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.

I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior.

You cant reduce me to a set of influences.

Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.

It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.