Evil Dreams (26 page)

While both doctors ruminated their deductions, a lull fell over the room until Sam began to chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I was just thinking that we sound like a couple of ghost chasers. I’m sure we’re overreacting to the tape. Parapsychology isn’t my bag and it’s not yours, either.”

Her face brightening noticeably, she jumped from her chair, pacing about the room, her forehead furrowed in thought. He watched, fascinated as the woman he loved suddenly displayed facial expressions showing puzzlement, successful recall, wonderment, joy, sadness and discovery. She stopped her perambulating in front of the large bookcase that covered one wall of the living room. Scanning the titles she reached up, selecting a thick volume.

“I don’t want you to think I’m forgetting the topic we’ve been discussing,” she said, plopping down in the easy chair again, “but I’ve got to do some research right now. In the meantime, you get all of Jon’s health records together and I will put some questions to you in a little while that might help us.”

Bewildered, he picked up the file containing Jon Ward’s medical and psychiatric history and sat on the couch. Studying the detailed outlines, he periodically raised his eyes to study Marie who was lost in the book lying open on her lap. He hadn’t caught the title and after several minutes of overpowering curiosity, decided he would know in time when she had found whatever might be the object of her search.

Thirty minutes stretched into forty-five and when an hour had almost elapsed, she cleared her throat. “I think I’ve got some corroborating material here that might help us make a decision about the other voice.”

“What book is it?” he asked, purposely waiting until she answered.

“John Toland’s
ADOLF HITLER.
It’s probably the most comprehensive work ever done on his life. At any rate, I’ve been able to find most everything I’ve wanted by using the index. This information, and Jon’s folder, will corroborate my findings even more—I hope.”

“You hope?”

“We’ll see, Sam. First, how old was Jon when his mother died and what did she die of?”

Having read the file history several times while Marie was poring over the thick volume in her lap, he knew exactly where to find the answer. “Ah, he was nineteen and she died of cancer—four days before Christmas.”

“The same,” she said curtly.

“What?”

“Exactly the same as in Hitler’s case.”

“Unbelievable! Wait a minute. Why did you pick that particular item?”

“There are several points in Jon’s case that stuck in my mind for no reason I can fathom.”

“Would you say the two points are coincidental?”

“If that’s the only similarity, it could be nothing more than coincidental. However, I think we might have more to work with. Next, Jon was devoted to his mother, was he not? Very broken up when she died?”

“I know that from his sessions with me.”

“Again, it matches Hitler’s. But that would be possible in most instances. For the time being, we’ll count it but not rely on it. Now, are the dates April twentieth or thirtieth mentioned any place in either set of records?”

Dayton quickly scanned the medical records, finding the date Jon had been admitted to Presbyterian Medical Center. He looked up into Marie’s inquisitive face.

“Well?” she asked.

“The thirtieth of April was the day he was admitted to the hospital as an emergency case. That was the day Mrs. Ward called me about the blood. She raved he was bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth when she arrived home from work. After she hung up, she claimed all traces of the blood had disappeared and he was merely suffering from the headache that normally followed his dream. What’s the significance?”

“Hitler killed himself April thirtieth, 1945,” she said slowly, deliberately. “Perhaps the trauma of experiencing the dream on that date, the anniversary of his death, caused the blood to appear momentarily. Perhaps this incident triggered the strengthening of Hitler’s personality.”

“Oh, Christ,” he whispered in a low, disbelieving voice. After several long minutes passed, he said, “I’ve got the twentieth, too. I made a notation in my pad about his having a few drinks the night before his initial examination, which was on the twenty-first. He and his wife had been celebrating their wedding anniversary the night before. Now, don’t tell me Hitler got married on that date.”

“I won’t, Sam. It was his birthday, though.”

“I don’t believe any of this,” he said, throwing the folder down next to him on the couch.

“I know you’re tired, Sam, but do you recall the type of dog his wife said he wanted to get? And what was the name he wanted to call it?”

