The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  And something strange had been happening whenever I looked in a mirror. In the morning, I’d had trouble shaving because the glass was always steamed up from the shower. I could never seem to wipe away the steam well enough to see myself, and whenever I passed in front of a mirror, the man I saw staring back at me seemed ill-defined and only vaguely familiar. One afternoon as I stood chatting with Julietta, I couldn’t recognize myself in the endless regression of mirrors that opened behind her desk. Was this the price of my obsession? I wondered. Had Julietta captured me so completely that I’d lost the part of me I show the world?

  One morning I heard something extremely disturbing: Gottlieb was scheduled to be on vacation at the same time as Julietta. The nurses were making jokes about it—they all seemed to assume that Gottlieb and Julietta would be vacationing together. The very idea sent me into a panic. Where were they going? I remembered that Julietta had told me she was going to Venice. Was Gottlieb going there too?

  When no one was looking I did a little snooping around Gottlieb’s desk. It looked like a pig sty, not surprisingly, heaped with unopened mail and magazines and confidential patient records that should have been kept under lock and key. In the top drawer I found a thin manila folder labeled “Italy” and in that folder a color brochure describing a “Romantic Getaway Vacation For Two” in Venice. My hand shook as I hid the folder back in the drawer.

  * * *

  Since she couldn’t sleep, Nicole tried to do her work at night. By the light of her computer screen, she would arrange her books and research notes on the desk and sit typing from midnight to dawn. She left the downstairs door unlatched in the hope that Hunter would find her, but her only visitors were Dumas, Hoffmann, Offenbach and other refugees from the Romantic Era whose phantasms loomed around her in the eerie shadows cast by the computer screen. Sometimes, when she was falling into that half-dreaming state that comes just before sleep, she imagined that she heard her uninvited guests whispering furiously, arguing with each other about their lives and works and what she would write about them. Suddenly, with her heart pounding, she would catch her breath and sit up, frightened by her lapse into hallucination, and in the darkness she’d find that the phantasms had disappeared, their insinuating words hushed by a car swooshing past, the landlady’s cat mewing on the stairs. But on one such occasion the visitor did not vanish when she blinked her eyes. Instead he hovered in the doorway, with his thin moustache and his high forehead and his ravening eyes boring into her like a messenger from another world.

  “Oh, my God!” she blurted, shaking herself awake. “It’s you again! Edgar Allan Poe!”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The man was holding himself perfectly still, as if expecting her to leap out at him. “And it’s Dubin,” he added.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My name’s Dubin.”

  She studied him quizzically. “Of course,” she said. “Dubin. The manuscript detective. Do you have a first name?”

  “You can just call me Dubin.”

  She stood up and stepped toward him. “I’m so sorry I keep mistaking you for Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately.”

  “I understand.”

  “Are you still trying to find out if there’s a connection between your manuscript and what happened to Maria Morgan?”

  He hesitated. “Yes, but the plot has thickened since we spoke.”

  “The plot?” That was an alarming turn of phrase. “What do you mean?”

  “The murder at the Institute,” he said. “Mrs. Paterson.”

  Nicole took another step closer to the doorway, half expecting Dubin to disappear when she turned on the overhead light. Instead he blinked, smiled and asked if he could come inside. She moved a pile of books and papers to make room for him on the couch and sat down across from him in the incredibly uncomfortable wooden armchair she’d bought at a yard sale. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How is Mrs. Paterson connected to your manuscript?”

  “Through her death, obviously. And Hunter Morgan.”

  She waited for an explanation but none was forthcoming. “Hunter had nothing to do with her death,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know Hunter.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dubin leaned forward and pulled her into his intense gaze. “I don’t want to alarm you,” he said, “but I do want you to listen to me. I think you’re in danger. You know Hunter and he knows you. That’s enough right now that you should be taking reasonable precautions, like not leaving your door wide open.”

  “Precautions against what?”

  “Against Hunter showing up when you’re here alone.”

  “Don’t you understand?” She flew out of her chair, gesturing wildly. “I want him to show up here so I’ll have a chance to talk to him before they take him away. I want to find him before he gets hurt. That’s why I’ve been leaving the door unlocked.”

  “You’re using yourself as bait?”

  “You could say that,” she said defiantly.

  Two hours later Dubin and Nicole were the best of friends. She served him Irish whiskey while the night was still dark and English breakfast tea after the November light crept around the edges of the curtains. Something about her half-wild but fiercely sympathetic spirit made him want to talk. He told her everything that had happened since he first stumbled into that miserable town—his meetings with Avery Morgan, Miss Whipple, Mrs. Paterson, Peter Bartolli, even Susan. She asked all the right questions and when he answered she listened with a concentration that gave him the hope that with her help he might be able to find his way out of the maze he’d been wandering in for the past three months.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, a little sheepishly. “I want to show you something.”

  With a leap, she climbed on top of the kitchen counter and groped behind a cabinet, locating a manila envelope which she brought down and handed to him. “Open it.”

