Chapter Fifteen

October 19, 2:30 AM, Summerlin:

Clarice Starling had just awakened from a thin, unrestful doze, and the dream that had roused her, so vivid only moments before, was now disintegrating into illogical, cryptic fragments, as dreams do upon exposure to the waking world.

She looked; eyes still half bleared shut, at the faintly glowing green read-out of the clock radio at her bedside, and saw that it was only two-thirty, not a good time to be awake and alone.

In the darkness of her room, her newly roused consciousness hovered between the increasingly solid impressions of the real room around her, and the swiftly melting images and sensations of her dream.

She saw a pale stream of dim moonlight pouring through her bedroom window, as well as the phantom of a dark head, bent to her breast. The clammy touch of her own sweat cooled her skin, even as the illusory touch of warm hands and lips heated it. She felt the constrictive embrace of her tangled bedclothes, along with the ghostly and far more welcome embrace of her recent dream companion. She felt an untenanted void at her center and at the same time she felt a diminishing, much-loved presence filling her wherever she was empty. She saw a candle-lit terrace in Buenos Aires, an alfresco supper laid for two, and she saw a darkened, solitary room in a suburb of Las Vegas.

She shut her eyes tightly and hugged herself as she squeezed her legs together, trying to keep the images of her dream in sight as long as she could, attempting to stay on the terrace just a little longer, attempting to keep his fading image with her, beside her, inside her, just a few moments more.

She was lying in the narrow bed in the attic room that Dr. Lecter had occupied during his own brief stay at the Verger residence. Like him, she had not wished to encounter any of Judy and Margot's houseguests, and the out-of-the-way room at the top of the house had suited her desire for solitude.

But she had not requested it for that reason.

Judy Ingram had guessed the real reasons, of course. When she and Margot had first come to the house in Summerlin just before noon, Margot had wanted to stop and talk with the head of the private security detail she'd hired to keep the press at bay, and had turned Starling over to Judy. Judy had taken charge of her at once, and filled her so full of tea that she had begun to entertain the whimsical suspicion that she might be in China.

There had been tea, there had been lunch, and there had been a quiet climate of unspoken sympathy, but there had been no demands on her at all. She had not spoken much over lunch, and she had not been expected to. Margot and Judy's home was full of houseguests, and surely, Starling had thought, they all must be aware that she was present. Surely they must be curious about her; they'd seen her on the news often, over the past two days. But over lunch, and throughout the afternoon, she had seen various members of Judy's large family only in passing glimpses, and not one of them had even tried to speak to her.

Judy must have had some heavy-duty briefing with the fam, this morning, before I showed up, Starling thought, both amused by the idea and grateful for it.

After lunch, Judy had shown her to the bedroom she had chosen for Starling's use. It had been a large, airy chamber that opened on an enclosed alcove of the great patio the home was built around. A small terra-cotta fountain gurgled pleasantly in this patio alcove, and there was an ornamental rock garden filled with a variety of interesting succulents. It was a lovely room, serene and pleasing to the both the eye and the spirit. Thought and consideration had obviously gone into its selection. Clarice had been sorry to have to turn it down.

"Give me the room you gave him, Judy," Clarice had requested baldly, too tired and too heartsick to cast her hunger for some shred of contact with her absent mate into more courteous terms. "You must have hidden him away somewhere. This is nice, but it isn't what I want. What I need."

"Starling . . . Clarice . . ." Judy had answered, in the same gentle, cautious tone one might use to address someone who was very ill, perhaps terminally so. "Are you sure . . . well, are you sure that's wise?"

This question had struck Clarice as horribly funny, and she'd laughed, even though it hurt her mouth to do so. A hard and glassy tinkling sound.

"Oh, Judy. You and Margot need to be a little more careful who you invite to your parties, I think. Haven't you been paying attention to this Gothic soap opera of ours, mine and his? Do you seriously think being wise has ever had the slightest thing to do with it? Neither one of us has made one single sensible decision since the day we met."

She'd shrugged and moved through the sunny bedroom, to look through the French doors and admire the rock garden outside. Then she had turned back to Judy, who'd been keeping a polite distance behind.

"I really want whatever room you gave him, Judy. That's what I want. Now how much of a hard time are you going to give me?"

