Red Dragon

by Thomas Harris

  Graham walked away.

  “Let me have the file, then. I’ll tell you what I think.”

  Graham had to pack the abridged file tightly into the sliding tray. Lecter pulled it through.

  “There’s a summary on top. You can read that now,” Graham said.

  “Do you mind if I do it privately? Give me an hour.”

  Graham waited on a tired plastic couch in a grim lounge. Orderlies came in for coffee. He did not speak to them. He stared at small objects in the room and was glad they held still in his vision. He had to go to the rest room twice. He was numb.

  The turnkey admitted him to the maximum-security section again.

  Lecter sat at his table, his eyes filmed with thought. Graham knew he had spent most of the hour with the pictures.

  “This is a very shy boy, Will. I’d love to meet him. . . . Have you considered the possibility that he’s disfigured? Or that he may believe he’s disfigured?”

  “The mirrors.”

  “Yes. You notice he smashed all the mirrors in the houses, not just enough to get the pieces he wanted. He doesn’t just put the shards in place for the damage they cause. They’re set so he can see himself. In their eyes—Mrs. Jacobi and . . . What was the other name?”

  “Mrs. Leeds.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s interesting,” Graham said.

  “It’s not ‘interesting.’ You’d thought of that before.”

  “I had considered it.”

  “You just came here to look at me. Just to get the old scent again, didn’t you? Why don’t you just smell yourself?”

  “I want your opinion.”

  “I don’t have one right now.”

  “When you do have one, I’d like to hear it.”

  “May I keep the file?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Graham said.

  “Why are there no descriptions of the grounds? Here we have frontal views of the houses, floor plans, diagrams of the rooms where the deaths occurred, and little mention of the grounds. What were the yards like?”

  “Big backyards, fenced, with some hedges. Why?”

  “Because, my dear Will, if this pilgrim feels a special relationship with the moon, he might like to go outside and look at it. Before he tidies himself up, you understand. Have you seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black. Of course, it keeps the distinctive sheen. If one were nude, say, it would be better to have outdoor privacy for that sort of thing. One must show some consideration for the neighbors, hmmmm?”

  “You think the yard might be a factor when he selects victims?”

  “Oh yes. And there will be more victims, of course. Let me keep the file, Will. I’ll study it. When you get more files, I’d like to see them too. You can call me. On the rare occasions when my lawyer calls, they bring me a telephone. They used to patch him through on the intercom, but everyone listened of course. Would you like to give me your home number?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how you caught me, Will?”

  “Good-bye, Dr. Lecter. You can leave messages for me at the number on the file.” Graham walked away.

  “Do you know how you caught me?”

  Graham was out of Lecter’s sight now, and he walked faster toward the far steel door.

  “The reason you caught me is that we’re just alike” was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him.

  He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness. Walking with his head down, speaking to no one, he could hear his blood like a hollow drumming of wings. It seemed a very short distance to the outside. This was only a building; there were only five doors between Lecter and the outside. He had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him. He stopped outside the entrance and looked around him, assuring himself that he was alone.

  From a car across the street, his long lens propped on the window sill, Freddy Lounds got a nice profile shot of Graham in the doorway and the words in stone above him: “Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

  As it turned out, The National Tattler cropped the picture to just Graham’s face and the last two words in the stone.

  8

  Dr. Hannibal Lecter lay on his cot with the cell lights down after Graham left him. Several hours passed.

  For a while he had textures; the weave of the pillowcase against his hands clasped behind his head, the smooth membrane that lined his cheek.

  Then he had odors and let his mind play over them. Some were real, some were not. They had put Clorox in the drains; semen. They were serving chili down the hall; sweat-stiffened khaki. Graham would not give him his home telephone number; the bitter green smell of cut cocklebur and teaweed.

  Lecter sat up. The man might have been civil. His thoughts had the warm brass smell of an electric clock.

  Lecter blinked several times, and his eyebrows rose. He turned up the lights and wrote a note to Chilton asking for a telephone to call his counsel.

