Chapter Ten
Monday, October 16, 5:00 AM, Four Seasons
Clarice Starling was stumbling along a hotel corridor, surrounded on all sides by a protective phalanx of emergency medical technicians and uniformed police officers. Deputy SAC Frank Ortega walked at her side, gently grasping her arm, close enough to get his own face in any pictures, should they encounter press. Which Clarice fully expected they would.
Her battered face was half hidden in the folds of a hospital blanket she clutched around her head and shoulders, refugee-style. Hotel guests loitered about the hall and popped their heads out of room doors to watch her pass, as uniforms tried to clear the way, herding the curious back into their rooms.
Earlier, as she had been gently removed from her staged bed of pain, Clarice had felt like the centerpiece in some perverse and blasphemous deposition scene.
But as time had passed, in odd dreamlike jerks and starts, she'd seen the way sympathy for the present victim had been quickly replaced with the crime scene investigator's trained concentration on the absent assailant. It had been as though Dr. Lecter had become the more vivid presence in the minds of the onlookers, although she was the one who was actually in the room.
She had amended her somewhat florid conception of a deposition to a more homey analogy. In truth, she felt more like the Thanksgiving turkey, the central object of busy preparations for a holiday feast, rather than Christ down from the cross.
Dr. Lecter enjoyed Christian symbolism and loved twisting it into outlandish and absurd new shapes. It was a mental tic of his, a time- passer, something he did the same way others might count sheep or imagine winning the lottery to occupy their minds during boring moments. He often mentally clothed her in Christ-like trappings, she knew, for his own intellectual amusement. But she did not find such games appropriate at all. She had been no selfless savior, she had made no significant sacrifices. Every one of her decisions for the past year of stolen happiness, and all that had led to it, had been motivated solely by her own desire and will. All her own choices, made honestly, and without constraint.
She, ultimately, was the one who had put herself in this room, the passive, naked bird isolated at the center of feverish activity.
She wondered if her absent lover would be able to comprehend this truth. She feared that he might well believe himself to be the primary author of this sad little drama. She would have to explain it to him, once they were reunited, explain it carefully, make him believe. In spite of all his frightening intellectual acuity and power of perception, he had his blind spots. There were still some things he could not see.
She had remained studiously incoherent for the benefit of the officers, speaking only in disjointed, traumatized whispers and hysterical moans. The medics had given her some powerful pain-killing drug in an injection, after ascertaining the extent of her physical injuries. She'd flown on the stuff, whatever it had been, and everything had taken on an odd hyper-real glitter for her, like the hugely portentous, illogical events in a vivid dream. She did not wish to answer substantive questions while stoned on high grade pharmaceuticals, so she had kept to unconnected gibberish.
While this was something all of the techs and paramedics and agents and cops and others that swarmed the suite could understand perfectly (or thought that they could), it also lessened their immediate interest in what she might say considerably. Lecter had successfully flown, and this was a bad thing, a negative value in the career equations of the agents in charge of the botched arrest. But they still had her, a witness of the most intimate kind, to question down the road , and this positive would balance out such equations. She was a kind of inanimate consolation prize to them, for later, when all the second guessing would begin.
But she could tell them nothing of use now, she knew they had decided, not at the moment, anyway. Better to reconstruct, piece by small piece of evidence at the scene, the living image of the fled monster and his last actions before escaping.
As though he was the grisly specter in the room that haunted them all, there and not there.
Ah, Zen and the art of Lectermyth maintenance. She must remember to mention that to him, when she could. He'd laugh.
This transference of focus had suited Clarice. She had not felt up to extensive Q and A just then. She was very tired, aside from everything else, and was quite content to remain a voiceless object as long as she could.
She had made only one tactical decision as she'd been helped from the hotel bed and examined and medicated and so forth. She had decided not to allow herself to be taken out of the hotel on a stretcher.
So she'd faked a burst of screaming panic at the sight of the gurney the paramedics had brought in for her, and had shrunk from the innocuous piece of equipment as though it was an instrument of torture. She was gratified to note telling glances darting from face to face among the law enforcement personnel at her reaction. Clearly they imagined that stretchers or gurneys must have somehow played some unknown, horrific role in her torment during her year of captivity. She could see imaginations busily spinning depraved scenarios to fit to the imagined circumstances.
Good God, the inexhaustible gullibility of people! How easy it was to believe the worst, how quickly the mind could supply the stuff of nightmare in the absence of actual facts, how entertaining it all was, in the end. How strange that the truth would have been so much harder for these good, decent, normal people to credit.
How right Dr. Lecter had been when he'd predicted the greedy way this dark fairy tale they'd concocted would be consumed by all.
Here you are, folks, all the psychosexual horror you can guzzle. No need to trouble with the truth. The truth is actually pretty slippery, and we do need our finite borders, don't we? This is white, that is black . . .
She'd felt a dismal upwelling of profound, icebound contempt for the petty wickedness of the entire human race, a terrible, wearisome burden that she had suddenly understood HE bore constantly, every moment of every day.
God, it must be awful to live that way, all the time. She had felt vaguely sick.
But her histrionics had earned her the chance to stumble out of the hotel on her feet, just as she wished.