He fumbled through the file, withdrawing his hastily scribbled note. “He wanted to get an Alsatian bitch, of all things, and wanted to call her Blondie. Why?”

“According to Toland, and I’ve read about Hitler’s dog in many different books, he had an Alsatian bitch named Blondi.”

“If everything about Hitler is in that book, wouldn’t it have been possible for Jon to have read it and absorbed the information—” He stopped. “Of course not,” he said. “He’s had the dream since he was five and I suppose the book is only a few years old.”

Marie said nothing.

He looked at her. “If this could be true, and that
if
is a mighty big one, how, no make that
what
the hell do we do next?”

“We don’t run off half-cocked accepting it right away, do we, Sam?”

He studied her before speaking. Would she make fun of him? He didn’t want to believe that of her and after thinking about it for a moment, he knew it could not be.

“No, of course not,” he said simply. “What I meant was, how do we go about ridding Jon Ward of Hitler’s spirit or personality or whatever you want to call it? Is there a precedent we can follow? Do we treat it like a dual personality? Just what the hell do we do?”

“We continue investigating—confirming or eliminating parallels until we are absolutely certain. Maybe you’ve already laid the groundwork for a solution.”

“Wha—? Me? What did I do?” Struggling to understand the avalanche of ideas beating at his mind, he found his fatigue refusing to allow him a clear memory or perception.

“You gave Jon the suggestion, while he was still hypnotized, to examine in minutest detail each facet of the dream the next time he experienced it. You may have created a situation wherein Hitler’s spirit will voluntarily leave, if the dream, especially the first part, becomes too traumatic.”

His face brightening, he recalled his spur of the moment proposition as a last ditch effort to get the other voice to tell him more of the beginning segments of the dream. “Do you think that’s possible?” he asked.

Shrugging, she stood, crossing the room to return the book to its place on the shelf. “It could be. I don’t really know.”

“Would that be harmful to Ward?” he asked, concerned for the immediate well-being of his patient. Would a severe trauma for the spirit of Hitler be equally devastating for Jon? He knew the aspiring author to be a healthy, well adjusted person. But who could foretell the consequences of such a situation? He doubted if he could, and Marie appeared to be acting strangely again, as she had earlier, before consulting Toland’s book.

Ignoring his question, she stopped to face him. “I had an electrifying chain of ideas take place before I began reading. I know you were watching me, trying to understand and anticipate my thoughts at the time. I believe I can explain to you in correct order what I was thinking. First, the whole chain was triggered by your reference to something about parapsychology not being our bag.” She closed her eyes for a brief instant and could see Helmut Rosenspahn as clearly as she had the day she left Vienna. She’d refer to him but wouldn’t offer any more information than Sam needed to know.

“An old friend of mine, with whom I went to school in Vienna, went into the field of parapsychology after we graduated. He studied in Bonn for a while. If you recall, he is the friend I referred to as wanting to call in Vienna for some information if we couldn’t solve this problem ourselves.”

“Are you saying that you suspected last week this was something totally out of the ordinary?”

He began laughing. “Did I say out of the ordinary? God, how odd and unusual can a case get ? Dual personality was the front runner last week right up until the other voice said yesterday he was Adolf Hitler. What else are you holding back from me, Marie?” He thought his voice sounded hysterical but when he finished speaking, he knew he hadn’t overreacted to the woman’s surprise announcement. Maybe she was a better psychiatrist than he.

“Just hear me out, Sam. Then you can question me all you want. Is that fair enough?”

He shrugged, waiting for her to continue.

“While we were students, we worked together on an assignment that led to an interesting, and for the time, curious discovery. I’m sorry I don’t recall everything about it but I feel it is vital we contact Helmut in Vienna. He can look up the manuscript he and I discovered in the archives at the University.”

“Slow down, Marie. What the hell are you talking about? What manuscript?”

