Healer

by Peter Dickinson

  “But if she wants to get out,” he muttered.

  Mr. Stott put his mug down and picked up a small flowerpot that was almost completely filled with one brown bulb. His fingers teased at the papery old skin around the neck, freeing the last few withered leaves and dropping them on the floor.

  “Too late now,” he said. “That daughter of mine, she’ll do anything for money. I could have bought Pinkie off her five years back. Thought that was what I was doing, setting them up in Viola Street and paying the rent. Anything more would have meant giving up this lot.”

  He turned the pot over in his hands, glaring at it. Nobody had ever told Barry about his paying Mrs. Proudfoot’s rent. He had some money. He’d been able to hire a detective to find Pinkie and then pay the fee for the Foundation, plus another fifty pounds for Barry’s trouble. It had all been his idea in the first place, so it was unsettling to discover that he didn’t seem to want Barry to go any further with it now.

  “Do anything for money, she would,” he said.

  “She used to be very religious. She threw me out for mentioning that Pinkie had sent my headaches away. But now …”

  “Who’s to say with a woman like that? Who’s to say about anyone? Those meetings she went to—sort of lot that’s sure the world is coming to an end next Friday and then everybody’s going to fry in hell except themselves. But there was a minister, you see? Had a row with him, Brasher found out. Women like my daughter, making out they despise all men and same time wanting more from a man than a man can give. More senses than one. Who the hell d’you think she was baking those cakes and stuff for? Not a lot of save-my-soul biddies like herself. It’ll have been the minister. Can’t say how far they’ll have gone together—yes, I mean like that, young man, it’s going on all the time—but now suppose some other biddy nips in, younger, cuddlier. I don’t know how your Freeman came to hear about Pinkie, but from what you say he’s always been interested in that sort of thing, so he might pick up a rumour, come and see for himself. And if he looks like Moses, then he looks like God, and my daughter will have been after him like a cat after a mouse. Then, when he tells her how she can make money from what Pinkie can do…”

  “I told you. She slung me out for just mentioning it.”

  “Ah. She’s always been jealous of Pinkie.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Bought her a violin for her fourth birthday.”

  Barry laughed.

  “Bet it didn’t last long with Pinkie around,” he said.

  “Broke it first lesson. And again when it was mended. That daughter of mine, she’d got it into her head Pinkie was going to be a child prodigy and herself was going to manage her, touring the world, making a pot of money. Course, she had to give up in the end. You see, she’d spotted early on there was something about Pinkie, and she thought she was going to take charge of whatever it was. Then it turns out Pinkie can heal people—what use is that to her? Where’s the money in it? Something she can’t understand and she’s got no control over? So she joins a sect where they think anything like that is the work of Satan, see. He’s good-looking, your Freeman?”

  “Terrific.”

  “There you are then. She’s not bad, either, when she does herself up. They’ll have sparked all right. First glance, I shouldn’t wonder. Don’t look at me like that, young man. I tell you it goes on all the time, and a bloody nuisance to all concerned…”

  He banged the flowerpot down so vehemently that crumbs of compost jerked out onto the table. He brushed them onto the floor with a sweep of his hand.

  “Past helping anyway, that daughter of mine,” he said. “You’re not. Yet.”

  His furious blue glare focused on Barry, as though the mere notion of trying to help him was an insult.

  “What do you reckon about me taking this job on?” said Barry.

  “Ah now, provided you understand your own reasons.”

  “You’re trying to tell me I’m making a mistake.”

  “Didn’t say that. It’s something that might get you into a lot of trouble, for a start. It might change you, ways you can’t guess at. It’s a big step. All I’m telling you is if you understand why you’re taking it, you’ve a better chance of getting it right. So think about it, like I say. Then, if you come and tell me you’ve decided to call it off, I won’t think the worse of you. And if you decide to go through with it, I’ll give you a hand. I could find you a bit more money, I daresay. Reminds me—there’s fifty pounds I owe you.”