Outside these walls, in the parking garage where the ambulance for her would be waiting, the members of the press, the reporters and photographers, the video cameras and news vans, would be gathering like carrion birds at the gibbet. Dr. Lecter would have seen to it that the floodgates to the media were well opened before he'd gone. The police would never have been able to keep the tide back, to keep them all out of the garage. They'd be covering every exit, just as the law enforcement officers had.
The media would tear into this story like a combine tears into the earth, bringing layer after buried layer of raw dirt to view. They would want sound bites, interviews, detailed information. But first and foremost, before anything else, they would want pictures.
Clarice knew she would make a better subject for film on her feet. It was difficult to get a really good look at someone bundled in a gurney and surrounded by standing figures. She hoped to make the morning news, and wanted every last mark or bruise on her face to show to full advantage. None must be lost on the mass audience that would soon be watching. It had cost them both far too much to put them there in the first place.
So she stumbled along with her escort of paramedics and officers, and clutched her blanket tightly as they rode to a connecting level to the garage in an elevator.
She had to struggle to keep her aching face from assuming a bitter smile as the elevator doors whooshed open at the garage level and she saw what was beyond.
The doors opened on a nightmarish maelstrom of flashbulbs and camera lenses and shouted questions, thrusting microphones like hungry beaks and what seemed like hundreds of bright pairs of staring eyes, avid and curious, beady as bird's eyes. The flock of media people surged forward at the sight of her, bundled in her blanket, and the uniforms around her closed ranks as best they could, forming a protective barrier. Ortega clutched her arm almost painfully as, for a moment, he shrank back toward the rear of the elevator car, his own eagerness to be photographed at her side momentarily forgotten.
Clarice wanted to shrink back too. Between the drugs she'd been given and her deepening fatigue and the awful emotional extremes she had endured in the last few hours, all her innate reserves of courage and strength had been much depleted. Everything was beginning to seem like a terrible dream. For a moment, dazed by the drugs in her blood, blinded by the lights, overwhelmed by the battering, incomprehensible noise of too many voices raised at once, she honestly believed she was being attacked by a flock of nightmare crows with human faces.
A "murder" of crows, they called it. That was how one referred to a large gathering of the scavenging birds.
She felt a great need to scream boiling up out of her tensed stomach and filling her throat and mouth like some foul liquid. This time, in earnest. But she did not dare to do it.
She was suddenly afraid that if she once started screaming now, she might never stop. She was slipping. Everything was slipping out of her grasp.
In this strange dawn hour, Clarice, trapped with a mob in a concrete bunker, could not see it, but the sun was rising. A certain knowledge came to her, the kind of arcane knowledge that resides in the unguessable spaces between the heart and the head.
As she was struggling to contain her fear and rage and disgust, seeking for some last shred of strength in her nearly sapped spirit, at the same moment, the one dark soul in the world she was most attuned to was seeking his own caustic solace in the deadly intimacy of murder.
Cold comfort that ruined even as it relieved, poisoned as it nourished, deformed as it strengthened. But comfort nonetheless. Through whatever unknown conduit that opens between people who love beyond reason, Clarice somehow gathered the black sustenance of that corrosive comfort to herself. She felt renewed strength hardening her will and chilling her heart, dire but welcome.
Black magic, perhaps, borne on the pale rays of the rising sun above them both. A sending. Did he pause in the pursuit of his artful atrocities and think, for a moment, of her?
Could he hear her? Did he see her? Had he sensed her need?
No matter. She found she was able to walk forward into the curiously avian crowd of cawing media people once more, if only for a few more steps. She let her blanket slip away to her shoulders and revealed her marked face to her strange new admirers. She stood erect and turned slightly as she moved toward the ambulance to give them her best angles.
She looked weirdly beautiful, as an apparition might. The photo opps were stunning.
Then her own will, and with it whatever she'd borrowed from a distance, broke.
"Crows," she murmured faintly, for no rational reason she knew. "Stone the crows."
She collapsed forward into the arms of the medics around her in an exhausted faint.
A highly dramatic moment, something to run on the morning news again and again. The whirring, chirping video cams devoured it all.
October 16, 7:30 AM, Summerlin
Dr. Lecter was dozing. The alarms and activities of the previous day, night and morning just passed had drained even his odd constitution at last, and he had become exhausted.
He was curled in a compact ball, wedged out of sight in a corner of the covered deck that shaded half of Margot Verger's pool, a deck chair screening him from view on the right, a pair of potted succulents providing cover on the left. His head and back rested against the wall of the deck, and he was wrapped in early morning shadows, like a viper in a nest.
He was covered in the gritty, grey-brown dust of the Las Vegas desert, and blood marked his hands, folded neatly against his breast, and stained the cuffs of his shirt. His closed eyelids twitched occasionally, betokening REM sleep.
He had ditched his stolen vehicle in the same gully that was now the final resting place of one Dr. Everett Doemling, former professor of psychology, now carrion. It would not do, he had reasoned, to bring a stolen, easily traceable car to Margot Verger's doorstep. He had decided to avail himself of the help she had courteously offered, but he did not wish to create problems for his former patient. Her involvement in his currently disarrayed affairs must be kept strictly dark.
Indeed, she must be seen to behave as though she were utterly appalled to learn that Hannibal Lecter, insane murderer of her only brother, was at large in Las Vegas. She must pretend to be frightened and angry with the police for letting him slip out of their grasp, and it would be best if she angrily demanded police protection too. He'd made a mental note to remember to mention the matter to her when he saw her.
