GlitchedPups Den

Like bacchants after the festivities are done with you three go to your beds, Will lingering at Hannibal’s doorway, considering for a lengthy minute taking to that room rather than his own. But then he looks down at you, leaden-lidded in his arms, and turns instead into the spare bedchamber, whose atmosphere has retained his scent even through the long nights between his last stay.

You are asleep the instant your side strikes the mattress, Will seemingly taken likewise into his own slumber. When the first finger of daylight prods you awake he is still under its influence, his face—crested by the sun—as close to peaceful as you’ve seen it.

Feeling your stare, an eye opens, laxly focused.

“It’s around seven,” you say, having read the digital clock on the nightstand with a wince. “You can probably get another hour.”

“So can you,” says Will. “As many as you want. You don’t have anywhere to be or to do. You should enjoy it.”

He shifts forward to kiss you softly on the mouth. His breath, foul from sleep, does not repulse you, only fills you with affection for his humanity.

Still, when you kiss Will back you hold onto a mouthful of air, watching the dark fibres of his curls flutter in the eventual exhale.

“Don’t know if I can sleep again,” you say. “I’ve been thinking about the way Hannibal killed Tara-Lynne. How you would have liked to see it.”

“I would have,” Will affirms. “I wish I’d been standing there with you. Able to feel the vibrations of the killing blow. The heat of the open wound. See how Hannibal moved. What he felt as he did it.”

“He was... triumphant,” you say. “Finally he’d found a way through to me. To help me kill with him as the knife. He made the whole thing look like one of those art pieces where living people are a moving part of it.”

You shift onto your back as you talk, chasing lazy dust motes with your finger.

“But the body—it stank,” you say, matter-of-factly. “The smell got in my hair. Hannibal had to wash it for me. He told me it would be like that, though. Death itself is kind of gross.”

“So’s living,” says Will. “It just has a better reputation.”

He watches your side profile, and you feel behind his stare the helpless rankling of envy, resenting that you—the shallow child protégé—had been death’s witness, too green yet to appreciate its majesty.

“Are you going to say something about there being merit to the grotesque?” you ask, only half-teasing. “Forgive me, oh wise craftsman, for being such a rube. I guess my eyes just weren’t open enough.”

“They were,” says Will. “You saw it. The beauty of it. You reached for the blood; Hannibal told me.”

The fern of your fist closes at the memory.

“It looked like red diamonds coming out of her.”

“There you go,” says Will, satisfied. “You made the association. Whenever you think of that moment you’ll always see it that way. As priceless art.”

Will brushes a hand easily from your naked breast to your stomach, which jumps inwards at a learned impulse. Then, as the fingers spread and the palm lies, warm and damp as the heart of a pastry left to harden you let that hand remain there, knowing there is no judgement of your body in that touch, only acceptance.

Only love.

“I also saw it another way,” you say.

“What way?” Will asks, and you poke at his twitching groin until he laughs and smacks your fingers off him.

“You thought about ejaculation,” he says. “There’s a reason people consider death and sex as the head and tail of a coin. One end you only ever flip once.”

“Not when it comes to Hannibal,” you say. “He flips a coin and other people die. I can only imagine one person in the world ever flipping his.”

You turn again on your side, nuzzling into the sour moisture of Will’s t-shirt collar, the growing-in scraps of his stubble.

“I’m not going to kill Hannibal,” Will says. “Haven’t we decided that the three of us are going to stay alive?”

“But if someone were going to kill him,” you say, “or if he gets really old and sick one day and wants somebody to hurry things along—that’ll be you. And it won’t be morphine or putting bubbles in his tubes the way it is with other people. That would be too... prosaic.”

Distantly within some inner pocket of the mind you’re disturbed by your own ease with such talk, that you’ve leaned in so far to this killing character that the same excitement you perform is a spark through your wiring. A very real joy.

“I can imagine Hannibal in bed with you, just like we are now,” you say. “How you’d put a knife to him the way he did to Tara-Lynne. So gentle, at first. Like you’re fixing his shirt. Only you’d give Hannibal a knife, too, and he’d put it out just here, in your belly, like he was opening your belt, and then you’d cut each other open. And that would be bliss to you both. That’d be love.”

“You’re waxing poetic,” Will comments, smiling.

“Yeah,” you say. “I suppose I am. I have started writing again. Art inspires the artist.”

Sleep whispers at your ear once more, and you yawn, content to embrace the temptation of a longer rest, after all.

“And where would you be in that ideal ending?” Will asks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” you say vaguely. “One of you would find time to squeeze me in somewhere. Room for a little one.”

“No,” says Will. “You’ll outlive us. Bury us. Live in your own house somewhere, wealthy from the stories you’ll write about the horrors of captivity. And you’ll buy wine without checking the calories on the label, or looking them up online. You'll eat breakfast at a café on a street in a European city, and let yourself feel full. You won’t even think about it. Death won’t find you until you’ve lived a long enough life to have earned it.”

