The Sleepless (45 page)

Michael went down to the street and got his tattered Rand McNally route map out of the glovebox of the car. The sidewalks were still crowded and busy, and across the street a young man with long sweeping black hair was playing the violin – one of those high and hungry passages that always reminded Michael of Gothic movies, with white-faced women in deserted mansions, hurrying in terror from room to room. 

Michael was locking the car when he noticed somebody else across the street, too. A man in very dark glasses, standing in the doorway of DiLucca Italian Bakery, which was closed. Michael felt a prickle of apprehension. It was impossible to tell whether the man was staring at Michael or not, but he was standing so still, his arms by his sides, and it was his utter stillness in the midst of all the hurrying and jostling that made him appear so threatening. 

Slowly, Michael retreated across the sidewalk, and back to the Cantina Napoletana. He turned around just once, before he went inside, and the man was still there, still motionless. 

Back upstairs, he went to the window overlooking Hanover Street, but a large blue van had parked in front of DiLucca’s and he was unable to see whether the man was still there or not. 

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Victor. He had poured himself another shot-glass of whisky and was reading through Dr Rice’s notebook. 

‘I don’t know ... there was a guy standing in a doorway across the street. Pale face, dark glasses. He looked just like one those guys who were hanging around at New Seabury.’ 

‘Is he still there now?’ 

‘I don’t know ... I think he must have gone now.’ 

‘Well ... don’t let’s get paranoid,’ said Victor. 

Michael unfolded the map and laid it out on the table. He traced his finger all the way up the coastline from Acoaxet in the south to Salisbury Beach in the north. 

Victor said, ‘Did you know that Dr Rice practised Aura Hypnosis?’ 

‘Yes, he mentioned it today. And he talked about my “aura” a couple of times when I was under therapy. I guessed he meant personal vibes. He said my aura was in pretty lousy shape.’ 

‘That was all? He didn’t tell you what he was trying to do?’ 

Michael looked up and frowned at him. ‘He was trying to straighten my aura back into a shape. Kind of a Cindy Crawford workout, with Woody Allenish overtones.’ 

‘But he didn’t explain what Aura Hypnosis actually is?’ 

Michael pursed his lips. He found it irritating that Victor was questioning him so intently on a course of therapy which he, after all, had been experiencing first-hand for almost a year. ‘Aura Hypnosis is hypnosis that sorts out your aura, that’s all.’ 

‘Well, for sure, it does in a way. But it works in a different way from regular hypnosis. It has the same therapeutic purpose ... but the technique is different. Apparently it’s much more powerful, much more direct. I was reading an article about it in
New Psychology
a couple of months ago, and if you can understand Advanced Mumbojumbo, it’s all explained here in this book.’ 

‘Oh, yes?’ said Michael, trying not to be testy. His finger had crept as far north as Priscilla Beach, just south of Plymouth. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in hypnosis. I thought you said the only hypnosis you’d ever witnessed was on the stage, people being persuaded to take their pants off, stuff like that.’ 

‘Maybe I lied.’ 

Michael looked up. ‘Maybe you
lied
?
Why would you lie about something like that?’ 

Victor took off his glasses. His eyes looked bleary and unfocused. ‘I know what hypnosis did for me. I just wanted to find out what it had done for you.’ 

‘So what did hypnosis do for you?’ 

‘I’ve never been hypnotized myself. I wasn’t lying about that. But my sister was, repeatedly, for months. She was very ill, you understand. It seemed to spare her a whole lot of pain. I suppose I just wanted to know if it was true – and if it really did ease her suffering.’ 

‘Well, it works, I can guarantee it,’ Michael told him. 

Victor had folded down the corner of one of the pages in Dr Rice’s book. ‘Listen to this: “Aura Hypnosis was originally discovered by the Marquis de Puysegar in 1782. He was a pupil of Mesmer, the Viennese doctor who invented mesmerism. Mesmer used to use all kinds of elaborate magnetic equipment to hypnotize people, wires and magnets and bowls of water, but the Marquis de Puysegar proved that you didn’t need any of this equipment ... all you needed was an optical focus like a light or a coin, and a soothing voice.” 