Judy had held her in that stern gaze of hers, so incongruous on her round, pleasant features, a look that Margot, or Dr. Lecter, for that matter, would have remembered well. Then Judy had shrugged too.

"Oh, all right. Come on."

The two women had climbed stairs and wound down narrow hallways and finally arrived at the isolated cubby that had served as Lecter's temporary lair on a Monday morning, only two days past. Forty-eight hours. It had seemed strange to Clarice that her entire universe could be so profoundly shifted in such a short period of time.

Judy swung the door open for Clarice. She looked inside.

"He spent as much time lurking out by the pool as he did in here," Judy remarked, a bit waspishly. "Maybe you want a sleeping bag and a camp stove so you can wallow in anguish out there, instead."

Clarice walked inside the small space. She could sense his imprint on the surroundings immediately, as clearly as one might sense the difference between night and day, or down and up.

"You think I'm being stupid, don't you, Judy?" she asked, absently. She was noticing the small television set in the room, and the punctured fabric on the arms of the easy chair nearby.

"I think you both tend to take the most complicated possible route from point A to point B," Judy answered. "I think maybe if you hadn't met - one or both of you would have just . . . imploded by now. And I think you two are probably the bossiest guests Margot and I have ever had."

Starling had laughed and, for the second time in their brief acquaintance, had impulsively hugged Judy Ingram.

"Gotta re-think that guest list, Judy, like I told you. Thank you for this. And thank you for putting up with us. I think I'd like to try to get some rest now, if that's okay? Think I'll pass on the sleeping bag, though."

"Progress," Judy commented, smiling. She turned to the door of the little room and stepped through it, then paused for a moment just outside. "Just for the record, I don't really think you're being stupid, Clarice. But I will let you know when I do."

Clarice nodded, almost formally, as she might to a worthy opponent after a tough shooting competition. "I'm beginning to expect nothing less. I understand you already told Dr. Lecter that HE was an idiot."

Judy laughed. "Not in so many words. But I think he got the message anyway. I've never been so scared in my life."

"Gave you the voodoo look, didn't he?" Clarice asked, and then cocked her head at a predatory, questing angle, became totally immobile, and stared into Judy's eyes unblinkingly.

"Yes!" Judy giggled. "Just like that. Oh my God! That's perfect."

"It better be. I've had that look aimed at me enough times." Her rather grim smile looked particularly disturbing on her battered face.

"Yeah, I guess you have," Judy said, shaking her head. "Amazing, the things people can get used to. Well, there's a shower through here, and I left a robe and some pajamas in there for you too. We're serving dinner to the ravening hordes about sixish, but you come on down and have a bite later, if you'd like. I'll leave you alone now."

She'd turned away and left, and Clarice, suddenly feeling an intense craving to be completely alone here in the space that Dr. Lecter had recently occupied, closed the door after her.

For Clarice, the afternoon and evening had gone by at a glacial pace, as though time was passing only through slow erosion, not in increments of hours and minutes, but in ages and eons. The elastic nature of time was a topic she and Dr. Lecter discussed often, it being a central, almost talismanic issue in their alliance. She wondered if he was now perceiving, as she did, how time could not only move forward and back, but could, on occasion, stand still altogether.

Around six, she had been able to watch herself being wheeled out of the hospital on the evening news. Another odd twist in the fabric of time, that she could be in both places, both times, at once. That she could be both on the pavement outside Sunrise Medical Center in the late morning, and also watching herself in an attic room at early evening. It was a queer, doubling sensation, and Starling had found herself looking down at her hands in her lap, to make sure that they were there, to make sure that she was real.

She thought she looked small and shrunken as she watched herself crouching in her wheelchair, and was both dismayed and satisfied to see how really terrible her face looked on camera. She set aside any lingering worry that someone who had seen her at the christening party would recognize her. She hardly recognized herself.

Around eight, she'd crept down to the kitchen for something to eat, more because she didn't want Judy or Margot to trouble themselves bringing her something than because she was hungry.

At nine she'd drawn herself a bath, and by nine-thirty, she had forgotten that she had done so, and had stared at the small black and white television in her room, unseeing, as her forgotten bath water cooled, unused.

At ten, she had decided to go to bed and try to get some sleep.

