Healer Read Online Free Page B

brick buttresses. He fitted himself into the corner of one of these, leaning his back against the sooty brick. It was a mild September morning, with misty sunlight. A corner of brickwork touched the light bruise at the back of his head, seeming to fit the invisible wound without hurting it. He let it rest there, making it part of him, himself part of it. Like that he could feel the whole world reaching out around him, not dreamy, not blurred at the edges, but sharp and clear and all in its necessary place, each worn old brick where it belonged, and the cabbage smells and the echoes of feet and voices all true to themselves and all full of one life, a slow, quiet thereness spreading on and on beyond the sun.
    He stayed in his nook, part of this life, this quiet, until the bell rang.

3
    â€œMedium response,” called a voice. “Four-point eight. Point-nine. Five-oh-five. Five-oh. Five-oh-five. Steady.”
    The aerial pointed at Barry for another few seconds and then moved on. The assistant had to come right around behind the rows to give him his badge. Dazed with the violence of memory, he barely noticed.
    Of course, if he’d been asked about his first meeting with Pinkie at any time since, he would have remembered it, though probably not told whoever had asked him. And he had often thought about it in a more theoretical way, trying to make up his mind what, if anything, Pinkie did when she “helped” someone get well. His main conclusion was that she’d got it right. She helped. You were due to get well anyway, your body had geared itself up to that point, and there was something about her that triggered the process of recovery off. That was all.
    But thinking about it, Barry had only used as much of his memory of that morning as he needed to make his theory work. What it had actually been like—the knowledge of peace, the sense of the world’s life flowing through him—had been left out. It hadn’t been forgotten. It was like a once-favourite book he’d stopped reading, there on the shelf still, available but never opened. But as the aerial aimed at him and the word “harmony” hummed in his mind, it was that part of the memory which he had snatched up from the jumble of past days.
    It was more than memory. It was the same thing happening again. Everything belonged, and he belonged with everything, a speck of the universe, a speck called Barry Evans, but the speck was also the universe, and one of the billion billion names of the universe was Barry Evans. Only one moment more, and he would dissolve and become the universe, exist along its infinite network, knowing all its past, all its future …
    But first …
    Yes, there was something to do. A reason. Why he was here, standing, gripping this rail …
    He made an effort, like deliberately waking from deep sleep, from a marvellous dream. He couldn’t have dozed off (if you could call it that) for more than half a minute, but he felt like a time traveller who has spent perhaps years of his own life going back and forth through the ages and has only now returned almost to the instant when he set out.
    He continued the effort by pushing the experience away, so that he could think about it, make sense of it. (That was Barry, the impatient, disbelieving mind. Old Bear had been with him on the trip but was surly about waking up, still trying to snuggle back into the dream.) Of course, it was the same old either/or problem you always got with Pinkie, magnified by the setup in this place. Either the Moses-man was on to something, and all this kit and the circle of patients and Pinkie herself were actually producing an effect, even if they weren’t sure what, but call it focusing this Harmonic Energy stuff, or it had all happened in Barry’s mind, was going to happen soon anyway but had come with an extra rush now, with the chocolate and brandy wearing off, and the mild delirium of not having eaten a proper