The Cure for Dreaming (12 page)

I inhaled a long breath of inky air and handed the woman an unstamped envelope, addressed
Letters to the Editor Department
. “Someone must have dropped it,” I said. “I thought I should bring it in.” My fingers pulsed with nervous energy.

The woman took my envelope and studied the address through her half-moon lenses. Her hair was puffed so high and her sharp chin held with such confidence that I could have sworn I shrank six inches just from standing in front of her.

She lifted her face and offered a thin smile. “I'll deliver it to the correct department. Thank you for bringing it in.”

A gleam in her eye told me she knew the handwriting on the envelope belonged to a seventeen-year-old girl with shaking hands, so I turned and left the building.

NOT ONCE IN MY LIFE HAD I PLAYED HOOKY FROM SCHOOL
before that frosty-cold autumn morning.
Not once
. The temptation to be truant had never even occurred to me.

Yet instead of hurrying off to school, I found myself standing in front of the arched brick entrance of the Metropolitan Theater. A haunted sort of feeling squirmed around in my gut, but still I walked inside, my feet motivated by a will of their own.

The empty lobby felt like a hollowed-out husk compared to the hot and buzzing scene from Halloween night. My
footsteps clapped across the black-and-white tiles, and the echoing, gilded ceiling above seemed a thousand feet high. I stopped and caught my breath, worried I'd get caught trespassing. I probably shouldn't have even liked theaters so much—not after their allure had spirited my mother away one snowy December night when I was just four years old. When she told us she couldn't breathe in our house anymore.

The pipe organ started up in the auditorium, and my heart leapt into my throat. Beyond the open doorway, someone played “Evening Prayer” from
Hansel and Gretel
, the spellbinding melody Genevieve Reverie had performed when Henri invited me to float up to the theater's catwalks and bask in the warm electric lights. Whoever was attempting to play the song lacked Genevieve's passion and talent, but even the school-recital stiffness of the performance allowed the notes to melt inside my bones and ease my troubled soul.

With silent footfalls, I stole into the auditorium.

The music proved to be the work of a bottom-heavy lady organist with pumpkin-orange hair. She sat in front of the dark wood-and-copper pipe organ, all alone on the stage, her eyes fixed on the sheet music in front of her as if she were just learning the song that very moment. I hunkered down in a red velvet chair in the back row and listened to that mesmerizing melody that reminded me so of Halloween night. My eyelids drooped with each passing refrain. I remembered all the rows of lights hanging above the stage, beckoning me to them, and my cheeks and neck warmed.

Henri Reverie's pacifying voice rose to my ears: “And that's when I leap off the young lady's torso.”

I opened my eyes with a start. There he was, on the stage, strolling over to the organist with three pages of notes in his hands, dressed in his midnight-black trousers and vest, without the coat.

Henri Reverie
.

He pointed to one of his papers. “If you finish the song early, I recommend transitioning into ‘Sleep, Little Rosebud.'”

The pumpkin-haired organist, who for some reason wasn't Henri's sister, withdrew her fingers from the keys and rotated toward the hypnotist. “Do you really stand on top of these ladies, young man?”

“Oui,”
said Henri, nodding. “But I believe in equality, and I stand on gentlemen, too, depending on what I feel the audience would prefer to see. Haven't you ever heard of the great Herbert L. Flint?”

“No.”

Henri stepped back. “You haven't?”

“Do you honestly think I've heard of every two-bit stage performer?” asked the organist.

“But he is not ‘a two-bit performer.' He's a well-known and respected mesmerist. We adapted his use of the human plank for our show, and I always open with it. It is my most popular feat.”

“And none of these stepped-upon volunteers ever complains?”

Henri shook his head. “None so far.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Well”—he lowered his papers and rubbed his smooth chin—“I never force anyone to come on the stage,
madame
. The volunteers join me up here because they want to, even if they initially demur. I think they want—need—to be seen. To be noticed.”

The organist scowled. “And having a hypnotist stand on their torsos, while they're sleeping like pacified infants, is preferable to remaining shrinking violets?”

Henri shrugged. “As I said, they never complain, and the audiences adore viewing them up here. You should hear the applause. Americans gobble up magic and visual oddities, such as viewing a man standing upon a near-floating woman.”

“It is scandalous. You may as well be in New York City, debasing yourself in
Sapho,
that
rrr
ibald”—she rolled the
r
in
ribald
with dramatic flair—“theatrical production I keep reading about in the newspaper. The one about the strumpet and her lovers.”

“As I was saying . . .” He pointed to his notes again. “This is where you transition into ‘Sleep, Little Rosebud.'”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Start with an adagio tempo. The notes should be delicate at first.”

“Youth these days will be the death of morality.” The organist flipped through her sheet music to find the right selection. After a cough and an outward thrust of her chest,
she blundered her way through a musical number that would have sounded quite pretty if it were being played by anyone else.

Henri wandered across the stage with his hands in his pockets, wincing and hunching his shoulders as the off-key notes assaulted his ears. His gaze turned to the (almost) empty auditorium, so I ducked my head down farther and inhaled a noseful of dust.

Before I could control myself, a sneeze exploded from my nostrils.