  Dubin removed the smaller envelope addressed to Maria Morgan and studied the postmark before he pulled out the anonymous letter, which he read two or three times before looking back up at Nicole.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Dubin frowned and read part of the letter aloud: “‘A. is a fool to think he can keep you away from me—if he succeeds I may do something drastic. There are worse things than unhappiness. I think about you constantly, even when I’m supposed to be concentrating on my work. A textbook obsession, I’m afraid. Like Hoffmann in the Venice act, or my little friend Nero racing around and wagging his tail when he sees me coming and moping when I’m gone.’” He read it again silently and smiled. “So the opera singer was having an affair.”

  “Evidently.”

  “And ‘A.’—obviously that’s Avery Morgan—found out about it and was trying to stop it. And the lover was threatening to do something drastic if he succeeded.”

  “Do you know exactly when she died?”

  Dubin stuck the letter back in its envelope. “About a week after this letter was postmarked.” He lurched to his feet and paced around the little room like a tiger in a cage. “Avery Morgan is an autograph collector but this is one priceless item that he let slip through his grasp. Where did you get it?”

  “It was entrusted to me. I can’t tell you any more.”

  “Do you realize how important this is? It’s the smoking gun that gives Morgan a motive for murdering his wife.”

  Nicole looked a little queasy. “Maybe I shouldn’t have shown it to you.” She took the letter from Dubin’s hand and tried to put it back in its hiding place, but she was too shaky to climb back up on the counter. Instead she stuck it inside a cookbook and buried the cookbook in a pile of papers next to the stove.

  “There’s no way Avery Morgan will ever know you have that letter,” Dubin reassured her.


  “And the other man? The lover?”

  “Whoever he was, he had a dog named Nero. That shouldn’t be too hard to nail down.”

  Chapter 19

  One afternoon after a heavy rain, when clouds of mist were still drifting over the landscape, I put on my raincoat and walked along the gravel path that sketched the perimeter of the Institute’s grounds. Inside the iron fence, the lawns and gardens had been raked and put to bed for the winter, but the other side was a thicket of thorns and hemlocks that encircled the Institute like a forest closing in on an abandoned castle. As I walked through the mist I thought back over the bizarre series of events that had unfolded in the three months since Hunter’s first performance of Schumann’s Kreisleriana. My affair with Olympia, which had burned so brightly and so briefly that in retrospect it almost seemed like a dream. A brutal murder, leaving Hunter at large and my brilliant career hanging in the balance. My own troubling symptoms—lately I’d been hearing voices, dimly, as if a radio had been left on in a nearby room, warbling in some foreign language that was impossible to understand. And all the while the figure of Nicole hovering over me like some half-crazed Cassandra, warning me that my life was being taken over by an opera plot. Now it was the growing obsession with Julietta that threatened to send me off in new and dangerous directions. What could I do to keep things from getting worse? How was I ever going to find my way out of this labyrinth?

  On the other side of the iron fence, in the densest part of the thicket, a man in a hooded parka stood staring back at me. My heart leaped—it was Dr. Neuberger! My innermost wish had been fulfilled. At last I could breathe free, at last I could unburden myself of the crushing weight that had been building over me these past three months.

  I stepped closer, wondering who would be the first to speak. He pushed his hood back and instead of Dr. Neuberger I recognized the dark, angular face of Peter Bartolli. He smiled and called my name.

  “You’re not supposed to be here!” I yelled.

  Bartolli shrugged. “I’ve often spoken with Hunter here.” He looked over my shoulder, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of Hunter coming up the path.

  “Where’s Olympia?”

  “Gone. You won’t be seeing her again.”

  “Hunter’s gone too, as I’m sure you know.”

  He nodded. “Is my brother blaming me for that?”

  “Mostly he’s blaming me.”

  He smiled sympathetically. It was the same smile he’d aimed at Hunter when he was hypnotizing him. I tried to look away but found myself being drawn into the depths of his chthonic eyes. I wondered if I could trust him the way I trusted Dr. Neuberger.

  “You should search for Hunter yourself,” he said. “He won’t run away from you.”

  The idea made me uncomfortable. “I can’t,” I objected. “I’ve got other responsibilities, other patients...”

  “But finding Hunter must be your highest priority.”

  “I can’t leave here.”

  “You want to stay with Julietta,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Who’s been talking to you about Julietta?” I roared, amazed at how deftly he’d been able to play on my emotions. “Is it Gottlieb? Have you been talking to Gottlieb?”

  “I know about Julietta,” he nodded, without answering my question. “But Gottlieb—I wouldn’t waste my breath talking to that man. You’re right to be afraid of him.”

  “I’m not afraid of him.”

  “Then you ought to be. He’s the main obstacle keeping you from Julietta.”

  I was starting to feel desperate, as if one of my panic attacks was coming on. “What can I do?”

  “Keep your eye on him. And be careful: he can be violent at times.”

  “Violent?”

