The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  * * *

  “I must apologize for my lack of operatic resources,” Peter Bartolli said. He stood beside his puppet theater, wearing a dark smile that looked anything but apologetic. “Not having live singers at my disposal, we’ll have to make do with these marionettes.”

  Dubin was the only one in the audience who knew what to expect when Bartolli raised the curtain—a row of hooded figures that dangled over the stage like corpses on a scaffold. The others gasped when they saw the figures and they gasped again when Bartolli removed the hoods from two of them. The first was obviously Antonia, who sat behind Bartolli staring fixedly over the audience as if to confirm the resemblance, and the second was her mother. The other characters remained faceless under their hoods.

  “Hoffmann’s three loves are Antonia, Olympia and Giulietta.” Bartolli jiggled the hooded figure of a woman in a gaudy dress, which swung back and forth helplessly a few times before coming to rest. “All are fated to die untimely and gruesome deaths.”

  He pushed the other marionettes aside and grabbed a tall hooded figure in a long blue coat, raising its arms menacingly toward the three females. “Thanks to our hero. Let’s call him Hoffmann.”

  He reached behind Antonia and pushed some buttons on the audio equipment. “Olympia is the first to die.” A high female voice began to sing a lilting, jagged tune that didn’t sound quite human. “This is her famous aria from the second act, ‘La Chanson d’Olympie.’ She’s an automaton, of course. A beautiful, lifelike doll. Everybody knows that except Hoffmann, who thinks he loves her.” From behind the stage he pulled the strings and Olympia danced her mechanical dance, skittering impossibly across the proscenium as the Hoffmann figure stood motionless. Then the music slowed, like a clock running down. There came a mechanical winding sound and the high, angular singing began again.

  “The voice you hear is Maria Morgan’s,” Bartolli said through the little hatch above the stage. “You all know that, I’m sure. But here’s something you don’t know. Here’s how she dies.”

  Suddenly the Hoffmann figure sprang to life, hurtling toward Olympia and wrapping his enormous arms around her neck, strangling her, until the singing stopped. Then he stood with her limp body dangling from his arms and hung his head in regret. “The murderer, of course, claims to love poor Olympia even after he realizes that she’s only a doll, even after he’s destroyed her. But still he must cover up his crime.” Hoffmann pulled down a noose and fastened it around Olympia’s lifeless corpse, which he hoisted up and out of sight as if her death were a suicide.

  “Do you want to see his face?” Bartolli’s hand appeared over the puppets as he reached down and started to remove the hood. “No, on second thought, let’s leave the hood on. We’ll need it again in a few minutes for the execution.”

  * * *

  Frank Lynch navigated relentlessly over the dips and curves of the mountain roads. In the back seat Hunter swayed in silence, staring into the darkness.

  Ned Hoffmann held Nicole’s hand, trying to calm her fear. “I almost forgot,” he said. “You were going to tell me what happens in the next act.”

  “The Antonia act,” Nicole said weakly. “It’s about a young woman named Antonia whose mother was a famous opera singer. She has her mother’s voice, but she’s ill with consumption and her father has forbidden her to sing.”

  “So far it sounds familiar.”

  Nicole nodded and went on. “She’s fallen under the spell of a sinister figure named Dr. Miracle, who urges her to sing in spite of her illness. Just as her lover Hoffmann rushes in to save her, she collapses in the arms of Dr. Miracle. She has sung herself to death.”

  “Who’s Dr. Miracle? Is he the Devil?”

  “He’s Hoffmann’s nemesis, the same fiend who’s dogged him every step of the way and spoiled the three loves of his life. He’s the false father who shattered Olympia and he’s Dappertutto, the collector of souls, who tricked Hoffmann into killing his rival and then drifted off in the gondola with Giulietta.”

  “Then do you think—”

  “To answer your question—yes, he’s the Devil. That’s exactly who he is.”

  Several minutes passed before Ned spoke again. “You’re worried about Antonia,” he said.

  “Yes, of course. I’m afraid she’s the next victim.”

  “I think we can rule out Hunter’s notion that reality has somehow been captured by the plot of an opera. You agree, don’t you?”

