Chapter Seven.
It had been three days nearly to the hour before Dr Lecter heard movement up at the orderly post and although he did not look up from his sketching, his eyes narrowed slightly and he concentrated his hearing to pick up the far off voices. Barneys higher tones reached him easily but his words were still incomprehensible murmurs to the doctor. He waited.
Footsteps now, not many, two people perhaps? Coming closer, slowly, and then a smell he recognized. The smell of cooling wires after conducting a great deal of electrical power, the smell of suppressed rage mingled with this cool, calm scent with sharp undertones of power. Gretchen was returning. He still did not raise his head from the concentrated position above his paper but his eyes widened again to normal and he glanced up from beneath his lashes at the barred vantage point his cell afforded him.
They had stopped now. He was sure it was only Gretchen, Barney and another orderly by the name of Grant who always carried the bitter scent of garlic around with him, seeping from his overlarge pores no doubt.. Barney dismissed the garlic drenched orderly and muttered something to Gretchen, who replied with a snort of cynical anger then muttered something back in hushed, almost hissed tones.
Ah.
So she had been informed of certain facts.
Dr Lecter wondered how Chilton had presented what little he knew to the young woman. However it had been done, he had no doubt it painted him in a less than positive light. How that man loved to interfere. No matter, though. If Chilton was determined to try and break him with this damaged young woman, Dr Lecter was sure he could find a way of retaliating. He would have to think about it though, and for that he had all the time in the world.
She was in front of the cell now- Barney wasn't even holding her he noted. How different to how he was handled outside his cell. Although, he mused, he had proved himself to be rather volatile, and craftily so. He smiled slightly. Barney looked over to him.
"Doctor?" He sounded weary. Perhaps he had been arguing with Dr Chilton, the doctor thought. He was quite indignant of the current set up.
"Yes, Barney?" Still not looking up.
"Can you sit tight while I pass through your cellmate here? If I have to get Grant back down here with the restraints and mace, you know I will, but I'd like to save everyone the bother if possible."
"But of course" He drawled lazily, still not looking up at the two.
"But look!" Gretchens voice now, with purpose and intent sounded quite different to her usual abstract tones. "That cells totally empty. Why can't I just stay in there? I won't be any extra bother, I promise I won't."
"You've just heard me argue that point quite unsuccessfully. It's just how life is at the moment, okay? You'll just have to deal with it." He muttered to her, as if wishing Dr Lecter hadn't heard her complaints. Perhaps that is what he was saying to her in muted tones earlier.
Once inside the cell and under lock again, Gretchen faded back into the expressionless, emotionless shadow she had posed as since her arrival. That wouldn't do any more, he thought, she knows too much now. Well, too much misinformed information anyway. A time for action has come.
"So what have they told you then, little girl?"
"Don't patronize me, please." She said tonelessly, a small waver in her voice.
He moved closer. An offensive strategy had worked before.
"I asked you a question. Let us not repeat this game again. It bores me."
She twitched her head irritably, but her fear of him was still to great to warrant a reply. Just push her a little further, he thought. Anger loosens the tongues of the most stoic men, or women in this case.
"What did they tell you? Indulge me, dearest. I simply wish to know how misinformed you have become."
A short derisive laugh that ended in a involuntary gasp of anger and misery. Her mouth clenched and blanched at the slip of strength.
"Please don't let your manners slip, Gretchen. It doesn't become you. All I ask is an answer." He let his voice drop, almost seductively.
She turned to him then, her face an easel to her pain, her anger, her frustration.
"I don't believe you…I really don't." She hissed. "Was my mother not enough? Is your twisted existence not saited by her death? Am I next then? Well good. I welcome it."
"Dramatic, aren't we?" His voice was amused and he made little effort to hide it. Her cheeks colored some more. "And please don't leave reality for the sopping plains of self pity. It shall be most tedious for all involved. You welcome death no more than one of my victims mother would welcome me for tea and biscuits."
Her eyebrows rose at his flippant words.
"You joke about murder as if it is some amusing playground rhyme."
"Oh come now, if nothing else have a sense of humor. I can see one lurking somewhere." He brushed his fingertips over her forehead and she recoiled, a hand shooting up to protect herself in a flash.
He laughed and pushed his thumb against her nose teasingly.
"Get the hell away from me!" She cried trying to rise but he blocked her movement with a quick shove on her shoulder. She landed back on her backside rather harder than expected and winced. Her expression was thunder.
"Do you believe that I harmed your mother then?"
"I know." She muttered darkly. "You treated her. She went to you for help. Help!" Her voice was shaking and she took a deep breath to still it. " But you didn't help her, you didn't and that's why she's dead. That's why she kicked that chair from under her. She wanted help and you didn't…you should have…it's you, all you aftph-" A cool hand clamped over her mouth and its mate pushed on the back of her head, muffling all further speech. She was reaching hysteria. He put his face very close to hers and she struggled like a wild dog, teeth trying to catch the taut skin of his palm.
"Listen to me now, child- and if you bite me I shall make you very sorry-" He hissed in her ear, hands compressing her skull until she calmed. "You're very quick to pin your mother unfortunate demise on me. Why is that, Gretchen? Deep down I think you know who killed her, who made her take that last leap. Do you ever think, late at night, that maybe, just maybe if you had been a better daughter, if you had been stronger, older, smarter that she wouldn't have taken her life? Do you ever think that it's your faults that reduced her to that cold, swinging thing in the back bedroom?"
His voice was getting harsher with every word and the young woman was still now, great gasps of pain and misery blowing against his palm, those great green eyes, the eyes of her mother's demon were closed but tears were dripping off her sharp chin and onto her shoulders and breasts.
He pushed his warm lips closer still, so he could feel the tender flesh of her ear against them.
