1 & 3 from ‘Poison’, Alice Cooper
2 from ‘Someone Always Hates Someone’, by Mike & the Mechanics

Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, plus characters copyright Thomas Harris
POSION

by elfin


PART ONE


‘Last night I shook hands with the devil in a dream that I can never lose’ (2)



Jack Crawford steeled himself for what would greet him when he stepped into the beach house. 

He hadn’t seen or spoken to Will in five years and had no idea where the man was living now.  There had been no answer to his calls and now he was here he knew there was no longer anyone living in the secluded beach house. 

Five years since Jack had come here and all but blackmailed Will into returning with him to Atlanta to investigate the Tooth Fairy case.

Five years since Will had wound up in the hospital again; endured seventeen hours of life-saving surgery to remove five bullets from his body and repair the damage they’d left in their wake.

Will’s wife, Molly, had left him, taking their son with her, as he’d lain in the coma.  Safer that way, she’d said.  Hannibal Lecter had said that too.

Despite that, despite knowing Will was alone, Crawford had stayed away. 

He’d blamed himself for Dolarhyde attacking Will, for the horrifying stand-off that the man he’d once considered his best friend had been forced to endure to protect his family.

He still blamed himself.  He’d convinced himself that Will wouldn’t ever want to see him again.

But two days ago, Lecter had escaped from Tennessee.  He was gone, vanished yet again from under the noses of the FBI.  And Crawford was terrified that he’d go after the man who caught him.


For months after he’d found Will at Lecter’s townhouse that terrible night, Jack had spent night after night caught in nightmares.  The same dream, again and again.


He’s at a dinner party in a grand dining room.  He sits opposite his lovely wife. 

The general chatter around the table is polite and quiet.  One lady, dressed in pink, laughs a little too loudly and is quickly silenced by her scowling husband. 

The door opens.  Lecter enters wearing an immaculate suit and carrying a large china platter.  He leans over Jack’s shoulder and lifts the lid.  The scent is sickening.  Rich meat, dark and pink. 

Crawford looks up and Lecter smiles at him.

“Will you have some Will?” he asks.  

And Jack wakes up screaming.


It took a long while for the nightmare to fade and for it to become easier to sleep, easier to breathe, easier to live.  Will had moved to Florida with his wife and son.  Jack Crawford had allowed Hannibal Lecter to become a memory, for a little while at least.


He’d meant to come sooner.  He’d tried to call, left countless messages with the answer machine here in the house, with Will’s cell phone messaging service.  Finally he’d called Molly who had no idea where her estranged husband was.  Even if she did, she’d assured him in no uncertain terms, she wouldn’t tell Jack.


The secluded beach house lay just on the edge of the small town of Marathon.  Crawford hadn’t known where else to start.

The garden was overgrown now.  The skeletons of three small wooden boats were buried in the reeds.  The boardwalk was rotted through.

The outer and inner doors swung free on rusted hinges.  The creaking of old wood and the screech of metal on metal were the only sounds save for the brushing of the waves onto the shore. 

Crawford pushed open the doors and stepped cautiously into the house.  There was no one here.  There had been no one here for many years, he suspected.

He’d known in his heart that Will wouldn’t be here.  He’d come back to find answers to questions he didn’t have the courage to ask.  He’d come back searching for a conclusion to a tragedy he still felt responsible for.

He was terrified of the possibility that his conclusion would be Will’s cold corpse.

The mirror in the hall was smashed.  This, he knew, was how Will had known that the Tooth Fairy was in his house that awful night.  He’d seen the mirror, heard the telephone and before Jack had spoken a word to the answer machine that had picked up his call, Will had known.  He’d taken two kitchen knives and headed upstairs where he’d found his son in the grasp of Dolarhyde, a blade at the young boy’s throat.

Crawford took the stairs one at a time, trying to imagine what it must have been like.  To know.  To walk towards something that scared the life out of you.  To understand that you probably wouldn’t live through the next ten minutes but as long as he didn’t either, that was okay.  As long as your family survived, it would be all right.

Stopping at the top of the stairs, Crawford listened for a long time.  The house wasn’t just quiet, it was dead.  There was nothing here anymore; no soul, no spirit.  Only the echoes of love and laughter from happier times long since forgotten.

