Psychos Page 18

  The doctor’s wife’s hands were laced loosely about his waist as they came down through a thin strand of sassafras, edging over the ridge where the ghost of a road was, a road more sensed than seen that faced into a half acre of tilting stones and fading granite tablets. Other graves marked only by their declivities in the earth, folk so far beyond the pale even the legibility of their identities had been leached away by the weathers.

  Leaves drifted, huge poplar leaves veined with amber so golden they might have been coin of the realm for a finer world than this one. He cut the ignition of the four-wheeler and got off. Past the lowering trees the sky was a blue of an improbable intensity, a fierce cobalt blue shot through with dense golden light.

  She slid off the rear and steadied herself a moment with a hand on his arm. Where are we? she asked. Why are we here?

  The paperhanger had disengaged his arm and was strolling among the gravestones reading such inscriptions as were legible, as if he might find forebear or antecedent in this moldering earth. The doctor’s wife was retrieving her martinis from the luggage carrier of the ATV. She stood looking about uncertainly. A graven angel with broken wings crouched on a truncated marble column like a gargoyle. Its stone eyes regarded her with a blind benignity. Some of these graves have been rob, she said.

  You can’t rob the dead, he said. They have nothing left to steal.

  It is a sacrilege, she said. It is forbidden to disturb the dead. You have done this. The paperhanger took a cigarette pack from his pocket and felt it, but it was empty, and he balled it up and threw it away. The line between grave robbing and archaeology has always looked a little blurry to me, he said. I was studying their culture, trying to get a fix on what their lives were like.

  She was watching him with a kind of benumbed horror. Standing hip-slung and lost like a parody of her former self. Strange and anomalous in her fashionable but mismatched clothing, as if she’d put on the first garment that fell to hand. Someday, he thought, she might rise and wander out into the daylit world wearing nothing at all, the way she had come into it. With her diamond watch and the cocktail glass she carried like a used-up talisman.

  You have broken the law, she told him.

  I got a government grant, the paperhanger said contemptuously.

  Why are we here? We are supposed to be searching for my child.

  If you’re looking for a body the first place to look is the graveyard, he said. If you want a book don’t you go to the library?

  I am paying you, she said. You are in my employ. I do not want to be here. I want you to do as I say or carry me to my car if you will not.

  Actually, the paperhanger said, I had a story to tell you. About my wife.

  He paused, as if leaving a space for her comment, but when she made none he went on. I had a wife. My childhood sweetheart. She became a nurse, went to work in one of these drug rehab places. After she was there awhile she got a faraway look in her eyes. Look at me without seeing me. She got in tight with her supervisor. They started having meetings to go to. Conferences. Sometimes just the two of them would confer, generally in a motel. The night I watched them walk into the Holiday Inn in Franklin I decided to kill her. No impetuous spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought it all out and it would be the perfect crime.

  The doctor’s wife didn’t say anything. She just watched him.

  A grave is the best place to dispose of a body, the paperhanger said. The grave is its normal destination anyway. I could dig up a grave and then just keep on digging. Save everything carefully. Put my body there and fill in part of the earth, and then restore everything the way it was. The coffin, if any of it was left. The bones and such. A good settling rain and the fall leaves and you’re home free. Now that’s eternity for you.

  Did you kill someone, she breathed. Her voice was barely audible.

  Did I or did I not, he said. You decide. You have the powers of a god. You can make me a murderer or just a heartbroke guy whose wife quit him. What do you think? Anyway, I don’t have a wife. I expect she just walked off into the abstract like that Lang guy I told you about.

  I want to go, she said. I want to go where my car is.

  He was sitting on a gravestone watching her out of his pale eyes. He might not have heard.

  I will walk.

  Just whatever suits you, the paperhanger said. Abruptly, he was standing in front of her. She had not seen him arise from the headstone or stride across the graves, but like a jerky splice in a film he was before her, a hand cupping each of her breasts, staring down into her face.

  Under the merciless weight of the sun her face was stunned and vacuous. He studied it intently, missing no detail. Fine wrinkles crept from the corners of her eyes and mouth like hairline cracks in porcelain. Grime was impacted in her pores, in the crepe flesh of her throat. How surely everything had fallen from her: beauty, wealth, social position, arrogance. Humanity itself, for by now she seemed scarcely human, beleaguered so by the fates that she suffered his hands on her breasts as just one more cross to bear, one more indignity to endure.

  How far you’ve come, the paperhanger said in wonder. I believe you’re about down to my level now, don’t you?

  It does not matter, the doctor’s wife said. There is no longer one thing that matters.

  Slowly and with enormous lassitude her body slumped toward him, and in his exultance it seemed not a motion in itself but simply the completion of one begun in one world and completed itself in another one.

  From what seemed a great distance he watched her fall toward him like an angel descending, wings spread, from an infinite height, striking the earth gently, tilting, then righting itself.

  The weight of moonlight tracking across the paperhanger’s face awoke him from where he took his rest. Filigrees of light through the gauzy curtains swept across him in stately silence like the translucent ghosts of insects. He stirred, lay still then for a moment getting his bearings, a fix on where he was.

