Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Authors: Thomas Harris
- Language: English
- Genre: Psychological Fiction
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Hannibal Rising
Thomas Harris
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PROLOGUE:
THE DOOR TO DR. HANNIBAL LECTER’S memory palace is in the
darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by
touch alone. This curious portal opens on immense and well-lit spaces, early
baroque, and corridors and chambers rivaling in number those of the Topkapi
Museum.
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Everywhere there are exhibits, well-spaced and lighted, each keyed to
memories that lead to other memories in geometric progression.
Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other
archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like
painted Attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound
and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes.
Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself
cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you
like.
The palace is a construction begun early in Hannibal’s student life. In his
years of confinement he improved and enlarged his palace, and its riches
sustained him for long periods while warders denied him his books.
Here in the hot darkness of his mind, let us feel together for the latch.
Finding it, let us elect for music in the corridors and, looking neither left nor
right, go to the Hall of the Beginning where the displays are most
fragmentary.
We will add to them what we have learned elsewhere, in war records and
police records, from interviews and forensics and the mute postures of the
dead. Robert Lecter’s letters, recently unearthed, may help us establish the
vital statistics of Hannibal, who altered dates freely to confound the
authorities and his chroniclers. By our efforts we may watch as the beast
within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world.
I
This is the first thing I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe Within a wood.
Philip Larkin 1
HANNIBAL THE GRIM (1365-1428) built Lecter Castle in five years,
using for labor the soldiers he had captured at the Battle of Zalgiris. On the
first day his pennant flew from the completed towers, he assembled the
prisoners in the kitchen garden and, mounting his gallows to address them, he
released the men to go home, just as he had promised. Many elected to stay in
his service, owing to the quality of his provender.
Five hundred years later Hannibal Lecter, eight years old and eighth of the
name, stood in the kitchen garden with his little sister Mischa and threw
bread to the black swans on the black water of the moat. Mischa held on to
Hannibal’s hand to steady herself and missed the moat entirely on several
throws. Big carp stirred the lily pads and sent the dragonflies soaring.
Now the Alpha swan came out of the water, stumping toward the children
on his short legs, hissing his challenge.
The swan had known Hannibal all his life and still he came, his black
wings shutting out part of the sky.
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