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*
I will speak the truth. I have seen sights and been scared. I have been very wicked. I hope I shall be better, if God will help me.
(Abigail Hobbs, Salem Witch Trials, April 19, 1692)
*
It's not what it seems.
Since when has it ever been.
*
This is it. Picture the moment. The curtain rises. This is how a drama unfolds:
Her winter coat's folded on the counter, her pretty pink scarf unwound, her throat bare and trembling and the maroon scar against pale flesh a glorious chiaroscuro.
Blood staccatos in veins. She lacks a set rhythm, has for minutes, heart frenzying and leveling and plateauing and frenzying, sucked to the center of his eyes, a huge cold vacuum pulling.
Dr. Lecter, holding one of Dad's hunting knives in his hand and wearing a full-body plastic suit and fearfully, wonderfully calm, speaking detailed and simple like an explanation to the ignorant child no longer inhabiting her body and Abigail hears every word and they ring in her like a transformation.
(she is awoken not with a kiss but with death, ash and asphyxiation and fire she never feared, even as a child she charred her marshmellows and hovered her palm over the oven, concealed evidence with a bandage and a brilliant smile)
Hannibal coaxes, across the distance of the kitchen, “I said I wanted to give you back your power.”
He extends the knife handle-first.
“Take it,” Hannibal says. “Take control, Abigail.”
She releases a breath up and up and upupup through her lungs and nostrils, out her open mouth. Crosses the gap on lightly trodden feet, linoleum instead of leaves, but deep ingrained are a huntress' instincts.
Her fingers, drenched with sweat, each their own separate convulsion, breathe, breathe, another to curb the adrenaline (be brave be strong show no trace make him proud), slide easy against plastic.
Then, steel. Cleaned and primed. She skims a thumb up the arc to watch the first blood swell. She's never the one to surface her own blood. She's only witness to the aftermath.
(she will accept what she is given and commandeer to her own devices, she will serve his purpose to service her own because this is the tragedy of her life, Sophocles would boast of her – but she'll unfurl, she'll rise, she'll devour, she'll survive, she will claim their souls in recompense and first, first –)
And that's how Abigail Hobbs slits her throat.
*
This she remembers from winter evenings. Sun slanting rectangular patterns through the side windows, Dad hot with excitement at her shoulder, the deer still warm on the table, her hands tingling outside of gloves.
“Not too deep,” Hannibal says, behind. His arms wind up to adjust her grip on the handle, sliding down her tiny palm and spreading her fingers. “Keep it at this angle, directed upward. A slow slice is the best way, but clean. Deep.”
The curve of the blade beneath her chin makes a shuddering chill, cold dead winter in this cold dead house built and stuffed and holed and cemented in cold dead girls denied a burial.
“Are you ready?”
His breath stirs her hair.
Abigail nods.
Hannibal moves. The front grants the best view. Keeping his guiding hands on her, breathing loving instructions into her ear, watching avid as she hitches a breath free from deep behind her ribcage and raises her rifle, juts it hard against her shoulder bone and levels the crosshairs on the doe and her finger aches frozen over the trigger and –
“This is the only way, Abigail,” Hannibal reminds. “It must be one of us.”
One of us, the two of us, us against the world, the only ones who know.
Secrets bind them hand-to-hand, fragile as veins.
Somehow, by power of will, he makes the brightness of his eyes soften to something just off the edge of kind, a mocking parody he cuts with pupils and lips because she's in on the joke, now, the greatest delight of life.
“I can do it for you,” he offers gently, without moving.
Abigail flexes her fingers and presses the steel closer until she registers, distant, the sweet sting of a pricked scar, healed for the last time.
“No,” she hisses high through her teeth.
The upward hook of his lips, pleasure and goading and what was that poem about the abyss staring back. That's right, Dr. Lecter, you keep on smiling.
Defiant, she closes her eyes. (Thou shalt not see evil)
One quick movement. Deep within, fast as a bullet.
Any slower and she'd lose her nerve and the doe would run, and Dad would kill her regardless.
*
She will hide.
