Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [91]
He carried the picture with him for days, photographed and enlarged it in the darkroom late at night. He was agitated much of the time. He posted the painting beside his mirror in the weight room and stared at it while he pumped. He could sleep only when he had worked out to exhaustion and watched his medical films to aid him in sexual relief.
He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone and that he would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties.
Now, in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took him a step beyond Alone.
At a time when other men first see and fear their isolation, Dolarhyde's became understandable to him: he was alone because he was Unique. With the fervor of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept down for so longcultivated them as the inspirations they truly were - he could Become.
The Dragon's face is not visible in the painting, but increasingly Dolarhyde came to know how it looked.
Watching his medical films in the parlor, pumped up from lifting, he stretched his jaw wide to hold in Grandmother's teeth. They did not fit his distorted gums and his jaw cramped quickly.
He worked on his jaw in private moments, biting on a hard rubber block until the muscles stood out in his cheeks like walnuts.
In the fall of 1979, Francis Dolarhyde withdrew part of his considerable savings and took a threemonth leave of absence from Gateway. He went to Hong Kong and he took with him his grandmother's teeth.
When he returned, redhaired Eileen and his other fellow workers agreed that the vacation had done him good. He was calm. They hardly noticed that he never used the employees' locker room or shower anymore - he had never done that often anyway.
His grandmother's teeth were back in the glass beside her bed. His own new ones were locked in his desk upstairs.
If Eileen could have seen him before his mirror, teeth in place, new tattoo brilliant in the harsh gym light, she would have screamed. Once.
There was time now; he did not have to hurry now. He had forever. It was five months before he selected the Jacobis.
The Jacobis were the first to help him, the first to lift him into the Glory of his Becoming. The Jacobis were better than anything, better than anything he ever knew.
Until the Leedses.
And now, as he grew in strength and Glory, there were the Shermans to come and the new intimacy of infrared. Most promising.
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Red Dragon
CHAPTER 29
Francis Dolarhyde had to leave his own territory at Gateway Film Processing to get what he needed.
Dolarhyde was production chief of Gateway's largest division - homemovie processing - but there were four other divisions.
The recessions of the 1970's cut deeply into home moviemaking, and there was increasing competition from home video recorders. Gateway had to diversify.
The company added departments which transferred film to videotape, printed aerial survey maps, and offered custom services to smallformat commercial filmmakers.
In 1979 a plum fell to Gateway. The company contracted jointly with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to develop and test new emulsions for infrared photography.
The Department of Energy wanted sensitive infrared film for its heatconservation studies. Defense wanted it for night reconnaissance.
Gateway bought a small company next door, Baeder Chemical, in late 1979 and set up the project there.
Dolarhyde walked across to Baeder on his lunch hour under a scrubbed blue sky, carefully avoiding the reflecting puddles on the asphalt, Lounds's death had put him in an excellent humor.
Everyone at Baeder seemed to be out for lunch.
He found the door he wanted at the end of a labyrinth of halls. The sign beside the door said “Infrared Sensitive Materials in Use. NO Safelights, NO Smoking,