The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  * * *

  At least once a day Nicole had to stop what she was doing for a few seconds to marvel at the unaccountable strangeness of life.

  She worried about this habit because she knew it was probably a symptom of something, but there was nothing she could do about it. The sensation could come at any time. She might be standing in line at the ATM or pumping gas at the Exxon station or cruising into the city on the commuter bus—she might even be right in the middle of a conversation with someone she knew—and suddenly there it was: she had to stop and catch her breath because all at once it struck her how incredibly strange life is—how strange people are, how strange they look and sound, how strange all their activities appear if you step back and watch them for a moment. Just look at these odd-shaped animals, she would say to herself, standing here wrapped in fibers made from petroleum or plants or the skins of other animals, barking out arbitrary sounds to which they attach so much meaning and importance. Yet sometimes it didn’t seem strange so much as magical, as if she had turned a new page in the book of the world where everything was connected to everything else in some occult fashion and if only she could find the hidden footnotes that explained the connections she would know everything there was to know. That Saturday afternoon as she sat listening to The Tales of Hoffmann on the car radio she was struck by its resemblance to Dumas’s The Woman With the Velvet Necklace, to which she had been led by Hunter Morgan’s playing of Schumann’s Kreisleriana. The same characters had migrated for almost two hundred years through the brains of Hoffmann, Schumann, Dumas and Offenbach and all their readers and listeners, and now there they were, speaking to her through radio waves from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Could anything have been more strange? Could anything (and this is where things get really strange) have been more predictable?

  She had to stop at the library to return the Tales of Hoffmann video that Miss Whipple had recommended the day after the radio broadcast. It was a spectacular, surrealistic movie and she’d kept it out for a week, even though it was due after three days, watching it again and again until she knew every scene by heart. Now she felt guilty about returning it so late.

  “I’m returning this,” she said sheepishly. “It’s overdue.” She had her wallet out, ready to pay the fine.

  “Don’t worry, dear.” Miss Whipple interrupted her conversation with another library patron to smile at Nicole and reject her attempt to pay the fine. “How did you like it?”

  “It’s very beautiful.”

  “Yes. It’s a beautiful, beautiful work.”

  The librarian was talking to someone Nicole had never seen before, a small, wiry man of about fifty whose deep-set eyes seemed to sparkle when he looked at her, as if he already knew who she was. “There’s a more interesting version than this one,” the man said, smiling. “Just as beautiful in its own way.”

  “Really?” asked Miss Whipple. “Which one is that?”

  “The Kent Nagano production that was done in Lyon in 1993. I believe it’s available on video.”

  “Well, we don’t have it.”

  The man ignored Miss Whipple and concentrated his gaze on Nicole. “It’s set in an old-fashioned lunatic asylum,” he said. “Hoffmann is a madman who keeps falling in love with the female inmates until finally he thinks one of them is a prostitute who has stolen his reflection and he stabs her in a jealous rage.”

  “What have they done to my favorite opera?” cried Miss Whipple.

  “They’ve restored the insanity and brutality its composer intended,” the man answered, still smiling. He bowed slightly. “By the way, I’m Peter Bartolli.”

  “Oh! Dr. Bartolli!” Nicole extended her hand.

  He nodded again. “You’ve heard of me, perhaps?”

  “I… I know some people at the Institute.”

  “Have you been out there?”

  “Oh, yes. Visiting some friends. Hunter and Antonia Morgan.”

  “Ah.” He raised his eyebrows. “Hunter and Antonia don’t get many visitors.”

  “I know. That’s why I go often.”

  He must have known the real reason for her weekly visits, Nicole realized later. He was a psychiatrist, Dr. Palmer’s brother—of course she’d heard of him. Had he heard of her? Was that why he suddenly introduced himself—to cut off the conversation before it got anywhere, the way psychiatrists always do? They can’t let the patients get anywhere near the truth or they’d be out of a job.