He took one step forward.  Then another.  The second door on the left was Josh’s bedroom.  It was where Will had discovered Dolarhyde with his son. 

Crawford stood in the doorway and looked around the child’s room.  The clothes and toys were gone.  Molly – Will’s wife – had packed and left for Atlanta while Will had still been unconscious in Miami’s Mercy Hospital.  There was very little left to indicate what had happened here.

But Crawford had the gift of knowing.  He’d read the police report and months later he’d listened to a tape of Will talking in a dead voice about the sequence of events that night.

Dolarhyde had threatened to slice open Josh’s throat, to murder Molly while Will watched and then to finally take his revenge on Will himself.  Crawford had known of too many people like Dolarhyde, he cursed his own imagination – fired by knowledge – when it conjured up all the ways Dolarhyde might have kept Will alive for hours, days.  Torturing, hurting, raping.

Shaking those black thoughts, Crawford looked again at the reality of the empty room.  Once Josh had been away from Dolarhyde, Will had fought the intruder.  He’d been cut on the cheek, sliced open by Dolarhyde’s knife, but he had managed to stab the madman in the thigh before hurrying Josh into the master bedroom and locking them both inside.

Backing out of the room, Crawford turned toward the bedroom at the end of the corridor.  What was left of the slatted door hung from abused hinges.  He looked down and saw that the carpet ahead of him was now dark with damp.  But Dolarhyde’s blood still marked the place where he’d fallen.  Will had shot him three times, Molly had shot him twice.  One of the bullets had pierced his skull and driven into his brain.  Still, he had not died instantly.

Treading carefully, Crawford stepped over the dark, almost black, stains into the bedroom beyond.

The blood on the carpet in here was Will’s.  He and Dolarhyde had stood two yards from one another, separated only by the flimsy bedroom door, and fired repeatedly through the splintering wood, bullets hitting their marks one after the other after the other.

No one knew who had dropped first.  Dolarhyde, Crawford suspected.  Will wouldn’t have given up, wouldn’t have allowed himself to stop until he was sure Molly and Josh were safe; despite the pain, despite his lung collapsing, his stomach and liver bleeding into the rest of his body.

Turning, trembling, Crawford dropped to sit on the unmade bed.  The wardrobe had been raided; Will’s clothes still hanging there, Molly’s gone.  He looked around, noting that everything that had made this her room too was gone.

She’d left in a hurry, no doubt unable to face the evidence of what had happened in her family home, of the shattering of her peaceful life.  All because he – Crawford – couldn’t leave Will to spend the rest of his days recovering from the hurt that Lecter had already caused him two years before.  He’d had to get him involved because desperate times caused for desperate measures and he couldn’t have been more desperate.

The Tooth Fairy had been about to kill a third family.  What else could he have done?  Who else could do what Will could do?  But in saving the lives of strangers, he’d put in danger the life and sanity of a friend. 

Rubbing his face with his hands, Crawford looked around at the devastated room.  He glanced at the window and something caught his eye.  A book – square, thick and bound with slim leather straps – was sitting on the windowsill.  Unlike everything else in the room, it wasn’t covered in a layer of dust.

Standing, crossing the room, Crawford lifted the top cover and read the scrawled writing on the top page.



Molly, if you ever come back and find this, I know it’ll upset you.  But I need you to understand this, I need you to know after all this time what the world never knew.  Give my love to Josh, when you took him from me you took a part of me.  After reading this, you’ll know that there isn’t much of me left.  What there is, I’m taking away with me. Don’t ever try to find me, don’t let Jack try either.  Will


Frowning, heart racing, Jack picked up the volume with only a moment’s hesitation and sat back down on the bed.  He settled the heavy pages on his knees and dropped open the cover and the first page open to start to read.



2/3/1979

This killer of young girls is driving me slowly insane.  I can’t do this alone but I don’t know where to turn.  Jack thinks I’m the only one who can find this guy, who can get inside his head.  He believes the crap Alan’s been feeding everyone who’ll listen about this gift he thinks I have.  I know full well what I can do and it’s no gift.  More like a curse.

Alan talks out of his butt at the best of times, love him as I do.  He doesn’t want me doing this and his reason for wanting me off the case is that I’m too good.  Go figure.  I have no idea what he thinks Crawford’s going to say but I know what he isn’t.