  “Of course. But Hunter’s story mirrored both the opera and reality so closely that the connections couldn’t be coincidental.” She glanced at Hunter, hoping for confirmation, but he kept staring out the window as if she were speaking a different language.

  “What significance could they have?”

  “Isn’t it possible that Hunter has been trying to tell us something?”

  “Of course he has. Any patient—”

  “Something specific, I mean. Not just the kind of psychological fluff you’d be expecting from a patient, but clues to the mystery.”

  Ned looked past her trying to catch Hunter’s attention. “What mystery?”

  “The mystery of who killed his mother. And the other women.”

  Frank Lynch jammed on the brakes as he brought the car a little too sharply around a curve, propelling Ned forward and almost into the barrier.

  “The piano playing was real, wasn’t it?” Nicole went on. “I think he was trying to tell us something. And in the past life regression—”

  “That didn’t really happen.”

  “No, I know that. But all the more reason to try and figure out what it meant. It ended with Olympia’s two ‘fathers’ tearing her apart as they struggled over who would control her. If that isn’t symbolic, was is it?” She turned to Hunter, hoping vainly that he would give her argument some support.

  “Maybe it was just a scene from an opera.”

  “Sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar. Is that it?”

  “Something like that. Or the opposite, actually. Sometimes a tale full of sound and fury really signifies nothing.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” Nicole said, shaking her head. She laid her hand on Hunter’s knee, and although he kept staring out the window he didn’t try to pull it away. “This was not a tale told by an idiot.”

  * * *

  Peter Bartolli’s guests had watched in horror as Olympia’s strangulation had been played out on the puppet stage, and Dubin wondered how much they could endure. Bartolli came down from his perch and again stood beside the stage. “Of course the murderer isn’t punished until the very end of the story,” he said. “Before that he has to dispose of his two other loves, the innocent Antonia and the lustful Giulietta. Antonia comes first.”

  He set the Antonia puppet in center stage and hoisted the hooded Hoffmann back down. “Again we’ll use the recording of Maria Morgan, this time singing the role of Antonia. But we’ll also have something even better. Something very special. The real Antonia.”

  He whispered Antonia’s name and coaxed her forward until she stood beside him, terrified in her hypnotic trance. “Antonia,” he said gently, “I want you to look behind you. Do you see that picture on the wall? That’s your mother, isn’t it? Now turn back around, because in a minute she’s going to start singing and she’s going to need your help.”

  Antonia faced the audience while Bartolli adjusted the recording equipment. When Maria Morgan’s voice rose from the speakers—and even to Dubin it seemed to be coming from the picture on the wall—Antonia began to sing. She sang without hesitation, as if she’d known this aria all her life. As Bartolli predicted, she sang with the voice of an angel: her voice merged with her mother’s and any difference between the two became imperceptible. And as she sang, the hypnotic veil lifted from her eyes and genuine emotion, genuine communication played across her face for the first time in many years. She was able to reach out to each member of the audience—to Dubin, Dr. Palmer, Susan and especially her father, who seemed deeply
moved, almost hypnotized, by this otherworldly duet. For Avery Morgan, Dubin realized, it must have been as if both his wife and his daughter had come back from the dead.

  As the music rose in volume and pitch, Antonia sang with mounting intensity, gasping for breath as she modulated into higher and higher keys. Her face was flushed and she tottered on her feet, staggering backwards into Bartolli’s arms. Still he urged her on, and for a few more minutes she stood singing urgently, desperately, until it seemed that her heart would burst.

  The audience sat transfixed, immobilized by the terrible beauty of the catastrophe that was unfolding before them.

  Suddenly the spell was broken. A crashing noise, shouting voices, tramping feet—and Frank Lynch and Hunter Morgan clattered through the door, followed by Ned and Nicole. The music continued, but for a few seconds the audience forgot about Antonia.

  The sight of Hunter—the fugitive son, madman and murderer—was almost too much for Avery and Susan Morgan after what they’d experienced that night. They both burst into tears and rushed over to embrace him. He pushed them away and lurched desperately toward the stage, restrained only by Frank Lynch’s heavy grip.