It would be amusing as well, he had thought, to hide in plain sight at her home for a time, while the police guarded against his advent just outside. One must take one's amusements wherever they could be found. Especially in trying times like these, when small diversions were all too scarce.
Lacking a better vehicle, he'd walked out of the desert, a two hour trek through dusty roads and suburban neighborhoods, somnolent and empty so early on a Monday morning. He had not been much concerned with being seen. The authorities were unlikely to be scouring the suburbs for a fugitive on foot, not yet.
And he had simply been unconcerned. He had entered that disconnected, coldly drifting state of consciousness that was his way with all pains and threats hours before his final appointment with Doemling. From the moment he had walked out of his room at the hotel and left Clarice behind, he had been locked fast in this strange separate place within himself, as though he had taken a step to the left, while all the rest of existence had taken a step to the right. A shifted reality he had often found it difficult to find his way back from. He had wanted the sensory anchor of a long walk to help him find the way, and so he had taken one.
But it had been tiring. The early desert sun was not so terrible in October as it would likely be in July, but it had, nonetheless, begun to pry at his tired eyes and scrape at his fair skin in his second hour on the road. There had been dust, and he was thirsty. He had supped fully on those forms of sustenance he had learned to covet in a time long gone by, but his thirst for the living warmth of freshly spilled blood and his hunger for the rich milk of terror could never be entirely fulfilled. These appetites were such that they increased exponentially even as they were slaked. There was never enough. So, on the road, in the dust and the prying sun, he had begun to crave the simplicity of water.
Once at Margot's well-filled and well lived-in hacienda, he had drunk from a garden hose like a child unwilling to come in from play long enough for a proper drink, and had washed his burnt, dusty face. There had been the pool, and he had wanted to sit quietly beside that water for a space, to assuage his thirst in a different way. He had wanted to rest.
He had not wished to talk, or to see other mortal creatures at this time. He had not wished to enter the house. He had settled himself in an unobtrusive corner of the covered deck beside the pool, grateful for the cool shade and the quiet and the pleasingly complex smell of chlorinated water.
The scent had brought Clarice, who liked to swim, to his mind, and he thought of a time when they'd visited the ruins of Tikal, on a whim of his. This past spring, it had been. They had stayed at a little resort at nearby Belize City, and he remembered how she would come into their room at evening, fresh from the pool just outside, dripping pool water on the carpet at her feet. For some reason, the random combination of the scents of chlorine and fresh evening air and her own innate fragrance had struck him as sensual beyond measure, and he'd asked her not to towel the water from her skin. And she had done just as he'd asked, to please him.
Clarice often indulged his caprices with unstrained graciousness, and he'd devoted a whole new storehouse of memory to her many, many unwarranted kindnesses to him over the past year. Her inexplicable generosity was puzzling, mesmerizing, and perhaps a bit frightening.
It would be so easy to become dependent on such unlooked for largesse, gifts freely given, neither earned nor compelled. She had uncovered desires in him he had not known he harbored, indeed, had not known that he could harbor. There was a considerable portion of his consciousness now that was always completely open to her, an unguarded door, and that was a peril.
In light of recent events, there might well be no more precious memories to store away. He knew he might lose her now, but could no longer be certain what would happen to him if he did.
Even in the midst of his systematic destruction of Dr. Doemling, the image of Clarice's beautiful face had come to him, the marked, ravaged face he himself was responsible for.
He'd known, somehow, in some arcane way, that she was failing, that the strength she needed to complete her tasks was flagging.
Without knowing or caring how he did it, he'd sent her something, some intangible. There was a channel between them, always open now, or so it seemed. He'd released Doemling's soul to wherever there was for her, ended the man's torment and fear quickly, before he was quite through savoring it. A sacrificial release of energy.
Rough magic. He'd heard the words "stone the crows" quite clearly, not with his ears, but with his heart.
There had been no more. The channel had dimmed and emptied. Was she all right? Safe? He didn't know. He'd set to the familiar business of disposing of the remains, dumping the car, alone and disconnected once again, and suddenly unutterably weary.
That weariness had been his shadow-companion on the dusty road back to Margot's house, and had nestled in beside him as he'd settled in the shade by Margot's pool, like an unwanted Siamese twin. It had overcome him as he'd sat resting, and now he dozed.
And dreamed.
. . . a tree stump chopping block on a snowy hill, and the bitter cold winter wind all around. The countryside ravaged; the wolves of war loose in the fields this winter, the harshest in years. He was floundering through the deep drifts of snow, ascending the hill, unwilling. He knew this frozen black-and-white landscape so well, a hated place he could never completely leave. He was freezing. He was starving. He was terribly angry. He was afraid . . .
. . . there was something to learn at the top of the snow-bound hill, some ruining sight he did not wish to see. But there was no option, really. He lacked the ability NOT to see. His vision, both literal and figurative, was perpetually clear. He could not remember a time, ever, when he had been able to look away. From anything . . .
. . . some figure was crumpled at the base of the block, half draped over the rough bark, clothed in a glossy black moving shroud. Flashes of orange in the black, sharp points of vivid color. Beaks. A shroud of crows, then, covering the vaguely human shape, black feathers and orange beaks, Halloween colors . . .
"Dr. Lecter?"
