Healer

by Peter Dickinson

  The impulses to send his muscles into that rush, that blow, were already on their way when something cried out in the silence of the moor, a short, wailing yelp, not loud but full of pain. An animal sound, calling to an animal, to Bear. For a fraction of an instant he hesitated, stopping the arm in its backward motion, and glanced toward the sound. Pinkie was standing facing him in the gap by the missing stones. Her skin gleamed. Pale light seemed to be flowing out of it so that it shone like a signal. The pain and the cry and the light were all part of the same thing.

  With that hesitation the moment of certainty was lost. The chain could still slash forward, still probably hit the neck, hurt, wound—but kill? And after? The incalculable network of consequences, the alterations in his own life and destiny that would flow from that spasm of action, exploded in Barry’s mind. He was appalled. He lived in a real world where things weighed what they weighed and no Bear magic could change them. Somehow he took control, forcing Bear back, away, down into darkness. The rush of attack became a momentary lurch and stumble.

  “Twisted her ankle?” said Mr. Freeman.

  He had heard Pinkie cry out and quickened his pace. They walked toward her, picking their way along separate twisting paths between the heather patches.

  “I am very impressed with you, Barry,” said Mr. Freeman.

  “Uh?”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. You have made a serious mistake, both dangerous and distressing to innocent people, but I have no doubt you acted for what you thought were good reasons. I can see myself at your age and in your shoes doing much the same. I hope I would have had the resource you have shown in carrying it through.”

  And Mr. Stott is a remarkable old gentleman. What’s he up to?

  “Pinkie, too, no doubt …” Mr. Freeman went on but then stopped. The track he had been following twisted to one side to get around a large mound of old, tangled, almost impenetrable heather. Barry’s track turned the other way but not so sharply. He hurried on and found Pinkie now leaning against one of the stones, running her hands over it and patting it like a completely blind person, though she must have been able to see, so close, what she was touching.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “I hurt my leg. Ouch!”

  He lifted her and settled her onto his left hip. She snuggled close against his shoulder. He found he was trembling, partly with unused adrenaline and partly with the slowly realised shock at what he had almost done. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “I was wrong, Barry,” called Mr. Freeman. “It was no mistake. No mistake at all.”

  Barry turned, surprised by the velvety, preaching tone, the throb of excitement. Mr. Freeman, instead of following his track around the heather clump, had picked his way right into the middle of it and was standing there. He seemed to be floating a little above ground level. Presumably there was some kind of mound under the heather, or possibly a hidden stone. He faced directly toward the mouth of the broken circle.

  “The ancients were wiser than we remember,” he said in the same loud voice, as though he was preaching to the silent stones. “They had not yet dulled their sensitivity to the Harmony by overreliance on the five superficial senses of the body. They understood that there are not only times and places but places beyond time.”

  “What’s he on about?” whispered Barry.

  “Places.”

  “Like you said yesterday?”

  “Suppose so.”

  She seemed dazed. It could have been the fall, or the tiredness of the last two days, or the shock of capture.

  “I wonder who owns the land,” said Mr. Freeman, quietly but with a throb of excitement in his voice.

  Once again, but with his intellect this time, Barry was aware of Mr. Freeman’s double nature. He’d decided that Ferriby Circle was a “place”—whatever that meant—and that the whole business of Barry’s escaping with Pinkie had been arranged, without any of them knowing, so that he should come to Ferriby and find the circle. And now his first instinct was to ask who owned it. He wanted Ferriby for himself. He wanted to own it and use it, in the same way that he owned and used Pinkie. He would lie and cheat and fake evidence to get it and then probably use it to cheat people out of money they couldn’t afford. But at the same time he was totally sincere, a true believer. He believed in his Seven Energies far more deeply than Barry believed in anything. He wanted money, but more than that, he wanted power, and more than that, he wanted knowledge. If he’d lived a thousand years ago, he’d have been a magician who spent his time doing hocus-pocus to cheat peasants out of a few small coins, but he’d still have been certain that one day he would draw the right signs on the floor and throw the right herbs in the fire and say the right words, and then the enormous powers of hell would rise in the room and be his slaves, and he would rule the world and be told all its secrets. A man like that, a thousand years ago, would have sacrificed his own daughter on his crazy altar if he thought it might do the trick. A man like that, in these days, would fill a kid with mind-bending chemicals for the same kind of reason.