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Do you have a weapon? A small knife, perhaps, that you can carry in your pocket?”

  A knife? Was I hearing him correctly? “Yes”—I remembered the paring knife I’d lifted from the kitchen—“I have a small knife. But I... I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “You’ve already lost Olympia. Are you going to let Julietta sail off into the sunset with a man like Gottlieb?”

  He turned and disappeared into the thicket and I found myself gripping the iron bars of the fence as I caught my breath and tried to frame my answer to his question. I felt like one of the inmates, peering through the bars into the woods and wondering whether I’d been hallucinating. Had Peter Bartolli been standing there a moment before—or was it really Dr. Neuberger?

  “No,” I finally said, calling after him. “I’m not going to let that happen. Did you hear me? I’m not going to let that happen!”

  * * *

  Miss Whipple stayed late at the library, afraid to venture out in the darkness, afraid most of all to spend another night alone in her bungalow. The previous night she’d heard something—or someone—rattling around in the basement, having entered (she supposed) through the bulkhead in the back. It could have been a raccoon or even a fox—such varmints had been known to pilfer from her basement pantry at this time of year—or it could have been an intruder of a more dangerous sort, even a creature of her own fevered imagination or her guilty conscience: entering in the nighttime, lying in wait by day, ready to torment her when she returned home to sleep. She gave scant credence to the theory that Hunter Morgan was still in the neighborhood. Even a madman would know enough to head north into the mountains, and with all the search parties about he surely would have been caught by now. No, it wasn’t escaped lunatics she was worried about, but the other kind, the kind who don’t have to escape because no one knows they’re mad. No one but her, that is. No one but her

  Miss Whipple locked the library door and turned off the outside light. Then she sat down at her desk and loosened the laces of her sensible shoes, which, to tell the truth, had begun to feel like a pair of steel vices by the end of the day. Luckily she found a container of yogurt and an apple in the little refrigerator beneath her desk, and after consuming these she hoisted her reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and sat back to relax with a copy of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, one of her favorite books. After a chapter or two she dozed off and fell into a dreamless sleep, awakening in confusion and panic two hours later. Eleven o’clock! An hour earlier she could have called one of the women from church to drive her home, but now she’d slept too long. There was no one she could call at this hour. She gathered her belongings—her purse, her knitting and the Capote book, even though she was unlikely to read any more of it that night—and quietly eased herself out into the darkness, locking the library door behind her. Then with an air of resolution she shuffled through six blocks of shadows and fallen leaves until she came within sight of her bungalow. There were no lights on in the surrounding houses: all the neighbors must have gone to bed or been murdered like the Clutter family so long ago. Her house looked the same as it had looked the night before—dark, sequestered, the porch screen still banging in the wind—but she stopped in her tracks when she saw it. Without the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet, the house stood all the more forbidding in its silence.

  It was too late for second thoughts. All she had to do was brush her teeth and put on her nightgown and go to bed, which she’d done ten thousand times before. Why should this night be any different?

  * * *

  “What’d you get on Dubin?”

  Frank Lynch sat in the police cruiser with Captain Tom Wozniak digging into a couple of Spicy Italians they had just extracted from the proprietor of Val’s Sub Shop. It was five in the afternoon, near the end of a gloomy, tedious day. The cruiser hovered like a space ship in Val’s parking lot, its defroster roaring uselessly as the two men steamed up the windshield with their exhalations of prosciutto and onions and hot Italian peppers.

  “It’s like you thought,” Wozniak said, taking a sip of his Coke. “He’s not really a writer.”

  “New York magazine never heard of him?”

  “They’v
e heard of him, all right.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Tom Wozniak proved to be a more resourceful detective than Lynch had expected. On the phone with New York magazine, he’d pressed his inquiries from one desk to another until he hit pay dirt—an old timer named Brad Cornelius who not only knew Dubin in his previous life but seemed to have an axe to grind against him.

  “Dubin used to be an investigative reporter for the Times. A regular boy wonder. Won all the awards. Then he got caught up in one of those scandals.”

  “Plagiarism?”

  “No, the opposite. He was just making the stuff up. Falsifying his notes and travel records and writing fake articles for the paper. He denied it, claimed he was only guilty of sloppy recordkeeping, but the paper fired him anyway. And after that none of the other papers would touch him. He made some noise for a while, threatened to sue, even got into a brawl with a couple of editors from the Times. And then he just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “Nobody knew what happened to him. He’d been drinking heavily, his wife left him. They figured he had a breakdown or went into rehab somewhere.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Seven, eight years.”

  Lynch lowered the remains of the Spicy Italian to his lap and wiped his hands with a napkin. “I thought he looked familiar.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind.” He crumpled his garbage into a paper bag and wiped his hands again. “So your friend Brad never heard of him again?”

  “I told you, this Brad guy—I don’t know if I believe everything he says. He seems to have it out for Dubin but he wouldn’t say why. He says he’s heard rumors that Dubin showed up back in the area and was going around doing research.”