  Ned dodged past them and hurried towards Antonia. When she saw him she stumbled backwards, losing her place in the music.

  “Don’t frighten her!” Bartolli warned. “She’s under hypnosis.”

  “You can stop singing now, Antonia,” Ned murmured, ignoring Bartolli. “That’s enough singing for now.”

  Nicole darted onto the stage and clicked off the audio system and suddenly the orchestra and the voice of Maria Morgan stopped. Antonia sang a few more notes, staring in desperate confusion like a lost child. When she ran out of notes she started choking and crying and gasping for breath, and then she collapsed in Ned’s arms. He sat her down in the first row of seats and held an asthma inhaler in front of her face until she could breathe again.

  Bartolli remained alone on the stage, his face contorted in anger. He must have known that whatever he’d hoped to accomplish with this bizarre performance was now lost; he would never be allowed another minute with Antonia. Dubin doubted if she had been in any real danger, otherwise Dr. Palmer would have intervened. He’d been humoring his brother, Dubin realized, not appreciating how dangerous he could be. That would change in a few minutes, as soon as all the commotion around Antonia’s singing and Hunter’s arrival had died down. The time had come to confront the murderer, and to expose him.

  Dubin stepped toward the stage and addressed Bartolli in a voice that everyone in the room could hear. “You’ve shown us how Hoffmann’s first love died. The beautiful toy Olympia. How she was strangled, how her body was hoisted up to the ceiling to make it look like suicide.”

  “That’s correct,” Bartolli said, glaring back suspiciously.

  “And that’s how Maria Morgan died, isn’t it?”

  The room was alive with silence as all conversation, all movement ceased.

  “Yes, I believe it was,” Bartolli mumbled.

  “You could be right,” Dubin said, smiling. He couldn’t resist a glance at the audience as he said this, fastening his gaze on Nicole, who stared back with a troubled expression that seemed to warn of impending danger. “Things might have happened as you depicted in your puppet show. In Maria Morgan’s studio there are still signs of a violent struggle, a struggle her murderer tried to conceal. And those signs tell a story of their own.”

  “What story is that?”

  “The turntable was knocked onto the floor, and the record on it was scratched when it fell. A few days later that record disappeared, along with a couple of other items: a photograph of the victim, and a kaleidoscope. The record was never returned to the library; instead it turned up at the Institute, where you happened to work. You took it there, didn’t you? And the other things that were removed from the studio?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. A record? I don’t have any record.”

  “I saw the kaleidoscope when I was here before.”

  “I have dozens of kaleidoscopes. I collect them.”

  “You have a cat named Nero.”

  “Yes.” Bartolli squinted back at Dubin with a look of puzzlement. “Is my cat somehow implicated in this?”

  “A man with a pet named Nero wrote a love letter to Maria Morgan a couple of days before she died. I have the letter.”

  “I was in Geneva when she died, attending—”

  “You were Maria Morgan’s lover, weren’t you?”

  He shook his head. “You really don’t understand what’s going on here, do you?”

  “Don’t deny it. It’s obvious from the letter.”

  There came a muffled cry and the voice of Avery Morgan, which had always sounded so colorless and thin, rumbled through the room like the growl of some enormous beast. “You?” he bellowed. “You... were the one she was having the affair with?”

  Bartolli winced uncomfortably. “Yes, I was her lover. But I didn’t kill her.”

  “You killed her,” Dubin said.

  “I was at a conference in Geneva. And I can prove it.”

  There was something new in Dubin’s manner, an air of moral certainty that had been submerged in years of cynicism and self-indulgence. “You went to her studio and strangled her just as your Hoffmann strangled Olympia,” he said, suppressing a triumphant smile, “and then you strung her up from the ceiling like a marionette to make it look like suicide. And seven years later, in an attempt to cover up your crime, you did the same thing to Mrs. Paterson and Francine Whipple.”

  Bartolli looked away, shaking his head.

