The Hypnotist (10 page)

The sounds of hammers, electric drills, saws and sanders accompanied a very angry Henry Phillips as he walked through the Met’s unfinished Islamic art wing inspecting his firm’s work, accompanied by the job’s foreman, Victor Keither.

There was of course no art on display, nothing to look at except for the work Keither’s crew was doing. As far as Phillips was concerned there was nothing artistic about that.

“All of these inconsistencies in workmanship are not up to our standards,” he said.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Keither agreed. “But I wanted you to see for yourself. I need better men, Henry.”

They’d stopped in front of an exposed stone wall with an oculus in its center. The round opening must have once displayed a piece of art, then been closed up and forgotten until Keither had discovered it a few months ago. When you dealt with such an old building there were always surprises. Having the original architectural drawings helped, but alterations over the years weren’t always annotated. The committee from the museum that was overseeing the construction had checked this out weeks ago and none of them felt this anomaly was architecturally significant or worth preserving.

“This should have been closed up by now, and the wall should have been plastered over.”

Keither took off his helmet and ran his hand through his orange hair. His fair skin, sprinkled with freckles, reddened. “There’s been too much turnover, Henry.” A competitor, Manhattan Construction, was recruiting Phillips’s men and overpaying them by fifteen percent to move. “We’ll get back on track if you’ll approve additional men.”

Since taking the job with Phillips in 1985, Keither had worked on every museum job the firm had handled—six of them, almost back-to-back. He’d started out a member of the crew and now was in charge of the whole operation. Except for the days his children had been born, two bouts of the flu and an appendicitis attack, he’d never missed a day of work, even showing up during two blizzards only to discover that the museum was closed.

“That would take us over budget,” Phillips said.

“Over budget or late? Take your pick. The replacements aren’t as good as the guys we lost. Can’t you keep them?”

“Manhattan Construction is playing an expensive game.”

“What do you know about Manhattan?” Keither asked.

“Other than the fact that they’re poachers?” Phillips shook his head. “How about if I pull some men off the hotel job and move them here for a few weeks temporarily? We haven’t lost anyone on that crew.”

“You haven’t?” Keither asked. “Not a single man?”

“No. Everyone they’ve stolen has been from this job. Everyone knows you train them the best.”

“I wish that was the reason.”

“Me, too. Any ideas?”

“Not yet, but I’m going to work on it.”

The blinds were drawn, but Dr. Iris Bellmer dialed down the rheostat so that the room was shrouded in darkness. “I’d like you to sit back on the couch, James, and make sure you’re comfortable. Put your arms by your sides, uncross your feet and close your eyes. Relax.”

Relax at four in the afternoon with two cases weighing on him? Two cases—the Malachai Samuels investigation and the vandalism and extortion situation at the Metropolitan—both of which were fraught with tension and personal conflict. It was hardly ideal, but even if ACT hadn’t been understaffed, Lucian—aka James—was too committed and involved to consider withdrawing from either one.

“The concept of what we’re doing starts out identical to the process you said you learned from your pain specialist. Once you achieve a deep state of relaxation I’ll make a few suggestions that your subconscious will hear and work on, and hopefully we’ll make some discoveries. Any questions?”

“Let’s do it.” He was certain he knew enough about the process to fight her efforts and stay alert. Despite having another upsetting dream this morning that had forced him out of bed
to once again draw the young girl whose eyes were filled with fear, he was here as an investigator, not as a patient. Certainly, part of him wanted to understand, but whatever was causing his delusions, it had nothing to do with past lives. The stories Bellmer’s patients told her under hypnosis were just that—stories. If humans could manufacture entire fantasies at will—dreaming while sleeping and daydreaming while awake—certainly the mind could create narratives at the suggestion and urging of a trained therapist.

“All right, James, I’d like you to take four deep breaths… slowly…one…two…three…four…now picture a staircase in your mind…as you walk down the steps, count them backward from twenty…nineteen, eighteen, one step after another…one foot after another…counting until you reach the bottom…” She paused, waited and then resumed in the same low, modulated voice. “When you reach the last step you’ll see that you’ve reached a place you know well…the same underground grotto you told me about from your pain therapy…it’s comforting here…easy here…”

Lucian’s headache was abating. That didn’t surprise him. Hypnosis was a well-known remedy for pain. As he’d told Dr. Bellmer, he’d used it himself.

“You’re in the grotto now…the lights are low…”

He’d slept little the night before, and he was so tired. Her voice was so soothing.

“There’s a pool with turquoise water that’s warm and waiting for you…”

Lucian focused on the street noises outside the office instead of on what she was saying. No matter how tempting, he couldn’t enter this imaginary oasis, not even if he found respite there from the melancholy that had overwhelmed him since visiting the Jacobs apartment yesterday. He was
here as a federal agent investigating a potential suspect, not as a patient.

