| "Jack?
Will." "Will! How was New Years?" A pause. "Jack, it's Lecter." "What?" "The Chesapeke Ripper. It's Lecter." "Oh, God." "I need to confront him, I need to do this in my own way." "Will, no...." "If I don't call in an hour, come over with the troops." "Will, don't do this. Wait for backup." "Bye, Jack." "Will! WILL!" click. ~ There's something about this thing that scares me Coming round, I tried to take a deep gulp of air and found my throat blocked. It felt as if my lungs were filled with fire and in a moment my heart would explode. Hands suddenly were on me, pushing me back. The last hands I could remember were Lecter's, his strong grip once loving turned deadly in the space of a heartbeat. I recall trying to fight, but I couldn't have put up much of a struggle, as weak as I was. After that, I slept for a while. They told me later I'd been asleep for three weeks, I had no knowledge of the passage of time. Later, they told me Lecter had stabbed me, sliced into me, presumably with the intention of making me his next meal. I didn't believe them. They told me that I'd died on Lecter's office carpet. Jack, apparently, had brought in the cavalry and was the first to fine me. He wasn't sleeping well anymore. I couldn't remember anything more than Lecter's hands on my shoulders. Not for a long time. I'd been in a coma, the doctor informed me. But even when I came out of it, I lay at the mercy of machines, tubes and wires, in an odd state of dulled awareness. When the nurses and doctors disturbed me I briefly knew the pain the body was in, but not for long. Molly came to see me but she didn't bring Josh. She sat and held my hand for a long time, told me about her family and the next-door neighbour's dog. She didn't mention Lecter and I couldn't understand why. Jack visited too, with Alan Bloom. Jack cried, kept telling me that he was sorry, that he shouldn't have let me go there alone. I recalled that he didn't have any choice but I wasn't able to work out how to process those thoughts and turn them into words, so I stayed silent. When Jack left, Alan sat beside me, the first time he'd ever been alone with me, and just watched me. After a while, I opened my eyes and watched him back. I seemed to know that he was thinking about Lecter and me. The next time he visited, he told me about Lecter. My would-be murderer was being cared for in the same hospital, in a room a couple of doors down from mine. He was under such close FBI custody that there were two agents in the theatre with him when the doctors had operated to remove the bullets and sew up the wound in his abdomen. For a time, Alan's words meant very little. Just over a month after I'd been admitted in a flurry of activity and a cacophony of sirens and shouting I was moved from Intensive Care to a private room. It was a relief to be off the machines, to not have so many tubes filling and emptying my body with whatever substances had been required to keep me alive. But as they wheeled me along the corridor, helpless on my back on the bed, I happened to peer into the rooms we passed and in one I saw Lecter. He was sitting up in his bed, handcuffed, to the railings, but still he managed to raise one hand slightly and wave at me. Suddenly I remembered everything. Everything they'd told me had been true. The man I'd trusted above everyone else had stabbed me in the gut with letter opener and would have finished the job by slitting my throat or cutting out my heart if his other victims were anything to go by. What was worse was that I'd known. I'd finally realised that it was him I was after but I'd not believed my own instinct. I'd called Jack to tell him from a phone booth on the corner of Lecter's street! They almost wheeled me right back into the ICU when I started to scream. For a few terrifying hours it was like being back in the psychiatric wing at Bethesda. I woke with the same awful taste in my mouth I remembered from back then and knew they'd given me a shot of something. They'd restrained me, cuffing me to the railings of bed as I'd seen they'd done to Lecter. Both of us trapped there, held against our will because of what had happened between us. For a while there was nothing that I wanted more than to get to the man who'd put me in the hospital and rest at his side as I'd done so often in the past. Finally, blessedly, Alan had come to see me. He'd unfastened the restraints and told me that Lecter was being moved to a high security hospital to recover and await trial. I was in so much pain by then I had to struggle to hear his words over the terrible, nauseating pounding in my head and the streaking, throbbing pain in my side. After he'd spoken to me he handed me a button and told me to press it if I was in pain. Almost immediately I felt the relief as the morphine flooded into my system and with my hand held in his, I went to sleep. ~ There's something about this thing that dares me The trial had already been going on for two weeks when Jack told me I was to testify. I told him that they had everything they needed, all the evidence they could ever want. Lecter's defence lawyers hadn't entered a plea of insanity, the prosecution was convinced he was insane and wanted to prove it. I could do that, apparently. I told Jack that I'd testify to what happened that