Whatever.  I need some help on this one.  There’s a forensic psychologist in Baltimore.  Dr. Hannibal Lecter.  He comes very highly recommended, even Alan grudgingly admitted that he was, and I quote, ‘quite good’.  Praise indeed coming from Alan.

I have an appointment in the morning at his consulting room in his townhouse.  I have to do something because this guy isn’t going to stop and I know they’re going to find another little girl sooner rather than later.  I don’t want any more blood on my hands.



2/15/1979

Oh God.  We found him.  Dr Lecter was right.  His name is Jacob Garrett Hobbs.  He’s a construction worker by trade.  I showed the doctor the metal shaving we found on the third victim.  He suggested our guy was a plumber or some sort of construction worker.  It took us two straight days and nights but we found something and it nailed him.

I took a cop and we went over to his place.  But he’d already killed his wife and when I got into the apartment he was cutting up his own daughter.  I shot him, over and over, but he wouldn’t die he just kept cutting.

I don’t know if I’ll ever sleep again



2/21/1979

Surprise, surprise.  Since that afternoon at Hobbs’ apartment, seeing his wife, seeing his daughter, I’ve had an hour’s sleep a night and I always wake up screaming. 

I’m scaring Molly.

I begged Alan to take me as a patient but he refused.  He, in turn, begged me to go to a hospital.  He didn’t say it in so many words, but he thinks I should have myself committed.  There’s something to be said for the idea.  It’ll be quiet at least.  I won’t have to think.  Won’t have to pretend I’m interested in anything any more.

I won’t have to listen to the voices in my own head.


Of course Jack had known that Will had had himself committed to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in the winter of ‘79.  The man had withdrawn into himself.  By the time he’d left home temporarily Molly had confessed to Jack that she was relieved he’d taken Alan Bloom’s advice.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that the next date in his journal was after he checked out of the psychiatric wing.



6/28/1979

To say I’m back would be a lie.

I’ve spent four months with no one but myself for company and I don’t like who I am.  Molly came to see me but she didn’t bring Josh.  She didn’t want to scare him she said and I don’t blame her.  I didn’t really want him to see me like that.

Did it help, sitting on a bed or on a windowsill, hours on end, locked deep inside my own mind?   Working through the labyrinth of images and phrases, tripping over memories and side-stepping nightmares.

I have no idea who I am.  Am I Hobbs?  Did I shave the metal from water pipes that I later used to make marks in the skin of my unfortunate students?  Did I rape those girls, take them when they most trusted me?  Some of them fantasised about me… Hobbs.  Not me.  Not me.

Not me.

Who am I?

Dr Lecter came to see me in the hospital.  He’d been away but on his return he’d been told about me.  I think Alan phoned him.  I think Alan was worried because he’d told me to go to the hospital and he thought it had gone too far.  I think Alan was worried he would lose me forever, that I’d never come out.

So he called Dr Lecter who came to see me.  He watched me for a long time, not saying a word.  And then he reached for me, grasped my shoulders until it hurt too much for me to ignore and said, ‘this isn’t you, Will.  You’re not in there, you’re out here.  Come out now, let me help you.’

He’s thrown me a lifeline.

I’ve grabbed at it like a drowning man.  I’m pathetic.  I’m not worth his time.



7/2/1979

Dr Lecter called.  I told him I wasn’t worth it.  He told me that was nonsense.  I couldn’t remember anyone actually using that word before.

I told him I couldn’t afford his fees.  He told me not to worry myself about money. 

He told me he would look upon me as a professional challenge.  I laughed.

I haven’t laughed in too many months.  He asked me to drop by tomorrow.  I promised.  Maybe I’ll keep that promise.



7/9/1979

Molly misses me, I think.  Would I feel less guilty if I knew for certain that she didn’t?

In the last week I’ve barely been home.  I didn’t know.  I had no idea.  How could I have known what he was, what he would be for me? 

The first evening I went to see Hannibal we sat in his consulting room for a couple of minutes, him looking at me over steepled fingers, me looking anywhere and everywhere but at him.  Then he stood up and smiled and motioned for me to follow him.  We went through into the lounge.  He poured me what even I know was a very expensive whiskey and we sat on the high-backed leather couch.

