Storyteller's Notes: Thank you very much for your reviews. I greatly appreciate the time you are giving to read the story and write the reviews.
I am glad I am able to accommodate you, who give me your time, and not keep you waiting for too long. I am afraid, patience is not one of my virtues, hence, I'd hate myself to wait to find out what has happened in some gripping story.
I hope you'll enjoy this chapter.
Thank you again for your time.
CE
Disclaimer: as in the first part as it is a continuation of the story...
story continues...
Starling sought it as an opportunity to reflect on the situation. Cold water initially soothed and eased the pain, now it was back. Nothing much she could do about it, except to concentrate on something else. The pain inside her mind was worse still, and to avoid the insanity here and now, she elected to survey the surroundings. She will then revise the information and work out various scenarios of escape, no matter how improbable. She just needed to tie her mind to something other than pain, any pain. Who knows, if she had a plan, if she worked out the moves in this hideous game, it may come handy when it mattered.
Fight it, Starling, keep focused... You are a warrior... You can be as strong as you wish to be... Right... Tell me about it...
While men busied themselves with the next act of Mason's madness, Starling had a brief chance to look around. She registered her gun behind the white-haired man's belt with the Deputy's badge. She made a mental note of her clothes in a pile by the wall, the arrangement of the showring and adjoining rooms and entrances, the position of the air rifle and hierarchy of the men.
She glimpsed at Dr Lecter and questioned if he was able to walk, whether she would be able to take him into custody.
Take him into custody?..
She stumbled. Did she still want to take Dr Lecter into custody? Starling felt a rush of confusion, nausea of returning pain. She felt panic of hesitancy and distaste at herself for it. She needed a clear line of action if she is to win this fight. Needed to be a machine, unquestioning, decisive.
Clarice Staling: the FBI's killing machine,.. headline came to mind. She was still a sworn agent, suspended, on administrative leave, but not discharged. Was she? Pearsall said, you're not a law officer, you're Joe Blow. Balls. She had a duty. She winced remembering Krendler rolling on the ground, spewing up rage. She had a duty not to Krendler, not to FBI, to her father, to her sense of right and wrong. She looked then at Dr Lecter and he knew. For that moment at least the struggle was over, Special Agent Starling, suspended and disgraced, had an upper hand. At least for now.
Ahh, discipline, duty and self-flagellation. Good evening, Officer Starling...
Dr Lecter smiled, life without a challenge would be tedious.
"How much longer, Cordell?" Mason, unable to fidget, was becoming restless and irritant.
"Almost ready." Cordell fiddled with the projector's height and focus until he was satisfied with the Verger family's mansion, projected on the white sheet suspended from the ceiling opposite. "Ready, Mr Verger."
"Excellent. Now, bring Ms Starling down and get the circulation back in her limbs. We'd want her to fully experience the rites of passage."
Propped from the back, Starling was seated on the barn floor, her arms and legs spread, noncompliant, boneless and unbearably tingly as Cordell skilfully massaged them restoring the blood supply to her hands and feet. One of the Sards slipped a whip around her neck to restrain her, pulling her chin up to face the projection.
"You did not think, Doctor, I would bore you with the depiction of my house as magnificent as it is." Mason said and announced with a mocking pomp. "Ms Starling, Dr Lecter, gentlemen, let me present you with the next act in our evening show – The Crucifixion Clock Recreation."
Mason pressed a button on a remote control and a blue lined copy of the crucifixion watch drawing appeared in place of the manor. On the watch face, Jesus was on the cross with the arms pointing to half past nine, the hanging forward head was of Clarice Starling.
"Please, forgive my insolence, Ms Starling, but am I right to understand you've just turned thirty three, the age of our Saviour?" Mason was almost ecstatic.
Starling remained still and impassive. Her mind wandered off to the first time she saw the drawing, to Catherine Baker Martin and Jame Gumb.
Strange, how things have turned out, she thought, had I known it then would I ever set my foot in the Baltimore hospital?
She remembered then the hurt she felt when all this years ago, even then, in Memphis Krendler wanted to wash his hands of her. Starling remembered the stinging shame she felt after when she realised that in her little lapse into a self-pity she had forgotten about Catherine Baker Martin and her inevitable fate to end up, as Dr Lecter put it, as a vest with tits on it.
Inevitable fate, unless I did something about it... And I could, thanks to Dr Lecter... Perhaps, this is a price I have to pay for silencing the damn lambs... Didn't he say, the blessed silence you'll have to earn again and again... the payment simply caught up with me... Quid pro quo... Goddamnit, I hope I have enough strength to pay up in style...
"Your poor copy does not do it justice, Mason." Dr Lecter said as he watched Starling's gaze wander off, once again calm sadness on her face. She was noticeably elsewhere, and he went down the marble halls and cobbled pavements of his memory palace to join her there.
Mason Verger was clearly disappointed with the reaction but the best was yet to come.
"True, quite true, Doctor, however, I am sure, you'll find my recreation to surpass even the original."
The large hardwood cross was then brought into the centre of the showring. Starling was lifted and placed atop, her arms stretched along the cross beam, her feet comfortably resting on the sloped plank at the bottom.
Jesus, how long he'd been planning it? Did he size me up when I came to interview him?
Carlo neatly arranged the nails and instruments for the job while Mogli aimed the air rifle at Starling's chest, Tommaso and Piero holding down her shoulders.
"All ready? Good, we'll start with the wrists,.." Mason said. "I must praise you, Doctor, on the accuracy of your sketch. From my experience, you've got to nail them through the wrists and use big wooden washers, otherwise they get loose and start flapping. We'll do without washes in our recreation, though. They'll spoil the appearance, the masterpiece. Anyway, as appealing as it is, Ms Starling won't get a chance to rot and get loose. Patience is not one of my virtues."