  An unmistakable shout floated across the moor. Halfway along the track to the parking lot, still a couple of hundred yards from the circle, Mr. Stott was wrestling with his wheelchair. One of the wheels was stuck, and he was bellowing his frustration, but as Barry watched, he reversed free and came slowly on, wriggling his way past obstacles over the heavy ground. He must have got his chair out from behind the seat of his car and then somehow forced himself and it up the steep bank and onto the track. His face, even at this distance, glowed scarlet with effort and anger.

  Mr. Freeman had heard him, too. He glanced around, called to Sergeant Coyne and gestured to him to head the intruder off. The sergeant, who had been waiting with Norah a few yards from the tractor, hesitated a moment, then loosed Norah from her leash and spoke to her. She settled onto a grassy hummock. He crouched beside her, pointing toward Barry. Her ears came up, and her gaze fastened. The sergeant made signals to Barry to make sure he understood the dog was still watching him, then turned and trotted off to intercept Mr. Stott.

  For a moment hope flared. The tractor. If he could move a bit farther out of Freeman’s line of vision … with Coyne out of the way there was only Norah … Freeman had turned the engine off, but if he hadn’t pocketed the key

  Pinkie stirred on his shoulder.

  “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Something …”

  “What?”

  “Can’t you feel—”

  “No.”

  He was outside the mystery, if there was one. He could not even perceive that anything might be happening for him to be outside of. The moor was a wide, bleak space containing five people, a dog, a tractor, and a circle of stones. That was all.

  “Pinkie,” called Mr. Freeman.

  She hid her face in Barry’s shoulder. Mr. Freeman looked around.

  “Bring her here,” he said, speaking in a low but urgent voice, like a stage performer prompting an assistant when something has gone wrong with the act.

  Pinkie seemed to cling even closer. Barry stayed where he was.

  “Bring her here,” repeated Mr. Freeman. “Now. The harmonics …”

  Her arms were as hard as tree roots, gripping a cliff face. Barry shook his head. His own grip tightened on the chain where it hung from his right hand. Mr. Freeman’s face changed. His nostrils widened, and his eyes seemed to darken from gold to hot brown. His look was one of aimed fury, like a beam of force coming out of a weapon, glaring directly at Barry as he climbed down, thrashed his way out of the heather, and strode toward him. Barry turned to run.

  It was hopeless, of course, with his own tiredness and Pinkie’s weight to carry. In half a dozen paces he felt Mr. Freeman’s hand grab him by the shoulder to heave him around. His foot slithered on a wet patch; he staggered and broke accidentally free. His heel caught on something, and he staggered
still farther, thrashing for balance. Still Pinkie clung to his neck as if she’d been soldered there. This time, though, he did see Norah coming.

  Sergeant Coyne must have told her to watch him and bring him back if he tried to run away. That must have been part of her training. In her simple dog brain his attempt to keep Pinkie from Mr. Freeman must have triggered the response. The thirty yards or so she had to cover let her reach maximum impetus for that massive flowing onrush with which the wolf brings down a caribou three times its own weight. She was stretching into the final elastic bound before the leap of attack when Barry, still off balance, saw her coming.

  His answer was instinct. It was Bear, doing what he was there for. In his effort to keep his feet he had thrown his right arm back. Now it flailed forward in a whipping arc that flung the chain and lock out beyond it. He let the movement take him right off balance, falling clear of the line of Norah’s leap. In the middle of the tilting moorland he watched her and saw with precise, slow clarity the instant of impact.

  She was in the air, leaping for the target of his left arm where it held Pinkie. She had seen him beginning to fall and had allowed for the movement in her leap. Now she saw the arm coming around, saw that the fist would miss her, turned her head, and opened her jaws to snatch the wrist as it went by. She had not seen or had not understood the chain before the padlock slammed into her, catching her edge-side on between the corner of her jaw and her ear.

