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After Mischa’s death, there’s a long period of silence. He is no longer starving, no longer an orphaned child, and no longer responsible for his sister. He is free. He is filled, he is sure of it, with the life-blood of his sister and that gives him strength. Her flank, her biceps, her heart, her liver, have been digested and integrated into his own flesh. They are one. He will carry her forever. She is a silent appendage that will symbolize his stand against death for the rest of his life.
Last week, he passed a church in the small village he’s found himself in. (A week before that and two days after he’d eaten the last of Mischa, he’d pickpocketed a great many people in the town square and immediately made off out of the city. The train he boarded was headed for Italy.) There are stained glass windows and gargoyles that stare back at him from the front facade. The gray brick blends in with the sky and the cold wind whistles around its corners and cuts across Hannibal’s face, sharp as a knife. He thought, vaguely, that the church would be a fine respite from the winter chill.
As he entered, he thought that he did not feel the need to atone for his sins—his circumstances hardly seem to warrant atonement or any need for forgiveness from a higher power—nor did he feel bad in any way. Still, the quietness of a hushed church hall (the sort he remembered from Sundays he’d spent with his mother and father and sister) afforded him a small bit of comfort. He dreadfully needed that. He was so alone. His steps were hushed by thick carpet in the hall and then clicked sharply as he entered into the chapel. The floor was marble. He sat in a wooden pew and examined the stained glass windows.
In the Middle Ages, they served to tell the story of Jesus Christ—the whole of the New Testament—to illiterate and non-religious peasants. Humans have always wanted connection, understanding, in some way. In religion, it was taken by force through Crusades and morality plays and glittering, painted windows. Religion was meant to form a common ground of understanding.
Taken by force… he mused. The good second God, Jesus Christ, hung up on a cross. Imagery, however, often wasn’t accurate. It was glorified, cleaned-up. The son of God didn’t bleed in rivulets from the nails in his hands and feet. He did not cry out on the cross, he did not whimper or beg.
The image of a cowed and quiet figure grew in Hannibal’s mind. He drew him up in his mind palace, a man placed in his own historical garb with the kiss of Judas Escariot on his cheek. Hannibal set a cross of wood—cedar, pine, cypress, olive—against a wall. It towered over him. The man took his place in front of the cross, arms spread. His robes draped down from his arms, across his chest and legs. Hannibal would need to disrobe him. He did so reverently, stroking the skin of The Son as he peeled back the woven cotton. Tanned chest, arms, legs. Bared and unarmed, the man only blinked back at Hannibal. Here, now, Hannibal was God.
He drove in the first nail. The skin split around the metal and blood dripped down the hand. Hannibal hammered in the nail, one, twice, thrice, and then nailed up the other hand. The man’s pulse was slowing, as if he were entering a deep and pleasant sleep. When you are put to sleep by God, you can only accept your fate. Hannibal nailed the feet to the cross, set a crown on his head, and stepped back to admire his work. The blood was staining the man’s skin, the wood was streaked with it beneath his feet, and the floor was gathering pools of it in sticky, thick red puddles.
Hannibal inhaled, feeling (for the first time in a rather long time) an empty calm engulf him. He opened his eyes and found he was not alone in the church. There was a man kneeling a few rows in front of him in reverent prayer. The sun had slipped from the sky and the chapel was cast in shadow. Hannibal stood and left, dipping his hands in the bowl of Holy Water on the way out.
This week, Hannibal was preparing his first work of art. He had made a crown of thorns and a cross of wood that would fit a standard man. He had gathered nails and a hammer and a piece of white cloth. By sunrise, there would be a replica of Velázquez’s Christ Crucified propped up in the chapel of the small town church.
The action itself was more difficult than Hannibal had anticipated. At long last, he was heaving and exhausted over a body at the ridge of the forest. This was after discovering that he could not get into the church, so the priest was crossed off the list, and then that he could not prop his art near the church at all, and finally deciding upon a dying, homeless, man who, once killed, is dragged slightly farther away and into the forest.
He sits on the ground for a while, panting. The cross will have to be brought here. The message will be less potent, but alas. An hour later he has brought his cross and fixtures, and props the man up against it. He takes the liver roughly out of the belly—he cannot afford the liver in the butcher shop.
The picture is crude and imperfect. An obviously amateur arrangement. The police will not notice that—they are not artists, after all. He checks for any possible physical evidence and the walks back towards home, his steps lost in the autumn leaves littering the forest floor.