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‘Twas the night before Columbus Day and all through Hannibal’s house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
Well, actually, that’s a complete lie.
Hannibal Lecter is, in fact, stirring—stirring fresh blood into a batch of his famous artichoke dip, and things are going most swimmingly.
“Things are going most swimmingly,” Hannibal says to the 57-year-old man-turned-corpse laying out on his table, “Nobody will know that the artichokes in this dip are actually made of human flesh!”
“I hope you arti-choke on your lies,” the corpse replies, the organs in his chest cavity jiggling merrily as he speaks. It’s like one of Hannibal’s fish aspics, except much more appetizing and with a touch more sodium content.
“Now, now, Clarence, we’ve talked about this,” Hannibal scolds, “You’re a corpse now, and corpses-“
“Corpses don’t back-sass their murderers,” Clarence sighs, “I’m sorry, Hannibal, I just keep forgetting.”
“No harm done,” With a warm smile, Hannibal sets his devious bowl of dip on the counter to place a comforting hand on Clarence’s shoulder, “Although I must ask for your complete cooperation while I brutally remove your eyeballs for—.”
*Ding dong!*
“But perhaps not right now.” Hannibal wipes his hands on his apron, which stays pristine white despite the copious amounts of blood that had littered his fingers moments before, “If you’ll excuse me, Clarence, I believe we have company.”
The moment Hannibal opened the door, Will Graham stumbled across the threshold and into the foyer with a bottle of wine in one hand and his car keys in the other. Hannibal discreetly scented the air, inhaling the aroma of what he liked to call the ‘three D’s of Will Graham’: dog, disease, and disaster. If Hannibal had to give Will a letter grade for his general aesthetic, it would have to be a ‘D’—‘D’ for delightful.
Yes—as much as he hated to admit it, Hannibal Lecter had grown quite fond of Will Graham. Perhaps it was the way he wore the same three K-Mart shirts over and over again, or the way he left sweaty fingerprints all over Hannibal’s possessions, or the way he blinked approximately every 14.3 seconds…there were thousands of reasons why Hannibal loved Will Graham, and he had them all conveniently outlined in an anthology of 5 notebooks he kept in his bedside table for nightly perusal.
“Hey Hannibal,” Will said, adjusting his fogged-up glasses, “Thanks for letting me in.”
“No need to thank me, Will. You’re always welcome—not only in my home, but in every aspect of my life as well, whether it be physically, emotionally, or in a giant soup pot with onions, potatoes, carrots, and garlic while you simmer away for hours over a roaring wood fire in a broth of white wine and-“
“Such a gourmand, with your wine soups and your onion pots…” Will dropped his jacket on the floor, paying little mind as it used its sleeves to pull itself across the floor and hide under Hannibal’s sofa, “Speaking of wine, I made this for you.”
Will tossed the bottle in Hannibal’s general direction. Luckily, Hannibal was equipped with cat-like reflexes, so with little more than a tiny ‘meow’, he was able to catch it before it shattered all over the marble floor he had imported from Mount Olympus. What a close call.
“You…know how to make wine?”
Hannibal examined the bottle, noting that the label was actually an old Walmart receipt with the words ‘Shiraz-matazz’ written on it in big Sharpie letters, and the two puppy face-shaped stickers on the back.
“Yeah, it’s easy! I squished a bunch of grapes with my feet, poured in a bottle of vodka, and left it outside for 3 days to ferment,” Will smiled to himself, “It’s an old Graham family recipe.”
Like an old woman with a sinus infection in a Yankee Candle store, he leaned in entirely too close and took a long, exaggerated sniff of the bottle itself. Hannibal’s sneaky eyebrows shot up, as if they suddenly became sentient and decided to flee the curvaceous landscape of his face. His spine clenched. His left eye began to bleed a little bit, something that hasn’t happened since his card-playing days in 2006.
He’s had foot wine before, but this…this is unholy.