We didn’t talk about me.  We talked about Baltimore, about the symphony orchestra he’s a patron of.  He asked me about Molly and Josh but I found I didn’t want to talk about them.  He told me I didn’t have to talk about myself until I was ready, but that he’d like to try very shallow hypnosis to see if he could take the raw pain from the recent memories.

I went back to work the next day and Jack offered me a lecture, once a week, on the final year forensics stream. He’s worried about me, I can tell.  But there’s nothing I can do to reassure him at the moment.

It was late when I finally plucked up the courage to return to Hannibal’s townhouse but he didn’t seem to mind.  He hypnotised me - took me under slowly.  I didn’t feel anything but a slight skew in my perception.  I was able to look at things from an outsider’s point of view and when he brought me out of it everything was just a little bit easier somehow.

We sat in the lounge again and drank whiskey.  This time I did talk to him.  I started and I couldn’t stop.  He sat and listened to me for hours.  Hobbs, the academy, that thing Alan calls my gift; I told Hannibal everything.  No one had ever had so much of me and I know now no one ever will.

It’s terrifying but at the same time it’s sheer exhilaration.  I caught a taxi back that night.  But not the next. 

I had no reason for going back, but I went anyway.  The tension was palpable between us.  I guess we both knew what was going to happen.  We silently teased one another over dinner, which he cooked, and over whiskey, which he poured. 

I’ve never felt as relaxed as I feel in his company, as safe as I feel just sitting with him on that leather sofa.  When we first kissed we shared a mouthful of whiskey.  The taste of him under the liquor, the slow play of his tongue over mine, in my mouth.

.
.
.


Crawford read the lines over again, his mouth dry.  For a moment he was able to believe that the kiss was all they’d shared.  He could imagine that his protégé, one of his best friends and once upon a time his finest officers hadn’t been emotionally and physically involved with a serial killer, the man who almost killed him.  Twice.

But only for a moment.



.
.
.

He led me to the bedroom that night holding my hand.  I felt like a teenager again right up to the moment that he put his hand on my cock and made me come in a second.  I almost slipped back.  The word ‘pathetic’ was on the tip of my tongue when he kissed me.

He told me it was what I’d needed and that we could take it easy now.  And that’s what we did.  We stayed in bed for twenty-four hours.  When we got hungry for more than each other he made waffles and coffee, later he cooked these wonderful little Thai pastries that we ate off one another.

Whatever we were doing, we weren’t making love.  It wasn’t anything that romantic.  But it was more than fucking, and for the first time in a very long time I felt like I belonged.

He held me like I was something so precious.  When I turned under him after the first time, he held himself over me, smiled at me with this expression of amazement.  I asked him when he’d last been with someone and he answered, ’longer than I can remember’.  I believed him.

When I left two days after I arrived, I told him thanks.  He said ‘you make it sound like you’re not coming back.’  Before I could respond, he smiled and closed the door behind me.

I did go back. 

He hypnotised me, took me just a little deeper and rooted out the monsters that stalked my nightmares.  When I came to, he told me ‘you should at least sleep better now, Will.’

I love how he says my name.  I love him, in my own way.  He’s done more for me than anyone ever has and he hasn’t asked for anything in return.  Except what I’m more than willing to give.


Crawford looked away from the square pages, surprised by the tears in his eyes.  He wiped them away with the heel of his hand.

He tried to remember, tried to recall if anything Will had said or done should have opened his eyes to what was going on.  But he knew deep inside that Will was smarter than that.  If he didn’t want anyone to know, no one would have known.  He’d kept it from Molly after all, why should he – Crawford – have worked it out?

He turned the page and found that the next date was almost four months on.  Will had either removed the other pages, or he’d never written them.



11/12/1979

The papers came up with a nickname this morning – ‘The Chesapeake Ripper’. I guess it was only a matter of time.

Hannibal and I went through the case files again this evening.  Even with his help we’re not getting any closer to this one.

There’s only a vague pattern and that’s the trophies this one’s taking.  The victims aren’t connected, the MO is never the same.  There were months between the first two victims – the first two we know of –
a day between the next two.  Since then there’s been nothing.

He’s as stumped as I am about the meaning of that.

