The Rules of Dreaming (25 page)

Chapter 31

Ned Hoffmann and Nicole filed out of Dr. Klein’s office in stunned silence, followed by a security guard who had been summoned to escort them along with Hunter to a locked waiting area.  There they were to remain for two hours until Frank Lynch arrived to drive them all back to the Institute.  For liability reasons, Dr. Klein would release Hunter only to the police.  Ned was reluctant to let either Hunter or Nicole
out of his sight.

“Why did you tell Dr. Klein that Hunter’s story was all a fantasy?” Nicole asked Ned as they padded down the hall.  “You know there was a lot of truth in it.  His piano playing, the two deaths, your rivalry with Dr. Gottlieb—”

“Keep quiet!” Ned whispered, pulling her along by the elbow.  “Dr. Klein doesn’t need to know about any of that.”

The waiting area adjoined the emergency room and seemed to have been designed for mental patients.  There was nothing in it but plastic chairs and a few old magazines—and no way out without the blessing of the security guard, who parked himself by the door reading a newspaper.  Ned and Nicole took seats near the door and wrestled with their private thoughts.  Hunter sat in the corner as far away from the others as possible and started flipping through magazines at a furious pace as if he expected to find encoded messages stuck between their pages.

Nicole thought about the tale Hunter had told and was astonished at the breadth of his genius.  He had memorized and internalized
Hamlet
along with every other book at the Institute.  He had deconstructed her thesis topic and demolished whole schools of philosophy and literary theory in the process.  He had taught himself to play the piano by listening to a record and turned all the people around him into characters in
The Tales of Hoffmann
by watching a video.  She was one of those people, one of those characters—of course she’d told him about her childhood traumas and her work with Dr. Hoffmann and the agony of writing her thesis, so it wasn’t surprising that these elements had found their way into his story.  But it was humbling to realize that many of the words he put in her mouth were more insightful than anything she’d actually thought of on her own.

“I feel like one of those authors I’ve been writing about,” she said
to Ned Hoffmann in a low voice, “meeting myself in someone else’s story.”

“Scary, isn’t it?”

Ned stood up and wandered off in search of coffee, avoiding Hunter’s eyes, which were aimed at him across the top of the magazine.  He felt exhausted, shaken, exposed.  When he passed a mirror in the hall he instinctively looked away: he couldn’t bear to see the shambling, unkempt figure he’d become after ten days of scouring the wilderness for this delusional young man who, in his own wild imaginings, had turned into himself.  He ached with a sense of repugnance and fear that no patient had ever aroused in him before.  He felt that Hunter had captured his personality or something even deeper than his personality.  In that five-hour narration, Hunter had displayed all of Ned Hoffmann’s favorite gestures and facial tics; he even spoke in a simulation of Ned’s voice.  He wasn’t just pretending to be Ned Hoffmann: he
was
Ned Hoffmann, and no one knew that better than Ned himself.  It was as if Hunter had observed Ned from within and molded his delusions out of Ned’s deepest secrets.  His meanest impulses, his weirdest fantasies, his most shameful self-deceptions—they were all there in living color: the affair with Peter Bartolli’s daughter “Olympia” (that wasn’t her real name, of course, but she really was like a wind-up doll and Hunter had been diabolically clever in describing how she lured Ned with sex and then dropped him when she realized he couldn’t help her father), the fascination with Julietta, the jealous resentment of Gottlieb, even the fantasy that Nicole was in love with him.  But Hunter had taken this admittedly embarrassing material and distorted it beyond all recognition.  Ned wasn’t insane and he wasn’t the monster depicted in Hunter’s story—he’d never been to Venice, never stabbed or strangled anyone, never actually said or done anything the least bit unprofessional or malicious. He’d never stalked Julietta or had those crazy conversations with Olympia or Nicole or Dr. Palmer; in fact none of his secret fantasies would have come to light if Hunter hadn’t worked them into his delusions.  And how did Hunter find out about them?  Did he spy on Ned?  Gossip with the staff?  Or was his own illness so finely tuned that he could detect the merest whiff of mental derangement in others?

Over an hour had passed in the hospital waiting room.  Hunter had devoured every magazine—back issues of
People
,
Newsweek
and various medical journals—while Nicole drifted in and out of sleep. The security guard had made slow progress with his newspaper, as if he were studying an ancient text.