You punch Will gently in the arm.

“Wouldn’t you love me enough to kill me?”

“We’d love you enough to let you live without us.”

Will tightens the covers around you both, a coffin of warmth. Your death, for all his talk of a merciful release. Life had been done with, long ago.

“Let’s catch up on more sleep,” says Will. “I don’t know if I can face one of your hangovers.”

*

Later in the morning you awake alone, electrified by the terror of a single thought: something terrible is going to happen because of what you’ve done.

Of course it must. You’d been a fool to be caught up in Hannibal’s madness, coaching yourself to celebrate. A crime done cannot be undone. You must give back for the life you’ve taken, a karmic cycle of repetition.

You tremble with fear and regret, those words that had cracked sleep in two like a warning from the divine. Through the slow paring down of your character you’ve become a triplet to your enemies, a killer who delights in slaughter’s justice. You have lain with such creatures. You have eaten a young woman’s flesh and had not thrown it up, had in fact sucked your fingers and the solemn white face of your dinner plate for the last of her.

You have earned the loathing you have held for yourself, now, are as callous as you have long conceived. There is a satisfaction in meeting those expectations, as though you had known it from a mystic’s spread of cards and not the mutterings of the mind.

Under the oppression of this mood you go down the spine of the house to Will and Hannibal, wanting to be consoled by the instigators of your every grief. The lower floor reeks of Black Ivory coffee, suggesting many a cup has been served there, drunk casually in spite of the cost. Hannibal’s wealth is of some fathomless number, fortunes spirited off and stored where no investigation could find them.

And like rich men your captors stand, laughing, their heads thrown back, identical, if one had been watching at a distance.

You cannot approach quietly in your condition, but the men are so involved with one another that they don’t yet attend to you.

Will stands with his back to the refrigerator, looking up at Hannibal through the web of his lashes in a flirtatious form. For his part Hannibal stands rather closer to Will than is necessary, taking groceries out of a bag at an unhurried pace, extending his excuse for such proximity.

You study the elder man’s back under his shirt, trying to picture him trotting along the aisle of some store with a shopping cart nudged before him, or a basket over one arm, jolly and domestic.

Hannibal seems to enjoy such things, the contrast between his dark nature and twee daily activities amusing him.

“You said you’d speak to him,” says Will. “Smooth things over. If this is your definition of smooth I’d hate to see the alternative.”

“It’s not my definition,” says Hannibal, reaching up with one toned arm to put something away in a cupboard. “It’s his. Questionable, certainly, but we are familiar with the logic of such a mind, and the effects of petty jealousy upon the choices made when its constructs have been interrupted by artists of a similar ilk.”

Will scoffs, though his eyes go as yours do to the hand reaching back into the bag, the athletic lines of Hannibal’s body as he moves back and forth, tempting his attention.

“I resent the implication that we’re anything like the Lover,” says Will.

“Yet, by intent of design, we are,” says Hannibal. “Not in our sensual preferences, but in the particular mode of violence we have made routine.”

“Only for her,” Will says. “It was the only way she’d allow us any authority over her.”

“Still,” says Hannibal, “that we have engaged in the practice incites a particular ire in the Lover that even our friendship cannot abate. Now we have involved ourselves further he wishes to strike out at us as much as his chosen bride.”

Hannibal moves Will aside to access the fridge, squeezing his shoulder in what, in another friendship, would be an affable gesture of play, but between them is the slow and gentle pressure of true affinity and closeness. Will allows himself to be manoeuvred, gazing into Hannibal’s face so intently that he may well have chiselled it into stone, such is the immortalising quality of memory.

“We, after all, have achieved her love in far less time than the Lover has been acquainted with her,” says Hannibal. “And what greater expression of feeling could she have given than her consent for me to kill?”

“And how are you going to manage the problem of the Lover’s retaliation?” asks Will. “It’s not going to go over well with her.”

Engaged in slotting away milk and a wedge of gingery cheese Hannibal is slow to answer.

“How I respond will depend on our daughter,” he says at last. “I’ve begun to defer to her wishes in these matters. We both know too well the cost of forcing a path before she is prepared to make the crossing. She is the wind in our sail; without it, we cannot progress.”

A frosty tingle encloses you, the sensation of a prophecy fulfilled.

Your voice cuts the intimacy of the room like a shear.

“What has the Lover done to punish us for Tara-Lynne?”

Hannibal pivots, his expression, like Will’s, bearing an instantaneous interest in the direction to which your entrance will turn future events.

“Tara-Lynne Hockstetter was found in Loch Raven by a married couple on an early morning hike,” says Hannibal. “The Lover worked quickly, on this occasion, and spitefully. He left considerable evidence behind for the police to find.”

“On purpose?” you ask, picking up on the deliberate emphasis of the comment.

