The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Sure there’s plenty of evil in the world, though, isn’t there? And it must come from somewhere. Because nothing comes from nothing, does it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Now I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “I know what happened to your little brother, and my heart goes out to you and your family. That was a great tragedy, and it was evil, to be sure, for something like that to happen to an innocent young boy, falling off a cliff like that. And that evil must have a source, and its source must be the Devil.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Father Ahearn’s smile darkened. “You don’t believe in the Devil?”

  “No.”

  “But if there is no Devil, then there must also be no God, because then God would have to be the source of both good and evil. And as such, God could not be God.”

  She turned away to avoid the priest’s sanctimonious gaze. His office, she realized, was decorated entirely with paintings of St. Anthony being tortured by demons.

  “Therefore, to doubt the Devil is to doubt God,” he concluded. “It is a very great sin. A mortal sin, my child. A mortal sin which you must renounce and repent.”

  Through several interrogations Nicole held her ground, refusing either to repent or to explain herself. There were other girls at the school who openly admitted that they did not believe in God; this was treated as youthful folly that could be remedied by proper instruction. But not believing in the Devil was a far more serious matter, so unusual, so obviously willful and perverse, that it could not be overlooked. In the mind of Father Ahearn and the other school authorities, a person would practically have to be in league with the Devil to deny his existence. And so Nicole was asked to withdraw from the school, and in the middle of the term, without returning home, she went to live with an aunt in London. The headmistress called her parents and they agreed to this arrangement without even asking to speak to Nicole.

  Nicole’s secret, which she never revealed to anyone, was that she knew who killed her brother and it was not the Devil. It was her father.

  Chapter 12

  Nicole’s theory that The Tales of Hoffmann provided the key to both my own life and Hunter’s fantasies made little sense to me. Of course I didn’t know—I still don’t know—if the synopsis she related after listening to the radio broadcast bore any relation to what really happens in the opera. It did resemble the fantasies Hunter described during his past life regression, the transcript of which I had foolishly allowed Nicole to read. And as I told her, Hunter could have seen the opera on TV or video, just as he had seen Hamlet which also stood out in his mental landscape. But I still couldn’t see how either the opera story or Hunter’s fantasy world had any connection with me. True, my name was Hoffmann and I’d become obsessed with Olympia almost from the moment I laid eyes on her. She was a dancer and I suppose you could say she had two “fathers” who contended over her, and she had an odd, otherworldly quality that made her seem a little detached from reality. But that was about as far as the resemblance reached. Nicole’s perception of a mystical connection between myself and Hunter’s fantasies or Offenbach’s opera must have stemmed from an intense jealousy which her illness had magnified into a delusion. She loved me, or thought she did, and she saw Olympia as a major threat to her happiness. That much I could have expected—should have expected—based on psychoanalytic theory alone. What I wasn’t prepared for was Olympia’s insistence that she too played a role in Hunter’s past-life experiences.

  It was about a week after the regression, a couple of nights after Nicole had heard the opera broadcast and tried to warn me about Olympia. I had slipped into Olympia’s room when all the patients went to bed and was surprised to find her fully dressed and wide awake, reading a paperback novel under a small bedside lamp. She smiled and stood up, pulling me into a long, deep kiss. I needed her more urgently than usual, but I wanted to avoid any discussion of the past life regression issue until after we had made love because I’d decided to discontinue the treatment and I knew she would try to change my mind. I peeled off her dress and stood caressing her in the dim light.

  “We’ve got to finish Hunter’s past life regression,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I tried to stop her mouth with a kiss. “Let’s talk about that later.”

  She kissed me eagerly, then pulled away. “It’s important to me. We need to talk about it now.”

  A feeling of sudden breathlessness, even suffocation, came over me. “Why?” I gasped.

  “I think I was the woman in Hunter’s past life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The dancer.”

  “You mean he was fantasizing about you?”

  “No, I mean I was actually there.”

  I sat her down next to me on the bed and took a long, desperate breath. My heart, which had been fluttering with amorous excitement, was now pounding with an almost violent frustration. “Olympia,” I said, “let’s not get too carried away with this past life stuff. You went under hypnosis—I know that because I had to shake you out of it—and you heard what Hunter was saying and—”

  “No,” she objected. “I didn’t go under hypnosis. But I knew what he was going to say before he said it.”

  “Dammit!” I jumped to my feet and circled the room. “I thought it was supposed to be Hunter’s past life we were regressing to—not yours!”

  “Why couldn’t it be both?”

  “How could it be both?”

  She reached out her hand and pulled me back to the bed. I sat down and she kissed my neck and unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off and rolled me onto my back. “When I was sitting there listening to Hunter I had the feeling, just like Hunter, that I’d seen it all in another life. I was the woman he was in love with, the beautiful young woman sleeping on the swinging couch. I was the one who danced with him and spun him around and whirled him down the staircase.”