She will transform and burn and deform. She will split open the lying throat and cut off the hearing ear. She will fuse the shifting ground between girl and monster, open wide her mouth and assume them whole. She will inflict whatever damage necessary; shed her skin, take a new shape, innocent to complicit to victim.
She will not be so easily disposed.
Read between the lines.
*
The carotid artery. Veins, blood, layers epidermis and dermis, inches of ectodermal guarding the underlying bones, muscles, organs, ligaments. In cases of severe trauma, cells congeal protective scars from the remains.
Abigail remembers this from biology and anatomy classes, freshman year second semester. Before. A good two years before. She was interested in the workings of the human body, contemplated medical school and researched qualifications.
She liked surgery best.
Hannibal blinks once as her blood sprays across his face, the cabinets, damnation, accusation, proof. He watches her blood seep out and soak into the tile floor, filling the same bleached cracks. Pool in her hair, gurgle in bursting bubbles of air. Back down her throat, exsanguination.
Outside herself, there exists by necessity a private place Abigail Hobbs crafted to retain a semblance of sanity, hoard it away out of sight and treasure it. Water it. Where she retreats to assume her mask and emerge as the Shrike's consort; later, his victim. An innocent.
(She is only one of these things.)
A place where home and a parent's love are the truest things and the fireplace is always burning and she wore scarves only for winter.
She goes there. Outside herself, she wonders if Hannibal will watch until the delicate pulse-beat in her neck flutters still, a dove with a broken wing, and, assured of his good work, leave.
After I was curious what you'd do, and you were the lure, Jack was right, apathy in one eyes and hatred, she doesn't care.
Either way she made a choice.
Either way the victory is hers.
Hannibal sips on her pain and finds it exquisite. (That's sufficient for now.) He kneels and applies pressure to her wound with efficient hands that will carry no stain, nails no grit.
An ice pack retrieved from the trunk of his car stills the flow, clots the spillage.
Later, sewing tools and a blood transfusion, as they discussed. A house somewhere, extraneous details she'll gather after the first hurdle.
His smile sits proud on his mouth like finely aged wine.
She owns it.
She's owned it since And I'll keep yours.
This is merely the scraping twist of a skeleton key.
When she wakes in a soft, warm bed, suffocated by thick down blankets, for a moment it's home and hopes and this unknown rarity called love and then agony wretches through her ear and she vomits inside her mouth, staining the pure white sheets.
Abigail cleans the mess.
Hannibal invades the room with fresh-smelling breakfast on a tray, collar open, shirtsleeves rolled, white napkin folded over his wrist like a corsage, and that same smile, and Abigail is accustomed to the taste of death in her mouth.
*
(He gave her the scars but they belong to her, now, just as a gift once given is no longer owned.)
*
A vacation cottage on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Walls filled with provisions to meet a fugitive's daily needs, and some comforts.
New clothes in a new closet. Several months worth, but a smart satin dress in creme waits expectantly at the foot of her bed. Lace sleeves, flared skirt, a double-layered pearl choker holding great fire within the white – it's not her by half and too old-fashioned, different time for a different body, perhaps one not yet made by man.
A note on her nightstand telling her to join him downstairs when you're ready, - H, folded into crisp squares.
“You must eat, and often. We have to rebuild your physical strength.”
“Just like my mind, huh?”
It's difficult to focus, the euphoria of shock. One side of her head's numb, unbalanced, too heavy. She dislikes herself for the physical weakness. Once athletic, fit, and this is what their hands have reduced her to: a body, a collection of frail twisted bones and young flesh riddled through with a plethora of holes, gaping wounds to minor cuts her hastily-erected armor was too thin to defend, sixty percent water, oxygen and sun and a soul deformed and quailing at the light.
“Mind and body are intrinsically connected. Many times an ailment existing in one affects the other.”
“So Will's sick in the head, and he kills me.”
Hannibal's tongue darts out to wet his lip.
“The concept's similar.”
Abigail eats her meat and vegetables quietly, without inquiry. She's a connoisseur in taste, and for this meal and the ones before and any to come (this can't be their last), she hates Hannibal Lecter more than she ever hated her father.