“You’re walking into the pool…slipping into the water. Its warmth embraces you and feels wonderful.”

And it did, but it was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

“Warm, welcoming water. You’re lying on your back now…floating on the surface…comforted by the warm water…by the soft sound of water dripping from the rocks into the pool. You are very comfortable…there’s no worry and no stress…no one needs anything from you…you’re completely at ease. Now…slowly…look up…up toward the roof of the grotto. It’s a mirror, and you can see yourself floating. You can see how relaxed you are…you feel relaxed…in every part of your body…your feet…your ankles…calves…knees…hips…your shoulders and neck are relaxed…your hands…your arms…your diaphragm…you’re completely relaxed.”

For the next fifteen seconds Iris Bellmer watched James Ryan’s breathing, checking its evenness, assessing his state of relaxation, imagining he was slipping back through the layers of time. Some people were afraid of hypnosis, fearing they’d become suggestible and do things against their better judgment. But it was not magic or mind control. You were never more connected to your core being than when under hypnosis. Iris knew that firsthand. Two years ago she’d been working in a psychiatric hospital when one of her patients, who had exhibited no violent tendencies before, attacked her and started to rape her. A guard stepped in and prevented a full assault, but Iris was traumatized and sought out therapy. The doctor used hypnosis to file down the edges of her anxiety. During one session, Iris had a spontaneous past-life memory. Frightened by the intensity of the experience but fascinated, she sought out Dr. Beryl
Talmage. Their meeting led to Iris becoming the first full-time therapist to work with adults in the Phoenix Foundation’s history.

“The water that’s all around you and supporting you is time, and you’re floating through it easily and without effort, able to remember things you thought you’d forgotten, able to see them in your mind’s eye. I want you to remember something that happened to you when you were a little boy…something that was fun and that made you happy.”

She watched his face and saw the first hint of a smile. “Tell me what you’re remembering. Where are you?”

“The bookstore. My mother is with me in the bookstore.”

“How old are you?”

“Nine.”

“Do you like it there?”

“Yeah, my mom lets me buy as many books as I want.”

“Wow, that’s great. You’re really lucky.”

He nodded so enthusiastically that a lock of his hair fell into his eyes, but he was oblivious to it.

Despite her years of experience, when someone first slipped into the past and started to recount events as if they were still occurring, she was amazed anew at the power of the human brain to keep so many memories stored in such precise detail and how the right conditions made them so accessible.

“How many books are you going to buy?”

“So far I’ve only picked out one—
The Secret Garden.
”

Bellmer allowed Ryan to enjoy the memory a few moments longer. She wanted to regress him slowly from one age to the next so the slide from his present past to a deeper past, to the life before this one, was a gentle passage. Step by step she took him back to when he was an even younger child, then a toddler, and finally to when he was an infant.

“Now, I’d like you to think about another time, a time before you were James…before your mother was your mother and your father was your father…to a different lifetime. Will you try to do that?”

He didn’t respond.

“I’m right here, James, and I’m staying right here with you. If you are willing to try what I’m asking, we might be able to find out what’s compelling you to keep drawing these portraits.”

He didn’t respond.

“Let the water take you back to where you knew the woman with the dark hair who you drew this morning. Picture her in the place where you knew her.”

Iris watched her patient’s face muscles relax and then tighten. She was no longer sitting opposite James Ryan but someone from his past who was angry and uncomfortable.

“Hello,” Dr. Bellmer said softly.

“Who are you?” he asked aggressively.

“I’m a doctor. I’m here to help you. What’s your name?”

“Telamon.”

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

“I’m thirteen,” he said proudly.

“And where do you live?”

“Delphi.”

“What year is this?”

“The first year of the games, of course.”

“What games?”

“The Pythian games.” He sounded surprised that she didn’t know.

This wasn’t the first time she’d run into the problem of dating a period when the soul had lived in a time before Christ. Many ancient civilizations didn’t keep numbered calendars and the
only way to pinpoint the year in ancient Greece was to find out what was happening historically.

“Who is your ruler?”

“Kleisthenes.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar and she made a note of it.

“Do you go to school?”

He looked slightly confused. “I’m not a priest. I’m apprentice to the sculptor, Vangelis.”

“How long have you been his apprentice?”

“Since my father died. He was a builder of temples and I was going to be apprenticed to him.” There was pride in his voice.

“What happened to him?”

Telamon, for Iris had already begun to think of him that way, shrugged as if to make light of what he was going to say, but his voice was now thick with emotion.

“My father could lift heavier stones than any of the men who worked for him until he got sick and couldn’t eat and became very weak. He went to the healers at the sleep temple, but they couldn’t help. My mother acted as if everything would be all right, except at night I would hear her crying. When she thought none of us would know how bad—”

Telamon broke off. Sensing that the boy was struggling for control and that once he found it he’d continue, Iris waited.