  He was in his bed, lying on his back. He could see a huge orange moon poised beyond the bedroom window, ink-sketch tree branches that raked its face like claws. He could see his feet book-ending the San Miguel bottle that his hands clasped erect on his abdomen, the amber bottle hard-edged and defined against the pale window, dark atavistic monolith reared against a harvest moon.

  He could smell her. A musk compounded of stale sweat and alcohol, the rank smell of her sex. Dissolution, ruin, loss. He turned to study her where she lay asleep, her open mouth a dark cavity in her face. She was naked, legs outflung, pale breasts pooled like cooling wax. She stirred restively, groaned in her sleep. He could hear the rasp of her breathing. Her breath was fetid on his face, corrupt, a graveyard smell. He watched her in disgust, in a dull self-loathing.

  He drank from the bottle, lowered it. Sometimes, he told her sleeping face, you do things you can’t undo. You break things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. And you were right, there are things only a miracle can set to rights.

  He sat clasping the bottle. He touched his miscut hair, the soft down of his beard. He had forgotten what he looked like, he hadn’t seen his reflection in a mirror for so long. Unbidden, Zeineb’s face swam into his memory. He remembered the look on the child’s face when the doctor’s wife had spun on her heel; spite had crossed it like a flicker of heat lightning. She stuck her tongue out at him. His hand snaked out like a serpent and closed on her throat and snapped her neck before he could call it back, sloe eyes wild and wide, pink tongue caught between tiny seed-pearl teeth like a bitten-off rosebud. Her hair swung sidewise, her head lolled onto his clasped hand. The tray of the toolbox was out before he knew it, he was stuffing her into the toolbox like a rag doll. So small, so small, hardly there at all.

  He arose. Silhouetted naked against the moon-drenched window, he drained the bottle. He looked about for a place to set it, leaned and wedged it between the heavy flesh of her upper thighs. He stood in silence, watching her. He seemed philosophical, po
ssessed of some hard-won wisdom. The paperhanger knew so well that while few are deserving of a miracle, fewer still can make one come to pass.

  He went out of the room. Doors opened, doors closed. Footsteps softly climbing a staircase, descending. She dreamed on. When he came back into the room he was cradling a plastic-wrapped bundle stiffly in his arms. He placed it gently beside the drunk woman. He folded the plastic sheeting back like a caul.

  What had been a child. What the graveyard earth had spared the freezer had preserved. Ice crystals snared in the hair like windy snowflakes whirled there, in the lashes. A doll from a madhouse assembly line.

  He took her arm, laid it across the child. She pulled away from the cold. He firmly brought the arm back, arranging them like mannequins, Madonna and child. He studied this tableau, then went out of his house for the last time. The door closed gently behind him on its keeper spring.

  The paperhanger left in the Mercedes, heading west into the open country, tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore. Without knowing it, he followed the self-same route the doctor had taken some eight months earlier, and in a world of infinite possibilities where all journeys share a common end, perhaps they are together, taking the evening air on a ruined veranda among the hollyhocks and oleanders, the doctor sipping his scotch and the paperhanger his San Miguel, gentlemen of leisure discussing the vagaries of life and pondering deep into the night not just the possibility but the inevitability of miracles.

  Red Dragon

  BY THOMAS HARRIS

  In much the same way that Dracula is the defining vampire novel and The Exorcist is the book that put demonic possession stories on the map, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris is the absolute ground zero for the entire forensic serial-killer-chasing craze. Without it, there would be no CSI, no Criminal Minds, and none of the trillion novels—best-selling or otherwise—that tried and failed to reach the bar that it single-handedly raised.

  If you’re one of the millions who first stumbled upon Harris’s brilliance when Red Dragon’s fairly well-known sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, slapped the icing on the cake, I can’t even tell you how thrilled I am to share with you the following chapter, from the even-greater masterpiece that started it all.

  The very one in which Harris first introduced us to Hannibal Lecter, and resoundingly opened the door for all that was to come.

  Dr. Frederick Chilton, chief of staff at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, came around his desk to shake Will Graham’s hand.

  “Dr. Bloom called me yesterday, Mr. Graham—or should I call you Dr. Graham?” “I’m not a doctor.” “I was delighted to hear from Dr. Bloom, we’ve known each other for years. Take that chair.”

  “We appreciate your help, Dr. Chilton.” “Frankly, I sometimes feel like Lecter’s secretary rather than his keeper,” Chilton said. “The volume of his mail alone is a nuisance. I think among some researchers it’s considered chic to correspond with him—I’ve seen his letters framed in psychology departments—and for a while it seemed that every Ph.D. candidate in the field wanted to interview him. Glad to cooperate with you, of course, and Dr. Bloom.”

  “I need to see Dr. Lecter in as much privacy as possible,” Graham said. “I may need to see him again or telephone him after today.”

  Chilton nodded. “To begin with, Dr. Lecter will stay in his room. That is absolutely the only place where he is not put in restraints. One wall of his room is a double barrier which opens on the hall. I’ll have a chair put there, and screens if you like.