  But these thoughts came later. At that moment Nicole was confused and embarrassed and all she knew was that there was no point in continuing the conversation.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said. She glanced toward the librarian, but Miss Whipple stood with her back turned arranging some books on a cart. “I’ve got to be going. Very nice to have met you.”

  She moved toward the door. “I was just leaving myself,” Peter Bartolli said. He waved good-bye to Miss Whipple and followed Nicole out to the parking lot. They exchanged a few pleasantries—Nicole really did like him; he seemed a warm, humorous man, the kind she’d like to know better if the circumstances were different—and then they each climbed into their cars and went their separate ways.

  * * *

  Dubin had spent the afternoon following the man who attempted to buy the Offenbach manuscript. Followed him from the Victorian mansion in the woods along the narrow roads that wound their way into town. Followed the blue Saab to half a dozen destinations—a bank, a gas station, a couple of strip malls, a dry cleaner—before it finally slipped into the library parking lot. There, remembering his last visit, when Avery Morgan had denounced him to the librarian as a blackmailer, Dubin stayed in his car listening to NPR. When Nicole drove up a few minutes later he pulled down the sun visor and looked the other way, his heart racing. She didn’t seem to notice him as she emerged from her car and flitted inside.

  He turned off the radio and moved his car so he had a better view of the library entrance. Ten minutes later Nicole emerged with Dubin’s quarry shuffling after her, his arms laden with books. He and the redheaded angel stood chatting like the best of friends. Then they exchanged a few parting words, climbed into their cars and drove away in opposite directions.

  Dubin cruised out of the parking lot behind them, but this time he didn’t follow the blue Saab. He followed Nicole.

  Chapter 13

  There came a knock, and without peering through her peephole Nicole opened the door. She wondered if she ought to be alarmed. It was the man with the thin moustache and the dark wavy hair who’d spent the last two months turning up wherever she happened to be.

  “You’re here again,” she said. “Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Dubin,” he corrected her.

  “Of course. Dubin. The mysterious detective. Won’t you come in?”

  Again she led him into the dingy apartment and offered him a seat at the table, pushing a pile of books to one side. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “I’m hoping there is,” he smiled. “I’m handling the sale of a valuable manuscript for some clients.”

  “I doubt if I can help you with that. What’s the manuscript?”

  “It’s the final score of The Tales of Hoffmann.”

  Nicole felt a little chill when he said that. How did he know about the work she’d been doing? Had she told him about it the last time?

  “My clients want to sell it,” he went on, “but they’re very particular about who they deal with.”

  “So they hired a detective?”

  “Last year someone bought an autograph letter that Offenbach wrote on his deathbed, claiming that he was working on a secret final version of the opera. He was afraid his wife would destroy the manuscript or even kill him in order to suppress it. That letter belonged to my clients and it was sold through a dealer to an unidentified collector. Now someone—probably the same collector—wants to buy the secret manuscript.”

  “Nothing unusual about that, is there? I mean, natural
ly the person who bought the letter would be interested in the manuscript.”

  “Remember we talked about Maria Morgan?”

  “Sure.”

  “When she died she was rehearsing The Tales of Hoffmann. I’m convinced there’s a connection between that and her death.”

  “A connection?” Nicole felt her pulse racing. “What do you mean?”

  “It was more than a role to her. It was an obsession—an obsession that seems to be shared by our unidentified collector.”

  She pushed the pile of books a little farther from Dubin’s line of sight. “What does all this have to do with me?”

  “There’s a man who’s interested in the manuscript and I saw you talking to him this afternoon outside the library. Sort of a small man—”

  “Oh, you mean Dr. Bartolli. That was Dr. Bartolli I was talking to.”

  Dubin seemed taken aback to learn the man’s name. “I need to know a lot more about this Dr. Bartolli. Who is he? How do you know him?”

  “He used to be Associate Director of the Institute. He’s Dr. Palmer’s half brother. I never saw him there, though. I just met him this afternoon.”