“Afterward…a builder took over my father’s workshop, but he had his own apprentices and there was no room for me, so I came here, to Delphi. My cousin Vangelis is a sculptor here, and he accepted me as an apprentice. I wanted to stay with my mother.” His voice had lowered to a whisper. “I miss her.”

“Is that a secret?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because whenever I get homesick, Zenobia makes fun of me
and tells me I am too young to be an apprentice to anything but my mother’s teat.” He stopped and swallowed hard.

“Who is Zenobia?”

“The senior apprentice.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Four, and I’m the youngest—except, of course, for Iantha.”

“Is she another apprentice?”

“A woman? No! She helps out, bringing us food and wine, and tends to the hearth. She’s Vangelis’s daughter.”

“So she is your cousin?”

“No, his daughter from before he married into my family.” Telamon’s face shifted again, and his mouth lifted into a small smile.

“How old is she?”

“Almost as old as me.”

“What does she look like?”

“I could sculpt a likeness of her for you. I did once.” He sounded bereft.

“Did you?”

He nodded. “Vangelis had thrown out a block of marble because it had a dark vein that spoiled it for him, so I used it to sculpt a bust of Iantha. I worked the flaw into her hair. Vangelis found me carving one day, and I thought he was going to be angry because I was making a likeness of his daughter. Instead he showed me where my mistakes were… She has beautiful wide eyes, but I’d set them back too far so she looked worried. There was nothing Vangelis could do to fix that, but he gave her cheekbones more definition and fixed her mouth.”

“What was wrong with her mouth?”

“She has full lips and always wore a little smile. I hadn’t caught that.”

Iris looked down at the floor at one of the drawings James
had brought, of a young woman with full lips, high cheekbones and eyes wide in terror.

“Did you give the sculpture to Iantha?”

“Zenobia saw Vangelis helping me with it. He was always jealous when the master spent extra time with any of us, but I never guessed what he’d do. The next morning when I went to the workshop there were dozens of pieces of shattered marble at my station. At first I didn’t realize what I was seeing, then I recognized a fragment of her nose and then one of her mouth. He’d destroyed it. And then I heard laughing behind me. He was gloating.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to hit him, but he was so much bigger than me. He shoved me against a huge block of marble, trapped me there and hit me over and over until my eyes started to swell shut and my nose was bleeding and my stomach ached. I was at his mercy, but he had no mercy.

“And then I saw a mallet someone had left on the ground, so I pretended I was losing consciousness and slipped down to the floor. He believed that he’d knocked me out and that gave me just enough time to grab the mallet, lift it and swing it at him. The flat surface connected with Zenobia’s shoulder and there was a loud thud and then he started screaming. I took off, but even in all that pain he came after me, yelling that I was going to be sorry. I hid from him on the far side of a stone so big it had taken all of us to bring it inside and waited to see if he was really going to come after me. When he did I jumped out and wrestled him to the ground. Because of the pain in his arm he was weakened enough for me to get on top of him and then he was at my mercy—and I had the mallet. I was sitting on his stomach and he had blood coming out of his nose and his eyes were watering and he had to be in terrible pain, but he
wasn’t scared of me. That was the worst part. He still wasn’t scared of me.

“‘You stupid fool,’ he hissed. ‘I’m the senior apprentice and the master’s favorite. Don’t you know what he’ll do to you if you hurt me? All I’ll have to do is tell Vangelis about the walks you take with Iantha and tell him what the two of you do with each other. He won’t stand for it and you’ll be out on the streets.’

“He was older and stronger than me, but he was the one on the ground, and I had the advantage—except I was scared, and he knew. He started laughing at me again, and, like a great animal, rose up and pushed me off him. Iantha was there, and she tried to stop him…”

Iris was suffering alongside the sweating, panting boy—yes, boy, because that was who James Ryan was now.

“He was shouting, ‘You bug, you insect.’ His spit sprayed my face. Then he punched me in the stomach. I was scared for Iantha, worried he was going to hurt her, too, but all his attention was on beating me up, and even after my nose and mouth were bleeding and my head was pounding he still kept coming at me. He kept punching me in the face, and then everything went black. The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t see. Was I blind? How would I sculpt?”

Her patient had stopped speaking. The room was quiet enough so that Iris could hear cars honking in the street and the drone of the ubiquitous white noise machine in the corner that therapists used to prevent anyone from overhearing a session. His face was twisted with the pain; he’d had enough.

“James, I’m going to start counting, and when I reach ten you’re going to wake up. You’ll remember what you’ve told me, but you won’t feel any distress or pain. You’ll be in control and at peace.”