“How…delightful,” Hannibal mumbled, the smooth jazz that normally played in the back of his mind replaced by the screams of a thousand damned men as his nose actually died a little bit inside, “Come, let’s go into the kitchen so I can put your gift in…a place of honor.”
“I’m so glad you like it,” Will said, following Hannibal closely enough to be weird but not close enough to be romantic, “I mean, what do you get for the man who has everything, am I right?”
“I only have most things, dear Will, due to my fabulous and mysteriously vast wealth,” Hannibal carried the bottle of wine at arm’s length. He opens the kitchen cabinet underneath the sink and pulls out something that could be a modern art sculpture. Luckily, the discarded human entrails and used ramen flavor packets proved that it was, in fact, a trash can.
“Here we go,” Hannibal announced, depositing the bottle of despair into the trash with a hollow thunk, “A place of honor for your gift.”
“But Hannibal, that’s…that’s the trash!”
Like two great big Dollar Store water balloons, Will’s Clorox-blue eyes threatened to burst from the torrent of tears that swelled beneath his eyelids.
“It definitely might not not be not not the trash,” Hannibal answered slowly. “Or maybe you’re just hallucinating again. Either way, life is meaningless.”
“Oh, well in that case…”
Will stood on his tiptoes and pressed a kiss to Hannibal’s pointed cheekbone. Clarence, who had been witness to the entire scene, gave Hannibal a post-mortem thumbs-up.
“Sorry,” Will said, face turning redder than a tomato getting punched in the face, “I, uh…”
What Will Graham didn’t know was that he hadn’t actually kissed Hannibal’s cheek at all—oh no, at the last second, his salami-pink lips had collided with Hannibal’s massive, pulsating ego. A common mistake, really, but one with potentially dire consequences.
Side effects of KISSING HANNIBAL’S MASSIVE PULSATING EGO™ may include, but not limited to: deep conversations, tainted fishing lures, references to Greek and Roman mythology, wrongful imprisonment, excessive sweating, fine dining, and severe penetrating trauma to the abdominal region. Call your doctor if you experience dizziness, hallucinations, fainting, fevers, headaches, nightmares, and/or nausea, because these may be signs that you have untreated Anti-MDMA Receptor Encephalitis and Hannibal Lecter is screwing you over for his own amusement.
Life is hard. KISSING HANNIBAL’S MASSIVE PULSATING EGO™ can make it even harder.
The moment Will’s lips left Hannibal’s flesh, every bone in Hannibal’s body began to vibrate. His blood vessels expanded and contracted wildly beneath his quivering epidermis, and somewhere deep in the woods of Lithuania, a lone wolf stood on a mountaintop and howled the first notes of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at the moon.
“Will…”
There was something rising in Hannibal—a Hannibal Rising, if you will—that began at the tips of his well-manicured toes and began climbing up the lengths of his aesthetically pleasing calves. It tickled like a sneeze and burned like that time he ate three chicken-fried human flank steaks in less than 15 minutes on a personal dare.
“Hannibal, are you okay?”
“My hips don’t lie, and neither can I,” Hannibal stated, almost bored as his insides recreated the part in Titanic where that one guy falls off the ship and hits his leg on a propeller with a satisfying thud before spiraling to his watery death, “There’s something I need to tell you…about me.”
“Well, so long as you’re not a serial-killing cannibal with a stamp collection, we’ll be fine!”
With the speed of a determined turtle, Hannibal’s irises dart to the leftmost edge of his eyeballs and stare down his craft drawer, where a big book of assorted stamps lays on a velvet pillow. Right next to that sits 127 rubber stamps, their fleshy bottoms just begging to be pressed into an ink pad.
“…But what if I do have a stamp collection?”
“Hannibal,” Will half-growls, a dark aura gathering around his subtly voluptuous person, “Don’t even joke about that.”