night and to our professional conversations that had gone before. I told him I wouldn't speak of my friendship with Lecter and if either side brought it up I would deny it. I wasn't able to walk when the day of my court appearance came around. Jack wheeled me into the court room and would have left me in the chair, but I wanted to sit up in the witness box, so he helped me up. The judge looked at me kindly and told me that at any time if I needed a break he would call a recess. I thanked him, I assured him I would be all right. I never imagined it would be as hard as it turned out to be. Over four hours I requested three breaks. Throughout the proceedings, Lecter stood in the dock and watched me steadily, that maroon gaze I used to love so much never wavering. Now and again, he smiled at me. The prosecution lawyer went right back, asked me about my first meeting with Lecter, my initial impressions. He asked me about the assistance he'd given in helping the FBI track down Garret Hobbs, a serial killer I'd shot dead the previous year. When he asked me whether I'd eaten a meal cooked by Lecter, I had to stop. Jack wheeled me into the rest room and I threw up. When we started again, the questioning turned mercifully to the crime scenes themselves, to my observations, and I was able to separate those scenes from Lecter himself. The two other breaks came during the defence's cross-examination. Lecter's lawyers had come at an astronomical fee. Unable to dispute the overwhelming evidence, they used the trial to attempt to shame and humiliate the prosecution witnesses. They asked me when I'd realised that Lecter was the man I was hunting, how I'd accused him, what my approach had been. They questioned my reasons for going there that night. They accused me of leaping to conclusions, of being obsessed with Lecter like so many others had quickly become. But not once did they mention our relationship and I realised that they didn't know about it. I had to ask for a second recess then, for I was as close to breaking down as I'd been during the whole ordeal. The judge adjourned the court for the day and Jack took me back to his place instead of to the hospital. Bella, his wife, made me a wonderful meal and afterwards I curled up on their spare bed and sobbed myself to sleep like a child. On the second day they called into question the extent of my injuries and forced the prosecution to show the court photographs taken the night Lecter attacked me. I hadn't seen them before. The first was of me lying on my side on the floor of Lecter's office, a pool of blood under my left hip. The second was taken when the paramedics had turned me over and were trying to restart my heart. The wound Lecter had opened up was a mess of blood and guts. I knew then how lucky I was to be alive. Or not, depending on how you looked at it. The others were taken by FBI agents at the hospital. Forensic photographs taken specifically as evidence to be used in court. I asked for a break and for the second time in two days I was sick in the rest room at the Baltimore Court of Justice. I'd never seen my own intestines before and never wanted to again. At one point I begged Jack to get me out of there and I think he had a word with the judge because when I returned to the witness stand, the only other question came from the prosecutor who asked me, "Do you remember what Lecter said to you when you were lying on his floor bleeding?" I nodded and forcing myself to look straight at my murderer, I answered, "He said, 'I think I'll eat your heart.'" I didn't tell them that he'd already broken it. ~ There's something about this thing that haunts me This morning the FBI post room forwarded a letter to our Florida home. It was from Lecter and there was only one line, written in his perfect handwriting in the centre of a page of soft paper. It read, 'Do you dream much, Will?' A part of me wanted to screw the letter up and throw it away, hurl it into the ocean or burn it in the yard. I did none of these things, instead I folded it back into the envelope and put it in the drawer next to my side of the bed. I don't dream. I have nightmares. Incredible nightmares that I wake from covered in sweat with tears in my eyes. That's when I sleep at all. Even after I've walked away from everything I'd known, everything I'd been, it still won't let me go. Molly gave up her life too and came with me, let me drag her south until finally she dug her heels in and we found this small slice of stolen paradise. Yet still I hear his voice in my head, his thoughts mingled with mine. Knowing Hobbs like this put me in a mental hospital, I don't want to go back. And somehow I know I won't. Hobbs was just ideas, fantasies, an insane psyche I slipped too far inside of and couldn't escape even after he was dead. Lecter is a real memory. I don't only know his mind, I know his body, his touch. I know his heart and I loved him desperately. The madness won't let go of me because I won't let it. ~ I'm fooling myself thinking I have it under control. Facing Lecter again is the hardest thing I've ever done and now... now I know he was never out of my head, just hidden in the darkness I'd buried deep in the past. I was scared to death but not of him, of myself, of my own reaction. Of this. Even through the glass he