  “They gave me back the fee. I’ve got it here. I’m supposed to be paying it back out of my wages.”

  “That case it’s yours. I don’t want it. Water under the bridge. But I’ll hang on to the fifty, against you need some more later.”

  “Okay. Thank you very much.”

  “You better be off, case that Brasher’s watching. Spend too long here, and they’ll think we’re hatching something. Drop me a line, anything you need, and set up an address somewhere I can answer.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  The next morning Barry cycled to Ferriby.

  It was a sort of ritual act. When the Evanses had first come to Marsden Ash and he had so loathed the place, and so longed for Thursley, he had chosen the moorland up at Ferriby as a kind of substitute. It was nothing like gentle green Thursley, except in being different from Marsden Ash. He used to cycle out there on the first and last day of every holidays. Now he had grown used to Marsden Ash. They’d built a bypass two years back, so the juggernauts no longer boomed past the doorstep. He had friends and haunts and interests. It wasn’t that he liked the place, but just as a limpet grows its shell to fit one exact spot on the rock where it clings, so he had grown to fit this town, these people. Ferriby was a place where nobody belonged. He did not go out there with the deliberate object of following Mr. Stott’s advice and thinking about himself, but that was what happened.

  It was a day more like March than June, with gutters sloshing wet and the trucks booming along the main road with plumes of spray trailing from their wheels. The rain had stopped, but he had to wear his cape as far as the turnoff. The two-mile climb up the lane helped dry out his jeans and shoes. He was steaming by the time he padlocked the Galaxy to the litter bin on the parking lot. Crows had got at the plastic bag inside the bin and scattered picnic litter across the clinker surface. The lot was empty. It was a fair-size space, built up with a terrace wall at one corner. On fine afternoons there would be twenty or thirty cars up here, many with people still in them who had driven up simply to sit and look at the view, but anyone who wanted to see the circle had to get out and take a little exercise.

  Barry merely nodded to the view like an old friend, turned and climbed the steep bank behind the parking lot, and strode down the track that led to the stones.

  It was nowhere much, Ferriby. A wide, saucer-shaped depression, heather, and rough grass. When you stood at the middle, the furthest horizon was only half a mile away. The nineteen stones were mostly no more than knee-high, buried in the slowly accumulating peat. You wouldn’t have known, looking at any one of them, that it wasn’t just an outcrop of rock—unless, that is, you happened to be a geologist and could see that the rock didn’t belong on this hill and had been brought from somewhere else. And even when you stood where you could see all nineteen, the ground was so rough that you mightn’t have noticed they were arranged in a broken oval, like a drawing of an egg-shell with the top knocked off. They were old but dull. Even on fine days few people bothered with the circle. Ramblers might walk by on the track to Brant, but the lead workings five miles to the north were more interesting to scramble around. There was an industrial museum up there, just as good a view from the parking lot. On a morning like this the saucer that held the stones was as empty a place as anything you could imagine.

  Barry strolled around the circle, continuing the meaningless ritual, touching stone after stone as he pa
ssed, beginning on the left of the gap. Nobody knew whether the circle had been built like that deliberately or whether three stones had been taken away. They could even still be there, deep in the peat. He wasn’t thinking about this, or anything much, as he went around. The process was a way of telling himself who he was: Barry Evans, who came to Ferriby every so often and did this. And Bear, too, of course.

  Just as he got back to the gap the thought suddenly struck him that the circle wasn’t only like a broken eggshell. It was also like a magnet. He grinned sourly to himself. Get old Freeman up here some time. Stone Age Harmony Session.

  Why not? Made just as much sense.