. . . closer still, close enough to hear the rustle of feathers as the birds took flight, reluctantly abandoning their feast. Angry caws as he, an uninvited guest, disturbed their revels. Too close. There was something wrong with the figure, it was bent in a physical configuration no live human could assume. No, not this. Please. Mischa? . . .
"Dr. Lecter, it's me. Can you hear me?"
. . . a woman's body, not a child's, not a baby's. The torso here, the head there, blood everywhere. Red gold hair and black feathers in the snow. It was so cold . . .
"Wake up, now. Can you hear me? Wake up."
. . . Clarice's face. Livid bruises on her cheeks and a bite on her mouth, right eye swollen shut, the other pecked out. Mouth open in a last scream, head irreparably divorced from body, the damage done and no remedy possible. Take this back, God, I know you can hear me. Undo it. Undo it now . . .
"Listen to me . . . you're dreaming."
. . . bitter, unending cold. Hunger and distant pain, a low-grade ache in his left hand. A stiffness, from muscles clenched too long and too tightly, around some tightly grasped object. No. Rigid and roughly cylindrical, wood grain against his palm. No. An axe handle. A beheaded, well-loved body, crumpled at the foot of the block, a severed, crow despoiled head, an axe in his hand . . .
He jerked awake and his eyes flew open and he saw Margot Verger kneeling beside him. He saw her flinch back before whatever she saw in his face.
"Crows," he screamed, and then, instantly fully awake and aware of his surroundings, clapped his hands over his mouth to still any further screaming. It wouldn't do to rouse the household.
"Dr. Lecter, it's me," Margot said, eyes wide and frightened.
"I know who you are, Margot. Good morning. I'm very sorry if I've disturbed you."
"Are you all right?"
"Hmm. I'm not quite sure how to answer that. On the whole, I suppose I am."
"How long have you been sleeping out here?"
"I don't know."
They stared at each other, strange fellows, bound by many common experiences, and a history of dark mutual favors. It was good to see Margot on this awful morning, Dr. Lecter reflected. He liked and admired her very much.
"Would you like to come in the house now?" she asked, after some hesitation. She spoke gently, cautiously.
"You're afraid, Margot. I can see that you are. Are you quite sure you still want to extend such an invitation? You don't have to, you know. You really don't owe me anything."
"It's not a matter of debts," she said, and smiled for the first time. "Nothing that simple. We're old pals, right? Come on in the house. Or are you just gonna stay out here in the yard, lurking under the porch like some mean junkyard dog?"
He smiled too. It was an amusing image.
He rose from his spot and stood, gazing back at the large house, observing the terraced patio and grounds.
"You don't seem to have a porch, Margot, dear. I don't see one, anyway. It appears I'll HAVE to come inside."
She laughed. "Good. Let's go. After you."
He walked ahead of her, a pace or two. "You don't want me at your back, Margot?"
"Very funny. Naw, I trust you. See that? Some psychiatrist you are! You treated me, and here I am, still crazy as hell. I must be . . . "
"Perhaps you should sue me. Malpractice."
"I'll think about it. You look terrible, you know."
"How kind! I appreciate your plain spoken ways, Margot, really, I do. Well, it has been a long morning, I admit."
"I've got an attic room for you, out of the way. The house is full of Judy's relatives. I swear, these Ingrams are like rabbits. Thank God they all sleep late. There's a shower and a decent bed. You'll need some rest."
"I'll want to see a television."
"Starling?" she asked, and then flushed, as though embarrassed by having voiced too personal a question.
"Margot -"
"No, don't answer, I'm sorry. I'll see that you get one. And then later, after you've had a chance to regroup, we'll talk, okay?"
They'd come to a service entrance to the house, off the laundry room. They slipped inside. The house was quiet. No one saw them pass.
Margot was as good as her word. By eight-thirty that morning, Dr. Lecter was safely tucked away by himself in a comfortable attic room, freshly showered and wrapped in one of Margot's terry bathrobes, a loose fit.
He was sitting in an old easy chair, hands resting on the threadbare arms, watching Clarice Starling on a portable black and white television.
He saw her shrink back from the cameras and the incomprehensible cawing of the crowds of reporters, framed by the doors of an elevator. She looked dazed. Drugs, he imagined. They would have given her something for pain, at the very least. Then he saw her posture stiffen, saw her recover her courage, a visible renewal of her energy. A renewal that he too had lived with her, from a distance, he was certain of it.
He saw how she was able to move forward to meet the crowd. He saw her present her battered face to the cameras, and he smiled at the deliberate stagecraft in the act, even as he shuddered at the ugliness of the marks he'd put there for her to show.
He saw her sway dizzily, and saw her wounded mouth forming words, her voice lost to hearing in the din of other, stronger voices. But he knew what she was saying. His own lips formed the words silently as he watched.
"Crows. Stone the crows."
Ah, Clarice. What have I done to you? And what have you done to me?
He saw her pitch forward in an exhausted swoon and his hands gripped the arms of his chair hard enough to break through the heavy fabric under his fingers.
" . . . Ms. Starling was taken to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center where she is currently listed in satisfactory condition . . . "
He rose and switched the television off. He had no desire to see the newsclip or to hear the reports again, not right now. He did not wish to hear his own name repeated in this context, as it had been and would be, again and again.
He was very tired. There was a comfortable, narrow bed in this borrowed refuge. He would rest now.
Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center. Yes.
Later . . .