“Yes,” says Will. “Jack wants me over there as soon as I can make it. I wanted to talk to you first, though.”

He moves to guide you into a chair, brought in as a prop for this predicted moment.

“What did the Lover do?” you ask again. “What did he leave at the murder scene?”

“A watch with an inscription on the underside,” says Hannibal. “Signed with your mother’s first name.”

Will does not crouch before you, as Hannibal had done under the news of your mother’s slaughter, nor infantilise in any way his audience. Instead he honours you as an adult daughter, or better still, a wife.

“Your father has been taken into custody. The Lover framed him for Tara-Lynne’s death.”

THE HISTORY

Léon travelled for ten years or so, this time alone, though he was not always without company on his way. There were always little girls around him, in parking lots or record stores or coming out of rest stop bathrooms, girls that giggled at his jokes and skipped along after him, snapping gum or toying with their jewellery. Easy to win.

None of them were Liliane, however. Léon missed her like a lost tooth, feeling her with him wherever he went. Sometimes he’d return to Louisiana to check on things as he’d left them—never for very long, but long enough to know it wasn't the same.

In her brief life she’d changed that place, was at every roadside, in the water.

Léon had to keep moving, after that, find a place to settle and make his own way as he'd planned, long ago. In each city he stayed in he tried out new names, shifted his personalities a little, trying each of them out like a new truck, always preferring the old.

People liked it when Léon played to type, or some exaggerated echo of it, the pretty boy out of the bayou. They liked that they thought they knew who he was; it comforted them, in some way, brought down the guard folks otherwise kept up against a man travelling by himself, far from home.

The easier people were to trick the stronger Léon's disdain for them grew. Without his sister he was aware again of the isolation that came of being himself amidst a shallow mass, attached to no one or nothing, every girl he had no more than sugar to suit a craving, useless once it had melted on his tongue and the rush had passed him by.

Léon had forgotten that the years before Liliane had lived with him were restless ones, had scorned the thought of ever being lonely, yet he was.

The attractions of the road lost shine and color for him, and Léon began to accept that one day he'd have to stay somewhere, make friends among these mindless people.

A realist, he did not set his hopes so high as to find another like Liliane. That they shared a father was what had made her different; Léon had seen parts of himself in her, and besides, she had still loved him after he'd made her his mistress, if not quite in the same way.

He wanted to be loved again, though he would have swallowed a gun before he'd say it even in the secrecy of his own mind. An innocent and unchangeable love—Léon had hit Liliane, had touched her body in ways that had her ascend from it entirely, and still there was adoration in her like an unopened bottle, forever full.

Léon was no fool. He had tasted it once, and had not watched Liliane close enough to keep it with him. He didn't have his father's luck—it would not come back around again.

Years went on, girl after girl left sobbing for the shame of him, their secret. Each going back to their little lives, that would always have a crack down the middle he had driven there, no one to believe them after he'd gone like a carnival into the night.

Tiring of it all, Léon took a sabbatical from his life's habit, burrowing himself into work instead, which as before was odd jobs he took wherever he could find them, or people offered, which they did as eagerly as they had always done. In this way he ended up in Baltimore, intending to stay only temporarily, at the time, roped into fixing a bathroom leak for a couple in their thirties.

They took a liking to Léon, and began asking him over to repair various other problems around the house as an excuse to keep him around.

The husband was an odd bird, of the dull, awkward type, his wife shrill and mouthy, but they became easier in Léon’s presence, lightened by the man he'd made up from his own life.

"Oh, daddy was a gambler, my Maman was a sick woman, my sister, mon catin, I had to leave her behind—"

They hung onto every word, each of which Léon embellished for effect until the fiction felt like fact to him. He would have wearied of it quickly, however, if he hadn't become acquainted with the family’s little daughter through their friendship.

She was three or four when he first saw her, stood sucking her thumb in earnest observation as he fiddled under the hood of her father's car. The girl, ———

(Here, a name had been put down, and violently scored from the page until the pen cut a hole through to the other side.)

The girl, Sailor, was chubby in the way kids tended to be at that age, her belly distended under her pink t-shirt, her arms and legs like little bread loaves. She did not look like Liliane in any way, but there was something of her there, still. The fascination in her wide-eyed gaze. The quietness with which she padded about the driveway in her jelly shoes, only speaking when Léon asked her a question or made some playful remark.

Each time he went over to the house she would trot out of her room to follow him around.

“She has a crush on you,” her mother said, and laughed, thinking it cute.

Léon had laughed too. But under that mirth, in the ash of his heart, something roiled and wanted, something he had let sleep for so long that he did not question giving it what it asked him for.

Léon soon bought a house on the same street, delighting his new friends, who had now begun to include him in social occasions. They trusted him with their child completely, seeming relieved that he was willing to take her off their hands on a regular basis.