“Good thing I have never seen or touched a stamp in my entire life,” Hannibal says, “But the serial killing cannibal thing is one-hundred-percent true, though.”
“Wait…what?”
“I said that the serial killing cannibal thing is…it...your accusations are making me feel, uh, blue! Yes, blue!” Just in the nick of time, Clarence pushes a velvet chaise into the room for Hannibal to swoon onto, blowing out the notes to Mozart’s Requiem on a handy kazoo he found in Hannibal’s junk drawer. Perhaps Hannibal should consider upgrading Clarence from an appetizer to a main course as a reward for his helpfulness…
“Oh, my wounded heart!” Hannibal cries out over the kazooing of his unlikely savior, “How could you be so cruel, Will Graham…after everything I’ve done for you? All the human flesh I’ve fed you, all the times I’ve manipulated you for my own benefit…”
“I’m so sorry, Hannibal,” Will cries, throwing himself to the floor beside the chaise and bathing Hannibal’s sleeve with his baseball-sized tears, “Please, let me make it up to you. I’ll do whatever it takes!”
“Marry me on a beach in Hawaii at sunset with a string quartet playing in the background. We’ll wear matching white linen suits and our rings will have each others’ fingerprints on the inside of the bands. I’ll bake a three-tiered red velvet wedding cake, with—“
“OH MY GOD, HANNIBAL, WHAT IS THAT?”
Hannibal’s head slowly turns, Exorcist-style, in the direction of Will’s accusing finger. He’s pointing directly at Clarence, whose look of horror is only outdone by Hannibal’s own. Hannibal quickly turns the rest of his body as the panic sets in.
“Will, please, I…I can explain…”
“I cannot believe what I am seeing with my own two glistening blue orbs,” Will growls, stalking over to Clarence. “Hannibal, how could you?”
Hannibal immediately hits the floor and wraps his arms around Will’s ankle in an attempt to keep him from taking another step. Unfortunately for him, Will was the ‘Star Stepper’ on his collegiate speed-walking team, and Hannibal is no match for Will “Steel Ankles” Graham’s ankles of steel.
“I once dragged a trash barge up the length of the Mississippi River with nothing but a rope and my trusty Ankles of Steel,” Will says, “I can certainly drag a trash barge such as yourself across the kitchen.”
“I’m going to pretend that I haven’t just developed a new kink and tell you that just because you can drag me across the room doesn’t mean that you should. There’s things over there, Will, that I don’t think you’re ready to see just yet…”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re getting at, Doctor Lecter,” Will growls, “Your tricks won’t work on me. I am a strong, independent empath who don’t need no psychiatrist.”
“Actually, in my professional opinion, I believe you could greatly benefit from regular therapy-“
“Actually, in my professional opinion, I believe you could greatly benefit from SHUT UP!”
Now, three paces from Clarence’s corpse, Hannibal considers that he might be in slightly over his head. A tiny amount, really. A teensy bit. Itty-bitty chance that maybe, just maybe, he’s messed everything up for the first time in his entire life.
No, that’s impossible. Hannibal Lecter has never done anything wrong.
“I mean, really, Hannibal?” Will gestures broadly at Clarence, who is clutching the bowl of artichoke dip to his gaping chest while simultaneously playing dead…or not, Hannibal can’t really tell.
“Will, don’t do this—“
“Oh, it’s too late.”
“Please, Will, you won’t—“
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice—“
“Will!”
“—that you made a fresh batch of artichoke dip?” Will dips his pinky finger into the bowl and then pops it into his mouth, “Come on, this stuff is the greatest! Heck, I’d eat my own leg if you covered it in artichoke dip!”
“I’d eat your leg covered in artichoke dip, too,” Hannibal says, his heart still wheezing from an asthma attack of emotion, “But intense flirtation aside, I’m glad you approve of my recipe.”
“Approve? Doctor Lecter, I don’t say this kind of thing often, but I think you make the okayest food in the entire world!”