  Dubin studied Nicole’s face as if deciding whether to believe her or not.

  “You’re really trying to find out if someone killed Hunter’s mother, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “My clients hate publicity,” he answered, ignoring the question. “They don’t want to be connected with any crimes, even after the fact. Especially a celebrity murder. So they asked me to clarify that point before the transaction is completed.”

  “You can’t blame him for what happened,” Nicole said.

  “Can’t blame who?”

  “Hunter.” She gazed around the room distractedly. “You can’t blame Hunter for what happened to his mother.”

  Night had fallen by the time Dubin left Nicole’s apartment. Naturally if someone had murdered Maria Morgan she would want to help in any way she could, as long as she was sure it wasn’t Hunter. And she was sure, she was utterly certain that Hunter could not be blamed. He was a victim, he and Antonia were victims—Dubin had agreed with her on that. But it troubled her to think that The Tales of Hoffmann was somehow linked with what had happened seven years before. All the work she’d done on her dissertation, all the connections she’d uncovered between Hoffmann and Dumas and Offenbach and the other nineteenth-century Romantics, even her chosen thesis topic itself, had taken on a sinister flavor and it frightened her.

  When she went to bed and closed her eyes she saw her brother’s broken face staring up at her from the rocks below and she knew that whatever happened she had to protect Hunter. She couldn’t protect her brother anymore but she could protect Hunter.

  * * *

  “Hunter, you remember when we were here last week, don’t you? You were telling me a story about something that happened a long time ago. Do you remember?”

  It was another rainy night and Hunter Morgan’s second past life regression was about to begin. The lights in my office were low; they flickered occasionally as the driving rain rattled the power lines that connected the Institute with the outside world. Peter Bartolli straddled a stool in front of my desk purring softly to Hunter, who sat in the wing chair facing him, with his back to Olympia and me. Despite my misgivings, everyone assumed that the process would be more or less the same the second time around. Dr. Palmer had flown to Chicago on personal business, and Gottlieb had the night off. None of us realized that we stood on the edge of an abyss.

  Olympia could hardly wait to finish what she had set in motion. She sat beside me in the back of the darkened room, squeezing my hand in her excitement.

  “Do you remember the story you were telling me?” Bartolli asked Hunter.

  Hunter turned away, covering his eyes with his hand.

  “We’re going to try to go back to that same time and place,” Bartolli said, ignoring this reaction. “We want to find out what happened next. Is that OK with you?”

  Hunter groaned indistinctly and Bartolli took it as a yes. “So to start out, like last time, just relax. Close your eyes and listen to my voice and don’t think about anything. That’s right. Just relax.”

  Olympia went limp in her chair, dropped my hand and fell into a hypnotic trance. This time I didn’t even try to stop her. If she was determined to join Hunter in his fantasy world, there was nothing I could do about it.

  “I want to take you back to where we were last time,” Bartolli told Hunter. “You remember, don’t you? A beautiful young woman in a ballet dress lies sleeping on a couch. You walk in with her father. An old man. Another old man runs into the room, with long eyebrows that stick out in front of his face.”

  “The two old men,” he muttered. “Fighting. Fighting over the woman.”

  “The two men are fighting over the woman? What does she do?”

  “Dancing. Dancing.”

  “She starts dancing?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you love her?”

  He made a deep growl. “Love her. Love her. Lover.”

  “Are you one of the men?”

  He shook his head violently. “No! I’m not an old man!”

  “You love her, but you’re not one of the old men?”

  And that was how it went, slowly, painstakingly, Bartolli drawing each thought out of Hunter’s mind until he finally started to babble. It was still a little incoherent but it made a kind of dramatic sense. He was dancing with the woman, spinning around and whirling down a long staircase with her father chasing after them, shouting for them to stop. The other man was chasing them, too, and the two men fought with each other, tugging and pulling at the woman and Hunter to try and make them stop.