Léon was careful with Sailor, at first. He could not, he knew, move too quickly, nor push her particularly hard when she was this young and fragile. Though Léon wished that he had taken Liliane as his lover far sooner than he had, she’d been uniquely resilient.

Sailor was a very ordinary child. She sulked and had tantrums, cried when she fell and hurt herself, loved fast food and Disney princesses and milkshakes. She was trusting, but volatile; she was not ready for him. He could not love her.

Yet.

Léon took Sailor out with him to playgrounds, movie showings, circuses and parades, suffering this mediocrity for the chance to make himself the favored relative, to touch her back through her miniature denim overalls and her warm knees as he hefted her up on his shoulders to feed on the press of her precious form on his.

Yet in doing so Léon was often stricken with random, venomous bursts of hatred towards Sailor for no other reason than she was not his sister, that she was larger than Liliane had been, impetuous and clinging. At such times he felt that spite rise out of him, heard it from his mouth in remarks that made the child flinch and retreat into wet-eyed silences.

She would hold herself differently, afterwards, suck in her stomach in the outfits he had bought for her to wear—short, flouncing dresses, skirts swinging high above the Band-Aids on her knees. As their relationship expanded Léon understood completely the control he had over Sailor, and would nudge her subtly this way and that, sometimes for his own entertainment, and then specifically to train her to his tastes.

He began to spend time with other girls her age, girls that reminded him of her, and of Liliane, if not in one aspect then in another. Girls that were lacking in confidence, isolated from their peers, easy to bring to him and later press into silence.

Sickly girls in particular had a frail vulnerability to them that Léon found he liked. He had enjoyed it in Liliane: her somber turns of reflection on mortality, the way she would look at herself in mirrors and car windows always with the discomfort of not being a girl the way others were.

Léon hoped that trait would come out in Sailor, if he set things into such delicate motion that her soft mind let him contort it in that way. He saw no reason that it would not. From her mouth he’d heard a longing to marry him; Liliane had never said so much, even when she’d come to Léon, half-orphaned, given up to his keep as though betrothed to him.

He began to crave the intimacy of a marriage, which only the threat of being found out held him from. It did not do so for long.

One night he’d stayed up drinking with Sailor’s parents, watching something with them on the television, and he'd heard the floorboards overhead make the unmistakable sound of motion in the child's room.

Something in the idea of her pacing restlessly, not daring to come down after bedtime in fear of upsetting the cantankerous mother, and still wanting to see Léon, to hear his voice—something in the thought of her rolling uneasily back and forth under her pastel bedding made Léon throb with excitement of a ferocity he couldn’t ignore.

Emboldened by drink, Léon went upstairs with the excuse of wanting to use the bathroom and found his girl, yawning and shy, waiting up for him. She had chocolate around her mouth like a dark lipstick; she would hide candy in a drawer next to her bed which she would eat privately in the night. Her breath was sweet with it as Léon bent down to her.

“Ma belle,” he said. “Pretty girl.”

“Uncle Lee,” said Sailor. “What are you doing up here?”

Her voice was nervous, but then he had taught that into her, never at ease unless he gave her cause to be.

“I needed to see you,” said Léon. “I’ve been thinking about you. Wanting to hold you. You drive me so crazy and you don’t even know.”

There were kisses between these words, which Sailor giggled at, initially, then began to flinch away from, her eyes fluttering in discomfort.

“Uncle Lee,” she said again.

He hushed her, put his hand under the unicorn quilt with the princesses on it he always said looked like Sailor, but didn’t.

“You know I love you,” he said. “I’m gonna take you home to my Maman. I’m gonna give you a ring. You want a ring, cher?”

Léon hung over Sailor, muttering sweet nothings. He felt her become like a graveyard angel beneath him, beautiful and cold, like Liliane had been, like so many girls he’d had before.

She smelled of chocolate, and washed hair, and bed. A child’s scent, light and sweet.

After, when the thrill had run out of him, Léon could only smell himself, his excitement and his shame. He had, perhaps, spoiled it all in a drunken moment. Lost this girl as he had his Lili, who had lived in hatred until—

Until.

Léon touched Sailor’s arm, felt how limp and strangely stiff it was at once.

“Baby,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have waited till we got married. You know what, cherie, I’ll save the rest till then. When you got your ring. You believe me?”

But she only lay on her side, open eyed in the dark, looking through it, away from him.

*

They withdrew from one another, then, he in caution of driving her so far from him that she could not be retrieved, and Sailor in horror of his poor restraint.

As with Liliane her moods tended to darkness. She became surly and argumentative, or else tearful and withdrawn. Adverse to touch and affection of any kind. Avoidant, in time, of eating.

This reflection of Léon’s work in her maintained the attraction that would have gone away as she aged. As with his sister he'd found the point from which real love—abstract from appearances—could form, and did.