  Probably it was the thought of the Harmony Session, or, rather, the Pinkie effect, the chemical trigger mechanism she sometimes seemed to produce in him, but a curious thing began to happen. He had been getting fairly cold as he mooned around, with the wind-chill working at his still-damp jeans and his upper body sweaty from the climb, but a vague warmth flowed through him, and then, suddenly, he was outside himself. His consciousness seemed to divide in two, half of it staying in his body, the other half drifting up and hovering twelve feet above him and a little to his right and looking down—amused, inquisitive, pitying—at a young man in a bright green sweater and blue jeans, lank black hair, sharp nose, thin, pale face, a young man who had made up his mind long ago without ever thinking about it that the world was nothing but a great machine for cheating people, men and women smiling while they thought how to do each other down, systems which churned blindly along, smashing up lives, throwing good men out of jobs, driving children out of homes where they’d been happy—nobody safe, the cheaters being cheated by other cheats, only a few, a very few, getting out of the cycle, cheating the system itself, usually by becoming some kind of nut, like Mr. Stott.

  Then, suddenly—the sort of change that happens in a dream—the hovering intelligence glimpsed something else. The young man had a shadow. Not outside him but in. A vague shape, blurred at the edges, but strong and dark and dangerous. The young man was afraid of it. It was growing stronger. He needed help.

  Barry wasn’t aware of his two selves coming together again. What he experienced was the shock of waking—again, just like waking from a dream, a nightmare. He was standing by the last stone, shuddering with cold or fright, thinking, I have seen Bear. And he’s real.

  Fright gave way to anger. He was furious with himself for letting himself become scared by a dream. He slapped his arms violently against his body—to get warm, of course, but also beating himself in punishment. He made his stupid legs jump and jump as he beat, forcing them on long after he was warm again, punishing his body for the trick his mind had played. He’d been intending to go straight home after the visit to Ferriby, but instead, he went and fetched the Galaxy from the parking lot, lugged it onto the moor, and began the eight-mile cross-country ride to Brant.

  Slowly, as he picked his way along the slithery track, he came to terms with what had happened, making a sort of sense of which he could accept. He’d started on a Pinkie-induced high—perhaps he’d already got colder than he’d realised and had reached a trance-like state on the edge of hypothermia—and then the high had turned itself into a bad trip. If it happened with artificial drugs, no reason why it shouldn’t with the ones in your own mind. He’d seen things which were not true. He had not actually been outside his own body looking down. Bear was not real.

  Even so, Bear was becoming a nuisance. He would have to do something about Bear.

  Once over the lip of the saucer which contained the stone circle, the track ran steadily downhill. It was enjoyable, easy riding, even on a morning like this. Barry thought about Bear as he rode. Bear had begun as a sort of half joke of Mum’s. Apparently he used to throw tantrums when he’d been tiny, and apparently Mum, trying to tease him out of them, used to say, “You’re not my Barry. You’re only a horrible wild bear.” He couldn’t actually remember this happening and only knew about it because she’d mentioned it once in one of those when-you-were-small sessions that parents go in for sometimes. Then, when the migraines had started, Bear had become connected with them. Bear-with-a-sore-head. Not real, of course. Just a way of thinking about himself so that it wasn’t Barry (nice lad, doing ever-so-well at school, football, too) being this unpleasant, snarly lump of pain and sickness, but something else. Barry would come back when the migraine was over.

  But when had Bear become somebody else, somebody not-Barry, somebody he could talk to, who didn’t only come into being to cope with the migraines but was there all the time, though usually sleeping? And who might, almost without warning, lurch out of his lair and take over?

  Barry realised that he hadn’t been aware that this was what had been happening to him until a few days ago when he had been lying on the lawn at the Foundation. The migraine had really stirred old Bear into life, which wasn’t surprising, seeing how bad it was and how long it was since he’d had one. There hadn’t been any moment at which Bear might have made trouble because the day had gone so well, but suppose Barry hadn’t been picked to be a “representative,” suppose Mr. Freeman had taken a different line in his study; then Bear might have broken out into the open.

  Got clean away? Taken over? Turned Barry Evans—the real Barry—into a lost and hidden person, remembered only in flashes and in dreams?

  It was a frightening thought. He’d have to talk to someone about it.

  Who? When? Got to get through with this business at the Foundation first anyway. Find somebody there? Not likely, among those nuts.