I’ve been so busy recently, we haven’t seen much of one another.  He’s angry that Crawford’s got me working this case.  It took me almost a year to recover after Hobbs.  Hannibal had much to do with that.  I guess he’s worried I’m going to lose myself again.

I won’t.  Hannibal’s keeping me anchored.

Last week, Molly told me I was working too hard.  I felt guilty then for what’s between Hannibal and me.  I would never cheat on my wife with another woman but he gives me something I can’t get from Molly.  He lets me let go.

I can be vulnerable with him.  I can hand over control to him.  I can submit to him.  I can be myself.  I can talk about the things I see when I read case files.  He’s happy to walk around in my head when I let him.  He lets me trust him when I allow myself to.

Two days ago we made love on the leather sofa in the lounge of his town house.  Last week he fucked me with a knife against my left nipple.

He knows the parts of me that I’d kept buried for so long I didn’t remember they were there.  Until he set them free.  He’s taught me that there’s so much more to me than even I knew.  He told me that all this stuff that’s in my head has an effect on me.  And he told me it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

‘Of course it does, Will.  It’s who you are.  You can’t ignore it, can’t pretend it’s not there just as you can’t act on it.  But it has to come out, has to be released or it’ll drive you insane.’

That night he used a dildo on me, preventing my climax for over two hours.  I was sobbing when he finally swallowed every drop that pumped painfully from me.  I slept like a baby in his arms after that.

It’s what he is to me.  Release.  From everything this fucking miserable world has done to me.


Crawford knew history.  He knew what was coming in the very intimate words he was reading but still he couldn’t help but dread it.

There was a gap in the journal between that last entry and the inevitable.  Just one single entry that had been written the night Will had gone to see Lecter.  The same night they’d almost killed one another.



1/2/1980

Oh God.


~

You're poison runnin' through my veins (1)

~



4/22/1980

Jack called.  I’m shattered.  And Jack called.

He wants me to testify at the trial.  He wants me to tell the judge and the jury what happened the night my lover practically killed me.  Not that he knows, of course.  Han Lecter’s just another serial killer to be locked up for life.

Even now I don’t know how I feel about it.  About him.  I know I wake up every night seeing his face so close to mine and feeling that pain in my side like an agonising white-hot heat.  But I don’t scream.  I don’t scream because I don’t believe it.  I still don’t believe it.



4/23/1980

Molly visited.  Jack asked her to convince me to testify.

She’s gone now.

They don’t know what he was to me.  Can I stand in front of a jury and lie to them?  Will he tell his lawyer what was between us for it all to come out in court?

Do I give a fuck?



6/1/1980

He got life. He pleaded insanity but the jury weren’t convinced.  They convicted him on nine counts of first degree murder.  They’ve sent him to Baltimore Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

He didn't look at me once. 

I looked at him.  Just sideways glances, not sure I was able to meet his eye. 

I shot him four times that night, Jack told me.  I remember the sound of breaking glass and thinking that one of the bullets must have gone wild.  I had no idea what I was doing, just that I wanted him away from me because I knew he was going to kill me and for some reason I still can't fathom, at that moment in time I didn't want to die.

Perhaps Alan's right when he says that our survival instinct is the dominant force within ourselves.  It's more difficult to give up than it is to survive.

All anyone said about us - he and I - was that he'd assisted on the Hobbs case and was assisting on the Ripper case in the same capacity, as a forensic expert in the field of psychology.  When I testified, sitting in my wheelchair next to the witness box, I lied about everything except what had happened from the moment he'd stabbed me with that stiletto.

I told them I'd arrived just after 1am, we'd gone into his study and talked for a while.  I said I'd told him I'd realised that our killer had a cannibalistic streak but I still couldn't get close enough to say more.  He told me to go home, get some sleep and come back in the morning, then he went to fetch my coat.  I got up and walked to the bookshelf, with no real purpose.  But I found the book - Larousse Gastronomique - opened it at the page marked and read that one word - 'Sweetbreads' - written next to a recipe I couldn't understand and didn't need to.

When the prosecutor asked how I knew from a single word, I couldn't give him a satisfactory answer.  I'd known for a long time, I said, I just hadn't believed myself until that moment. 

I'm an expert when it comes to deception.

I didn't mention the long, deep kiss in the hallway just after I arrived.

