Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris

responses.
    Hannibal’s sense of her fatigue took him out of himself and he found that he was talking so she would not have to talk, his new-found voice degenerating quickly to a croak. If Lady Murasaki was surprised to hear him she did not show it, but took his hand and squeezed it tight as she extended her other hand to the next mourner in line.
    A gaggle of Paris press and the news services were there to cover the demise of a major artist who avoided them during his lifetime. Lady Murasaki had nothing to say to them.
    In the afternoon of this endless day the count’s lawyer came to the chateau along with an official of the Bureau of Taxation. Lady Murasaki gave them tea.
    “Madame, I hesitate to intrude upon your grief,” the tax official said, “but I want to assure you that you will have plenty of time to make other arrangements before the chateau is auctioned for death duties. I wish we could accept your own sureties for the death tax, but as your resident status in France will now come into question, that is impossible.”
    Night came at last. Hannibal walked Lady Murasaki to her very chamber door, and Chiyoh had made up a pallet to sleep in the room with her.
    He lay awake in his room for a long time and when sleep came, with it came dreams.
    The Blue-Eyed One’s face smeared with blood and feathers morphing into the face of Paul the Butcher, and back again
.
    Hannibal woke in the dark and it did not stop, the faces like holograms on the ceiling. Now that he could speak, he did not scream.
    He rose and went quietly up the stairs to the count’s studio. Hannibal lit the candelabra on either side of the easel. The portraits on the walls, finished and half-finished had gained presence with their maker gone. Hannibal felt them straining toward thespirit of the count as though they might find him breath.
    His uncle’s cleaned brushes stood in a canister, his chalks and charcoals in their grooved trays. The painting of Lady Murasaki was gone, and she had taken her kimono from the hook as well.
    Hannibal began to draw with big arm motions, as the count had counseled, trying to let it go, making great diagonal strokes across newsprint, slashes of color. It did not work. Toward dawn he stopped forcing; he quit pushing, and simply watched what his hand revealed to him.

21
    HANNIBAL SAT on a stump in a small glade beside the river, plucking the lute and watching a spider spin. The spider was a splendid yellow and black orb weaver, working away. The web vibrated as the spider worked. The spider seemed excited by the lute, running to various parts of its web to check for captives as Hannibal plucked the strings. He could approximate the Japanese song, but he still hit clinkers. He thought of Lady Murasaki’s pleasant alto voice speaking English, with its occasional accidental notes not on the Western scale. He plucked closer to the web and further away. A slow-flying beetle crashed into the web and the spider rushed to bind it.
    The air was still and warm, the river perfectly smooth. Near the banks water bugs ran across the surface and dragonflies darted over the reeds. Paulthe Butcher paddled his small boat with one hand, and let it drift near the willows overhanging the bank. The crickets chirped in Paul’s bait basket, attracting a red-eyed fly, which fled from Paul’s big hand as he grabbed a cricket and put it on his hook. He cast under the willows and at once his quill float plunged and his rod came alive.
    Paul reeled in his fish and put it with the others on a chain stringer hanging over the side of his boat. Occupied with the fish he only half-heard a thrumming in the air. He sucked fish blood off his thumb and paddled to a small pier on the wooded bank where his truck was parked. He used the rude bench on the pier to clean his biggest fish and put it in a canvas bag with some ice. The others were still alive on the stringer in the water. They pulled the chain under the pier in an attempt to hide.
    A twanging