  Lecter was entitled by law to speak with his lawyer in privacy and he hadn’t abused the right. Since Chilton would never allow him to go to the telephone, the telephone was brought to him.

  Two guards brought it, unrolling a long cord from the telephone jack at their desk. One of the guards had the keys. The other held a can of Mace.

  “Go to the back of the cell, Dr. Lecter. Face the wall. If you turn around or approach the barrier before you hear the lock snap, I’ll Mace you in the face. Understand?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Lecter said. “Thank you so much for bringing the telephone.”

  He had to reach through the nylon net to dial. Chicago information gave him numbers for the University of Chicago Department of Psychiatry and Dr. Alan Bloom’s office number. He dialed the psychiatry department switchboard.

  “I’m trying to reach Dr. Alan Bloom.”

  “I’m not sure he’s in today, but I’ll connect you.”

  “Just a second, I’m supposed to know his secretary’s name and I’m embarrassed to say I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Linda King. Just a moment.”

  “Thank you.”

  The telephone rang eight times before it was picked up.

  “Linda King’s desk.”

  “Hi, Linda?”

  “Linda doesn’t come in on Saturday.”

  Dr. Lecter had counted on that. “Maybe you could help me, if you don’t mind. This is Bob Greer at Blaine and Edwards Publishing Company. Dr. Bloom asked me to send a copy of the Overholser book, The Psychiatrist and the Law, to Will Graham, and Linda was supposed to send me the address and phone number, but she never did.”

  “I’m just a graduate assistant, she’ll be in on Mon—”

  “I have to catch Federal Express with it in about five minutes, and I hate to bother Dr. Bloom about it at home because he told Linda to send it and I don’t want to get her in hot water. It’s right there in her Rolodex or whatever. I’ll dance at your wedding if you’ll read it to me.”

  “She doesn’t have a Rolodex.”

  “How about a Call Caddy with the slide on the side?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be a darling and slide that rascal and I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “What was the name?”

  “Graham. Will Graham.”

  “All right, his home number is 305 JL5-7002.”

  “I’m supposed to mail it to his house.”

  “It doesn’t give the address of his house.”

  “What does it have?”

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Tenth and Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C. Oh, and Post Office Box 3680, Marathon, Florida.”

  “That’s fine, you’re an angel.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Lecter felt much better. He thought he might surprise Graham with a call sometime, or if the man couldn’t be civil, he might have a hospital-supply house mail Graham a colostomy bag for old times’ sake.

  9

  Seven hundred m
iles to the southwest, in the cafeteria at Gateway Film Laboratory of St. Louis, Francis Dolarhyde was waiting for a hamburger. The entrées offered in the steam table were filmed over. He stood beside the cash register and sipped coffee from a paper cup.

  A red-haired young woman wearing a laboratory smock came into the cafeteria and studied the candy machine. She looked at Francis Dolarhyde’s back several times and pursed her lips. Finally she walked over to him and said, “Mr. D.?”

  Dolarhyde turned. He always wore red goggles outside the darkroom. She kept her eyes on the nosepiece of the goggles.

  “Will you sit down with me a minute? I want to tell you something.”

  “What can you tell me, Eileen?”

  “That I’m really sorry. Bob was just really drunk and, you know, clowning around. He didn’t mean anything. Please come sit down. Just for a minute. Will you do that?”

  “Mmmm-hmmm.” Dolarhyde never said “yes,” as he had trouble with the sibilant /s/.

  They sat. She twisted a napkin in her hands.

  “Everybody was having a good time at the party and we were glad you came by,” she said. “Real glad, and surprised too. You know how Bob is, he does voices all the time—he ought to be on the radio. He did two or three accents, telling jokes and all—he can talk just like a Negro. When he did that other voice, he didn’t mean to make you feel bad. He was too drunk to know who was there.”