  “That’s where it ended,” I said helplessly.

  “That’s when my father had to bring him back,” she corrected me. “But that’s not really the end of the story. There’s more. I know that because I was there.”

  I can’t begin to describe how defeated and humiliated I felt at that moment. In my professional judgment I’d decided to put an end to this nonsense before Dr. Palmer found out about it and expelled me from the Institute. But my good intentions—as Nicole predicted—had been undone by my obsession with Olympia. I had fallen literally into her clutches and now I lay beneath her strong and irresistible body as she rolled her kisses over me.

  “What happens next?” I ventured.

  “My father chases after us, shouting for us to stop. And then—”

  “What happens?”

  She shook her head. “I get dizzy even thinking about it.”

  Her face hovered over mine. It struck me that she really did look more like a doll than a living woman, but I didn’t care.

  “We’ve got to go back,” she smiled. “We’ve got to go back and finish what we started.”

  And so I agreed, against my better judgment, to allow Hunter Morgan’s past life regression to continue. Olympia beat me into submission using the oldest weapon in a woman’s arsenal. But that night our torrid relationship reached the melting point: I played along with her mad plan while plotting in my mind to get rid of her.

  You know you’re in trouble when just getting through the day requires a willing suspension of disbelief, as if instead of living your life you were reading some far-fetched novel. That was the way I’d begun to feel in the time I spent with Olympia. But which was the novel and which was my life? Were things really as weird as they seemed or was I losing my mind? From the moment I met her, my life had entered the realm of the improbable; now it seemed to be veering off in the direction of the impossible. I was haunted by nightmares, migraines, sweats, and now this desperate sense of suffocation that left me willing to accept anything, to actually believe anything,
if only it would end. I had imagined that I could protect myself from the destructive energy swirling around me simply by rejecting Olympia’s crackpot supernaturalism. There’s a natural explanation for everything that happens in this world—so I believed, and so I reminded myself when I agreed to let Peter Bartolli continue his hypnotic therapy. What I lost sight of was that nature itself can exert a terrifying and astonishing force. And soon we would all be reminded that there’s nothing more natural than death—even a most unnatural one.

  * * *

  It was less than twenty-four hours before Dubin heard back from Casimir Ostrovsky. He sounded calm, businesslike, quietly hostile. “I’ve spoken to the person who bought the letter,” he said. “He’s interested in hearing more about the manuscript.”

  “That’s nice. Is he interested in buying it?”

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Does he want to buy it or not?”

  A long, silent pause. Ostrovsky might have been talking to someone with his hand over the receiver. “I don’t want to be involved in this,” he finally said. “He’ll call you.” The connection went dead.

  An hour later, when the phone rang again, the voice on the other end was not Ostrovsky’s, though it did show a trace of a foreign accent.

  “Do you have the item our Russian friend mentioned?” the voice asked.

  “I can get it when I need it,” Dubin said. “If you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested, but I need to know who I’m dealing with. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Dubin. No first name, no address.”

  “Dubin,” the man repeated. “Where did you get it?”

  “You’re not listening,” Dubin said. “I said I don’t have it but I can get it.”

  “Are you a dealer?”

  “No. Listen, you want to talk about it, I’ll meet you somewhere and we can talk. And I’m going to need a down payment.”

  Silence.

  “We can make it a public place if that makes you feel better.”

  They arranged to meet at four o’clock in the food court at the Blythedale Mall, about thirty miles from Egdon. “They have a McDonald’s there,” Dubin said. “Carry an umbrella so I’ll know who you are.”

  “An umbrella? There isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

  “That’s the point. I’ll see you at four.”

  Dubin arrived at the food court at 3:30 and bought a Big Mac and some fries and a large coffee and settled down to wait with the New York Post spread out in front of him as he drank his coffee and nibbled his fries. He paid no attention to anyone and was careful not to gaze around as if he were expecting someone. A little before 4:00 he noticed a small, gray-haired man who looked slightly familiar walking around conspicuously clutching an umbrella. The man, who wore a navy sport coat over a yellow knit shirt, peered straight at Dubin and even waved his umbrella but Dubin ignored him and went back to his reading with a suppressed thrill of excitement. He knew where he’d seen the man before: it was the night he’d stopped in the woods behind the Palmer Institute and peeked through the fence at the ethereal dance on the lawn. His visitor in the food court was the otherworldly voyeur with the cavernous eyes who’d been watching the strange performance when he arrived.

  For over an hour the man waited with increasing impatience, marching around the food court brandishing his umbrella like a sword. When he finally decided to give up, Dubin followed him outside and watched him climb into a blue Saab sedan. He trailed the Saab for almost an hour over roads that led farther into the country, past the traffic jams and strip malls onto smaller roads and finally over the narrow blacktops that wound through the wooded hills near Egdon like a hidden network of underground caverns. There were no people in that country, only rural route mailboxes and trees. The houses near the road looked dark and unoccupied.