Ned
touched Nicole’s arm to wake her up.  “Remember when you tried to warn me that the opera plot was taking over everybody’s life?”

“I didn’t really say that.”

“No, of course not.  He said you said it.  He had you saying it in his story.”

“Right.”

“You didn’t really say it.”

“No.  But it was a clever thing to have said, wasn’t it?  So I won’t deny that I would have said it, if I had really been me.”

The security guard looked up from his newspaper.  “You folks patients at the Institute?”

They all laughed, except Hunter.  It was a few minutes before Ned dared to continue, and then he lowered his voice to keep the guard from overhearing.  “What happens in the next act?”

“What do you mean?”

“Assume that you—I mean your other self, the Nicole in Hunter’s story—were correct that the opera plot was taking over.  What would happen next?”

Nicole grinned and darted her eyes toward the guard.  “Are you serious?  Or are you just—”

“Assume for the moment that I’m serious,” Ned whispered.  “Near the beginning of the story he said he’d become obsessed with three women—an artist, an ingénue, and a nymphomaniac—each of whom brought him a step closer to ruin.”

“I remember him saying that.”

“Obviously
the nymphomaniac was Julietta. And the artist—”

“That would be Olympia, the dancer.”

“Right.  Which leaves the ingénue.  What the hell is an ingénue, by the way?”

“It’s an innocent young girl.  Invariably a virgin.”

“That’s what I thought.  Don’t you see?  He’s talking about Antonia.  She’s next.”

“Next?  What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Nicole’s face had been drained of all its color.  “I do,” she whispered.  She glanced up at the guard, who was still engrossed in deciphering his newspaper.  “Let me tell you
what happens in the next act.”

*   *   *

“Your daughter is like an enchanted princess who has fallen under a spell.  I know the magic that can wake her from her seven year sleep.”

Peter Bartolli stood on the stage in his underground theater, fixing his fierce eyes on Avery Morgan.  Antonia sat beside him in a folding chair facing the audience, her eyes wide but unseeing.  Her father, who had just arrived with Susan Morgan and Dr. Palmer, seemed momentarily transfixed by Bartolli’s imperious gaze.

“Don’t do anything sudden,” Dr. Palmer told Avery Morgan in a whisper that everyone could hear.  “You and Susan have a seat.  Let me handle this.”

Dubin watched from the doorway.  He had followed the Morgans and Dr. Palmer in his own car after meeting them at the Institute.  At Bartolli’s house they found a note on the door inviting them to proceed to the basement.  The theater was dark except for a spotlight on the stage and a half-dozen candles flickering from a candelabra on the grand piano.  Over the stage hung a photograph of
Maria Morgan.  Dubin wondered if it was the one Bartolli had taken from her studio.

“It’s not the kiss of a prince that will break the spell,” Bartolli continued, “but the charm of music, which speaks directly to the soul.  And not just any music, but the voice of one of the f
inest sopranos who ever lived.”

“Peter,”
Dr. Palmer said in an even voice, “I hope you’re not—”

“The voice that more than one critic called the voice of an angel.  The voice of Antonia’s mother,
Maria Morgan.”

Avery Morgan glared at Bartolli with a fury he made no effort to suppress.  “I won’t stand for this.”

Dr. Palmer clamped a hand on Morgan’s arm and pulled him back from the stage.  “Sit down, Avery.”

Avery and Susan dropped into seats in the front row and Dr. Palmer sat beside them.  “What are you getting at, Peter?” he asked wearily.

Bartolli seemed eager for an opportunity to explain.  “As you know, Antonia hasn’t spoken more than a few words since her mother died,” he said.  “But on rare occasions she’s been known to sing, in a hauntingly beautiful soprano voice that comes as a shock to anyone who ever heard Maria Morgan.”

“She has severe asthma,” Avery Morgan argued.  “She
shouldn’t be allowed to sing.”

“The asthma began at the time her mother died.  It’s a symptom of the same illness that made her stop talking.  She
believes that when she sings it’s really her mother singing through her—that by singing she can, in effect, bring her mother back to life.”

Dr. Palmer shook his head.  “Voice projection is a common delusion in schizophrenia.”