I didn't mention his playing with my fingers as I leaned over his desk when we talked.

I didn't mention the shoulder massage he gave me before he left the room, or that I'd never planned on leaving to return home.  He hadn't left the room for my coat, I thought he'd gone to fetch us a couple of brandys.

When I read that single, terrible word it was more than horror I felt.  My heart had broken.  My world had shattered, shards of myself piercing everything I believed to be true.  When I turned, and he was there, he'd embraced me in that same way so many times before I moved into it.

The flash of agony was almost countered by the shock of knowing I'd been betrayed.  I thought I knew him.  I know he knew - knows - me better than anyone ever has.  I never knew him.  I was blinded by what I felt for him and I couldn't have ever found the words to express the bitter pain of loss even as the sharp blade sliced into me.

I left out everything and his own lawyer knew no better.  Not once was my background of mental instability mentioned.  Lecter knew about it.  Why he didn't use it in his defence I guess I'll never know.  I suppose it wouldn't have made too much difference.  The local cops had found his basement.  Even I hadn't known about that.  It's where I'd have ended up if I hadn't managed to grab those arrows and stab them into him so hard they almost came out of his back. 

I try not to equate the man I slept with to the man who's now locked up in the maximum-security wing of a asylum for the criminally insane.  I try not to search my memories for clues of who he was. 

I try not to think of the meals we shared.  For that way lies madness and I don't want to be like him.  I don't want to think like him anymore.



12/25/1980

It’s strange to think that this time last year I was the most at peace I’ve ever been.  With myself, with who I am.  With my family even, as weird as that sounds.  All Molly knows is that I was attacked in the line of duty by Lecter when he realised how close I was to unmasking him.

I wish it were that simple.  I wish I hadn’t seen the heat in his eyes, heard the affection in his voice when he’d murmured to me that ‘every game must have its end’.  I hadn’t realised my life, my feelings for him had been a game.  I’d believed every word he’d said.  I’d fallen for the gentle massages and seductive shared smiles.   The caressing voice, talented hands, torturous mouth.

I used to think Lecter was an elixir I couldn't get enough of.  A balm for the horrific things I have in my head.

He's not.  He's poison.


Jack lifted his head and gazed out of the window.  He could hear the rush of the waves at the evening tide and the quiet breeze in the palm trees.  He knew why Will had come here, how he’d managed somehow to find peace in this place.

He hated himself for dragging Will into the Tooth Fairy case.  He’d had no choice, he’d convinced himself.  Would someone else have seen the video tape connection?  Would another family have died before they did? 

But what was Will’s life weighed against that of five strangers?  His confidence and God alone knew what else had been destroyed by Lecter.  His sanity had been shot to hell by Dolarhyde.  What remained after that?  Molly had left the shell of her husband lying helpless in a hospital bed.  Even she hadn’t known how deeply Lecter had hurt him.

Wiping tired eyes, Crawford looked back to the journal in his hands. 

Here in Florida it seemed that Will had set aside his old life and had settled uneasily into the safe embrace of his family. 

The next entry in his journal surprised Jack.



6/5/1983

The Tooth Fairy.  That’s what they’re calling him.  He bites his victims, more than usual I suspect.

I don’t want to be thinking about it but I am. 

I know what he is.



6/6/1983

Molly’s thrown away the newspapers.  I’ve fallen in love with her all over again.

Sometimes I think I’ll tell her about Lecter, confessing everything I’ve kept from her for so long.  But the thought alone is enough to bring on the dreams that haunted me for months after I left the hospital.  They’re not nightmares.  They’re just enough that they leave me with insomnia for nights on end.

And I just don’t know if I want to share that part of him with anyone.  The media psychoanalysed him for months.  Not that I was aware of it at the time.

I don’t know what Molly would do if I told her.  I don’t think she’d leave me but she’d only stay because of what happened after.

My head is a mess of this stuff.

We made love out on the boardwalk after Josh had gone to bed.  I love the balmy heat of this place.



6/11/1983

Jack’s come and gone.  First time I’d seen him in two years and he blackmails me.  He knows me!  He knows I wouldn’t be able to look at the photos of the dead families and ignore what’s happening.  He has everyone he needs, including Alan.  I begged him not to involve me.

He still did. 