For dessert he serves warm spice cake and sliced pomegranates. Abigail Hobbs the English major who spent her allowance on books and aced her literature tests crosses her arms, arches her eyebrows, bites out, “Really?” – for now she must sate herself on small defiances.
Hannibal takes his seat at the table's head. “I admit I enjoy my occasional dramatic touches,” he says as he raises his glass of wine, salutes her over the rim. His eyes never shift from hers as he savors the sacred initial taste.
Occasional, Abigail thinks but does not say, and sinks her teeth into the fruit, juice spilling uncouth down her jaw.
*
Water stings her eyes. She snaps her head up, red soaking the tank top against her rail-thin ribs, her lungs strangely and suddenly tight. Like a nightmare, drowning, a tube down her throat.
She towels herself dry and inspects a phantasm with jutting cheeks and glazed eyes in the small mirror above the porcelain sink. She feels weightless with lacking, Daddy's princess hair shod rough to her skull.
The sheep shears itself for a change.
She greets Hannibal with a mild curtsey and before he can proclaim judgment declares, “I always thought I'd make a good redhead.”
Hannibal observes without impulse or expediency, face sunken to impassive granite but eyes, eyes unfailingly keen and sharp.
“It suits you,” he says. “The phoenix reborn.”
Abigail had never asked, knew the answer, considered. Saving up money for the salon and the look on her father's face, would he kill her outright or elect punishment, forcing her to watch as he flayed the screaming girl alive on the deer table. (Examine the footnotes, this is when Abigail's final shard of stolen innocence lodged between her ribs as shrapnel.)
She planned out this part of the story on a sleepless bed – clothes in a backpack, hair chopped to shreds and dyed blonde, maroon, pink. Irrational, desperate, if she looked different he wouldn't want to kill her, if she looked different maybe he'd kill different girls and it wouldn't be her fault anymore.
(your fault, your fault your fault your fault so many train rides so many meaningless orientations so many handshakes so much small talk cannibals your fault so he wouldn't have killed me)
Hannibal reaches out to slide gentle fingertips through the bob, tucking strands behind her good ear.
“You should consider bangs,” he says.
After a week the color fades to something resembling natural. It takes Abigail nearer a month to cease the instinctive reach of her hands. She wants to grasp (anxiety), fiddle (lovestruck), twirl around a finger (petulant), language and motions of adolescence denied.
*
The actual work he does himself – minor injections of silicone, here and there. Hypodermic needles and Novocaine, and as soon as the objectionable discolorations fade she can pose for passport photos.
*
He contemplates colored contacts, but Abigail Hobbs has sat vacant behind her irises long enough.
*
Stay inside, you musn't leave, do as I say, it's for your own safety, his princess locked away in a high tower surrounded by bramble and thorns and a dragon's fangs.
The clarity slides, stunning, bursts apart, shocking her lungs barren.
Dad never truly left her. Her phantom limb was a human body all along.
*
He catches her stealing the medication he dispenses in dictated doses and she whispers, truthfully, allowing the vulnerability she feels and he loves to dampen her eyes and thicken her windpipe until she is exhausted, desolate, hollow, “It...it hurts.”
He stands extraordinarily still.
He sighs, we were making such progress, and encloses both hands over hers, warm and calloused and blunt from spices and salts and crusting blood.
“I know,” Hannibal the father coos, Hannibal the protector, Hannibal the lie she should have seen in its beautiful, hideous entirety from the moment she snared him in that first fable. I made a mistake, much like yourself.
They are nothing alike.
Abigail surrenders the pills because it's what wants. Her tears because he hungers. Her body coiled in the breadth of his arms, the familiar parody of the embrace for which she so desperately, desperately yearns because oh, how Hannibal craves.
(she just wants to be loved, she would do anything for even the chance)
He lets her cry and puts her to bed, tucking blankets beneath her chin, smoothing back her bangs with the width of his palm and resting smooth lips against her forehead. His tenderness reeks of unspent years together, and Abigail shudders from the force of understanding.
(there's a ghost in the room who wears her name)
*
The night she crawls silent predatory and uninvited into his bed, Hannibal props on an elbow to watch. White nightdress, skin ashen, hair almost black again in the moon. Bright eyes, wild in the pupils, staring upward. Fearful. Loving. Worshipping.