“We had to do a thesis on hypnotists and their different methods. One man we were researching had taught at the University before the war. This man, Dr. Hans Mattiges, had supposedly written a book but no one knew of its whereabouts. Helmut and I, quite by accident, found the manuscript of his memoirs in the basement of the library. It had never been published. He had died suddenly, or something. At any rate, I’d like to have Helmut look up some information in it that might shed more light on the German spoken while Jon was under hypnosis.”

“This is crazy, you know,” Sam said, immediately regretting his choice of words. “You know what I mean. What could this dead professor’s manuscript tell us about Jon and Adolf Hitler that would be pertinent to helping Ward now?”

“All I will say at this point, Sam, is that the coordinates sound familiar, now that we have uncovered so much confirmatory evidence. I want Helmut to find it so we have the information without error or conjecture on my part. If what he tells us is completely irrelevant, we’ll dismiss it and go at the problem from another angle. Besides, you’ll have another, more important question, answered for you if the call is made,” she said, smiling coyly.

Confused by the twist the woman wanted to give the case, he could not comprehend the meaning of her last statement. His brain was tired. His body was tired. The case was tired. He needed sleep and if she wanted to call Vienna, he would not object.

“What time do you have?” she asked.

“It’s a little past ten-thirty,” he said, looking at his watch. “Why?”

“There’s seven hours difference between Chicago and Vienna. It would be past five-thirty tomorrow morning there. It’ll take some time to locate Helmut and get the call through. Besides, it won’t hurt him to wake up early one morning,” she said lightly, more to herself than Sam when the thought of hearing Helmut’s voice again entered her mind.

Crossing the room to the telephone table, she sat down, dialing the operator to place the call. After she had given what scant information she still had on Helmut, the operator told her to wait for a return call. Replacing the phone in its cradle, she found Sam sound asleep on the couch. She went to the next room to get him a light blanket. After covering him, she returned to the phone table to look up the telephone number of Dr. James Nash, chairman of the linguistics department at the University of Chicago. He would be able to tell her the meaning of the word
Zozobra.

Howie and Tory sat crosslegged on the Murphy bed facing each other. “Does this nut think he’s Hitler or what?” he sneered after reading the third transcript she had brought home.

“I don’t know. I just thought you’d find it interesting. What did you find out at the library about the coordinates?”

“Shut up and let me think,” he growled. There was something here he felt he should know—recognize—but for some reason it kept evading him. What was it? The coordinates as given in the second trance were the location of the Four Corners area in the Southwest. He had taken the time to check out several maps and had been as precise as possible. His double checking placed the exact spot sixty kilometers south and sixty kilometers east to find the virtual center of Cistern, New Mexico.

Running his fingers through his hair, he shook his head. “I don’t know. It sure as hell doesn’t make sense. Does the doctor or this Ward guy know what any of this means?”

“I don’t know, honey. I don’t think so. Why?”

Suddenly, the missing pieces fell into place. “Of course!” he cried. How many times had he heard some of the prospectors and old sourdoughs who roamed the western part of New Mexico looking for the lost Adams Diggings speculate on other hoards of gold lost in the area? Among the stories he had heard was one of gold supposedly smuggled into the United States by Hitler sometime in the thirties. The story said it was a sort of nest egg to fall back on in the event things didn’t work out the way Hitler planned in Europe. The Four Corners area had been looked at more than once but each time someone had searched, nothing had been found. Could this be the location?

His eyes flashed brightly in the garish light of the single bulb. Smiling, he said loudly, “If—” and began laughing wildly. “If—if it is—oh, wow!” he whooped, clapping his hands.

“What is it, Howie, honey?” she begged, frightened by his strange behavior. Grasping his face in both her hands she shook his head. “Tell me what it is!” she begged. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing! There’s nothing the matter with me. If—if this is what I think it is—our troubles are over!” He got off the bed and walked to the window.

“What? Tell me, Howie!”

“If what I’m thinking is right, baby, we’re rich! Filthy, stinking, fucking rich! And Jon Ward is going to show us how to get it!”

“What? I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” she said, following him to the window.

“This guy, Jon Ward, is going to lead us to a lot of fucking money,” he said, slowly walking toward the door.