  Her head jerked sideways. She yelped. Then she was out of sight as Barry fell.

  The impact broke Pinkie’s grip at last. Barry let his fall become a controlled roll which brought him to his feet, poised and steady, facing the next attack with the chain swinging from his hand. Everything seemed slow-motion but intensely vivid. He saw Pinkie still sprawled by a tussock of yellowish grass. He saw Mr. Freeman moving towards her. He saw, a hundred yards away, Sergeant Coyne turning and beginning to run. But all the time he was watching Norah struggling up a few paces in front of him. She shook her head once, then charged again.

  This time it was different. She had lost her training. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in her snarl. The lock must have hurt her badly. There was blood over her ear and along the side of her jaw. First time she had gone for his arm to pull him down and hold him helpless until Sergeant Coyne arrived. This time she was going for his throat.

  He wasn’t frightened. He did not think. He felt his lips harden to bare his teeth as he poised to meet the attack, left arm guarding his neck, right arm back, chain ready again. And Norah too seemed to realise that something had changed. In all her life, all her training and work, she had known that her prey was supposed to be afraid of her; when she attacked, they would cringe or run; when she caught them and snarled, they would freeze with terror where they lay. Now she was faced by a human who met her with other signals, with the grimace of a fighting animal. She answered snarl with snarl but converted her rush into a probing feint.

  How did he know it was only a feint? How did he know to answer with no more than a warning twitch of the chain and a slight sideways leaning of the body? It was Bear knowledge, the primitive instinct of how to fight such an enemy coming to the surface when it was needed, telling him without thinking this was not only a contest between fangs and weapon blow but a battle between two wills, fought with signals. As Norah swerved from her feint, he took a half step forward. He jerked his wrist so that the chain swung whistling around his head. This, too, was a feint, an assertion of dominance. Norah answered with a growl and sidled off in an arc, looking for a fresh line of attack. It was thus that she came face-to-face with Pinkie.

  Mr. Freeman must have reached Pinkie’s side a second or two earlier, knelt, and touched her shoulder, and Pinkie had responded by jerking away and sitting up. Barry, concentrating on Norah, had been aware of movement at the corner of his vision. No one could know what Norah was aware of, what muddle of training and impulse made her attack this different target. Perhaps it was the suddenness of Pinkie’s movement, perhaps what had happened in the garden two nights ago had caused her to think of Pinkie and Barry as being a sort of joint enemy, or perhaps she was simply half-mad from the pain of her hurt and would have attacked anything. For whatever reason, she suddenly flew at Pinkie, knocking her flat, and immediately made a violent lunge and seized her where the neck joined the shoulder. She twisted around and began to drag her back across the ground.

  Mr. Freeman shouted and lurched forward on his knees to grab the dog by the collar, trying to pull her off and beating down with his free hand at Norah’s head. Pinkie threshed, screaming. Barry rushed in, but as he came, Norah loosed her hold and turned on Mr. Freeman. The sudden movement took him by surprise and broke his hold on her collar. She lunged in beneath his forearms, and the pair of them went down with Norah on top, growling in a deep rumble though her muzzle was buried in his beard. Pinkie struggled up, her face white and her sweater mottled with blood.

  “Tractor!” shouted Barry. “Get in the cab!”

  She couldn’t see it, of course. He gave her a shove in that direction, then ran to grab Norah’s collar and try and heave her clear. He was heaving not only Norah but Mr. Freeman. She wouldn’t let go. Then Sergeant Coyne was there, kneeling to prize her jaws apart. Barry hauled her off. The sergeant joined him and took her collar from the other side, whispering to quiet her. She paid no attention but wrestled violently between them, slashing at arms and legs. By keeping their grip and straining away from each other so that she was held at arm’s length between them, they managed to drag her over to the tractor. On the way they passed Pinkie, hobbling in the other direction. Barry yelled at her to get in the cab, but she didn’t seem to hear him. Sergeant Coyne slipped the leash through Norah’s collar and fastened her to the tow bar. They ran back, panting, to where Mr. Freeman was lying with Pinkie on her knees beside him.

