Hannibal Rising Page 0,45

gel, piercing thedura mater covering the brain as little as possible. It was more difficult, but the professor, inclined to the theatrical, would want to remove thedura mater himself before the class, whipping the curtain off the brain, so Hannibal left it largely intact.

He rested his gloved hand lightly on the brain. Obsessed with memory, and the blank places in his own mind, he wished that by touch he could read a dead man's dreams, that by force of will he could explore his own.

The laboratory at night was a good place to think, the quiet broken only by the clink of instruments and, rarely, the groan of a subject in an early stage of dissection, when organs might still contain some air.

Hannibal performed a meticulous partial dissection of the left side of the face, then sketched the head, both the dissected side of the face and the untouched side as well, for the anatomical illustrations that were part of his scholarship.

Now he wanted to permanently store in his mind the muscular, neural and venous structures of the face. Sitting with his gloved hand on the head of his subject, Hannibal went to the center of his own mind and into the foyer of his memory palace. He elected for music in the corridors, a Bach string quartet, and passed quickly through the Hall of Mathematics, through Chemistry, to a room he'd adopted recently from theCarnavalet Museum and renamed the Hall of the Cranium. It took only a few minutes to store everything, associating anatomical details with the set arrangement of displays in theCarnavalet, being careful not to put the venous blues of the face against blues in the tapestries.

When he had finished in the Hall of the Cranium, he paused for a moment in the Hall of Mathematics, near the entrance. It was one of the oldest parts of the palace in his mind. He wanted to treat himself to the feeling he got at the age of seven when he understood the proof Mr. Jakov showed him. All of Mr. Jakov's tutorial sessions at the castle were stored there, but none of their talks from the hunting lodge.

Everything from the hunting lodge was outside the memory palace, still on the grounds, but in the dark sheds of his dreams, scorched black like the hunting lodge, and to get there he would have to go outside. He would have to cross the snow where the ripped pages ofHuyghens ' Treatise on Light blew across Mr. Jakov's brains and blood, scattered and frozen to the snow.

In these palace corridors he could choose music or not, but in the sheds he could not control the sound, and a particular sound there could kill him.

He emerged from the memory palace back into his mind, came back behind his eyes and to his eighteen-year-old body, which sat beside the table in the anatomy laboratory, his hand upon a brain.

He sketched for another hour. In his finished sketch, the veins and nerves of the dissected half of the face exactly reflected the subject on the table. The unmarked side of the face did not resemble the subject at all. It was a face from the sheds. It was the face of Vladis Grutas, though Hannibal only thought of him as Blue-Eyes.

Up the five flights of narrow stairs to his room above the medical school, and sleep.

The garret's ceiling sloped, and the low side was neat, harmonious, Japanese, with a low bed. His desk was on the high side of the room. The walls around and over his desk were wild with images, drawings of dissections, anatomical illustrations in progress. In each case the organs and vessels were exactly rendered, but the faces of the subjects were faces he saw in dreams. Over all, a long-fanged gibbon skull watched from a shelf.

He could scrub away the smell of formalin, and the chemical smell of the lab did not reach this high in the drafty old building. He did not carry grotesque images of the dead and half-dissected into his sleep, nor the criminals, cleaved or hanged, he sometimes picked up from the jails.

There was only one image, one sound, that could drive him out of sleep.

And he never knew when it was coming.

Moonset. The moonlight diffused by the wavy, bubbled window glass creeps across Hannibal 's face and inches silent up the wall. It touches Mischa's hand in the drawing above his bed, moves over the partial faces in the anatomical drawings, moves over the