I don’t know why I’m going with him.  I don’t know why I didn’t tell him to leave me alone.  I wanted to.  I didn’t want to pick up the photographs but something made me.  There’s something inside me that needs to go back and it scares me to death.

Maybe it’s the something that keeps me dreaming of the man who wrecked me.

I’m going to Atlanta, and I don’t know if I’m going to help catch a killer, or to find whatever it was I left behind.



6/12/1983

Did I know this was going to happen?  Did I somehow know Jack would ask this of me?  Is this what I’ve been searching for, hoping for?  A chance to see him again?

It’s some crazy time in the morning and I can’t sleep.  My stomach’s churning, empty except for the whiskey I drank earlier.  My heart’s pounding, pulse is racing.

I spoke to Molly this evening but I didn’t tell her I was flying to Baltimore tomorrow.

Can I really face him again?



6/13/1983

Why the fuck didn’t I just fly back to Florida?

An hour passed between my leaving the asylum and calling Jack.  I sat in my car and sobbed like Josh does when he’s really hurt himself.  I feel like Lecter’s torn my skin off and touched me somewhere so deep inside I won’t ever be able to get him off me.

I know what he’s done and I know what he is, so why do I feel this connection with him?  He said we were very much alike, but we’re not!  We can’t be!  He’s a brutal serial killer and although I know how he thinks, although he’s always in my head, I’m nothing like him.

I used to step through the front door of his town house into his arms.  A couple of times we didn’t get much further into the house, fucking against the banisters.  His thick cock inside me, his strong arm around my chest, holding me back against him, his mouth on my throat, fingers on my nipples.

When I saw him behind the glass there was thinly veiled hate in his eyes.  His first words to me were mocking and it was hard to believe he was the same man who’d been my lover for five months.  His tone was at first bitter and as hard as it is to admit, when that changed, when his voice changed, became what it was so long ago, I clung to it like a lifeline.

For two years he’d been the monster everyone else saw him as.  Molly rightfully hated everything that he was.  Crawford referred to him as ‘a resource’.  Now I’d seen him, not as I once had but as he was now, without the mask.

He hates me as much as I hate him.  And I do.  He used me, made me believe in something so intense I was convinced it was what I’d been aching for my entire life.  Then he betrayed me.  When I got too close he tried to kill me and eat me like he’d done all the others.

I’ve seen the photos.  I know what he did to his victims.  I know what he did to me.  I was shattered by him, everything I believed in smashed against the same hard wood floor he’d ever-so-gently lowered me to.

I was attracted to him because he knows me better and more intimately than anyone ever will.

 That hasn’t changed.  I wish more than anything that it had.



6/15/1983

Face to face.  No glass.  For a moment I could believe there was just the two of us again.

My heart was pounding before I stepped into the gym.  As he walked toward me it was the hardest thing in the world to stand still.  The chain snapping at its limit did nothing for my composure but when I started to speak to him I was amazed at how steady my voice sounded to my own ears.

Didn’t fool him for a second, of course.  His eyes boring into me, I knew he could see the panic and fear streaking along my nerves, every fibre inside me screaming at me to run.  So I held my ground.  I walked side by side with him and as the seconds ticked passed I could feel myself relaxing.

There’s a part of me that feels safe around him.  For so long I’ve jumped at loud noises, been scared to sleep in the dark, hated people getting close to me.  Just in case.

But with him it’s no longer the nameless, faceless bogeyman who hides in closets and comes out only at night.  He walks in daylight and looks like any other human being.  He’s an immediate danger.

He’s the only place I feel safe.

When he asked me what I’d do if I could back in time, I told him I’d have shot him.  Would I have done?  He asked that very question with his eyes as he commented ‘very good, we’re making progress’.  Very witty.

Does he give a flying fuck about me?  Is he seducing me all over again because he wants me?  Or is he just winding me up, trying to get a rise out of me so that he can crush me all over again?  What about before?  It’s the one question I’m most desperate to ask and the one subject I daren’t broach.  Did he ever want me or was it always a game?



6/16/1983

Watching Molly fire that gun broke something precious inside me.  I hadn’t even realised that there was anything left to break.

Jack thinks Lecter meant to kill me.  He didn’t.  He knew I was here in Atlanta.  He was after Molly and Josh.  I just don’t know why.



