a similarity between herself and him?
I have windows.
Orion is above the horizon now…
She was surprised to find tears rolling down her cheeks. She swiped them away. Focus, girl.
But the thought would not completely escape her.
She takes a deep breath and followed the footsteps of those who had walked there decades ago out of the foyer and into a library or study.
The room was large and had been comfortably furnished as she could tell. Termites had chewed up most of it. Bookshelves lined the walls. High ceilings, of course. Could she expect less?
Little low ceiling life. Her brain mocked.
She noticed a round birdcage hanging in a corner of the room.
She observed the bookshelves. She almost smiled when she saw Marquis De Sade, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, Hume, Sartre, William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", Freud, among others. Seemed as though contextual intelligence was passed on in this family.
She noticed a door to the outside. She stepped out into the cold. Had this been where the deserters had taken the man, and two children? She noticed small gardening shed near the woods. She tromped out into the snow and approached it cautiously. It was very run down. The wood was rotted a covered in snow, making it look a bit like Atlas holding up the world.
She froze. An awful feeling slithered into her gut.
She stared at the shed and another flash came.
Lecter and Lecter being pushed to the shed. The father bleeding something awful, being dragged. Clarice realized that the deserter the father had killed must have been close to the man dragging the father. Revenge glistened in his dark eyes.
Some flakes of snow were falling, but it was not overwhelmingly cold. The baby Mischa was wailing piercingly. Almost sunset, the sky was painted pink and dark purple clouds hovered.
The doors to the shed were open. Loss of blood was surely threatening to take over the man. The man who had dragged him smirked.
This was sick, Clarice thought. The man was almost unconscious and they were making the children watch. Making him watch his children watch.
In the shed were many gardening tools. Smirking, three of the six deserters took up weapons while the others guarded the children, and watched hungrily. A hammer, a rake, and a pitchfork.
Clarice winced, covering her mouth, horrified.
The child Hannibal was mortified. Clarice did not know that she would ever witness this, but the six-year-old's fear was etched in his face, and Clarice did not blame him.
It was like a B-movie, one of those awful, tacky horror films Clarice only enjoyed when Ardelia would allow it, made real, and Clarice did not have the remote control. She couldn't pause or stop it. This wasn't something she'd eat popcorn to, nor laugh about later. This was real.
The first blow was with the hammer, in the chest, hard. They were like hyenas, crowding around the body, like bees to their nest. The rake was next, digging into his skin, his back, his spine. He made a painful sound, even to hear. He tried to defend himself, his six fingered hand held up in the air, like a bloody flag waving in the air after a war.
They completely raked off the skin on his back, leaving a horrible scraped, bloody mess. They kicked him in the gut and face. The hammer hit down on his back, hitting revealed bone. Clarice screamed and clamped her hands over her mouth. She knew he couldn't move. He was defenseless, writhing on the ground, probably paralyzed for what they were doing to his spine.
The child Hannibal was fighting his captives, trying to bite them, struggling help his father.
The third deserter, brother of the man Lecter had sliced open in the foyer, kicked Lecter onto his back and raised the pitchfork over his face.
Hannibal's mother ran past Clarice, into the shed and attacked the deserter with the pitchfork with a shovel and hit him in the back of the head. He slumped over unconscious. Clarice was stunned. The woman's face was so determined, so infuriated, that she did not resemble the woman Clarice has seen on the stairs at all.
The father had told her to run away, she realized. That she had come back to help him and her children. She suddenly had great respect for the woman.
One of the other deserters caught her by the throat and pulled out a knife. She dropped the shovel. He put the sharp edge to her neck. She struggled to reach her husband, lying in a puddle of murky crimson fluid. He smirked and handed her over to one of the other men, and Clarice knew he was ordering them to take them to the leader. She did not know what he ordered them to do with the children, but they followed the mother around the house, to the mother's demise.
When they were gone, Clarice still stood there, still frozen, watching the deserter stand over Lecter like a lion after a kill. He smiled an awful smile and picked up the pitchfork.
Clarice covered her eyes with her hands but she could not block out the sound. An awful, meaty, stabbing sound. She screamed as two deserters hung the body on the shed's wall, hammering nails into the limp wrists, like a piece of art you'd find in an office building. Like they were proud.
Clarice only stopped throwing up when she got back into the house.
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