  “They were all laughing and then they . . . didn’t laugh.” Dolarhyde never said “stopped” because of the fricative /s/.

  “That’s when Bob realized what he had done.”

  “He went on, though.”

  “I know it,” she said, managing to look from her napkin to his goggles without lingering on the way. “I got on his case about it too. He said he didn’t mean anything, he just saw he was into it and tried to keep up the joke. You saw how red his face got.”

  “He invited me to . . . perform a duet with him.”

  “He hugged you and tried to put his arm around you. He wanted you to laugh it off, Mr. D.”

  “I’ve laughed it off, Eileen.”

  “Bob feels terrible.”

  “Well, I don’t want him to feel terrible. I don’t want that. Tell him for me. And it won’t make it any different here at the plant. Golly, if I had talent like Bob I’d make jo . . . a joke all the time.” Dolarhyde avoided plurals whenever he could. “We’ll all get together before long and he’ll know how I feel.”

  “Good, Mr. D. You know he’s really, under all the fun, he’s a sensitive guy.”

  “I’ll bet. Tender, I imagine.” Dolarhyde’s voice was muffled by his hand. When seated, he always pressed the knuckle of his forefinger under his nose.

  “Pardon?”

  “I think you’re good for him, Eileen.”

  “I think so, I really do. He’s not drinking but just on weekends. He just starts to relax and his wife calls the house. He makes faces while I talk to her, but I can tell he’s upset after. A woman knows.” She tapped Dolarhyde on the wrist and, despite the goggles, saw the touch register in his eyes. “Take it easy, Mr. D. I’m glad we had this talk.”

  “I am too, Eileen.”

  Dolarhyde watched her walk away. She had a suck mark on the back of her knee. He thought, correctly, that Eileen did not appreciate him. No one did, actually.

  The great darkroom was cool and smelled of chemicals. Francis Dolarhyde checked the developer in the A tank. Hundreds of feet of home-movie film from all over the country moved through the tank hourly. Temperature and freshness of the chemicals were critical. This was his responsibility, along with all the other operations until the film had passed through the dryer. Many times a day he lifted samples of film from the tank and checked them frame by frame. The darkroom was quiet. Dolarhyde discouraged chatter among his assistants and communicated with them largely in gestures.

  When the evening shift ended, he remained alone in the darkroom to develop, dry, and splice some film of his own.

  Dolarhyde got home about ten P.M. He lived alone in a big house his grandparents had left him. It stood at the end of a gravel drive that runs through an apple orchard north of St. Charles, Missouri, across the Missouri River from St. Louis. The orchard’s absentee owner did not take care of it. Dead and twisted trees stood among the green ones. Now, in late July, the smell of rotting apples hung over the orchard. There were many bees in the daytime. The nearest neighbor was a half-mile away.

  Dolarhyde always made an inspection tour of the house as soon as he got home; there had been an abortive burglary attempt some years before. He flicked on the lights in each room and looked around. A visitor would not think he lived alone. His grandparents’ clothes still hung in the closets, his grandmother’s brushes were on her dresser with combings of hair in them. Her teeth were in a glass on the bedside table. The water had long since evaporated. His grandmother had been dead for ten years.

  (The funeral director had asked him, “Mr. Dolarhyde, wouldn’t you like to bring me your grandmother’s teeth?” He replied, “Just drop the lid.”)

  Satisfied that he was alone in the house, Dolarhyde went upstairs, took a long shower, and washed his hair.

  He put on a kimono of a synthetic material that felt like silk and lay down on his narrow bed in the room he had occupied since childhood. His grandmother’s hair dryer had a plastic cap and hose. He put on the cap and, while he dried, he thumbed through a new high-fashion magazine. The hatred and brutishness in some of the photographs were remarkable.