*************************************************************
Monday, October 16, 5:00 AM, Four Seasons
Clarice Starling was stumbling along a hotel corridor, surrounded on all sides by a protective phalanx of emergency medical technicians and uniformed police officers. Deputy SAC Frank Ortega walked at her side, gently grasping her arm, close enough to get his own face in any pictures, should they encounter press. Which Clarice fully expected they would.
Her battered face was half hidden in the folds of a hospital blanket she clutched around her head and shoulders, refugee-style. Hotel guests loitered about the hall and popped their heads out of room doors to watch her pass, as uniforms tried to clear the way, herding the curious back into their rooms.
Earlier, as she had been gently removed from her staged bed of pain, Clarice had felt like the centerpiece in some perverse and blasphemous deposition scene.
But as time had passed, in odd dreamlike jerks and starts, she'd seen the way sympathy for the present victim had been quickly replaced with the crime scene investigator's trained concentration on the absent assailant. It had been as though Dr. Lecter had become the more vivid presence in the minds of the onlookers, although she was the one who was actually in the room.
She had amended her somewhat florid conception of a deposition to a more homey analogy. In truth, she felt more like the Thanksgiving turkey, the central object of busy preparations for a holiday feast, rather than Christ down from the cross.
Dr. Lecter enjoyed Christian symbolism and loved twisting it into outlandish and absurd new shapes. It was a mental tic of his, a time- passer, something he did the same way others might count sheep or imagine winning the lottery to occupy their minds during boring moments. He often mentally clothed her in Christ-like trappings, she knew, for his own intellectual amusement. But she did not find such games appropriate at all. She had been no selfless savior, she had made no significant sacrifices. Every one of her decisions for the past year of stolen happiness, and all that had led to it, had been motivated solely by her own desire and will. All her own choices, made honestly, and without constraint.
She, ultimately, was the one who had put herself in this room, the passive, naked bird isolated at the center of feverish activity.
She wondered if her absent lover would be able to comprehend this truth. She feared that he might well believe himself to be the primary author of this sad little drama. She would have to explain it to him, once they were reunited, explain it carefully, make him believe. In spite of all his frightening intellectual acuity and power of perception, he had his blind spots. There were still some things he could not see.
She had remained studiously incoherent for the benefit of the officers, speaking only in disjointed, traumatized whispers and hysterical moans. The medics had given her some powerful pain-killing drug in an injection, after ascertaining the extent of her physical injuries. She'd flown on the stuff, whatever it had been, and everything had taken on an odd hyper-real glitter for her, like the hugely portentous, illogical events in a vivid dream. She did not wish to answer substantive questions while stoned on high grade pharmaceuticals, so she had kept to unconnected gibberish.
While this was something all of the techs and paramedics and agents and cops and others that swarmed the suite could understand perfectly (or thought that they could), it also lessened their immediate interest in what she might say considerably. Lecter had successfully flown, and this was a bad thing, a negative value in the career equations of the agents in charge of the botched arrest. But they still had her, a witness of the most intimate kind, to question down the road , and this positive would balance out such equations. She was a kind of inanimate consolation prize to them, for later, when all the second guessing would begin.
But she could tell them nothing of use now, she knew they had decided, not at the moment, anyway. Better to reconstruct, piece by small piece of evidence at the scene, the living image of the fled monster and his last actions before escaping.
As though he was the grisly specter in the room that haunted them all, there and not there.
Ah, Zen and the art of Lectermyth maintenance. She must remember to mention that to him, when she could. He'd laugh.
This transference of focus had suited Clarice. She had not felt up to extensive Q and A just then. She was very tired, aside from everything else, and was quite content to remain a voiceless object as long as she could.
She had made only one tactical decision as she'd been helped from the hotel bed and examined and medicated and so forth. She had decided not to allow herself to be taken out of the hotel on a stretcher.
So she'd faked a burst of screaming panic at the sight of the gurney the paramedics had brought in for her, and had shrunk from the innocuous piece of equipment as though it was an instrument of torture. She was gratified to note telling glances darting from face to face among the law enforcement personnel at her reaction. Clearly they imagined that stretchers or gurneys must have somehow played some unknown, horrific role in her torment during her year of captivity. She could see imaginations busily spinning depraved scenarios to fit to the imagined circumstances.
Good God, the inexhaustible gullibility of people! How easy it was to believe the worst, how quickly the mind could supply the stuff of nightmare in the absence of actual facts, how entertaining it all was, in the end. How strange that the truth would have been so much harder for these good, decent, normal people to credit.
How right Dr. Lecter had been when he'd predicted the greedy way this dark fairy tale they'd concocted would be consumed by all.
Here you are, folks, all the psychosexual horror you can guzzle. No need to trouble with the truth. The truth is actually pretty slippery, and we do need our finite borders, don't we? This is white, that is black . . .
She'd felt a dismal upwelling of profound, icebound contempt for the petty wickedness of the entire human race, a terrible, wearisome burden that she had suddenly understood HE bore constantly, every moment of every day.
God, it must be awful to live that way, all the time. She had felt vaguely sick.
But her histrionics had earned her the chance to stumble out of the hotel on her feet, just as she wished.