"Get on with it, Carlo." Mason's tongue snaked out and moved around the teeth in unrestrained agitation, welcoming long-awaited lip-smacking meal to his lipless mouth.
Starling looked on as Carlo picked up a large horseshoe nail and passed it to Cordell who found the location on the wrist and pushed the nail into the flesh. Carlo then took over, hammering on the nail until it met up with the hardwood underneath. Then Tommaso lifted Starling's arm away for Carlo to bore the hole through the mark the nail made on the wood beneath. The arm was then returned to its position on the cross plank and the nail driven fully through the wrist and into the pilot hole. A neat job.
You've got to admire the sumbitche's efficiency. Starling felt a new pain, the sharp piercing pain in her wrist, pushed aside all the other, then it changed into a dull nagging one radiating up her arm and into the shoulder.
She found if she thought of Catherine Baker Martin keening at the bottom of the well, if she recalled the pounding of her heart as she stood in the blackout, Jame Gumb cocking his revolver, she could endure the ripping pain in her body. Vacantly, she observed Carlo to drive a nail trough her one foot, then the other.
Boy, did it hurt, it took her breath away, just as well as she was now going breathless through the labyrinth of the late Mrs Lippman's house, securing room after room, searching for Jame Gumb, listening for him through Catherine's cries and that goddamn dog barking. Unaware, Starling was building her own memory palace, in desperation starting with the dungeons and the oubliettes. Unskilled, she compounded the strain on her heart, or, perhaps, it was exactly what she hoped for...
The worst was to come when the cross was upturned and her weight tore at the flesh around the nails. How much pain can human body endure? Apparently a lot, Clarice Starling discovered in a space of a few hours. And not to pass out and fucking stay out... what one needs to do around here to die? Then it came, the shock finally overwhelmed her entity and she felt her heart knock hard against her chest and stop as she fell into the blackness.
Escaped...
"Oh, no, you won't," Mason hissed as Cordell crouched over Starling and plunged a needle in her heart. "Get it going, Cordell, get it going. I am not done with her."
"I'll do my best, Mr Verger," Cordell said between giving mouth to mouth and pounding her chest. "Here she comes."
Starling's chest filled up with noise and air as her heart started and she took a few hurried breaths. Absently Starling opened her eyes, saw nothing but the bright light above, her mind still out. Her eyes closed, head rolled to the shoulder as, not allowed to die, her mind claimed its right to asleep.
"I'll get her hooked up now," Cordell inserted an IV needle with a butterfly into the back of each of Starling's hands and fixed the plasma bottles to the top of the cross.
Watching the needle mark on Starling's chest bob up and down as she slept, Dr Lecter was reflecting on his new experience. The Confusion. When he felt her heart stop, the world around him fell dull and silent, in an instant its colours desaturated, smells lost their sharpness, but worst of all, the air in his memory palace, in his private sanctuary, turned stale and heavy. He was struggling to breathe. He found himself in the world without brightness, without spark, without joy. All the thousand rooms, miles of corridors, all the wonderful artefacts he affectionately collected there to provide his comfort and reprieve looked now boring, tedious, useless.
The world being more interesting with you in it... he said to Starling once.
It disturbed Dr Lecter to find this concept being also true for his personal world, the world he believed to be in his total control and sole possession. In the eternity of her brief death he saw himself standing within the dusty walls of the empty palace, howling wind blowing the sand through its shattered windows. Like the traveller who stumbled across the ruins of long gone civilisation. A thousand years has passed in an instant.
Hannibal Lecter was unprepared for the intensity his mind held on to Starling. He was stunned, sharp ache pierced his upper arm, the remnants of the cracked bone when he held on to Mischa and failed. Before his eyes the holes were appearing in the floor of his marble sanctuary and the stench was rising up from the putrid oubliettes, clouding his mind, eroding his self-control. The confusion that enveloped him now was destructive as he began to question his choices within the direction of time. Who did he really want to occupy Starling's place – Mischa or Starling herself? Would the intensity of his childhood longing for his sister, the attachment he knew as a six years old boy, be enough to subdue the intensity of his attachment to Starling? He would need to give it more consideration.
"Lift her up," Mason said. "Let the Doctor enjoy the view for an hour and then put them both flat down for the night. We'll continue tomorrow. Mr Krendler might want to add a few touches of his own. We have a full set of farrier tools to suit any whimsy."
The elevating emotions inspired by the re-enactment left Mason drained. He wished he was already lying in the darken chamber, outside of time, slipping quietly into a dream, conjuring the evening's images, drinking the honey of his revenge. Something bothered him. There, during Starling's short venture over the edge, he observed it – the flame in Lecter's maroon eye died. For a moment, at least, Mason realised, Hannibal Lecter was caught out and lost his self-control.
The son of a bitch does care for the girl. It drove the life out of him to see her dead.
Mason chew on his tongue contemplating what to do with this new knowledge, how, if at all, should this affect his plans. If Starling died first would the Doctor then welcome his end? Or would it distress him more if he watched her consumed by the pigs? Which way would it be more unbearable for his foe? Mason was too tired to think now, he'll give it some thought tomorrow.
When Starling was up again, head hung forward, cross resting on the two massive bolts protruding through the wall, Dr Lecter could not help but admire the tableau that Mason Verger based on his design, he could not help but admire his own genius as the scene in front of him bore a remarkable resemblance to his drawing.
"Isn't it magnificent, Doctor? Well worth the effort, don't you think?" Mason said before Cordell put him into the van.
to be continued...
Thank you for your time. As ever I'd appreciate your reviews.
CE