Still he did not touch her again, kept to his promise knowing her love hinged on it, trust in her uncle's word. She still lingered in his presence, sometimes, looked at him as though she wished they were still intimate in the innocent way they’d been, and at other times as though she saw right under the act of Leland Frost to Léon Frossard and all that the name entailed.

You watch as Hannibal prepares his kill for the Lover to find, opening it cleanly from stomach to throat, pinning back four corners of the cooling skin to put the organs on display. They smoke in the dingy space, giving off a stench a shit and meat so powerful that you keel to one side to vomit weakly on the floorboards.

Hannibal comes away from his work to mop up the mess until no trace of it is left, then cleans your face as well. He finds a hessian sack and folds it to cushion your head, then sources a bit of water to pour into your mouth, washing the bile out.

Still he keeps you turned to Tara-Lynn, commanding in this gentle way for you to watch him with her, to continue to engage in what you have both done. It is a devastation akin to the quakes that once parted continents, of a mountain erupting under the sea.

You could have forced Hannibal to be sole enactor of this vicious attack, but you had spoken, wanting the young woman dead. It had given you pleasure to do so, a cold and righteous satisfaction that only now, sitting with the dead, recedes into disgust at what you've done.

You cannot account for the fact that you are in love with the same elegant wretch that poses the corpse like a painter's model.

Love, or fear—how close those instincts run, flank to flank, breeding together. You have lost the opportunity to run, now, and both of you know it; even when you are older and stealthy enough to skulk out from under Hannibal’s impossible eye you'll never dare speak against him, will always owe to him the freedom that he will inevitably claim from you again.

As he peers into the cave of the dead woman's chest you see how handsome he is in this devilish craft, how it suits him to be so deadly.

Noticing the pressure of your gaze Hannibal turns to you, peeling his gloves down over his fingers with a hearty snap.

“I will do no more,” he says. “The Lover will only desecrate my work, after all.”

He has wrapped some of Tara-Lynne’s innards in plastic, you notice, as he begins the detailed system of cleaning the shed of his presence. He cannot help but have his trophy, placing it in a protective box to retain its freshness as he finishes up at this site of death.

You observe in a respectful silence, though perhaps you could not speak even if you found yourself compelled to comment. Through the drug in your blood you go in and out of different states of perception, the moving picture in which you're cast bearing all the colours of an erotic Italian film, or amaryllis, crimson and green.

You're not quite conscious as Hannibal gets you into the car and drives you home, nor when he gives you a bed bath, your head leant back over the side of the mattress as he washes your hair over a bowl of water. The product he runs through it smells of tangerines, the towel he dabs you dry with of a luxury hotel, all heady perfume.

He dresses you in violet cotton pyjamas with frilled hems like woven vines and puts you to bed, a book playing in audio format: a reading of a Donna Tartt novel in the author’s own voice. Her soft, pretty accent talking through the tale makes you think of Léon Frossard and his Southern rides with Liliane; they'd gone to Jackson, Mississippi one year. Léon had talked about Elvis, who’d been born there. Liliane had listened and imagined little lonely Priscilla in Graceland over the state line. How she'd never felt at home.

You have half dreams of dead girls, one of them bound in rope, her throat grinning into a knife. Then you dream of Anna-May waking up in her bed with a sharp, violent breath, looking into your eyes across the room in terror and relief.

When your high finds its temporary end you roll over in bed to see Hannibal switching off the audiobook, which he has allowed to run for hours so that you will not stir to silence.

Hannibal looks as he frequently does in the morning, which is to say too perfect for any mortal life: his hair fashionably tousled to mimic having come from his pillow, a sterile shirt poking cheekily up from under his dressing gown.

He has the colour of health in his high cheeks, energised by having ended an enemy of one he loves.

You probe at yourself inwardly for your own feelings, anticipating a hurtling onslaught of hysterics, guilt so severe as to send you off to a self-induced death.

As of yet these emotions do not present themselves. Indeed there is nothing but acceptance of what you'd both done in the night, that a living soul is freed from her tormentor and a black one delivered justly under the earth.

"Why did you make me watch when you killed her?" you ask as Hannibal sets a tray of English tea and crumpets at your bedside.

"You chose to look," he says evenly. "Had you closed your eyes there would have been little I could have done to prevent you, save severing the lids. I’m not given to such gruesome mutilation, at least not upon those I dearly care for."

Hannibal bends lightly at the waist to blow on your tea, his breath rippling the surface. Even this, you think, will bear something of him, then, a fragment of his DNA in a particle of stray saliva. Another subtle rape.

"You told Will you thought he was right," you say. "That you should protect me rather than involve me, like Abigail. But you weren't telling the truth."

"I agreed with him, then," says Hannibal. "But you asked for my help in advancing change, and so my opinion altered. It was necessary for you to witness death before you committed a murder with your own hands. I wished for you to understand that it is a process like any other—in removing the mystique I hope, in time, your fear and revulsion of it will lessen, as well."