  The golden beard was soaked with blood. There was a crimson pool in a fold of his cloak beneath his neck. The tanned face was muddy grey. His lips were blue but moving, and his gold eyes stared at the sky.

  Pinkie was holding his left hand in both of hers and craning over his body, whispering to him. She didn’t seem to notice their coming, even when Sergeant Coyne knelt on the other side of the body and lifted the beard clear to expose the neck. There was nothing to see but blood-smeared skin and flesh, with more blood coming in pulses from the middle of the wound.

  “It’s too quick,” said Pinkie in a desperate voice. “I can’t. Oh, I can’t!”

  Sergeant Coyne felt methodically at the bloody mess, found a spot, and pressed hard with his thumbs. The blood pulse dwindled.

  “In the tractor, lad,” he whispered. “Walkie-talkie. Switch on and press the ‘Talk’ switch. Fellow called Brasher other end. Tell him to get an ambulance up here double quick. Then the police. Right?”

  “Right,” said Barry.

  He ran back to the cab, found the transmitter, worked the switches, and spoke. A voice answered, and he gave the message. It struck him as he switched off that the police would be coming for him. It didn’t seem to matter any longer.

  He was walking back to the others when he saw Pinkie let go of Mr. Freeman’s hand. A moment later Sergeant Coyne stood up. It was over. Barry sighed and looked around the empty moor. Mr. Stott was still there, still wrestling his way along the track. The whole fight, from the moment of Norah’s attack to when they’d pulled her clear of Mr. Freeman’s body, must have taken less than a minute

  15

  Problems are never completely solved. What seems to be the answer becomes the start of several new problems or of the old problem in a new shape. Not even a death can break the chain, unless it happens to be your own.

  From the first Barry knew that Mr. Freeman’s death was an end but not a solution. He carried Pinkie back to Mr. Brasher’s car, which now stood in the parking lot beside Mr. Stott’s, and smeared her shoulder with antiseptic from Mr. Brasher’s first
-aid kit. The bite marks were not as bad as he’d feared, thanks to the layers of clothing Pinkie had been wearing because of the cold dawn start. He bandaged them best he could and put her on the back seat. She immediately fell asleep. Shock, he thought, so he covered her with a rug from the car and another from Mr. Stott’s. He went back and helped Mr. Stott off the moor, then went and fetched his bike, took a wrench from the basket and removed the buckled chair and straightened the mudguard.

  An ambulance climbed the lane, its blue light blinking. Before it reached the top, two police cars were on the hill behind it. The ambulance men brought Mr. Freeman’s body down, then fetched Pinkie and took her, still fast asleep, to the ambulance. They whooped off down the lane, with one police car for escort. Two more police cars arrived. Nobody for a long time paid any attention to Barry. The policemen were up on the moor, photographing and measuring. Sergeant Coyne stood beside Mr. Stott’s car, holding Norah on a leash. She seemed tame again now but whined a bit and shook her head, puzzled by the pain in her jaw. Barry felt intensely sad for her. For some reason this seemed to be a stronger emotion than horror at Mr. Freeman’s death or worry about whether Pinkie would be all right or apprehension about what was going to happen to him now. Perhaps they’d insist on Norah being destroyed. It wasn’t her fault. She’d been a sort of tool—rather like Barry, in some ways, he felt. Two of a kind.

  Over and over his mind ran through the last few minutes after he’d seen the tractor climbing the hill and realised who was on the trailer. It was like that process you put yourself through when you’ve woken from a nightmare and work yourself free of its horrors by running it through your mind, changing details, erasing the stupid bits, inserting sensible episodes until the story, though still the same, is magically different, its monsters tamed, yourself in full, everyday control. But in this story there was nothing Barry could alter. There was nothing that he could ever have altered. Mr. Freeman’s death had been a complete accident, absolutely unforeseeable, but from the moment Barry first set foot in the Foundation it had been going to happen, in this place, at this time, with this horror. He was sure of that. Only a minute before his death Mr. Freeman had spoken and acted as though something important was building up, and Pinkie, too.