Abigail peels back the sheets with tigress grace. She lies down with her head nestled on Hannibal's torso, arm tucked beneath her, hand drawn to her chin.
She listens to their ill-suited breathing patterns, his heart muffled, thrumming dark and deep and precise and achingly real underneath her good ear.
“You'll protect me,” Abigail whispers.
It's not a question.
One of them knows that.
Hannibal twins his broad arms around her, tiny waist, slender wrists, strong ankles. He draws Abigail close, soothing.
“Yes,” Hannibal rumbles. The reverberation echoes from his sternum through to her bones and twists sweet and rotting in her belly. “Will that help you to sleep?"
Abigail nods.
“Then sleep.”
She closes her eyes, nuzzling her face to rest in the crook between his shoulder and his smooth, bare, untainted neck.
*
The aches dissipate.
*
“I thought you loved Will.”
Hannibal's hands pause in her hair, brush suspended.
“You think I don't care about him?”
“You're hurting him.”
“I care for Will's well-being very much. But I have to protect myself. As you must protect yourself, regardless of the cost.”
Hannibal waits.
Silence is typically perceived as acceptance.
He resumes the downward strokes of the brush, an animal's crisp fur.
*
(Once, and only one, she permitted hands besides hers to remove her scarf.)
*
(Of course they were male.)
*
She buys hats with the money he gives. Coquettish, bowler, 1920s low over her ear, mimicking the girls in her school who favored vintage throwbacks.
She indulges herself and buys scarves she likes, gaudish colors and clashing designs, risks his disapproval as she never would Dad's and he flicks his eyes but says naught a word except to assure her power of choice and she bites the adrenaline of recoil down so hard her tongue tastes copper and can barely contain herself she dare not hope once again but she must, she must she must she must because she is becoming.
*
Abigail knows she owns a certain beauty. Slender limbs, dark (red) long (short) straight (curly) hair, bright bright eyes, hollow bird-bones and a deceptively youthful face to the unknowing.
Mother, who screamed and twitched and bled to death on their wooden porch and never saw it coming, made sure to say how pretty she was and she'd mature into a gorgeous woman but when your father tells you the same and touches your shoulder arm waist hips neck all wrong and kills girls who look like you, arguments are void.
Hannibal's never looked at her with lust, at least not any recognizable kind. Greedy boys and leering men, an object for the consumption, hunted like the doe.
She wonders if she's capable of seduction. It would carve out a space even closer to the heart of him, no, not just there, she'd rattle around within his bones. If she made manifest the wants of the conflicted lonely teenage girl, if she played the role, assumed the ingenue victim for his pleasure, if she manipulated as skillfully as he because he was grooming her, was he not, a daughter a protege a pawn, a restored creation in his own image intended to share in a new life.
She could. She feels it, thrumming hot in the core of her, same as she knows she could kill him if granted the chance. (She will no longer be granted anything, Abigail Hobbs will take what is rightfully hers.)
She learned long ago better the devil's mistress than in the devil's sight-lines.
But Abigail's still a girl. Wearied, and corrupted, and used and abused and still so exquisitely needing. She could perform unskillfully, naively, and her attempts would amuse Hannibal. Perhaps he'd indulge himself (consume, control, honor).
But Abigail is loneliness in the shape of a girl, bloodstains reeking through the walls of her mind, screams visible shapes in the air, and driving everything beneath her rage, Hannibal Lecter terrifies her.
*
She wants to terrify him.
She wants to see the look in his eyes when she stabs him and know if it's the same as Nick Boyle's. How comforting, yes, you have no idea how much to see the broken bloated corpse of a monster and know it can never come back. I want to give you your power back, she'll tear it from your hands and not only control the how and when and why of her power but feel it.
*
She lifts a beautiful linoleum knife and turns it to shard the light.
To think she once was afraid of herself.