The bed was narrow and confining, and had not been changed since the previous occupant had briefly used it. Clarice could detect the faintest traces of the scent of Dr. Lecter's skin once she was wrapped in the linens and bedclothes that he had used before her. Only a phantom nuance of him remained, not of colognes or soaps or other artificial fragrances, but of his natural, innate scent, and perhaps she could sense it only because she was so deeply attuned to it. Her incessant hunger for him was both sated and intensified by this tenuous and most physically evocative form of displaced contact.

Fragrance of some indefinable ancient spice; astringent perfume of cedar, sandalwood, pine; vague, wild musk of fur and hide; brazen notes of copper and iron; dark and sweet of mountain plum and rambling berry; ozone-rich scent of liquid night and imminent lightning, just before an electrical storm. Forest and trees, leaves and rain, shadowy spaces and open air, new and old, red, black, purple, silver, stark bone-white.

The air I breathe, she'd said to herself silently, her last fully coherent thought before she had sunk into her uneasy slumber, and from there into the erotic dream that had lain waiting just beyond sleep, composed of equal parts memory and scent.

This is the air I breathe.

Her last thought before drifting off, and her first, upon awakening. In her dream, she had been coming, coming so hard, and the dark, glassy waves of imagined ecstasy had galvanized her real body, lying removed in her narrow bed, and the maddened bucking of her hips and the muffled cries of joy in her throat had awakened her.

This is the air I breathe.

Clarice lay in her borrowed bed and slowly relaxed the taut muscles of her body, and, in time, opened her eyes and looked into the darkness above her and all around her. She looked into the darkness, and she saw.

Clarice Starling made a single, inalterable decision in that odd moment, somewhere between dream and reality, her first since she had read Dr. Lecter's letter in her hospital room, since she had crushed that devastating message in her trembling hands.

From that strange hybrid moment in the iron dark, she at last began to think, to consider, and to plan.


October 19, 5:30 AM, Carnival Cruiseship "Irene Adler II", at sea, five degrees south of the equator

Hannibal Lecter stood at the rail of the deserted observation deck of his hastily chosen mystery ship, gazing into the lightening night sky to the west, where the sun was coming up.

He had been asleep in his narrow, solitary bunk in his woefully non-luxurious closet of a stateroom. Hasty travel arrangements often resulted in inconvenient accommodations. He disliked cramped spaces, and probably always would.

Upon awakening suddenly in the tiny cabin, he had immediately resolved to get up and leave the suffocating, enclosed chamber, and had been drawn to this limitless vista of the open sea as soon as he'd come on deck.

He'd been awakened by a particularly vivid erotic dream.

Shredding phantoms of that dream still played, wraith-like, in his mind, and he breathed in the overwhelming scent of the sea, that great salt-cauldron of fecundity from which all life on earth had originally sprung. It was a primal, ineffably female scent, and it meshed seamlessly with the attenuated fragments of scent and fragrance from his dream.

He saw the red-gold glow of dawn begin to gild the far edges of the waves at the horizon, and he tasted hints of sea spray, and he gripped the wet rail in his empty hands. He breathed in the vast scent of the eternal marine womb, filled his lungs with it, filled them again, tried to fill the newly empty places in his heart with it too.

A thought came to him as he breathed, repeating in his mind, insistent and clanging, but he was not at all certain that it was a thought that had originated with him.

This is the air I breathe.

For the first time since he had left Clarice Starling's bedside at the Sunrise Medical Center in Las Vegas, three days before, he began to question the wisdom of the choice he had made.

From that strange hybrid moment in the midst of the illimitable ocean, halfway between a fading dream and the rising sun, he at last began to doubt, to reconsider, and to regret.


October 19, Summerlin, 8:00 AM

On Thursday morning, an unexpected visitor for Clarice showed up at the temporary checkpoint Margot Verger's hired security people had set up at the edge of the property. All would-be visitors were obliged to show ID, declare intent, and await clearance from the house before being allowed to drive up to the front door, on Margot's orders, and this policy had kept the press safely outside the perimeter, at least for one day.

Clarice's visitor spoke a simple message to one of the security guards to relay to the household, something that could be repeated easily and quickly, and that left no room for equivocation. The guard called in to the house, and repeated the message word for word.

"I'm Ardelia Mapp, and I've come to see Clarice Starling. Tell her I've brought her a surprise."

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