  He began to feel excited. He swiveled the metal shade of his reading lamp to light a print on the wall at the foot of the bed. It was William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

  The picture had stunned him the first time he saw it. Never before had he seen anything that approached his graphic thought. He felt that Blake must have peeked in his ear and seen the Red Dragon. For weeks Dolarhyde had worried that his thoughts might glow out his ears, might be visible in the darkroom, might fog the film. He put cotton balls in his ears. Then, fearing that cotton was too flammable, he tried steel wool. That made his ears bleed. Finally he cut small pieces of asbestos cloth from an ironing-board cover and rolled them into little pills that would fit in his ears.

  The Red Dragon was all he had for a long time. It was not all he had now. He felt the beginnings of an erection.

  He had wanted to go through this slowly, but now he could not wait.

  Dolarhyde closed the heavy draperies over windows in the downstairs parlor. He set up his screen and projector. His grandfather had put a La-Z-Boy recliner in the parlor, over his grandmother’s objections. (She had put a doily on the headrest.) Now Dolarhyde was glad. It was very comfortable. He draped a towel over the arm of the chair.

  He turned out the lamps. Lying back in the dark room, he might have been anywhere. Over the ceiling fixture he had a good light machine which rotated, making varicolored dots of light crawl over the walls, the floor, his skin. He might have been reclining on the acceleration couch of a space vehicle, in a glass bubble out among the stars. When he closed his eyes he thought he could feel the points of light move over him, and when he opened them, those might be the lights of cities above or beneath him. There was no more down or up. The light machine turned faster as it got warm, and the dots swarmed over him, flowed over furniture in angular streams, fell in meteor showers down the walls. He might have been a comet plunging through the Crab Nebula.

  There was one place shielded from the light. He had placed a piece of cardboard near the machine, and it cast a shadow over the movie screen.

  Sometimes, in the future, he would smoke first to heighten the effect, but he did not need it now, this time.

  He thumbed the drop switch at his side to start the projector. A white rectangle sprang on the screen, grayed and streaked as the leader moved past the lens, and then the gray Scottie perked up his ears and ran to the kitchen door, shivering and wagging his stump of a tail. A cut to the Sc
ottie running beside a curb, turning to snap at his side as he ran.

  Now Mrs. Leeds came into the kitchen carrying groceries. She laughed and touched her hair. The children came in behind her.

  A cut to a badly lit shot in Dolarhyde’s own bedroom upstairs. He is standing nude before the print of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. He is wearing “combat glasses,” the close-fitting wrap-around plastic glasses favored by hockey players. He has an erection, which he improves with his hand.

  The focus blurs as he approaches the camera with stylized movements, hand reaching to change the focus as his face fills the frame. The picture quivers and sharpens suddenly to a close-up of his mouth, his disfigured upper lip rolled back, tongue out through the teeth, one rolling eye still in the frame. The mouth fills the screen, writhing lips pulled back from jagged teeth and darkness as his mouth engulfs the lens.

  The difficulty of the next part was evident.

  A bouncing blur in a harsh movie light became a bed and Charles Leeds thrashing, Mrs. Leeds sitting up, shielding her eyes, turning to Leeds and putting her hands on him, rolling toward the edge of the bed, legs tangled in the covers, trying to rise. The camera jerked toward the ceiling, molding whipping across the screen like a stave, and then the picture steadied, Mrs. Leeds back down on the mattress, a dark spot on her nightdress spreading and Leeds, hands to his neck and eyes wild, rising. The screen went black for five beats, then the tic of a splice.

  The camera was steady now, on a tripod. They were all dead now. Arranged. Two children seated against the wall facing the bed, one seated across the corner from them facing the camera. Mr. and Mrs. Leeds in bed with the covers over them. Mr. Leeds propped up against the headboard, the sheet covering the rope around his chest and his head lolled to the side.

  Dolarhyde came into the picture from the left with the stylized movements of a Balinese dancer. Blood-smeared and naked except for his glasses and gloves, he mugged and capered among the dead. He approached the far side of the bed, Mrs. Leeds’s side, took the corner of the covers, whipped them off the bed and held the pose as though he had executed a veronica.