Outside these walls, in the parking garage where the ambulance for her would be waiting, the members of the press, the reporters and photographers, the video cameras and news vans, would be gathering like carrion birds at the gibbet. Dr. Lecter would have seen to it that the floodgates to the media were well opened before he'd gone. The police would never have been able to keep the tide back, to keep them all out of the garage. They'd be covering every exit, just as the law enforcement officers had.
The media would tear into this story like a combine tears into the earth, bringing layer after buried layer of raw dirt to view. They would want sound bites, interviews, detailed information. But first and foremost, before anything else, they would want pictures.
Clarice knew she would make a better subject for film on her feet. It was difficult to get a really good look at someone bundled in a gurney and surrounded by standing figures. She hoped to make the morning news, and wanted every last mark or bruise on her face to show to full advantage. None must be lost on the mass audience that would soon be watching. It had cost them both far too much to put them there in the first place.
So she stumbled along with her escort of paramedics and officers, and clutched her blanket tightly as they rode to a connecting level to the garage in an elevator.
She had to struggle to keep her aching face from assuming a bitter smile as the elevator doors whooshed open at the garage level and she saw what was beyond.
The doors opened on a nightmarish maelstrom of flashbulbs and camera lenses and shouted questions, thrusting microphones like hungry beaks and what seemed like hundreds of bright pairs of staring eyes, avid and curious, beady as bird's eyes. The flock of media people surged forward at the sight of her, bundled in her blanket, and the uniforms around her closed ranks as best they could, forming a protective barrier. Ortega clutched her arm almost painfully as, for a moment, he shrank back toward the rear of the elevator car, his own eagerness to be photographed at her side momentarily forgotten.
Clarice wanted to shrink back too. Between the drugs she'd been given and her deepening fatigue and the awful emotional extremes she had endured in the last few hours, all her innate reserves of courage and strength had been much depleted. Everything was beginning to seem like a terrible dream. For a moment, dazed by the drugs in her blood, blinded by the lights, overwhelmed by the battering, incomprehensible noise of too many voices raised at once, she honestly believed she was being attacked by a flock of nightmare crows with human faces.
A "murder" of crows, they called it. That was how one referred to a large gathering of the scavenging birds.
She felt a great need to scream boiling up out of her tensed stomach and filling her throat and mouth like some foul liquid. This time, in earnest. But she did not dare to do it.
She was suddenly afraid that if she once started screaming now, she might never stop. She was slipping. Everything was slipping out of her grasp.
In this strange dawn hour, Clarice, trapped with a mob in a concrete bunker, could not see it, but the sun was rising. A certain knowledge came to her, the kind of arcane knowledge that resides in the unguessable spaces between the heart and the head.
As she was struggling to contain her fear and rage and disgust, seeking for some last shred of strength in her nearly sapped spirit, at the same moment, the one dark soul in the world she was most attuned to was seeking his own caustic solace in the deadly intimacy of murder.
Cold comfort that ruined even as it relieved, poisoned as it nourished, deformed as it strengthened. But comfort nonetheless. Through whatever unknown conduit that opens between people who love beyond reason, Clarice somehow gathered the black sustenance of that corrosive comfort to herself. She felt renewed strength hardening her will and chilling her heart, dire but welcome.
Black magic, perhaps, borne on the pale rays of the rising sun above them both. A sending. Did he pause in the pursuit of his artful atrocities and think, for a moment, of her?
Could he hear her? Did he see her? Had he sensed her need?
No matter. She found she was able to walk forward into the curiously avian crowd of cawing media people once more, if only for a few more steps. She let her blanket slip away to her shoulders and revealed her marked face to her strange new admirers. She stood erect and turned slightly as she moved toward the ambulance to give them her best angles.
She looked weirdly beautiful, as an apparition might. The photo opps were stunning.
Then her own will, and with it whatever she'd borrowed from a distance, broke.
"Crows," she murmured faintly, for no rational reason she knew. "Stone the crows."
She collapsed forward into the arms of the medics around her in an exhausted faint.
A highly dramatic moment, something to run on the morning news again and again. The whirring, chirping video cams devoured it all.
October 16, 7:30 AM, Summerlin
Dr. Lecter was dozing. The alarms and activities of the previous day, night and morning just passed had drained even his odd constitution at last, and he had become exhausted.
He was curled in a compact ball, wedged out of sight in a corner of the covered deck that shaded half of Margot Verger's pool, a deck chair screening him from view on the right, a pair of potted succulents providing cover on the left. His head and back rested against the wall of the deck, and he was wrapped in early morning shadows, like a viper in a nest.
He was covered in the gritty, grey-brown dust of the Las Vegas desert, and blood marked his hands, folded neatly against his breast, and stained the cuffs of his shirt. His closed eyelids twitched occasionally, betokening REM sleep.
He had ditched his stolen vehicle in the same gully that was now the final resting place of one Dr. Everett Doemling, former professor of psychology, now carrion. It would not do, he had reasoned, to bring a stolen, easily traceable car to Margot Verger's doorstep. He had decided to avail himself of the help she had courteously offered, but he did not wish to create problems for his former patient. Her involvement in his currently disarrayed affairs must be kept strictly dark.
Indeed, she must be seen to behave as though she were utterly appalled to learn that Hannibal Lecter, insane murderer of her only brother, was at large in Las Vegas. She must pretend to be frightened and angry with the police for letting him slip out of their grasp, and it would be best if she angrily demanded police protection too. He'd made a mental note to remember to mention the matter to her when he saw her.
