Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

The other wasn’t dead though, and Dolarhyde knew it.

He followed Miss Harper through thickets of fear.

They went through double doors into the Painting Study and Storage Department. Dolarhyde looked around quickly. It was a long, peaceful room, well-lighted and filled with carousel racks of draped paintings. A row of small office cubicles was partitioned off along the wall. The door to the cubicle on the far end was ajar, and he heard typing.

He saw no one but Paula Harper.

She took him to a counter-height worktable and brought him a stool.

“Wait here. I’ll bring the painting to you.”

She disappeared behind the racks.

Dolarhyde undid a button at his belly.

Miss Harper was coming. She carried a flat black case no bigger than a briefcase. It was in there. How did she have the strength to carry the picture? He had never thought of it as flat. He had seen the dimensions in the catalogs—17? by 13½ inches—but he had paid no attention to them. He expected it to be immense. But it was small. It was small and it was here in a quiet room. He had never realized how much strength the Dragon drew from the old house in the orchard.

Miss Harper was saying something “. . . have to keep it in this solander box because light will fade it. That’s why it’s not on display very often.”

She put the case on the table and unclasped it. A noise at the double doors. “Excuse me, I have to get the door for Julio.” She refastened the case and carried it with her to the glass doors. A man with a wheeled dolly waited outside. She held the doors open while he rolled it in.

“Over here okay?”

“Yes, thank you, Julio.”

The man went out.

Here came Miss Harper with the solander box.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Crane. Julio’s dusting today and getting the tarnish off some frames.” She opened the case and took out a white cardboard folder. “You understand that you aren’t allowed to touch it. I’ll display it for you—that’s the rule. Okay?”

Dolarhyde nodded. He couldn’t speak.

She opened the folder and removed the covering plastic sheet and mat.

There it was. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun—the Man-Dragon rampant over the prostrate pleading woman caught in a coil of his tail.

It was small all right, but it was powerful. Stunning. The best reproductions didn’t do justice to the details and the colors.

Dolarhyde saw it clear, saw it all in an instant—Blake’s handwriting on the borders, two brown spots at the right edge of the paper. It seized him hard. It was too much . . . the colors were so much stronger.

Look at the woman wrapped in the Dragon’s tail. Look.

He saw that her hair was the exact color of Reba McClane’s. He saw that he was twenty feet from the door. He held in voices.

I hope I didn’t shock you, said Reba McClane.

“It appears that he used chalk as well as watercolor,” Paula Harper was saying. She stood at an angle so that she could see what he was doing. Her eyes never left the painting.

Dolarhyde put his hand inside his shirt.

Somewhere a telephone was ringing. The typing stopped. A woman stuck her head out of the far cubicle.

“Paula, telephone for you. It’s your mother.”

Miss Harper did not turn her head. Her eyes never left Dolarhyde or the painting. “Would you take a message?” she said. “Tell her I’ll call her back.”

The woman disappeared into the office. In a moment the typing started again.