‘What’s more – listen to this – “he travelled to South America in the 1780s and found Peruvian Indians hypnotizing themselves for no other purpose than to let their auras leave their bodies and dance around their campfires to amuse their children.” Can you believe that? Early television! ‘They were even having hypnotic duels with each other ... putting each other into hypnotic trances so that the aura of one warrior could physically leave his body and fight with the aura of another.” It sounds like a certain amount of coca leaf chewing was involved in all of this, but basically that’s what Aura Hypnotism is all about. The hypnotist’s own personal aura actually leaves him for a while, and joins the patient’s aura inside of his trance. What you might call “hands-on” hypnotism.’ 

‘Go on,’ said Michael, pausing in his map-reading. 

Victor said, ‘Dr Rice mentions Aura Hypnosis two or three times here. This is, what?, October last year.
“Michael Rearden’s trauma is proving so intractable that I decided this session to take him under by Aura. The experience was horrifying. His state of shock is such that his etheric body has formed into dark knots of tension and dread, similar to extreme muscular spasm. It is one of the worst cases I have come across, even more difficult to deal with than Frank Coward’s. If it were possible to X-ray his aura, one could identify each and every traumatic experience he had on that night, but as it is I have to do it by ‘touch’ and by ‘feel’. I have never before encountered an etheric body so darkened and deformed.”
‘ 

Michael grunted in amusement. ‘He makes me sound like Quasimodo.’ 

‘The Hunchback of Hyannis,’ Victor smiled. ‘All the same ... he seems to think that Aura Hypnosis was helping to straighten you out. I guess you should be grateful, when you consider how dangerous it can be.’ 

‘Dangerous? What do you mean?’ 

‘In regular hypnotherapy, the hypnotist puts you into a light trance which has the effect of temporarily abolishing some of your cortical functions. You become highly suggestible, and so the hypnotherapist can guide you back to your childhood, or whenever your problem started – which in your case was the Rocky Woods air disaster. He helps you to locate and to understand your anxiety, and he simply suggests that it doesn’t worry you any more. Wake up, snap, end of problem.’ 

‘But Aura Hypnosis isn’t like that?’ 

‘Aura Hypnosis is more like physiotherapy ... you know, when you’ve had an accident or something, and a therapist takes you into a pool and manipulates your muscles. In Aura Hypnosis, the hypnotist puts you into a very deep trance – so deep that your heartbeat slows and your respiration rate is almost halved. Just as you’re going in, his etheric body comes in with you. His aura is actually
inside
your
trance with you. He can then ‘Visit” your anxieties along with you, and help you to see that you don’t have anything to be worried about’ 

‘What’s dangerous about it?’ 

‘For starters, your anxieties could be a whole lot more horrific than your hypnotist’s aura is capable of dealing with. Whatever traumas have been distorting
your
aura might distort
his
aura, too. The danger is that the doctor will wind up just as sick as the patient. Even sicker, since his aura is outside of his body, and is much more vulnerable than usual.’ 

‘Do you believe any of that?’ asked Michael. 

Victor nodded. ‘You should have seen Ruth, my sister. In 1967, she contracted stomach cancer. She had the kind of pain you don’t even want to think about. The only person who made her last days bearable was her hypnotherapist. She could have spent weeks in agony; instead he gave her weeks of bliss. He took her back through her childhood, he took her back through her wedding day. She relived all of her happiest moments. When she died she wasn’t lying in a hospital bed in Newark, she was walking her dog at our uncle’s home at Cos Cob, Connecticut.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Inside of here, anyway.’ 

He paused for a while, his eyes glistening a little. Then he added, ‘That was Aura Hypnosis, and what I didn’t find out until years later was that when the hypnotherapist was taking Ruth under he suffered almost as much pain as Ruth was suffering herself. After Rum died, he spent seven months in hospital with perforated ulcers. It almost killed him.’ 