You pick up one of the crumpets, dropping it hastily back in aversion to its many holes. They are too much like wounds in white skin, not all of them of natural formation.

Hannibal smirks and hands the crumpet back to you, holding onto its edge until you've taken a bite.

"I don’t expect you to make peace with death with any immediacy," he says. "But the lesson will find you, nevertheless."

You chew the piece of crumpet thirty times before you let it pass your gullet, soft as hash.

"Are we going to eat Tara-Lynne?" you ask once it's gone down.

"Yes," says Hannibal firmly. "Later. At our evening meal, with Will. Do you intend to stage a scene of protest?"

How he would like that, you think, an opportunity to pin you between his thighs like a shrieking piglet to be given his meat.

"No," you say. “I’ll eat it.”

The marks of age on either end of Hannibal's mouth press deeper in.

"I would not be so sure of that."

"I know you'll feed her to me no matter what," you say. "So I want to know when. To participate rather than be taken advantage of."

The tea cup, though cooled by Hannibal's breath, still stings your hand with its heat as you pick it up to drink. You hold the pain in your palm like a field mouse, a delicate thing brought in from the wild. It helps the inner ache.

"So you have indeed taken in what I’ve taught you," says Hannibal with satisfaction.

"Some people deserve to die," you say. "Yes. I see it now."

"You don't regret it, then."

You look into the tea as though into a cauldron's brew, a spell in it somewhere.

"No."

Then, with a little start of fear, you say, "Do you still love me, Hannibal? I'm not an innocent little girl anymore. I'm almost a killer."

Were you not holding a hot drink in your hand Hannibal would have made love to you, so overcome is he by his instinct to console you.

"Your innocence was never your prize," he says, touching his knuckles to your brow. "Your inquisitive nature and ability to develop, however, I greatly cherish, and Will does, as well."

*

The younger of your father-jailers does not come in until dinner approaches, stealing quietly through the enormous house to where you await him at the dining table, head back against your chair, spinning in another eddy of narcotic wonder. There had been a crumbled pill in the tea, perhaps, or the butter on the crumpets, cooked into the oil.

Hannibal had not trusted your mild mood to last, or had simply wanted to manufacture another.

Will sees it in you at once: the open pupils of the eyes, the jaw hanging softly open, tongue toying along the ends of your teeth.

"Ah," he says with a neutral interest. "So it's going to be that kind of evening. What are we celebrating?"

You look at Will with one eye shut, trying to keep the moving pieces of your vision together. His hair is so wet from having been soaked with snow that it is as black as panther hair; you'd run your fingers through it if you were able to stand and go to him.

"I killed Tara-Lynne," you say in a babyish sing-song. "Or at least I told Hannibal to. So he did. He's cooking her kidneys for dinner. Rognoncini Trifolati, he called it."

You drag out the syllables of the Italian words, enjoying the dancer’s rhythm of them.

"Garlic, white wine,” you say. “That’s what he’s cooking her with. We're all going to eat her together.”

Will’s head twitches aside, and though his expression scarcely changes it appears entirely different—not one of judgement, nor of disappointment, which you had feared from him.

“I don’t remember Hannibal mentioning any of this,” says Will. “Seems like I’m always missing out on the big milestones. How are you feeling about it?”

You screw your face up, noncommittal.

“I’m glad Tara-Lynne’s dead.”

“But not necessarily glad you had to do it.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Okay. That’s reasonable.”

Will circles around your chair and leans back against the table so that you’re face to face, his motion leaving trails of shapes and sparkling colour in the air. You run a hand through it, spelling his name.

“I should have been there with you,” says Will.

“No, you shouldn’t,” you say. “You’re basically a cop. You shouldn’t be doing things like that.”

“I shouldn’t have done what I did to you,” says Will. “But I did. So I’m sorry that I wasn’t there this time. That I have to be away from you both.”

He touches your hand, and you play with his fingers, as content as a child.

“You really do love me, don’t you?” you ask. “I really thought you wouldn’t anymore, afterwards. I think if Hannibal hadn’t given me his special tea I would have been awake all night long worrying about it. I’m supposed to be your innocent baby girl.”

Will’s hand shuts like a book over yours, trapping it in his.

“You’re not supposed to be anything but you.”

“And what am I, Daddy?”

“A person who made the right decision,” Will says. “Hannibal told me what Tara-Lynne did. I know that’s why you made that call. You cared about Anna-May; you asked about her. You were relieved when you heard that she was safe. You did this to set her free.”

“But,” you say, looking into the fairy-like loveliness of Will’s beastly face, the close cup of stubble, the ungiven kiss on his lips. “But I—”

“Liked it?”

