The House in the Pines(77)

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— The new dog’s name was Toto because she resembled the terrier belonging to Dorothy, but this Toto was less adventurous than the one in The Wizard of Oz. This Toto shook with fear at loud noises. Her small bones had quivered with such intensity the first time Maya picked her up, she had worried something was wrong, but then, as she held the middle-aged dog to her chest, Toto had calmed down.

She likes you, the shelter worker had said.

“No!” Maya said now as Toto barked and bared her teeth at the mail sliding through the mail slot onto the floor. It was a Saturday afternoon, three weeks after Maya had gone back to work. She and Dan had been reading together on the couch, their legs overlapping in the middle beneath a soft blue throw she’d recently purchased.

Toto began to shake.

Maya picked her up and brought her over to the couch, its green velvet heaven on a lazy winter day. She put the mail on the coffee table, then smoothed the dog’s shivering body with her hands, murmuring about how everything would be okay.

Toto had been with them for about a week, and it was obvious that Maya was better than Dan at calming her down. He joked that Maya was the dog’s therapy human. He reached over, scratched Toto behind the ears. Toto huffed.

Maya noticed a large manila envelope among the junk mail and home furnishing catalogs on the table. She slid a finger beneath the envelope’s seal, pulled out a vintage-looking scholarly journal.

Experimental Neuropsychology, Volume 17, October 1983. Her body tensed. She’d almost forgotten having ordered this online. The journal’s cover was burnt orange, the white font from another era. Inside the cover, halfway down the list of contributors, she found Frank’s father. She laid the journal on the coffee table so that she and Dan could read it at the same time. Toto settled at her side. The apartment was quiet, the only sounds the usual clatter of the street outside, the hum of the refrigerator, and, after a while, Toto’s snoring.

Oren had published the article a year before the research study that left Russell DeLuca dead. It was unrelated to the study but also had to do with hypnosis. It was about what Oren called the “Bellamy Induction,” a way of inducing a hypnotic trance in subjects who’d been previously hypnotized. It was faster, Oren claimed, than the popular Elman Induction, which many hypnotists currently used because of its ability to bring about a trance state in under four minutes.

The Bellamy Induction was based upon classical conditioning. Where Pavlov had trained dogs to associate food with the sound of a bell, Oren proposed that a subject, once induced into a trance, could be trained to associate that state of consciousness with an object.

Any object. A coin. A watch. A pencil.

Maya nodded knowingly. “A key,” she said.

Toto twitched in her sleep.

Once the object and the trance state had been paired in the patient’s mind, the sight of the object would induce the trance. It was practically instantaneous. Dr. Bellamy went on to stress the importance of selecting an object common enough so as not to be distracting while visually distinct enough that it wouldn’t be confused with other objects of its type.

He concluded by suggesting a possible application for his method. It could be used, he said, to exert control over potentially volatile populations, such as prisoners or psychotic patients. Subjects could be restrained without the use of force. The Bellamy Induction was presented as a “theory,” but Maya was sure it was more than that. Oren would have used the induction on his son, just as he’d subjected Frank to his hypnotherapy method.

And like the method, Frank would have learned the induction. He’d have perfected it until he was more adept at it than his father. Then he’d have combined the two procedures into what amounted to enormous power over anyone who happened to be hypnotizable.

Maybe Maya hadn’t been so far off when she called what he did to them magic. He’d waved an odd-looking key at her and she’d fallen into a trance. He’d done this not only to her, but to Aubrey as well. And Cristina. And his own father. It was as if Frank had cast a spell on all of them.



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— Maya began to cut her mirtazapine pills in half as she neared the end of the bottle prescribed to her at urgent care; then she cut them into quarters. Little by little, she relearned how to fall asleep naturally, though it would be a while before her brain fully healed.

She’d been attending AA meetings for almost a month and couldn’t tell if they were helping, if it was the mirtazapine, or if the truth was that she wasn’t an alcoholic. But she hadn’t had a drop since the night she confronted Frank at the Whistling Pig, and the only time she really missed it, the only time she felt like she absolutely needed a gin and tonic or she was going to lose her mind, was around dawn when she woke from another dream she couldn’t remember and couldn’t fall back asleep.

When this happened, her thoughts would turn to Frank. She might tell herself he’d be apprehended any day now—Diaz had all but assured her of this—but on mornings like this, so early that it might as well have been night, Maya would imagine other posthypnotic suggestions lying dormant in her head. An evil egg waiting for the right cue, the right word or image, to hatch and overtake her mind. She would picture herself slipping into a trance at the grocery store. While talking to a customer at work. While driving.

Or a floorboard in the hall would creak and she’d be sure that it was him. She had always been imaginative. She envisioned him slipping in through a window while she and Dan slept. Standing over their bed. Frank would never have to touch them as his words filled their room like poisonous gas.