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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 First Monitor swung his clipboard hard against the side of Hannibal's face. Hannibal did not change his expression. Neither did he sing. A trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth. "He's mute," Second Monitor said. "No sense in beating him." The song ended and First Monitor's voice was loud in the silence. "For a mute, he can scream well enough at night," First Monitor said, and swung with his other hand. Hannibal blocked the blow with the fork in his fist, the tines digging into First Monitor's knuckles. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 First Monitor started around the table after him. "Stop! Do not hit him again. I don't want him marked." Headmaster might be drunk, but he ruled. "Hannibal Lecter, report to my office." Headmaster's office contained an army surplus desk and files and two cots. It was here that the change in the castle's smell struck Hannibal most. Instead of lemon-oil furniture polish and perfume there was the cold stink of piss in the fireplace. The windows were bare, the only remaining ornament the carved woodwork. "Hannibal, was this your mother's room? It has a sort of feminine feeling." Headmaster was capricious. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 He could be kind, or cruel when his failures goaded him. His little eyes were red and he was waiting for an answer. Hannibal nodded. "It must be hard for you to live in this house." No response. Headmaster took a cable from his desk. "Well, you won't be here much longer. Your uncle is coming to take you to France." THE FIRE ON THE kitchen hearth gave the only light. Hannibal in shadow watched the cook's assistant asleep and drooling in a chair near the fire, an empty glass beside him. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Hannibal wanted the lantern on the shelf just behind him. He could see the glass mantle gleam in the firelight. The man's breathing was deep and regular with a rumble of catarrh. Hannibal moved across the stone floor, into the vodka-and-onion aura of the cook's assistant, and came close behind him. The wire handle of the lantern would creak. Better to lift it by the base and the top, holding the glass mantle steady so that it would not rattle. Lift it straight up and off the shelf. He had it now in both hands. A loud pop, as a piece of firewood, hissing steam, burst in the fireplace, sending sparks and small coals skipping across the hearth, a coal coming to rest an inch from the assistant cook's foot in its felt boot liner. What tool was close? On the countertop was a canister, a 150-mm shell casing full of wooden spoons and spatulas. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Hannibal set the lantern down and, with a spoon, flipped the coal to the center of the floor. The door to the dungeon stairs was in the corner of the kitchen. It swung open quietly at Hannibal's touch, and he went through it into absolute darkness, remembering the upper landing in his mind, and closed the door behind him. He struck a match on the stone wall, lit the lantern and went down the familiar stairs, the air cooling as he descended. The lantern light jumped from vault to vault as he passed through low arches to the wine room. The iron gate stood open. The wine, long ago looted, had been replaced on the shelves with root vegetables, primarily turnips. Hannibal reminded himself to put a few sugar beets in his pocket as Cesar would eat them in the absence of apples, though they turned his lips red, and gave him the appearance of wearing lipstick. In his time in the orphanage, seeing his house violated, everything stolen, confiscated, abused, he had not looked here. Hannibal put the lantern on a high shelf and dragged some sacks of potatoes and onions from in front of the rear wine shelves. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 He climbed onto the table, gripped the chandelier and pulled. Nothing. He released the chandelier and tugged it again. Now he swung from it with his full weight. The chandelier dropped an inch with a jar that made the dust fly off it, and he heard a groan from the rear wine shelves. He scrambled down. He could get his fingers in the gap and pull. The wine shelves came away from the wall with a considerable squeal of hinges. He went back to his lantern, ready to blow it out if he heard a sound. Nothing. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 It was here, in this room, that he had last seen Cook, and for a moment Cook's great round face appeared to him in vital clarity, without the scrim time gives our images of the dead. Hannibal took his lantern and went into the hidden room behind the wine room. It was empty. One large gilt picture frame remained, threads of canvas sticking out of it where the painting had been cut out of the frame. It had been the largest picture in the house, a romanticized view of the Battle of Zalgiris emphasizing the achievements of Hannibal the Grim. Hannibal Lecter, last of his line, stood in the looted castle of his childhood looking into the empty picture frame in the knowledge that he was of his line and not of his line. His memories were of his mother, a Sforza, and of Cook and Mr. Jakov from a tradition other than his own. He could see them in the empty frame, gathered before the fire at the lodge. He was not Hannibal the Grim in any way he understood. He would conduct his life beneath the painted ceiling of his childhood. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 But it was as thin as Heaven, and nearly as useless. So he believed. They were all gone, the paintings with faces that were as familiar to him as his family. There was an oubliette in the center of the room, a dry stone well into which Hannibal the Grim could cast his enemies and forget them. It had been fenced round in later years to prevent accidents. Hannibal held his lantern over it and the light gave out halfway down the shaft. His father had told him that in his own childhood a jumble of skeletons remained at the bottom of the oubliette. Once as a treat, Hannibal had been lowered into the oubliette in a basket. Near the bottom, a word was scratched into the wall. He could not see it now by lantern light, but he knew it was there, uneven letters scratched in the dark by a dying man the word "Pourquoi ?" |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 IN THE LONG dormitory the orphans were sleeping. They were in the order of their age. The youngest end of the dormitory had the brooder-house smell of a kindergarten. The youngest hugged themselves in sleep and some called out to their remembered dead, seeing in the dreamed faces a concern and tenderness they would not find again. Further along some older boys masturbated under their covers. Each child had a footlocker and on the wall above each bed was a space to put drawings or, rarely, a family photograph. Here is a row of crude crayon drawings above the successive beds. Above Hannibal Lecter's bed is an excellent chalk and pencil drawing of a baby's hand and arm, arresting and appealing in its gesture, the plump arm foreshortened as the baby reaches to pat. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 There is a bracelet on the arm. Beneath the drawing, Hannibal sleeps, his eyelids twitching. His jaw muscles bunch and his nostrils flare and pinch at a dreamed whiff of cadaverine breath. The hunting lodge in the forest. Hannibal and Mischa in the cold-dust smell of the rug rolled around them, ice on the windows refracting the light green and red. The wind gusts and for a moment the chimney does not draw. Blue smoke hangs in tiers under the peaked roof, in front of the balcony railing, and Hannibal hears the front door blast open and looks through the railing. Mischa's bathtub is on the stove where the Cooker boils the little deer's horned skull with some shriveled tubers. The roiling water bangs the horns against the metal walls of the tub as though the little deer is making a last effort to butt. Blue-Eyes and Web-Hand come in with a blast of cold air, knocking off their snowshoes and leaning them against the wall. |