The Healing Read Online Free Page B

store. Through the window, Karen watched her cross the main road at her usual unhurried pace.
    â€œDo you know who that woman is?” Karen asked the cashier. “I’ve seen her walking all over town ever since I was a kid, but I’ve never met her.”
    â€œWho, Grace Mitchell? She’s been around forever. One of those eccentrics you hear a hundred different stories about.”
    Karen’s curiosity was piqued. “Like what?”
    â€œWell, I heard she was a nurse years back, but not in a regular hospital,” the cashier said as she scanned Karen’s items, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Supposedly she worked for one of those holistic institutes and traveled around the country with some band of quacks. But that was a long time ago, and these days I hear she’s some sort of religious hermit or a New Age channeler or something. Lives all by herself in that big old house. She could be celebrating Black Masses in the basement for all we know.”
    â€œThe house on Terry Lane?”
    â€œYeah, that’s been in the Mitchell family for generations.” The cashier met Karen’s gaze as she started bagging the items. “Did you grow up around here?”
    â€œWe were summer folks.”
    â€œWell, when I was a kid we used to think that house was haunted.”
    Karen was surprised. “Really? I always thought it was grand and romantic.”
    â€œThat’s because you only saw it on nice summer afternoons. You should have seen it on a dark Halloween night, when the moon was out and the leaves were off the trees.” The cashier rang up the total. “That’ll be seventeen twenty-eight.”
    Karen fished in her bag for a twenty. “Wow,” she said. “My sister and I used to think she was so mysterious. I guess we weren’t too far off the mark.”
    As the cashier handed Karen her change, she leaned forward to let her in on another secret. Her voice dropped even lower than before. “Grace Mitchell has always been a little strange, but there are a few stories about her that aren’t so far-fetched. Some people say that she had some kind of major breakdown years back, and others say that she lays low because she’s dodging an arrest warrant in another state from her days of medical hoodoo. I guess it was just too easy to believe she was some kind of witch or something.”
    Karen hoisted her bag of groceries. “You never know,” she said, more mystified than ever about the woman in black.

chapter five
    The bathwater was as cool and refreshing as a deep pond on a hot day, and Mike was immersed to his armpits in its womblike comfort. Closing his eyes and resting his head on the rim of the old porcelain tub, he savored the remedial effects of feeling weightless and unburdened by movement. He was tempted to pretend he was in his old body, intact with its extraordinary strength and inexhaustible energy, but it would have been too painful to open his eyes and see the reality of his withering self. The indiscriminate daylight exposed his atrophying legs—two white, shapeless branches with knobby knees and ankles. The dark body hair that was once an external coat of virility now just floated around his pale skin like mossy seaweed on a shipwreck. His waist was the size of a woman’s, his stomach concave and twitching with his pulse. Even the sight of his own genitals horrified him. It looked like some drowning slug had crawled up between his legs, had died on a dark bed of grass, and was decaying in the sun.
    How was he supposed to relax and appreciate anything ?
    Even if he could tolerate the sight of his own ravaged anatomy, how was he supposed to accept the fact that another full-grown man was in the bathroom with him, making sure he didn’t unintentionally (or intentionally) slip under the water’s surface?
    Mike finally opened his eyes. He glanced at Raymond, who was sitting on the closed toilet seat