  “I must ask you not to pass him any objects whatever, other than paper free of clips or staples. No ring binders, pencils, or pens. He has his own felt-tipped pens.”

  “I might have to show him some material that could stimulate him,” Graham said. “You can show him what you like as long as it’s on soft paper. Pass him documents through the sliding food tray. Don’t hand anything through the barrier and do not accept anything he might extend through the barrier. He can return papers in the food tray. I insist on that. Dr. Bloom and Mr. Crawford assured me that you would cooperate on procedure.”

  “I will,” Graham said. He started to rise. “I know you’re anxious to get on with it, Mr. Graham, but I want to tell you something first. This will interest you.

  “It may seem gratuitous to warn you, of all people, about Lecter. But he’s very disarming. For a year after he was brought here, he behaved perfectly and gave the appearance of cooperating with attempts at therapy. As a result—this was under the previous administrator—security around him was slightly relaxed.

  “On the afternoon of July 8, 1976, he complained of chest pain. His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes.

  “You may find this curious.” Chilton took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. “Here, he’s resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse’s head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn’t resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue.”

  Chilton could read nothing in Graham’s face. He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers under his chin. His hands were dry and shiny.

  “You know, when Lecter was first captured we thought he might provide us with a singular opportunity to study a pure sociopath,” Chilton said. “It’s so rare to get one alive. Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he’s trained in psychiatry…and he’s a mass murderer. He seemed cooperative, and we thought that he could be a window on this kind of aberration. We thought we’d be like Beaumont studying digestion through the opening in St. Martin’s stomach.

  “As it turned out, I don’t think we’re any closer to understanding him now than the day he came in. Have you ever talked with Lecter for any length of time?

  “No. I just saw him when…I saw him mainly in court. Dr. Bloom showed me his articles in the journals,” Graham said.

  “He’s very familiar with you. He’s given you a lot of thought.” “You had some sessions with him?” “Yes. Twelve. He’s impenetrable. Too sophisticated about the tests for them to register anything. Edwards, Fabré, even Dr. Bloom himself had a crack at him. I have their notes. He was an enigma to them, too. It’s impossible, of course, to tell what he’s holding back or whether he understands more than he’ll say. Oh, since his commitment he’s done some brilliant pieces for The American Journal of Psychiatry and The General Archives. But they’re always about problems he doesn’t have. I think he’s afraid that if we ‘solve’ him, nobody will be interested in him anymore and he’ll be stuck in a back ward somewhere for the rest of his life.”

  Chilton paused. He had practiced using his peripheral vision to watch his subject in interviews. He believed that he could watch Graham this way undetected.

  “The consensus around here is that the only person who has demonstrated any practical understanding of Hannibal Lecter is you, Mr. Graham. Can you tell me anything about him?”

  “No.” “Some of the staff are curious about this: when you saw Dr. Lecter’s murders, their ‘style,’ so to speak, were you able perhaps to reconstruct his fantasies? And did that help you identify him?”

  Graham did not answer. “We’re woefully short of material on that sort of thing. There’s one single piece in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Would you mind talking with some of the staff—no, no, not this trip—Dr. Bloom was very severe with me on that point. We’re to leave you alone. Next trip, perhaps.”

  Dr. Chilton had seen a lot of hostility. He was seeing some at the moment. Graham stood up. “Thank you, doctor. I want to see Lecter now.”

  The steel door of the maximum-security sect
ion closed behind Graham. He heard the bolt slide home.

  Graham knew that Lecter slept most of the morning. He looked down the corridor. At that angle he could not see into Lecter’s cell, but he could tell that the lights inside were dimmed.

  Graham wanted to see Dr. Lecter asleep. He wanted time to brace himself. If he felt Lecter’s madness in his head, he had to contain it quickly, like a spill.

  To cover the sound of his footsteps, he followed an orderly pushing a linen cart. Dr. Lecter is very difficult to slip up on.

  Graham paused partway down the hall. Steel bars covered the entire front of the cell. Behind the bars, farther than arm’s reach, was a stout nylon net stretched ceiling to floor and wall to wall. Through the barrier, Graham could see a table and chair bolted to the floor. The table was stacked with softcover books and correspondence. He walked up to the bars, put his hands on them, took his hands away.

  Dr. Hannibal Lecter lay on his cot asleep, his head propped on a pillow against the wall. Alexandre Dumas’ Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine was open on his chest.

  Graham had stared through the bars for about five seconds when Lecter opened his eyes and said, “That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court.”

  “I keep getting it for Christmas.”

  Dr. Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points. Graham felt each hair bristle on his nape. He put his hand on the back of his neck.

  “Christmas, yes,” Lecter said. “Did you get my card?” “I got it. Thank you.”

  Dr. Lecter’s Christmas card had been forwarded to Graham from the FBI crime laboratory in Washington. He took it into the backyard, burned it, and washed his hands before touching Molly.

  Lecter rose and walked over to his table. He is a small, lithe man. Very neat. “Why don’t you have a seat, Will? I think there are some folding chairs in a closet just down that way. At least, that’s where it sounds like they come from.”