Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter, #1)

by Thomas Harris

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.

As a sultan once said: I do not keep falcons—they live with me.

When in the winter of 1979 I entered the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and the great metal door crashed closed behind me, little did I know what waited at the end of the corridor; how seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.

Jack Crawford heard the rhythm and syntax of his own speech in Graham’s voice. He had heard Graham do that before, with other people. Often in intense conversation Graham took on the other person’s speech patterns. At first, Crawford had thought he was doing it deliberately, that it was a gimmick to get the back-and-forth rhythm going. Later Crawford realized that Graham did it involuntarily, that sometimes he tried to stop and couldn’t.

“Because it’s his bad luck to be the best. Because he doesn’t think like other people. Somehow he never got in a rut.”

A murder house is ugly to the neighbors, like the face of someone who betrayed them. Only outsiders and children stare.

He was an old hand at fear. He could manage this one. He simply was afraid, and he could go on anyway.

Madness came into this house through that door into this kitchen, moving on size-eleven feet. Sitting in the dark, he sensed madness like a bloodhound sniffs a shirt.

The very air had screams smeared on it.

Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking.

He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

His mind was a busy rooming house with arguments all around him, and they were fighting somewhere down the hall.

Graham was nearly forty and just beginning to feel the tug of the way the world was then; it was a sea anchor streamed behind him in heavy weather.

You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.

Men have no confidence in whispers.

But it was his curse to pick at conversations, and he began to do it now.

“He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to.”

“He’s a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don’t put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.”

“When I looked at him again, maybe my face changed, I don’t know. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I still couldn’t think of the reason, though. I didn’t trust it. I had to figure it out.

He courted the feeling that precedes an idea. It would not come.

Graham was a natural procrastinator, and he knew it. Long ago in school he had made up for it with speed. He was not in school now.

There was something else he could do, and he had known it for days. He could wait until he was driven to it by desperation in the last days before the full moon. Or he could do it now, while it might be of some use. There was an opinion he wanted. A very strange view he needed to share; a mindset he had to recover after his warm round years in the Keys. The reasons clacked like roller-coaster cogs pulling up to the first long plunge, and at the top, unaware that he clutched his belly, Graham said it aloud. “I have to see Lecter.”

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.”

If he felt Lecter’s madness in his head, he had to contain it quickly, like a spill.

“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?”

“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?”

“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 had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him.

The children had wrapped the cat in a dish towel and buried it in a shoebox with a flower between its paws. Graham rested his forearm on top of the fence and leaned his forehead against it. A pet funeral, solemn rite of childhood. Parents going back into the house, ashamed to pray. The children looking at one another, discovering new nerves in the place loss pierces. One bows her head, then they all do, the shovel taller than any of them. Afterward a discussion of whether or not the cat is in heaven with God and Jesus, and the children don’t shout for a while.

“Well, you can call him retired, but the feds like to know he’s around. It’s like having a king snake under the house. They may not see him much, but it’s nice to know he’s there to eat the moccasins.”

In Dolarhyde’s mind, Lecter’s likeness should be the dark portrait of a Renaissance prince. For Lecter, alone among all men, might have the sensitivity and experience to understand the glory, the majesty of Dolarhyde’s Becoming.

Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.

Jacobi shook a cigarette out of his pack and patted his pockets for matches. “That’s all. I can’t imagine why they gave that to me. My father smiling at Mrs. Jacobi and all the little Munchkins. You can have it. He never looked like that to me.”

Besides, what particular body I currently occupy is trivia. The important thing is what I am Becoming.

“We’ll feel sick for a long time,” Graham said. “We have to do it.”

The daughter looked at him with wide glazed eyes and at her father sitting on the floor crying “See? See?” until he fell over dead. That was where Graham lost his faith in .38’s.

“It’s hard to have anything, isn’t it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.”

When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can.

“What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine—and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.”

Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

Spurgen looked for something in Graham’s face, found nothing he could recognize.

her controlled fear of the dark; her hard-bought knowledge that time is luck. She knew the value of their days. She could hold a moment by its stem. She had taught him to relish.

even then the fear flickered across him like an osprey’s shadow: This is too good to live for long.

He was possessed with a vision of a better life on the other side of the money. Buried under all the dirt he had ever done, his old hopes still faced east. Now they stirred and strained to rise.

Put the pain and fear away and think. Now. For all time. To have some time. To have years.

“Man to man. Man to man. You use that expression to imply frankness, Mr. Lounds, I appreciate that. But you see, I am not a man. I began as one but by the Grace of God and my own Will, I have become Other and More than a man. You say you’re frightened. Do you believe that God is in attendance here, Mr. Lounds?”

It seemed to Graham that he had learned nothing in forty years: He had just gotten tired.

There is no sense of vengeance in him, only Love and thoughts of the Glory to come; hearts becoming faint and fast, like footsteps fleeing into silence. Him rampant. Him rampant, filled with Love, the Shermans opening to him. The past does not occur to him at all; only the Glory to come. He does not think of his mother’s house. In fact, his conscious memories of that time are remarkably few and indistinct.

He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone and that he would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties. Now, in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took him a step beyond Alone. At a time when other men first see and fear their isolation, Dolarhyde’s became understandable to him: He was alone because he was Unique. With the fervor of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept down for so long—cultivated them as the inspirations they truly were—he could Become.