  The blue Saab turned suddenly into a long gravel driveway that disappeared into the woods. Dubin sped past and pulled into the next side road, about a quarter mile farther. He parked along the side road and found a path back through the woods toward the driveway where the Saab had disappeared. It was late October and the sky was already darkening. Dubin peered ahead, stepping through a thicket of brush and vines and fallen timber, and soon found himself at the edge of the driveway looking at the hulk of a Victorian mansion silhouetted against the fading sky. The blue Saab was parked by a side door, where there was a light on inside. As Dubin watched from behind the bushes, the man he’d been following came back to the door and opened it. A slender black cat slinked outside and at first Dubin thought the cat was running towards him. But after a moment it rolled in the dirt, then darted off in pursuit of some imaginary prey, while the man stood watching from the doorway.

  Dubin slipped back down the path and into the woods. He had learned enough for one day.

  The next two days were chilly and dismal with intermittent rain. Dubin was following two leads and all he could do was keep following them, even if it meant spending most of the day standing in the woods watching wet leaves fall to the ground. The man who’d bought the Offenbach letter stayed in his shadowy mansion, venturing out in the blue Saab only for one short trip to a convenience store on the edge of town with Dubin prowling along behind him. He must have had some connection to the Palmer Institute or the Morgan family, and by watching him day and night Dubin could find out what it was. He kept his vigil through the day but could only make it through part of one moonless night before the rain-soaked woods seemed to be closing in on him. He ached like a caged animal when he stayed in the car and shivered with cold when he stood in the mud listening to the wind rattling the last few leaves off the trees. About three in the morning he gave up and drove back to his apartment and poured himself a double shot of tequila and soaked himself in a hot shower before dropping into bed.

  The next morning—actually closer to noon—he drove back through the village and this time he parked along the road leading to the Institute, within sight of the entrance gate. There he watched through the rain and his steamed-up windshield for Mrs. Paterson, the Morgan twins’ nurse. A few minutes of internet research had shown that Mrs. Paterson owned a black Toyota Corolla. When he saw the Toyota leaving the compound at about four in the afternoon he followed it cautiously into town, staying right behind Mrs. Paterson as she parked and walked toward the old brick post office with her umbrella up. He hurried up beside her, his face spattered by the rain, and put on his most disarming smile.

  “Mrs. Paterson?” he said. “My name’s Dubin. I’m writing an article on Maria Morgan for New York magazine. I’ve been talking to people who knew her, trying to get a sense of what she was like as a person.”

  Mrs. Paterson kept walking. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Don’t run away. I just want to chat with you for a couple of minutes.”

  “I don’t feel like chatting. I’m in a hurry, can’t you see?”

  “So am I. I’ll walk along with you if you don’t mind. Like I said, I’ve been talking to people in town, just trying to get a sense of what kind of person Maria Morgan was.”

  She turned her head and peered at him from under her umbrella. There were no answers in her dark, ageless face. “She was a wonderful person, and that’s about all I’m going to say.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard all over town. A warm and wonderful person, with a smile for everybody. People around here really loved her, maybe some a little more than others.”

  She ignored him and kept walking.

  “Her husband—he’s sort of a cold fish, isn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Well, you worked for him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, and he’s always treated me fairly.”

  They were a few feet from the post office and Dubin knew he would lose her if she stepped inside. He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Mrs. Paterson, I know she had a lover. And I know who it was,” he lied, “as I’m sure you do.”

  She stopped and f
or an instant her eyes widened inquisitively. They didn’t ask who the lover was—she already knew that—but how Dubin had found out.

  “There were letters,” he explained.

  “How’d you get them?”

  “You don’t want to know. I’m a writer. I make it my business to find things out.”

  She pulled him aside, lifting her umbrella over his head as if to make a place where they could talk privately. There was anger in her tired eyes but it was mixed with fear and sadness and a plea for help. “What do you want from me?”

  “I’m trying to understand what happened,” he explained in a low voice. “Her career was just taking off, with her first role at the Met. So if she was depressed it must have had something to do with what else was going on in her life. In other words, with him.”

  “I took care of the kids, that’s all. I wasn’t involved in her life. If she was having an affair I don’t know anything about it.”

  “But you lived with the family. You must have seen things, known what was going on.”

  “I keep to myself and don’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “I’m the opposite,” he smiled. “I always stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. And right now I’m sticking it all over this town trying to find out why Maria Morgan killed herself—if she did kill herself.”

  Mrs. Paterson pulled away, leaving Dubin standing in the rain. “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on. Nobody really believes she committed suicide.”

  “You better get out of here before I call the police.”

  “The police? They’re in on it too, aren’t they?”

  She headed for the door and Dubin said something he regretted as soon as he said it. “Doesn’t your conscience bother you, Mrs. Paterson?”