Michael said, ‘It’s amazing that two people’s personalities can be so
intertwined.
You know, so – what’s the word – symbiotic.’ 

‘Well, I’m not so sure that I believe in the collective unconscious,’ said Victor. ‘But I sure believe that two people can become so magnetically close that they can share the same unconscious experiences. You love your wife. You should know that.’ 

‘Yes,’ said Michael, slowly. ‘I guess I do. Maybe I forget it more often than I should.’ 

Victor closed Dr Rice’s books and got up from the couch, in a deliberate attempt to break the mood. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, ‘where’s this Goat’s Cape you’re looking for?’ 

Michael continued to run his finger up the Massachusetts coastline. Past Boston Harbor, past Winthrop Beach and Revere Beach and Lynn Harbor. All of a sudden, there it was, and he was amazed that he had never noticed it before. Goat’s Cape, on the southernmost shore of the Nahant promontory, a fragment of land which jutted into Massachusetts Bay at the very end of a three-mile isthmus, like a leaping dolphin on the end of a line. 

Nahant –
where they had found Sissy O’Brien’s tortured body washed up on the beach; and about whose lighthouse Michael had dreamed in his deep hypnotic trance. 

‘Well, well, well,’ said Victor, lifting his glasses on to his forehead and closely scrutinizing the map. ‘This is all beginning to make some kind of sense.’ 

Michael turned away. His shadow on the wall looked enormous and threatening. 

‘It’s real, isn’t it?’ he said, tightly. ‘All this conspiracy stuff. It’s real.’ 

‘It’s going to bear some further investigation, let’s put it that way.’ 

‘Yes,’ said Michael, and he could almost feel the floor opening up underneath his feet. 

There was nothing much more they could do that night except drink and watch television and plan what they would do in the morning. 

At ten o’clock, CBS flashed a live news bulletin from Seaver Street. There was no sound at first, but the picture told it all. A black reporter was standing in a debris-littered bar with automobiles and trucks burning in the background. Red-and-blue police lights flashed on his sweating face. 

They heard him say, ‘ –
seven National Guardsman killed when their Chinook helicopter came down over Grove Hall, eighteen civilians missing – rioting now totally out of control – governor has declared a state of emergency –’
 

‘End of the world as we know it,’ Victor remarked, drily. 

Back in the studio, anchorman John Breezeman announced, ‘We have just received a release from the White House that the president is “gravely concerned” about the rioting in Boston and has promised the governor his “wholehearted personal support.” ‘ 

Michael got up and switched the television off. ‘Let’s get some sleep. I don’t want to face the end of the world with a hangover.’ 

But that night, in the very small hours of the morning, Michael had the most extraordinary and frightening nightmare. He was falling through darkness, as he always fell, and he knew that other bodies were falling all around him. 

But as he plunged through the night, he felt somebody jostling against him. Suddenly, he wasn’t falling, but pushing his way through a crowd, and everybody was jostling him. They didn’t jostle like a normal crowd, however. They did it stiffly and erratically, as if they were incapable of standing up by themselves, as if somebody was pushing them and pulling them to make them move. 

As if they were dead.
 

Through the crowd, he glimpsed a man in a suit, and the man was smiling. He didn’t speak, he simply waved; and as Michael pushed his way closer, he held out both of his hands, as if he wanted to catch hold of Michael, embrace him, take him into his arms. 

Michael screamed at him, ‘No! Don’t come near me! Don’t come near me!’ 

He wasn’t afraid of the jiggling bodies all around him. He wasn’t afraid of the man in the suit. 

He was afraid of the harm that he himself was about to inflict. He was terrified of his own murderous intent. 

If the man in the suit came any closer, Michael was sure that he would have to kill him. Slice him open, like a ripened cantaloupe. 

But the man kept smiling, and pushing his way nearer, and Michael couldn’t turn around, couldn’t escape, because of all of the dead jostling bodies.