Healer (7 page)

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 passed, 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.)

After that there was a busy period, answering clients' questions in the entrance hail, helping them find their way about, fetching them for interviews and so on, and at last getting them into the Harmony Session. Then a lull. Barry went to get his lunch before the session was finished, so that he could take over in the porter's booth and let Sergeant Coyne off. He was just about finishing when the first of the assistants, two women and a man, still in their white uniforms, came in.

“How did it go then?” asked the fat grey-haired woman who was working behind the self-service counter.

“H.E. a bit variable,” said the man.

“You can say that again,” said the taller of the two girls.

The stout woman sighed as if hearing of a bad result at a local football match. Another bad result in a bad season.

“One old fellow started yelling till Dr. Hamm got him quiet. You'd have thought it might have unsettled Miss Pinkie, but she didn't seem to notice. We came up with only nine reps.”

“You win some, you lose some,” said the other girl.

As she turned from the counter, Barry saw that it was in fact Karen, a plump, earnest, rather thick blonde he'd got into a chat with at supper last night. (Okay, she was a Sphere Four, but a lot of the staff wanted to make contact with Barry, because of his “good” reaction at the Harmony Session.) He hadn't been especially struck with her—jeans and a T-shirt, and you didn't look at her twice—but uniforms did something for some girls. He felt the familiar mild glow of interest—something like an intelligent electric heater might feel when it's first turned on, he'd often thought.

As he crossed with his empty tray to the counter, he made a deliberate effort to decide whether there was any of that in what he felt about Pinkie. More and more, since Mr. Stott's warning, he had come to realise what most people would think and say if a sixteen-year-old boy ran off with a ten-year-old girl—kidnapped her, it was going to look like. So it seemed to him important to be sure in his mind that there was no truth in it. He tried to think about Pinkie and compare his reaction with his thoughts (if you could call them thoughts) about Karen. Yes, there was warmth there, and actual physical sensation, slight but real, across his shoulder blades and the back of his neck; with it went a movement in his mind, but again feeling like something physical, something beginning to open … Inside himself he knew it was quite different, nothing to do with sex at all. But yes, there'd be problems persuading anyone. Old Stott had been right about that. He felt depressed as he made his way back to the entrance hail.

“That's for you,” said Sergeant Coyne, tapping a white envelope on the counter. It was, too—“B. Evans” in large floppy writing. The card inside said, “Will you please come to tea in the nursery wing today, 4:00 P.M.? Louise Butterfield.”

“Who's Louise Butterfield?” he asked.

“Mrs. Butterfield to you, my lad. She's a Sphere Three. Lady plays the harp at the sessions.”

“Oh. I've got to go have tea with her in the nursery wing. Where's that?”

Sergeant Coyne couldn't alter the tone of his voice, but his eyes widened.

“Up the stairs back end of kitchen passage,” he said, “Top floor, turn right. You'll see a notice says ‘No Unauthorized persons,' but if you've been asked, you don't have to mind that.”

“Thanks.”

“That's where Miss Pinkie lives, see? Mrs. Butterfield watches after her.”

It was a private apartment. There was a door with a lock to it, a bell push, a peephole. From beyond the door the plinkety sounds of harp scales came faintly, but they stopped at the ring of the bell.

Mrs. Butterfield opened the door. Barry didn't recognize her for a moment because she was standing, though with the help of a stick. He'd seen her that morning being wheeled into the Harmony Session and hadn't realised she could walk. She gave Barry a lovely smile, a typical Foundation smile, full of peace and happiness.

“You must be Barry,” she said.

“That's right.”

“I'm Louise Butterfield. Pinkie's told me a lot about you…”

(False note? A lot—Pinkie?)

“It'll be great to see her again.”

“She's just getting up from her rest. She seems extra tired today. It was a difficult session.”

“So I heard. Must be a strain any time.”

“She's wonderful how she stands it.”

“Right.”

Mrs. Butterfield, still smiling, nodded as though they had agreed on something really important, then turned and hobbled down the passage. Barry followed her into a large room brimming with light. The bright-coloured furniture looked used and comfortable. There was a harp by the fireplace and an enormous doll's house between the windows. Over in the far corner was a desk with schoolbooks on it, a blackboard, a globe of the world.