Will’s mouth, still holding your kiss, seems to tilt; perhaps it even does, that slight smugness that is always in him somewhere. Thinking himself elevated from all others in the world, even you, the girl that destiny has deigned his secondary mate.

“I knew that you’d enjoy it,” he says. “Your moral thinking is too strict to allow anything but gratification on seeing something evil taken from the world. Taking it yourself.”

You push Will away slightly, all-too aware, suddenly, of the slight overbite of his white teeth, the canines overlarge, the lower row mildly crooked, and still quite perfect.

He is too beautiful to be real. To be good.

He draws you back into him firmly, wickedly.

“Well?” he says. “Am I right?”

You feel a random lurch of disgust with him, this pitiful being that had once anguished at the thought of becoming a being of evil. How he relishes it now, having learned through his two lovers that he is seen for what he is.

“Hannibal cut her throat, not me,” you say, as curtly as you can through the slur of drugs. “I just sat there like a peeper or something. I’m always on the outside. Behind the glass. No matter how much I’ve wanted to prove myself to you both I couldn’t do it.”

“You have,” says Will. “Without a doubt.”

You snort.

“I think I’m going to start feeling bad about all this, pretty soon. Once dear old Dad lets me feel things for myself. He knows I’ll crash. That he’ll have to pick me up and make me feel all better again.”

Will looks briefly in the kitchen’s direction, drawn desperately to it in want of his other half.

“Did Hannibal take you to bed with him afterwards?” he asks.

As if by psychic projection you see where his thoughts go: Hannibal putting you on your back in a bed of blood, a fucking like a musical bridge, taking you both to a new and erotic low.

“He carried me up to my room, sure,” you say innocently. “I slept all night long.”

Will shoots you a hard look.

“You know what I want to know.”

Sighing, you say, “No. He waited for you.”

You’re certain Will’s face registers relief before Hannibal’s opportune entry through the kitchen door.

“Ah,” he says, pulling his stained apron up over his head and folding it into a flawless square. “Will. I thought I heard you come in. I assume our daughter has given you her good news.”

Will turns—not hurriedly, for all he craves the sight of Hannibal ahead of him, the smell of his imported cologne and hair products under the rich aroma of meat to be served.

“I’d like to come along on the next outing,” says Will. “But I suppose it’s enough to be here when Tara-Lynne joins us at the table.”

Dinner is brought out shortly after, first appetisers which you pick at lazily, distracted by a fresh fall of snow beyond the house, each flake like a fine structure of glass. Then the kidneys come, diced into many slim ovular pieces in a golden wave of garlic, and you are forced to mentally connect the torn open carcass of Tara-Lynne with this exquisite meat.

Your belly hums with pleasure even before you’re bidden to taste it, sold on its visual and olfactory merit. Perhaps this is some trick, you reason, another meat given to this meal instead of the dead woman. But as Hannibal sits at your side, and Will at the other, the expectant tension of the table could only be that which would exist between cannibals across a recent catch.

“Do you need assistance to eat tonight?” asks Hannibal, one hand already turning to your fork.

You pick it up yourself instead, thinking that having only achieved a partial success in the career of killing you’d better put yourself forward in another way. Yet underneath that confident act is a self that quivers and cries at having been so commanded, that is appalled that the same man that would feed you by hand has slashed open a woman your age and snipped out her organs for his kitchen.

You are another victim, for all you’ve perpetrated the unforgivable. A walking member of his many dead.

“It smells good,” you say.

Hannibal smiles, the indulgent one he reserves only for your successes.

“Yes,” he says. “She certainly does.”

Still he does not pick from his own plate, nor does Will, each of them immersed in concentration, caught between expecting you to scream out or begin to cry, or both in infantile turns. Out of self-preservation and a want to please them you put fork to tongue and take the disk of meat.

The quality of it cannot be denied. Shutting out the commands of your anorexic inner officer and your natural horror of such a feast you make a noise of approval and reach down again to your plate.

“No pointers for the chef?” asks Will teasingly as he and Hannibal follow suit.

“None,” you say. “It’s delicious. She is.”

“The way she never was in life,” Hannibal comments. “Previously she had such a bitter taste. Now I find her to be far more tolerable. Don’t you agree, Will?”

There is a level of performance to this meal from all of you, an exaggeration of the process of consumption and its enjoyment, a scripted air to each aside and appearingly passing remark. Will and Hannibal know you do not want to conclude the meal, know it as certainly as you had not wished for it to begin. But you eat to the bottom of your plate, sipping water to discourage the strained, sick feeling of having a full stomach already

.

Anna-May would like you far less than even Tara-Lynne were she to see you like this, licking your cutlery of her human flavour. Yet she would not wish to have her sister back with her, would learn to find relief in her having gone away from the world in such a fashion.

Engorged from the multiple dishes, particularly the last, you kick your chair back from the table with your healthy foot, watching with eyes semi closed as the men take away the plates and come back with a triplet set of wine flutes.