"Then you would be wrong, Gretchen Archer. You were the last reason your mother had to keep living in this world. And I know who was the reason she left it. Who it was that made her life so bearable that she chose to leave her beloved daughter to face the world alone."
Suddenly Gretchen stiffened and issued a great racking cough that seemed to grate past her throat. Then another and another. Dr Lecter took his hands from her face in alarm and she bent over the white knees of her pajamas, body wracking with these great rasping coughs and gasping breaths between. As suddenly as it started, the coughing fit stopped but the woman stayed bent over her knees, gasping painful in, very slowly, something seeming to grate on her larynx.
Dr Lecter felt a tickle on his palm, the one that had been covering her mouth and looked down to see it spattered with droplets of blood and a good amount at that. On her knees too; flecks of crimson blood.
She sat back, oblivious to the blood, concentrating only on the pain in her chest.
"Who?" Her speech seemed labored but the raw emotion behind it could not be masked by any amount of pain or restriction.
He watched her silently, rubbing his hands together into a red, smeary mess without seeming to notice. A smell crease appeared between his eyebrows.
"Who!" She reached for him, found a handful of his shirt and held on tightly, although her hand was shaking.
Did he tell her outright? As a one word answer, divulge the culprits name? Or explain the circumstances surrounding the demise of one Emily Archer, keeping the actual identity of her worthless father from her until the conclusion? Letting her see the whole grisly picture at once, understanding her fathers single minded ambition and see its casualties. The latter one seemed the best approach..best hit her with the full dose of his knowledge and later she would tell him what he wished to know. About Emily Archers last minutes both living and in death. Only this girl held that.
Looking down at his red, red hands he told her all of what he had recalled earlier in a calm, constant voice. As each fact fell into place and the tale was, at least partially, told the colour ran out of Gretchens face like rain from a window pane. But it was not shock. Oh no. It was something more powerful, more destructive and wholly more satisfying to Dr Lecter. Unbridled fury. If James Warwick was to meet the end he deserved, then it would be at the hands of his abused daughter.
Gretchen sat silent for many minutes after hearing of her mothers reason for therapy, of her abuse at the hands of the man she called father. Finally she opened her mouth, brow furrowing, then shut it again. She tried again.
"So..she didn't want me? My mother. I'm a rape child. No wonder she shied from me for so long. I felt her…her disgust when she was around me. It was always so repressed I could kid myself it was just my imagination but…but…"
She made a vague gesture of confused despair in the air and fell silent, tears still sliding down her pale face.
"She wished to hold only love in her heart for you. She wished so hard but she never could, not totally. But that isn't your fault or her fault. Its circumstance. All of life is just circumstance. We can only be 'in control of our lives', as so many magazines encourage, if we are able to create circumstances that benefit us in the moment we live in."
She seemed to ponder his words. "I do not completely understand, but I can see the concept. The only circumstance I wish to bring about right this moment is the untimely and inexplicably painful death of my father-no, I won't call him my father. A father is everything he is not to me."
Standing and moving to the sink, Dr Lecter let the tap run over his red hands and watched Gretchens blood swirl and gurgle down the drain as he seen in so many showers after a successful and satisfying kill. It filled him with the same reckless passion that had ruled him at his 'heats'- times where killing was never far from his mind and opportunity was all powerful.
"One day, maybe you can bring that about. But you must always wait until you can get away with it. No victory is won if the avenger is caught. But one day, Gretchen. Keep that and work on it. One day." He sounded as if he was drifting away and indeed his mind was providing him with vivid flashed of his victims, intoxicating him, dragging him into the whimsical, flighty mood of his free days.
He turned to the girl, an almost maniacal glint in his dark eyes.
"How?" He whispered, low and husky.
She turned looking confused, lost in thought but brought half way back to reality by his question and not liking it.
He dropped back down next to her, but closer so he could smell the astringent soap in her hair from her shower and see the pores on her nose. His heat was rising and now he was nearly beyond being able or willing to stop it.
"How will you kill him? How do you picture him dying?" He was slightly breathless and pushed closer, fencing her further into her corner and he could smell the tang of her fear which only pushed his heat up higher, like a shark smelling blood.
"Shootings functional of course but you don't really get your hands dirty. Stabbing, cutting, gutting is so much better- the smell of blood fills a room so fast and you can see the last glimmer of life in a persons eye fade, fade, fade, fade and its gone. Just like a flame…like a flame falling down the deepest, darkest well.."
"Stop it! What's wrong with you, you.." Real, raw fear now.
He laughed, low and dangerous.
"With me? Nothing, my dear. I simply bestow myself with the power to decide who has purged this world long enough with their pathetic destruction and banality. Is that wrong? Is it bad?"
"I..well, yes but.."
"Have you smelt fresh blood? It's so exquisitely bitter it has the slightest tang of sweetness. The feel of it- so warm and willing as it pours from the artery. The feeling of ridding the world of another deserter..another pathetic excuse of humanity."
"Deserter?" She whispered, confused but on some deeper level knowing she may have stumbled on a key piece of his mentality.
"Yes, there's always another, round the corner, down the street, on my couch whining to my oh-so sympathetic ear…yes, so many, so little time as they say?"
He laughed in his throat and pushed his nose against her cheek, slick with tears and fear-sweat and closed his teeth teasingly on her jaw, clamped just enough to worry.
"I can smell your blood lust. It's quite exquisite." He hissed into her ear, pulling her head close against his face, drawing a long pull of her scent from her trembling throat, her delicate pulse flickering against his lips like a butterfly fighting to free itself from its chrysalis. Should he free it? Free her from this pain? No, not yet- she had her task now and he was not yet through with her.
He rose then, and moved to his table where he resumed reading, his heat dissipating as water on a flat top cooker.