*
After they share their last supper, a regal candle-lit affair Abigail isn't sure is the finale of an act or an orchestra warming (she helped him make it, hands washed apron tied step-by-step), Hannibal passes her airplane tickets in a sealed envelope. He's instructed all she needs know, and she'll comply with the mask of the good sweet trusting daughter completely in place but completely removable.
No longer will her edges bleed.
“Goodbye, sweet Abigail.” And his face twists in the saying, as if the dismay in his voice surprises him. He can mold and murmur and coax and guide, but now he's releasing the cocoon and he can only influence, instigate, not ensure the outcome. He cannot predict. She denies him the final creation.
In this moment, perhaps Hannibal Lecter realizes he should fear her.
Hannibal kisses her cheek; presses his thumb over the delicate pulse in her neck; measuring her mood, counting the empty spaces between heartbeats.
“Will I see you again?” Abigail asks, permitting some of her old fondness (still fondness, ilke Dad despite) to seep through the words, beneath her dark lashes.
Hannibal reaches up to caress that same cheek, rubbing his thumb back and forth beneath her eye. Committing her dimensions to memory. She wonders if she'll be a sketch on his desk, immortalized in charcoal.
“What do you think?” he asks.
Abigail rests her hand over his heart, beating steady beneath coat, jacket, vest, shirt. Flesh, tissue, bones, organs. Layers. Light and color. All any man is.
“If I want to,” she says.
Hannibal the monster smiles at its exquisite cunning.
He snugs her braid over her cauterized ear, then closes the door softly behind him.
*
Before she left, she went back to the house stinking of fresh paint and bleach. A wind-bent for sale sign sat crooked in the mud, and there was no crime tape.
The pictures on the fridge faced the right way, smiling faces.
Abigail turned them over.
*
(One more wall to climb.)
(And: run.)
*
Florence is beautiful. She loves it, the cobblestone streets and European buildings and rivers and strolling bodies a complete antithesis to everything she's grown knowing. Minnesota is sewn beneath her tongue, sweet and brittle as a coin, and she doesn't want to lose the good parts, not even the bad. Without the bad she wouldn't be.
She always wanted to travel.
She knew she'd never leave.
She fills her lungs with the unknown air and smiles.
Abigail sits on the peaceful still of a gondola and makes the water ripple with her fingers. She reads, literature, newspapers, TattleCrime (it runs in the family: the Bureau's favorite mad dog incarcerated for murder of five, awaits trial). She borrows medical books from the library. Doesn't open them, lets sit on the bedside table of her tiny room in the attic above a wine shop.
She lives a dull life, eating in cafes and improving her Italian and not flirting with attentive boys.
She practices in the mirror, expressions and body language and pitching her voice and shedding the tell-tale slant of an accent.
She teaches herself to respond to Mischa without hesitation. But in her mind she is Abigail. In her heart she is Abigail Hobbs, born to deceased parents, the heart of the wild scraping along her bones, the forest twining through her blood, hunter, survivor, teenage girl.
Smiles, threats, knives, hands, drugs from a mushroom, protection, affection, death, false death, rebirth.
They've tried so many different ways.
Abigail traces her fingers over her scars and opens her mouth to laugh.
*
She goes to a shooting range to refine her skills. A pistol in her palm, and muscle memory takes over.
On the target she sees Dad's face. She sees the other girls she knew only long enough to trap, Marissa, Cassie. She sees Will, the last victim, sweet Will who would have burned the world for her and burned himself instead.
She sees Hannibal's face.
Abigail levels the gun at his forehead and fires.
*
Among her litany of recurring dreams are the woods at home. A buck, proud and glorious, maneuvering through his kingdom. Unaware, leaves undisturbed beneath her silent feet. Queen she is, her domain, her rules of play.
She aims and misfires, twice. She crouches and waits, patient, oh ever so patient, the opportune moment. Tenacious, stubborn girl. She corners him, steps on a branch deliberately, weight and press and crack satisfying the keenest urges, and at the sound the buck sweeps his head around to look, eye to eye.
Maroon irises, cool face, high cheekbones, cruel smile.
Somewhere a bell tolls.
Abigail Hobbs pulls the trigger. He drops dead, and she skins the hide and hangs him on her wall.
Someday it won't be a dream.