  Dubin turned to Frank Lynch, who, along with the others, seemed as immobilized as the puppets hanging on the stage. “This man should be arrested and charged with murder.”

  Lynch reached for his cell phone to call for support.

  “No,” Nicole said, rising hesitantly. “He didn’t kill her.”

  Ten pairs of eyes bore in on her like a swarm of hornets. “I’m sure he didn’t kill Maria Morgan or the other women,” she said. Her voice was dry with stage fright; she tried to smile but found that her face would not obey. “And I know who did.”

  Chapter 33

  Lurching over the mountain roads beside Hunter and Ned Hoffmann in the desperate hope of arriving in time to save Antonia, Nicole had suddenly realized that she herself was the key to the mystery.

  Yes, Hunter had been trying to tell them something and it was through her that he was communicating. She was the only person who could grasp his meaning and draw the necessary conclusions. And she could do that by using the critical tools she used in her work and applying them to his fictional creation as she would to any other text. Where Hunter’s narration was false as fact, it was true as fiction. She asked herself: what was the hidden thread that ran through his dreams and hallucinations and bound them all together? She thought back to his account of her final session with Dr. Hoffmann before he set off for Venice in his mad pursuit of Julietta. Hunter had cast her in the role of Nicklausse, the faithful servant who followed Hoffmann from one disastrous affair to another and could always see through his delusions. In that guise she’d told Ned she knew who the killer was but no one would listen to her. That was her destiny, she realized, a Cassandra, an unheeded seer of the truth. And to fulfill it she would have to unlock the unconscious—whose unconscious? hers or Hunter’s? or did it make any difference?—the only way she knew how: she must not only read the book of the world but deconstruct its text with all the ingenuity at her disposal.

  How could she make sense of Hunter’s story? It all began with his playing the piano: the Kreisleriana, Schumann’s portrait of the deranged composer who found in music and madness his gateway to the spirit world. “To find God he first had to find the Devil,” Dr. Palmer had told Ned Hoffmann in the story; and the same might have been said of Nicole, expelled from school and family—in an earlier age she would have been burned at the stake—for not believing in the Devil. Her true cr
ime lay in seeing her father for what he was. Like Hamlet she feigned madness in self-defense—is that what Hunter had done? When he’d imagined another life for himself it was as his psychiatrist, the ultimate father figure. In that persona he imagined that he’d followed Julietta to Venice and murdered her under the eye of Dappertutto, the collector of souls. Who was Dappertutto? Who was Hoffmann? Ask one who was there: the boy on the balcony with the mandolin. Ask the boy—who was the murderer?

  Suddenly Nicole saw herself not from the inside, the way people normally do, even in dreams, but objectively, as if she were a character in a story. She was standing off to one side watching herself and the others in the room: Bartolli still on the stage with Antonia tottering blankly beside him, being comforted by Ned Hoffmann; Avery and Susan Morgan, both looking angry and distraught, with Dr. Palmer frowning beside them; Frank Lynch grimacing through his broken teeth as he clamped a tight grip on Hunter’s arm and kept an eye on Bartolli; and Dubin, frozen and expressionless after Nicole’s foiling of his brilliant denouement. This could be dangerous, she realized. She was violating the rules of dreaming: you can’t dream yourself outside of your own mind. You might have multiple personalities—who doesn’t, in the course of a lifetime?—but there’s only one you. It’s the eye behind the camera. When you become so dissociated that you start seeing yourself from outside your own skin, you’re sailing close to the edge. That’s what happened to Hunter, and that’s what had been happening to her since she was fourteen, when she knew her father had killed her brother but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She had never mentioned it to anyone before she told Hunter and that was only because she thought he was crazy. Why? Was the whole world a conspiracy to keep you from telling the truth about the Devil? Everyone knows who it is but they will lock you up and throw away the key if you tell the truth. Now she saw Hunter staring fiercely ahead, past her, past his father and Bartolli, past the walls to another world.

  Time stood still and in its infinite imagination lighted every corner of her life, as if this were her last moment on earth. And suddenly she was back on the inside of her skin and she knew who the killer was. If he but blench, I know my course. Murder will speak.