can hurt people, no one seems to understand that. His words, his voice, his eyes all beckon to me. Turning to him is to turn to a forbidden place. He's a dark luxury I can't afford to crave. I lied to Jack, the man who brought me back to where I least want to be but at the same time need to be. I told him I was okay, that most of what Lecter had said was probably bullshit. But I can't help but dwell on it. His words to me, his offer of help when he was the one to inflict the wounds, was so seductive. I feel like I'm drowning and I'm letting myself go under. Why didn't I go home? Why did I want to go into the gym even after Chiltern told me I was welcome to wait until Lecter was firmly back in his cell, behind the glass? Where did this courage - the same courage and therefore the same stupidity that took me to his townhouse alone that night - come from? This thing takes hold of me and once I have a killer in my mind I can't let go until he's caught or dead. Lecter is a means to an end as far as Jack's concerned. The guilt at bringing me back, at sending me to him, nips at him from time to time but he sleeps better at nights now. He thinks I've healed. Alan called, begged me to drop it and go home, begged me not to see Lecter again. I told him I had to, told him I was trying to save lives and he almost spat down the line. "That's bullshit, Will, and you know it!" He's right. He knows me as well as anyone ever wants to. Only Hannibal knows me better and that's part of the problem. Alan's worried about me, perhaps frightened for me. I love him for that, always have done. He was the only one who knew about Lecter and me, still is. The night I told him, over beers in our favourite late-night bar, he smiled at me and said, "just be careful." Lecter tried to kill Molly and Josh, getting our address from the girl who covers for Alan's secretary on Saturdays and giving it to the 'Tooth Fairy'. Alan fired her. Jack thought Lecter was after me, he was wrong. Alan called me again, but all he had to say was, "Decide between them, then walk away." I knew what he meant without asking. I love my wife and son. Sometimes I love them so much it hurts. To have them threatened like that shook me. But it didn�t stop me from seeing him again. And this time I challenged him. I don�t know if I imagined his hesitation then. Was his momentary expression of sorrow just my mind playing tricks? Moreover my heart wishing it to be there? Or was he as seduced by the idea of my death as I was by his existence? Why do I still need him after so long, after everything he�s done to me? ~ After finding Dolarhyde, or what was left of him, I wanted to see Lecter one final time. But I couldn�t find a reason. I wanted to tell him everything that was in my heart, everything my soul cried out for, trapped in the prison of what was right, what was expected. I couldn�t say those things face to face. I decided to write, to put everything in a letter to him. I�d never have to see him again, he would never be released. What harm could it do to expose myself to him completely? I didn�t get the time to write it. ~ There's something about this thing that taunts me You don't think, you just act. And later on, you wake in a hospital bed in the sterile white room of an Intensive Care Unit and you know you're back where you began. Through the haze of pain and drugs, I might have actually thought, �oh no, not again.� As I lie recovering from Dolarhyde�s bullets and shutting out the rest of the world, my floating mind draws up a shrewd comparison between Lecter�s chains and glass, and my tubes and bandages. Like the last time, we're both prisoners. Apparently I told Alan this in one of my more talkative moments, but I don�t remember. I'm surprised because I don't want to speak to anyone. Whenever someone sits by my bedside and takes my hand, I pull it away. Sometimes it takes immense concentration to do so, sometimes it takes me hours to focus my energy, to send the right signal the incredible distance from my brain to my wrist. But I usually manage it. I woke from a coma within a couple of days. Within two weeks I'm out of Intensive Care. When they insist on having a tube up your ass and one up your dick, it motivates like nothing else. I wanted out of there. Molly went to stay with her parents, taking Josh. Alan wants me to go stay with him when the doctors finally release me, but I just want to be alone. ~ A couple of weeks after leaving the hospital, I receive a letter sent to my Florida address. I know it's from Lecter before I open it. �My dearest Will, We are even, wouldn�t you agree? I didn�t mean for our Red Dragon to find you, as you know. A old fashioned stand off is so quaint, wouldn�t you agree? I imagine it sometimes as I lie staring at four stone walls and seeing so much, seeing your blood, feeling it on my hands. My way was more intimate, don�t you think? I know how you must feel now, Will. I know the pain that�s tearing you apart, the fears shattering you piece by piece. You�re stronger than that. It�ll scare you, haunt you, dare you, taunt you, please don�t let it destroy you. You�ll always be a part of me, as I know I�ll always be a part of you. Always yours, Hannibal.� Like I said, you don�t think. When I finally do, everything goes dark for a very long time. |