“The…okayest? Your choice of words intrigues me. Why, dear Will, is my food the ‘okayest?’”
“Well, all the stuff you make is really good,” Will says, deep in thought, “but you’ve never made me onion rings so, really, I haven’t experienced the full scope of your culinary abilities.”
“I was hoping to give you a wedding ring someday,” Hannibal muses, his stone-cut facial angles making strange, angular shadow puppets reenact the third act of Hamlet on the kitchen wall, “But, I suppose an onion ring is a step in the right direction. Perhaps I’ll prepare some for you soon…say, next Thursday evening, seven o’clock?”
Will quickly pulls a detailed date-book out of his back pocket, a few fluorescent sticky notes with things like ‘daily sob-fest 12-4AM’ and ‘Nintendogs Password Code: [redacted]’ falling to the floor.
“Could we make it half-past seven? I’ve got a violent hallucination scheduled for six forty-five and I’d like to allow some buffer time, just in case.”
“Certainly. And please, for the love of God,” Hannibal says sternly, shooting a knife-sharp glance towards the trash can where Will’s ‘wine’ festers, “do not bring anything. Your gift was so…generous, I couldn’t possibly need anything more. Ever. Seriously, don’t ever give me anything like that again.”
“Why, Hannibal Lecter,” Will’s eyebrows raise and he gives Hannibal a sly smile, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re feeling a little threatened by my wine-making prowess!”
“Oh, I certainly do feel threatened...” Hannibal says, swallowing his disgust with a very audible gulp, “But, I believe we can save that conversation for another time. It’s getting rather late, and I have quite a lot of disemboweling to do before my nightly six-hour bubble bath and exactly thirty-three seconds of sleep.”
“Say no more, Doc—let me just…” With a flourish, Will pulls a 500-count bottle of Aspirin out of his coat pocket, dumps them all on the floor, and uses the now-empty container to scoop up the entire bowl of artichoke dip. Clarence knows better than to stop a man on a dip mission, so he assumes his best rigor mortis pose and lets Will take what he wants.
“Alright, well, thanks for letting me show up in your kitchen uninvited for the sixth time this week.”
“It’s no trouble at all, which is to say, it was a lot of trouble and I am highly inconvenienced,” Hannibal whistled for Will’s coat, which came slinking into the foyer with a human femur bone caught in its zipper,” I trust you’ll be able to get home safely?”
“Oh, yeah, just give me a minute,” Will punches out a large glass window with his bare fist (don’t worry, it was his window-punching fist) and whistles into the night.
“Ah, yep, here he comes…”
Out of the woods that oh-so-conveniently happened to pop up in the middle of Hannibal’s residential street comes the Ravenstag, running full-speed towards the house.
“Wait, Will, I thought you said that stag was a hallucination?”
The stag jumps through the broken window and scoops Will up into its great black antlers. Will gives its feathered head a quick pat, whispering words of thanks and something that sounded like a promo code for free breadsticks at Papa John’s into its ear.
“We’re still working out the whole ‘real versus not real thing,’” Will whispers so as not to offend his feathered-and-hoofed friend, “But in the meantime, this guy sure beats the highway! Isn’t that right, buddy?”
The Ravenstag rolls his eyes.
“He has such a way with words…” Will wipes a stray tear from his eye, “Well, see you in my nightmares, Doctor Lecter!”
“Yes, indeed,” Hannibal says, and before he can say something like ‘travel safely’ or ‘you owe me $700 to repair my window’, Will and the Ravenstag are bounding towards his home in Virginia. Hannibal devotes a tissue box in his memory palace to the image.
Suddenly, there’s a hand on Hannibal’s shoulder. He turns to find Clarence, still-dead and ready to be harvested smiling at him while holding his own heart in his hand. Hannibal gives him a knowing look and smiles back.
“Come, Clarence,” Hannibal says, “We have much work to do.”