  There was Pinkie, of course. Yeah.

  He got home late for lunch and very hungry.

  Part Two

  9

  On his third morning on the job at the Foundation Barry met the bus from Winchester Station and helped the clients down. You never called them patients. That was very important. In all its literature the Foundation never once said it was in the business of healing. No, it was carrying out a scientific program to investigate Harmonic Energy, and this might in some cases, as a by-product, lead to measurable amelioration in disease phenomena. Clients must not be misled about their prospects, oh, no … but Barry guessed there were probably laws which tried to control this sort of thing, and if you didn’t claim to be healing anyone, you got around some of them.

  He smiled at the clients, murmured “good morning” to anyone he was helping, looked straight in their eyes, answered their questions. He was just wheeling the last chair up the ramp when Sergeant Coyne stopped him.

  “I’ll take over there, lad,” he whispered. “You show the driver where to park. He’s new.”

  Sergeant Coyne whispered all the time. He had been a real sergeant and was only ten years older than Barry. He’d come out of the army after getting a bullet through his windpipe in Northern Ireland. The wound had left him dumb, but after his first Harmony Session he’d found he could talk again, though only in this rasping whisper.

  “Could’ve done it all along, you might reckon,” he said. “Only needed a bit of confidence, and watching Miss Pinkie doing her stuff somehow did the trick. Nothing much to it, really.”

  He had dark eyes and a leathery, humorous face. His voice gave the impression that he was telling you scandalous secrets, but once you’d got used to it, you found he was friendly and straightforward, like everyone else at the Foundation.

  Barry rode up in the bus to the parking area behind the stables, but because the driver wanted to listen to his radio he walked down alone. He seemed to have got over the foolish feeling his purple uniform had first given him, and now it only fretted him by being tight under the armpits. He was still conscious of a chilliness at the back of his neck where he’d had his hair cut short.

  It was a beautiful morning—going to be almost too hot later—but now smelling as fresh and crisp as one of the cakes Mrs. Proudfoot used to bake. Barry was actually thinking about her, wondering when she’d be back
from the States, when he rounded the stable block and glanced up at the main building, all gleaming white paint and glittering windowpanes. The house was shaped like a T, with the grand rooms in the crosspiece and the kitchens and what had once been the servants’ rooms tucked away in the upright. This was where the working parts of the Foundation now were—the kitchens still, of course, along with offices and storerooms on the ground floor; above that some of the resident clients’ bedrooms, and above those the rooms of the women on the Foundation staff. The men slept in the stable block.

  Barry had no idea what made him look up. In fact, the gleam and glitter made the building almost painful to see. He was looking away again when his glance seemed to snag on something, a coloured spot, a forearm in a pale blue sleeve projecting between the bars of a window at the very top and outer end of the building. The lower sash was up. There seemed nothing but darkness behind the white bars, but a shape stirred, and something gleamed. He was looking at Pinkie. They’d given her back her glasses. He took off his cap and waved. After a slight pause the arm waved back.

  She mightn’t have recognized him, of course, in his uniform and with his hair short. She might simply have waved back the way people do out of trains. He wasn’t sure she knew he was here. He hadn’t asked yet if he could see her. After all, she was Miss Pinkie, and he was only a Sphere Five.

  (For all its friendliness the Foundation was highly organized. Sphere Fives were the lowest—hall porters and cleaners and such. Sergeant Coyne was a Sphere Four, and so were most of the assistants at the Harmony Sessions, and people like Mrs. Beadle, the head cook. Mrs. Elliott was a Sphere Three. Dr. Geare and Dr. Hamm were the only Sphere Twos Barry had come across. You could tell on sight where anyone belonged by the arrangement of rings around the purple badges they all wore on their chests—it worked like the rings on a naval officer’s sleeve. There was only one Sphere One, and that was what you called him. You said, “Sphere One says …” Not “Mr. Freeman says …” But you called Pinkie “Miss Pinkie”, whoever you were talking to.)