Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter, #1)

by Thomas Harris

He watched her handle the bright knife. Strange to look at the front of a woman as much as he liked. How often in company can one look where he wants to look?

I mean, we were training people to live in the sighted world and we didn’t live in it ourselves.

She was aware of a deep vein of cripple’s anger in her and, while she could not get rid of it, she made it work for her, fueling her drive for independence, strengthening her determination to wring all she could from every day.

Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night-light; she knew that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering “Is this all?”

She knew that she would never have the light, but there were th...

The entrepreneur who hit the punk-rock market with “Tooth Fairy” T-shirts came out with an alternate line that said “The Red Dragon Is a One-Night Stand.” Sales were divided about equally between the two.

“Want some dinner?” “I’ll wait till later. I get dumb after I eat.”

She gripped the pelt and fur sprang between her fingers. In the very presence of the tiger her face grew pink and she lapsed into blindisms, inappropriate facial movements she had schooled herself against. Warfield and Hassler saw her forget herself and were glad. They saw her through a wavy window, a pane of new sensation she pressed her face against.

Last, Dr. Warfield put the stethoscope in her ears. Her hands on the rhythmic chest, her face upturned, she was filled with the tiger heart’s bright thunder.

Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this. Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.

The question was spoken lightly, very well done, but Reba knew that nobody is ever kidding. She met it head-on.

Don’t please hold me down, let me come up to you and take it.”

With Reba, his only living woman, held with her in this one bubbleskin of time, he felt for the first time that it was all right: It was his life he was releasing, himself past all mortality that he was sending into her starry darkness, away from this pain planet, ringing harmonic distances away to peace and the promise of rest.

Often Dolarhyde did not find out what he felt until he acted.

You know, Will, you worry too much. You’d be so much more comfortable if you relaxed with yourself. We don’t invent our natures, Will; they’re issued to us along with our lungs and pancreas and everything else. Why fight it?

Think about it, but don’t worry about it. Why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God—He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image?

As he stared at his stained photograph of the Jacobis, Graham felt the sweet jolt of a new connection. But when he saw the answer whole it was seedy and disappointing and small.

He clamped his hands on the sides of his head to keep the thought from getting away.

“Look here. There was plenty wrong with Dolarhyde, but there’s nothing wrong with you. You said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That’s what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn’t kill you and he couldn’t watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, kid. If you let yourself believe there is, you’re a sap.

This was a hunter’s ritual, like smearing Graham’s forehead with blood.

Possibly that was the most intense and savage joy that had ever burst in him. It was unsettling to know that the happiest moment of his life had come then, in that stuffy jury room in the city of Chicago. When even before he knew, he knew.

Graham and Molly wanted very much for it to be the same again between them, to go on as they had before. When they saw that it was not the same, the unspoken knowledge lived with them like unwanted company in the house. The mutual assurances they tried to exchange in the dark and in the day passed through some refraction that made them miss the mark.

They fished for three hours in silence. Graham opened his mouth to speak several times, but it didn’t seem right. He was tired of being disliked.

He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass. That’s what it was there for.

Dear Will, Here we are, you and I, languishing in our hospitals. You have your pain and I am without my books—the learned Dr. Chilton has seen to that. We live in a primitive time—don’t we, Will?—neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books. I wish you a speedy convalescence and hope you won’t be very ugly. I think of you often. Hannibal Lecter

In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us. Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too.

He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against. He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine. Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn’t haunted—men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.