  As this story poured out of Hunter’s mouth, Olympia stumbled to her feet and started to dance. Slowly at first, but then with increasing confidence and speed until she was whirling feverishly in the small space between Hunter and Bartolli and myself, her arms poised above her head like a ballerina’s. When one of the old men in Hunter’s narration would pull on the woman’s arm, trying to stop her from dancing, Olympia’s arm would shoot out to the side and she would start to lose her balance. Then the other man, according to Hunter, would lurch at her from the other side and Olympia would twirl away, escaping from both her pursuers to a different spot on the carpet where she resumed her pas de deux with the invisible Hunter.

  Suddenly something terrible seemed to be happening. Hunter’s voice dropped into a low-pitched growl and as he gasped for breath he described one of the men pushing the other aside and leaping violently onto the woman, knocking her down to the floor and strangling her as she shattered into half a dozen pieces. Her head fell off, though her eyes still blinked as if she were alive. Her limbs twitched their way across the floor as if she were still dancing. Hunter watched from a distance, powerless to protect her, his screams stifled by his fright.

  As Hunter reached this crisis in his narration, Olympia had thrown herself down on the floor and begun to thrash wildly, apparently reliving the horrors he was describing. Of course her head and limbs remained attached to her body, but they twitched and flipped in ways that seemed to defy human anatomy. I was reminded of the scene in The Exorcist when the girl’s head spins around—Hunter’s guttural narration even sounded like the girl’s voice as she succumbed to demonic possession in the movie. Then he let out a high-pitched scream—something about a belt, something about hanging her with a belt—and Olympia arched her back and twitched as if she were in her death throes.

  “Stop this!” came a shout from the doorway. “Stop this at once!”

  Miles Palmer burst into the room, his face an oven of fury. He glared at his brother, then at me, then at poor Olympia who was still writhing and whimpering on the floor, with a wrath that was almost divine in its intensity. My worst nightmare had come true. I felt queasy, desperately out of breath.

  Bartolli stood up in alarm. “Do you realize what you’re doing? They’re under hypnosis. You c
an’t just—”

  “Get out of here!” Palmer commanded.

  “Hunter—”

  “I’ll take care of Hunter. You get your daughter out of here!”

  Olympia had stopped writhing but she gave no sign of life or understanding. It was as if she had really broken into a dozen pieces that were scattered on the floor. Bartolli tried to revive her and raise her to standing position, but she was far too heavy for him to handle.

  “Dr. Hoffmann!” Dr. Palmer pointed at me. “Help him get her out of here!”

  I stumbled to my feet, and while Bartolli and I struggled to lift Olympia into a standing position and walk her out the door, Dr. Palmer stepped over to Hunter, who had sat quietly through this volcanic eruption as if nothing had happened. He crouched down beside Hunter, one knee on the floor, and wrapped an arm around his shoulder, murmuring to him in the kind of soft, reassuring voice you would use to comfort a child.

  “Hunter,” he said gently. “Are you all right?”

  Chapter 14

  The night before his world would change forever, Dubin stared at the TV screen surrounded by a mob of football fans whose beery excitement buoyed him in his own desperate anonymity. It wasn’t his usual bar but he was sipping his usual drink and thinking his usual thoughts, and the more he thought the more he wanted to drink. What had he been doing for the past couple of months? Chasing a story that had no beginning, no middle and no end, a story that made no sense even to the people it was supposed to be about. He told himself he was only in it for the money—but that wasn’t true and he knew it. He was in it for the story, just as he’d been back in his days as a journalist. And even then he couldn’t resist the temptation to delve into the story a little deeper than necessary, even to start making it up if he couldn’t get all the pieces to fit together. The missing Offenbach manuscript—that was something he’d made up, wasn’t it? And now people were talking about it, acting on it, weaving it into the plot, as if it really existed. He had to be careful.