These you touch together with chiming clinks—Hannibal makes some silly joke about the murder, which you do not quite take in, and Will watches you both with a hint in the pressure of his stare.

Promptly it is understood by Hannibal, and the glasses are put aside in favour of a better vintage, one young and fresh. Home brewed.

Hannibal sweeps you up by your waist and props you like a mascot upon his table, your legs—one in sheer burgundy nylon, the other in its pitiful cast—dangling freely into the air beneath, the toes of your functional limb brushing Will's trouser leg as he slips from his place to be among you.

Reality shifts like a cryptic animal, the colours and woven patterns in the men's suit jackets altering in auto-mimicry of the mood for sex. What was sage deepens to emerald, what was brown then into gold.

From head to chest you feel the bleed of chemical annihilation, the killing off of your previous self, regenerating into a genetic blend of your two fathers, truly theirs at last. First it is known to you by the griping of fear, that of kicking off from a rock down through water whose depth the light cannot touch, some shape—gargantuan, arcane—opening a sleeper's eyes to greet your diving mass.

Then, as Hannibal and Will turn your face back and forth between you to kiss your lips there is a sexual vibration, a desire for them to pass you by and join with one another instead. They are like secret lovers kissing through a gate, or twins through a sheet, the object—you—that restrains them from their transgression so slight as not to matter at all. Their hands unbuttoning the silk dress and unclipping the Italian lingerie interlink so many times that they are undeniably holding one another, Will's palm on the back of Hannibal's fist as he peels your stocking back from your knee, Hannibal's fingers singing like many needles through Will's as he undoes the catches of jewellery Hannibal had put on earlier in the day.

You hear the pearls slip down the second satin of your body, feel them used like an erotic toy upon you, pulled through the lips of your cunt and the part of your buttocks, drawn back and forth as you roll helplessly upon its strand.

 Hannibal's fingertips unseal your labial mouth, and Will's traipse the form of your waist as though inducing a crystal glass to sing. There is a hard cock aligned with a bruise on your thigh that Hannibal had put there when he had last fucked you, amorous with the killing thrill. Another length pushes up between the playful pearls, which then are wound about its base until it swells and noses your crying cunt, wanting to be let in, to console.

There has never been so poetic a rape, one so stained by love that you allow it, open armed, moaning like some cherub tricked down through Hell's gates. You strain to your attacker’s faces for another kiss, seek the burning hearts of night that are their eyes as they take you between them. They each fuck you in turn, slip out of you in a welter of passion to encourage the other in, each still erect, engorged by pride.

Their cocks brush once, crossed like holy arms in the tangle of you three, and both men shudder, yet still do not attempt to make the mishap a contact of intent.

"Oh, go on," you say, but are not understood, or are perhaps knowingly denied; impossible now to imagine that Hannibal and Will could ever fail to know your meaning, to predict what you will say or think.

One gorge of blood seems to run through the tongue that turns around your nipple and the breast itself, one blood between the finger and the glinting vulva, though you cannot, surely, all share the same type, the rarity of it an impossibility. Still it is stronger between Hannibal and Will; even as you come on the younger man's length, stinging from the roughness of his taking, you know it, are humbled by your place in their castle, though you have served them well.

They make use of you long after you've had your release, as though taking turns stabbing an enemy, one whom they still desperately love. It is a murder of time, of the past, of a spiritual hymen you had hoped to defend and have now, through clever force, lost; silly, you think, that you'd defended it when of course they would take it, as all breeds of innocence in you have been assumed by men as though splendour unearthed in some long war.

They have undone the weaving of your brain so well between them that even aware of the anguish of loss you are relieved by it, find yourself gleeful and glad of it, a tension split like the face of a drum.

The killing has reinforced a thought you've had since sheerest youth: that you are a terror, and further into other terrors you will go, tear into them until you are only satisfied by blood.

Hannibal, then Will, Will then Hannibal—so unlike in visual presentation, they are yet duplicates, rutting you until the act is a physical echolalia, neither of them seeming able to stop. Contracting in this repetitive action you make to scream, but it is a noise more of pleasure of pain that comes out.

Indeed, you do feel it, though your working heel blackens with bruising from the impassioned kicking of it in a struggle you haven’t noticed you've begun. It is the shame of it all, of what you've done, that makes the sore cut of this animal fuck more than an outright attack. The guilt of eating a cake, or stealing wine from under your father's nose, of a incest made through adoption, of slaughtering one who deserves it—all heightens the sensitivity of your inner tissues. All makes you want what you should not.

The reflection you see of yourself in the kitchen window is of a girl grown to love the underworld, the juice of its fruit on her mouth and her thighs and in her back molars as she cries out, two pairs of teeth in either side of her shoulders, a curly-headed devil grinding a pronged tool up your middle, a sleek sibling demon beside him, pushing upon his lower back.