Erik turned his head and watched the dying man slowly stop his struggling. It was easier to watch this than it was to face Hannibal. Still at a loss as to what he'd said in the first place, Erik understood now that it'd been enough.
"She was my music," he said, as Jordan's bowels released. "She embodied..." Erik stopped, then slowly pushed away from the wall. It was nearly impossible to explain how Christine had taken up residence inside him. Losing her was like going blind, deaf, and dumb all at once. It didn't matter, really, and so he stopped trying. Instead, he tore down the remnants of a thick and useless curtain and dropped it under the hanged man. A negligible movement of Erik's left wrist brought the corpse down into the middle of the curtain.
The composer worked mechanically. There was no joy in this. Killing had ceased to be a thrill after those rosy hours at Mazandaran. The little sultana he'd entertained with his Pujab lasso required his skill at death, and by giving it, he saved his own life. His murder had always been about protection of himself. Even this one, now that the man had seen the sanctuary of the house on the lake. Erik was too tired to be angry now, having spent so much energy on it when Hannibal arrived. Now his heart was heavy again with loss.
"I know that I am failing in my duties above." The Opera House. The child. But where was the beauty of music without Christine's voice to give it wings? Above everything, Erik loved beauty most of all. He surrounded himself with it -- or had. Now, it was more appropriate to surround himself with what was around them now. Destruction. Death. He rolled the corpse neatly in the curtain and tied the ends together. Erik doubted that he could lift the man. He was exhausted, and, he had to admit, weak. But Erik rather thought he could manage dragging the man out to the lake. It was but a moment's walk to the lake edge. And then, when he stepped just so over the rocky shoreline, the sirens in his lake would claim the body and transport it far from the house on the lake.
How many bodies decomposed in that secret place? How many sets of bones? Erik could count them, if he thought backward to Paris. Here, however.... Here, the number was far fewer than before.
"You can have it," Erik said over the body, but this time he was speaking to Hannibal. "The Opera House. Mazandaran Manor. You can have it all." There were few to whom he would trust these things, even now, and had there been no Hannibal Lecter, Erik may have surfaced long enough to burn both buildings to the ground. But there was a Hannibal Lecter, and he had proven himself to Erik time and again. The boy could have it, then. Erik began to drag the body.