It would be amusing as well, he had thought, to hide in plain sight at her home for a time, while the police guarded against his advent just outside. One must take one's amusements wherever they could be found. Especially in trying times like these, when small diversions were all too scarce.
Lacking a better vehicle, he'd walked out of the desert, a two hour trek through dusty roads and suburban neighborhoods, somnolent and empty so early on a Monday morning. He had not been much concerned with being seen. The authorities were unlikely to be scouring the suburbs for a fugitive on foot, not yet.
And he had simply been unconcerned. He had entered that disconnected, coldly drifting state of consciousness that was his way with all pains and threats hours before his final appointment with Doemling. From the moment he had walked out of his room at the hotel and left Clarice behind, he had been locked fast in this strange separate place within himself, as though he had taken a step to the left, while all the rest of existence had taken a step to the right. A shifted reality he had often found it difficult to find his way back from. He had wanted the sensory anchor of a long walk to help him find the way, and so he had taken one.
But it had been tiring. The early desert sun was not so terrible in October as it would likely be in July, but it had, nonetheless, begun to pry at his tired eyes and scrape at his fair skin in his second hour on the road. There had been dust, and he was thirsty. He had supped fully on those forms of sustenance he had learned to covet in a time long gone by, but his thirst for the living warmth of freshly spilled blood and his hunger for the rich milk of terror could never be entirely fulfilled. These appetites were such that they increased exponentially even as they were slaked. There was never enough. So, on the road, in the dust and the prying sun, he had begun to crave the simplicity of water.
Once at Margot's well-filled and well lived-in hacienda, he had drunk from a garden hose like a child unwilling to come in from play long enough for a proper drink, and had washed his burnt, dusty face. There had been the pool, and he had wanted to sit quietly beside that water for a space, to assuage his thirst in a different way. He had wanted to rest.
He had not wished to talk, or to see other mortal creatures at this time. He had not wished to enter the house. He had settled himself in an unobtrusive corner of the covered deck beside the pool, grateful for the cool shade and the quiet and the pleasingly complex smell of chlorinated water.
The scent had brought Clarice, who liked to swim, to his mind, and he thought of a time when they'd visited the ruins of Tikal, on a whim of his. This past spring, it had been. They had stayed at a little resort at nearby Belize City, and he remembered how she would come into their room at evening, fresh from the pool just outside, dripping pool water on the carpet at her feet. For some reason, the random combination of the scents of chlorine and fresh evening air and her own innate fragrance had struck him as sensual beyond measure, and he'd asked her not to towel the water from her skin. And she had done just as he'd asked, to please him.
Clarice often indulged his caprices with unstrained graciousness, and he'd devoted a whole new storehouse of memory to her many, many unwarranted kindnesses to him over the past year. Her inexplicable generosity was puzzling, mesmerizing, and perhaps a bit frightening.
It would be so easy to become dependent on such unlooked for largesse, gifts freely given, neither earned nor compelled. She had uncovered desires in him he had not known he harbored, indeed, had not known that he could harbor. There was a considerable portion of his consciousness now that was always completely open to her, an unguarded door, and that was a peril.
In light of recent events, there might well be no more precious memories to store away. He knew he might lose her now, but could no longer be certain what would happen to him if he did.
Even in the midst of his systematic destruction of Dr. Doemling, the image of Clarice's beautiful face had come to him, the marked, ravaged face he himself was responsible for.
He'd known, somehow, in some arcane way, that she was failing, that the strength she needed to complete her tasks was flagging.
Without knowing or caring how he did it, he'd sent her something, some intangible. There was a channel between them, always open now, or so it seemed. He'd released Doemling's soul to wherever there was for her, ended the man's torment and fear quickly, before he was quite through savoring it. A sacrificial release of energy.
Rough magic. He'd heard the words "stone the crows" quite clearly, not with his ears, but with his heart.
There had been no more. The channel had dimmed and emptied. Was she all right? Safe? He didn't know. He'd set to the familiar business of disposing of the remains, dumping the car, alone and disconnected once again, and suddenly unutterably weary.
That weariness had been his shadow-companion on the dusty road back to Margot's house, and had nestled in beside him as he'd settled in the shade by Margot's pool, like an unwanted Siamese twin. It had overcome him as he'd sat resting, and now he dozed.
And dreamed.
. . . a tree stump chopping block on a snowy hill, and the bitter cold winter wind all around. The countryside ravaged; the wolves of war loose in the fields this winter, the harshest in years. He was floundering through the deep drifts of snow, ascending the hill, unwilling. He knew this frozen black-and-white landscape so well, a hated place he could never completely leave. He was freezing. He was starving. He was terribly angry. He was afraid . . .
. . . there was something to learn at the top of the snow-bound hill, some ruining sight he did not wish to see. But there was no option, really. He lacked the ability NOT to see. His vision, both literal and figurative, was perpetually clear. He could not remember a time, ever, when he had been able to look away. From anything . . .
. . . some figure was crumpled at the base of the block, half draped over the rough bark, clothed in a glossy black moving shroud. Flashes of orange in the black, sharp points of vivid color. Beaks. A shroud of crows, then, covering the vaguely human shape, black feathers and orange beaks, Halloween colors . . .
"Dr. Lecter?"