“Who's there?” asked Henri, which made the organist stop playing.

I froze at first, but then I felt like a fool crouching down on the dirty floor that way, my feet stuck in something sticky and my nose itching with the threat of another sneeze. I stood up and let myself be seen.

Henri squinted up at me. “Miss Mead?”

“Yes. It's me—I mean, it is I, to be grammatically—”

“Stay right there. Don't go anywhere.” He leapt off the end of the stage and landed on his feet with a thump—a startling maneuver that made me think of illustrations of lions chasing down gazelles.

I turned and lunged for the door.

“No! I need to speak to you.” I heard him bounding up the aisle behind me. “Don't go. For your own safety, don't go. I've been worried sick about you.”

At those unexpected words, I stopped.

“Please . . .” He skidded to a halt a few feet away from me and held out his arms to catch his balance. “Please tell me— you have
got
to tell me—what terrified you so badly when you saw your father yesterday.”

I bit my lip and hesitated.

“Please”—he braced his hands on his hips and regained his breathing—“tell me. I swear to God, you can trust me, Miss Mead.”

“My name is Olivia. I have no intention of calling you anything as respectful as Mr. Reverie, so please stop this ‘Miss' business.”

“What I do on that stage, Olivia”—for some reason his accent suddenly sounded more American, less French—“all that showy stuff, it's just to earn money. I want to help people with hypnosis, not hurt them. I want to cure people of their addictions and fears and—and—”

“And dreams,” I finished for him.

“No, not dreams.” He swallowed and stepped closer. “Why did you react to your father the way you did? How did he look after the hypnosis?”

“Are you done flirting, young man?” called the pumpkin-haired organist from the stage. “I'm not being paid to watch you fraternize with girls.”

“One moment, please,
madame
.”

“I have a good mind to tell Mr. Gillingham you're wasting the theater's money—”

“Please—this is important.” He turned back to me and
softened his voice to a whisper. “I'm going to tell you something I don't usually share with anyone.”

“No! I don't want to become your confidante.” I backed away. “I just want you to return my mind to the way it was.”

“Listen—”

“No.”

“Olivia”—he came to me and took hold of my arm—“my sister has a cancerous tumor the size of a goose egg in her bosom.”

My jaw dropped with a gasp of shock.

“It's rare in girls her age,” he continued, his eyes moistening, “but it's there. She needs surgery. There's a specialist in San Francisco. His fees . . . they won't be cheap.”

“What? No.” I wrenched his fingers off my arm. “You're lying. That's a cruel story to tell a person just to get your way.”

“You can see the world the way it truly is, so be honest”— he straightened the bottom of his vest with a sharp tug of the black fabric—“do I look like someone who's lying about his sister's health?”

His eyes drew me toward them with a pull that tipped me forward onto my toes. I waved my hands to steady myself, and a second later, like a swift gust of wind, Genevieve Reverie emerged by his side in a white nightgown, her blond head slumped against his arm, her face thin and peaked. The rest of the theater rushed away into a vacuum, and all I saw was the two of them—Genevieve, ill, exhausted, supported by Henri.

I blinked, and she was gone. Her tousled-haired brother stood alone.

“For heaven's sake, Mr. Reverie,” called the woman on the stage. “I've had enough of your dillydallying . . .”

“My father looked like the monster in Bram Stoker's novel,” I told Henri. “Have you read
Dracula
?”

“Isn't that about a human vampire?”

“Yes, and that's exactly how you made him appear in his office. His skin lacked blood, and his teeth were the fangs of a ferocious animal. I'm witnessing other things as well— disturbing sights—so tell me, please, for the love of God, what in the world did you do to my head?”

“Mr. Reverie,” bellowed the organist in a bone-rattling voice that consumed the entire theater, “throw that girl out of here this minute, or I'm asking Mr. Gillingham to cancel your performance. I know of two highly talented juggling brothers who would love nothing more than to take over your booking tonight.”

“I'm coming, I'm coming.”

He backed away from me, and a topsy-turvy feeling seized me again. My eyes insisted on seeing his hair as more ruffled than before, his dark clothing as frayed and worn. He suffered from fatigue. Distress.

“I'd very much like to discuss this matter with you more, Olivia,” he said.

“I don't want to discuss this matter.” I rubbed my eyes with
the heels of my hands. “I want you to change me back. All is well!”

“I can't.”

“You can't? All is well!”

“Not now.”

I shoved my hands against my temples and swallowed down my anger so the right words would come. “Do you want to know how
you
truly look, Monsieur Reverie?”

He stopped in his tracks.

“You look like a shifty showman who doesn't really know what he's doing,” I said. “And I'm willing to bet the remaining shreds of my sanity that
Reverie
isn't even your real last name.”

He frowned and jogged back to the stage—back to his rehearsal with the glowering substitute organist who shook her head as if he were a misbehaving spaniel—and he seemed to ignore my words.

Before he reached the front row, however, he peeked over his shoulder.

He gave me my answer, in an accent that wasn't French in the slightest.

“You're right, Olivia. It's Rhodes. My name is Henry—with a
y
, not an
i
—Rhodes. But as I'm sure you've seen with your own eyes, I am
not
just a shifty showman.”