6/17/1983

Chiltern’s cleared out Lecter’s cell.  He’s an asshole.

When I asked him to put me next to the Dragon he flinched.  If I let myself believe that he didn’t want to, that just for a moment he didn’t want this other guy to kill me, would it be all that bad?  Don’t I deserve something to hold on to?

I got pissy with me and he called me William.  He used to do that sometimes, when we were making love or he was trying to explain something about me that I refused to listen to.

I know he’s told me the answer.  I know he’s told me how The Tooth Fairy’s choosing the women who become his victims.  I’ve looked but I haven’t seen.  How many times has he said that to me now?  Looked at what?


When he’d walked into this house, Jack had thought he’d known Will.  He’d been surprised at how okay Will had been with seeing Lecter again, but he’d put it down to the man’s incredible ability to deal with things like that.

Would he have done anything different had he known about their history?  Was it wrong that he’d been happy to send Will to face his killer?  His greatest fear?  But wouldn’t have felt right sending him to face a man who’d once been his lover?

What kind of person was he anyway?

Shaking his head, he wet back to the journal.  The next entry was the calm before the storm.



6/21/1983

Dolarhyde’s place burnt to the ground.  It makes it worse that we’ll never know, I’ll never meet him face to face and see the answers in his eyes to all the questions in my head.

Reba’s doing well.  The first time I spoke to her she was worried that it was something about her that had attracted the freak in Dolarhyde. I tried to reassure her but she insisted she should have known.  I think I said something like, ‘Sometimes we don’t.  Trust me, I’ve been there myself’.  It’s the first time I’ve talked about Lecter and I, however obliquely, to anyone.

I felt a kinship with her and as good as the company might have done me, I’d have screwed her up even more than she already is.

We’re back home, Molly and Josh and me.

It’s a beautiful afternoon.  We’re going to have dinner out on the boardwalk.  Molly’s bought marshmallows, we’ll see how long it takes Josh to spot them.

It’s good to be back home.

I keep thinking about Hannibal.  In his note, Dolarhyde mentioned Lecter corresponds a lot.  Maybe I’ll write one day.

Molly’s calling.


Jack turned the page and found the final journal entry. 



7/27/1984

Molly’s left me.

I don’t blame her.

Something broke inside of her too that afternoon out on Crawford brother’s farm.

The night here.  Dolarhyde.  He destroyed her.

I’m leaving too.  I’ve bought a yacht.  I’m going out to sea where I won’t have a home address.  Where no one can find me.  I’m heading to the Hawaiian Islands.


That was it. 

There was nothing left here for sure.

Closing the journal he dropped it to the mattress and stood, stretching his sleeping legs.  He had more questions than he had answers.  But at least it told him where Will had gone.  Hopefully he’d be safe out there.

Jack closed the front door behind him.  He doubted anyone would ever return here. 

Eventually, if the house wasn’t claimed and sold, it would rot, collapse.  It would become a grave for too many terrible memories buried for good amongst the rubble.

~ ~ ~

Crawford locked his hotel room door and crossed to the mini bar.  Pouring himself one of the most expensive whiskeys he’d ever had, he dropped back to the bed and reached for the phone.

It went through to Paul Krendler’s office and rang four times before being answered.

“This better be good.”

“Paul?  Jack Crawford.”

“Oh.  Hello Jack.  Did you find Will?”

Jack frowned to himself.  “In a manner of speaking.  Any news?”

He distinctly heard a pause.  “Yeah.  Bad.  Dr Chiltern – you know him?”

“Sure.  He ran the asylum, right?”

“He was found dead this morning.  He’s been badly cut.  His tongue and ears were missing.”

“Lecter.”

“Best guess.”

Yawning, Jack closed his eyes and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey.  “Where was Chiltern found?”

“On one of the Hawaiian Islands.”  Jack’s eyes snapped open.  “Lana’I.  That’s where he’d gone after Lecter’s escape.  Lecter must have followed him there.”  Scrambling off the bed, Jack spilt his drink and almost pulled the phone off the bedside table.  “Jack?  You still there?”

“Paul.  That’s where Will went.  Hawaii.  He went to Hawaii.  I have to go.”


~ ~ ~   END PART ONE   ~ ~ ~

PART TWO



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