. . . closer still, close enough to hear the rustle of feathers as the birds took flight, reluctantly abandoning their feast. Angry caws as he, an uninvited guest, disturbed their revels. Too close. There was something wrong with the figure, it was bent in a physical configuration no live human could assume. No, not this. Please. Mischa? . . .
"Dr. Lecter, it's me. Can you hear me?"
. . . a woman's body, not a child's, not a baby's. The torso here, the head there, blood everywhere. Red gold hair and black feathers in the snow. It was so cold . . .
"Wake up, now. Can you hear me? Wake up."
. . . Clarice's face. Livid bruises on her cheeks and a bite on her mouth, right eye swollen shut, the other pecked out. Mouth open in a last scream, head irreparably divorced from body, the damage done and no remedy possible. Take this back, God, I know you can hear me. Undo it. Undo it now . . .
"Listen to me . . . you're dreaming."
. . . bitter, unending cold. Hunger and distant pain, a low-grade ache in his left hand. A stiffness, from muscles clenched too long and too tightly, around some tightly grasped object. No. Rigid and roughly cylindrical, wood grain against his palm. No. An axe handle. A beheaded, well-loved body, crumpled at the foot of the block, a severed, crow despoiled head, an axe in his hand . . .
He jerked awake and his eyes flew open and he saw Margot Verger kneeling beside him. He saw her flinch back before whatever she saw in his face.
"Crows," he screamed, and then, instantly fully awake and aware of his surroundings, clapped his hands over his mouth to still any further screaming. It wouldn't do to rouse the household.
"Dr. Lecter, it's me," Margot said, eyes wide and frightened.
"I know who you are, Margot. Good morning. I'm very sorry if I've disturbed you."
"Are you all right?"
"Hmm. I'm not quite sure how to answer that. On the whole, I suppose I am."
"How long have you been sleeping out here?"
"I don't know."
They stared at each other, strange fellows, bound by many common experiences, and a history of dark mutual favors. It was good to see Margot on this awful morning, Dr. Lecter reflected. He liked and admired her very much.
"Would you like to come in the house now?" she asked, after some hesitation. She spoke gently, cautiously.
"You're afraid, Margot. I can see that you are. Are you quite sure you still want to extend such an invitation? You don't have to, you know. You really don't owe me anything."
"It's not a matter of debts," she said, and smiled for the first time. "Nothing that simple. We're old pals, right? Come on in the house. Or are you just gonna stay out here in the yard, lurking under the porch like some mean junkyard dog?"
He smiled too. It was an amusing image.
He rose from his spot and stood, gazing back at the large house, observing the terraced patio and grounds.
"You don't seem to have a porch, Margot, dear. I don't see one, anyway. It appears I'll HAVE to come inside."
She laughed. "Good. Let's go. After you."
He walked ahead of her, a pace or two. "You don't want me at your back, Margot?"
"Very funny. Naw, I trust you. See that? Some psychiatrist you are! You treated me, and here I am, still crazy as hell. I must be . . . "
"Perhaps you should sue me. Malpractice."
"I'll think about it. You look terrible, you know."
"How kind! I appreciate your plain spoken ways, Margot, really, I do. Well, it has been a long morning, I admit."
"I've got an attic room for you, out of the way. The house is full of Judy's relatives. I swear, these Ingrams are like rabbits. Thank God they all sleep late. There's a shower and a decent bed. You'll need some rest."
"I'll want to see a television."
"Starling?" she asked, and then flushed, as though embarrassed by having voiced too personal a question.
"Margot -"
"No, don't answer, I'm sorry. I'll see that you get one. And then later, after you've had a chance to regroup, we'll talk, okay?"
They'd come to a service entrance to the house, off the laundry room. They slipped inside. The house was quiet. No one saw them pass.
Margot was as good as her word. By eight-thirty that morning, Dr. Lecter was safely tucked away by himself in a comfortable attic room, freshly showered and wrapped in one of Margot's terry bathrobes, a loose fit.
He was sitting in an old easy chair, hands resting on the threadbare arms, watching Clarice Starling on a portable black and white television.
He saw her shrink back from the cameras and the incomprehensible cawing of the crowds of reporters, framed by the doors of an elevator. She looked dazed. Drugs, he imagined. They would have given her something for pain, at the very least. Then he saw her posture stiffen, saw her recover her courage, a visible renewal of her energy. A renewal that he too had lived with her, from a distance, he was certain of it.
He saw how she was able to move forward to meet the crowd. He saw her present her battered face to the cameras, and he smiled at the deliberate stagecraft in the act, even as he shuddered at the ugliness of the marks he'd put there for her to show.
He saw her sway dizzily, and saw her wounded mouth forming words, her voice lost to hearing in the din of other, stronger voices. But he knew what she was saying. His own lips formed the words silently as he watched.
"Crows. Stone the crows."
Ah, Clarice. What have I done to you? And what have you done to me?
He saw her pitch forward in an exhausted swoon and his hands gripped the arms of his chair hard enough to break through the heavy fabric under his fingers.
" . . . Ms. Starling was taken to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center where she is currently listed in satisfactory condition . . . "
He rose and switched the television off. He had no desire to see the newsclip or to hear the reports again, not right now. He did not wish to hear his own name repeated in this context, as it had been and would be, again and again.
He was very tired. There was a comfortable, narrow bed in this borrowed refuge. He would rest now.
Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center. Yes.
Later . . .
*************************************************************