“That’s true,” Bartolli agreed.  “And like any delusion it can be used therapeutically.  The patient must be allowed to experience the personality that’s speaking through her—”

Avery Morgan interrupted:  “You’re going to make her sing?”

“If she wants to.  She will only get better if she can bring her unconscious memories to the surface.”

Dr. Palmer stood up and took a step toward the stage.  “Peter, let’s put a stop to this right now.  Any prolonged singing could trigger a serious asthma attack.  You’re jeopardizing her health and all the
progress we’ve made with her.”

“There’s been no progress.  This is the only way to help her.”

“Please.  I insist that you let us take her back to the Institute.”

“I’m going to proceed as planned.”  The candlelight flickered defiantly in Bartolli’s cavernous eyes.  “You mustn’t interfere or interrupt while she’s under hypnosis.  It could have the most serious consequences.”

Dr. Palmer sat back down and whispered something to Avery Morgan, probably to confirm the dangers of disturbing a patient under hypnosis.  Bartolli pushed some buttons on the sound equipment at the back of the stage and disappeared momentarily behind the puppet theater, which was still concealed beneath its canvas cover.  Susan glanced over her shoulder at Dubin, silently pleading with him to stop this train wreck before it was too late, but her goal—and her husband’s and Dr. Palmer’s—was only to protect Antonia.  Dubin was there to catch a murderer, and before he could spring the trap he had to allow Bartolli to set it.  He couldn’t see very far into that twisted mind, nor did he aspire to.  But he had a hunch that the performance they were about to witness, played out before a hand-picked audience of the injured and the frightened and the guilt-ridden, was Bartolli’s symbolic way of returning to the scene of his crime.  And why did the killer return to the scene of the crime?  It was a ritual of triumph from which he imagined he would once again escape unscathed.

Dr. Palmer was the first to break the silence.  “I’m almost afraid to ask what yo
u’re going to ask her to sing.”

“A few highlights from
The Tales of Hoffmann
, of course.” 

Avery Morgan growled, “That’s the opera
Maria was rehearsing when she died.”

“Yes,” Bartolli agreed, “but it will be quite different from anything you’ve heard before.
  What you are about to see is
Hoffmann
as it was meant to be performed.”

Chapter
32

Frank Lynch arrived at the hospital before Nicole could tell Ned Hoffmann about the last act of
The Tales of Hoffmann
.  He strode into the waiting room murmuring into his cell phone and shook hands with the security guard without ending the conversation.  Then he stepped toward Ned Hoffmann, paying no more attention to Hunter or Nicole than he paid to the pictures on the wall.  “Listen,” he said, “I just found out something you need to know.  Our friend Dr. Bartolli has pulled one of his famous stunts.  He took Antonia out of the Institute and has her over at his house, where he says he’s going to give her some kind of hypnosis therapy.”

“How did that happen?”

“I don’t know.  Apparently nobody was watching.”

“Are they bringing her back?”

“They’re afraid to do anything sudden, in case she’s in distress or already under hypnosis.  Bartolli wants everybody to come over at eight o’clock tonight.”

“Everybody?”

Lynch leaned closer.  “You and Dr. Palmer, and Avery and Susan Morgan.  And Hunter too.”

“Hunter?”

“He wants Hunter there.”

Ned agreed to leave his car at the hospital so he could return in the police cruiser with Lynch and the two patients.  He sat in the back seat bouncing between Hunter and Nicole as Lynch piloted the cruiser over winding mountain roads.  “Could you slow down a little?” Ned called through the barrier that separated the driver from the back seat.  “There’s—”

“No, keep going!” Nicole interrupted, pulling Ned back.  It was the first time she’d spoken since Lynch arrived.  “Don’t slow down.  We’ve got to get there as fast as we can.”

“What do you mean?  There’s plenty of time to get there by eight o’clock.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, turning back to face Ned.  “You still don’t know what happens to Antonia.”

*   *   *

“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 remain
ed faceless under their hoods.

“Hoffmann’s three love
s 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 h
ero.  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 patie
nt, but clues to the mystery.”

Ned looked past her trying to catch Hunte
r’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 seem
ed 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 th
e 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 sho
wn 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 con
versation, 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.”