“I used to be a teacher,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “It's worked out very luckily—that's the Harmony, of course. We do our lessons here and—”

She was interrupted by the crash of the door being flung open. As Barry turned, Pinkie charged headlong into him, the way she used to rush at Mr. Stott. She threw her arms around him and nuzzled her face into his chest. At the same time she tried to jump up and down.

“Hi, mind my toes,” said Barry.

When he put his hands round her rib cage to lift her free, she giggled and clung to him yet more ferociously so that he wasn't sure he could force her loose without hurting her. He twisted his head and gave Mrs. Butterfield a sorry-not-my-fault shrug.

Mrs. Butterfield was watching, still with a smile on her lips but a slight frown on her forehead. She answered his signal with a warning shake of the head. He stopped struggling against Pinkie's hug and went limp.

It worked. As she let go, she pinched him hard on the hip.

“Oi!” he yelped.

She rushed away, around to the back of the big sofa, where she stopped and turned to watch him, so wild with excitement that her laughter was more like screams, unpleasant to listen to. Suddenly she crouched, peeping at him over the back of the sofa. Yes, of course. If she was treating him as a sort of substitute for her grandfather, the next thing would be…

He glanced around the room. It was an airy space, lit by its three big barred windows, one in the north wall and two in the east. Beyond the stable roof was a view of wooded fields sloping up to the skyline, lit by the strong afternoon sun. Despite the height and light and openness, there was something prison-like about the room, just as there had been about the close little house in Viola Street. Perhaps it was the bars on the windows, though they obviously hadn't been put there just to keep Pinkie in. They looked much older than that.

“Okay,” he said. “You want to play a game?”

She poked her head up and nodded violently.

“It'll mean pushing the furniture around,” he said to Mrs. Butterfield.

“In that case why don't you wait till after tea?” she said. “It's all in the hatch, and the kettle's just boiled. Then you can push the furniture around to your heart's content. It sounds as if your game will be a bit too active for me.”

Pinkie straightened up, looking sulky. Then she seemed to make a deliberate effort and switched to her other self, the one Barry knew and preferred, sedate and rather secret.

He smiled encouragingly at her, and she signalled back with a tiny movement of her lips. But she'd changed. There was something different about her, though he couldn't at the moment see what.

“Pinkie will show you where the hatch is, and I'll make the tea,” said Mrs. Butterfield.

Pinkie led the way out into the corridor, where she opened the doors of what looked like a cupboard set into the wall. Inside there seemed to be only one bare shelf with a rope going up from its centre, but Pinkie took hold of another rope which ran down by the hinges and gave it a tug. With a deep, rattling groan from above the shelf slid upward, and another came into view, carrying a tray loaded with crockery and cutlery. Yet another shelf and tray appeared, this time with honey, jam, butter, scones, and a walnut cream cake. There was a dull thud as the whole contraption stopped rising. Now it looked like an ordinary cupboard, apart from being unusually deep. They each took a tray and carried them back into the room.

“That's quite a gadget out there,” he said to Mrs. Butterfield.

“The old lift? It goes right down to the kitchen passage. This all used to be the nursery wing, you see, with a nanny and at least a couple of nursemaids and a whole brood of children. Poor darlings, they'd never have gone down to eat with their parents until they were almost grown-up, except on birthdays and times like that. Mostly they'd stay up here and have all their meals sent up in the lift. Boiled mutton and sprouts, my mother told me. She used to live in a house a bit like this. Help me down into my chair, will you, darling?”

Pinkie steadied her by the wrists as she lowered herself into an upright chair. There was a moment in the process when the calm, sweet face twitched, as if with a stab of pain. She sighed as she settled.

“I didn't realise you could walk at all,” said Barry.

“I couldn't. Six months ago. It's living with Pinkie. The Energy streams through her even when she's not thinking about it. I'm an extremely lucky woman.”

Pinkie's face was blank, bored.

“Is Granddad all right?” she asked.

“Fine last time I saw him. Sends his love. He was over the moon a few weeks back because he'd won an award with his new Roscoea.”