Healer (Chapter 1)

“Alright. Just sit here and relax. This won’t take but 10 minutes or so.” My patient, a Mrs. Dozier, tentatively leaned back against the chair and closed her eyes. I placed my hands on her shoulders, closed my own eyes, and let the magic flow through me, searching for the pain and exhaustion within her so that I could pull it into myself.

Mrs. Dozier was facing her second bout with breast cancer in five years and had come to me for help healing. Some people call me a mystic, some call me a witch, and others call me a fraud, but whatever I’m called, I do make a living by taking the symptoms of diseases away from the ill.

“All done,” I told Mrs. Dozier. I straightened up slowly, hiding the pain that I now felt. I showed her out of the drawing room, into the foyer where her husband waited. He looked at me expectantly, wanting to know how the treatment had gone, but Mrs. Dozier showed him the results better than I ever could have. Instead of the woman who had barely been able to walk from the car into my home stood a woman looking twenty years younger. She nearly ran to her husband to wrap her arms around him.

“I’ve never felt so good!” she exclaimed as she kissed him. I smiled, then hid the cough I felt suddenly as I cleared my throat.

“I don’t mean to rush you, but I do have another appointment coming. That will be three hundred dollars.”

“Oh yes. Here’s your check,” Mr. Dozier said as he handed me the slip of paper. I gave him a receipt I had made out earlier and told Mrs. Dozier to schedule an appointment with me when she had her next Chemotherapy session. Mr. Dozier took his wife by the arm and the two of them left.

I didn’t really have another appointment that afternoon, it was just my excuse to get my patients out of the house before I collapsed as a result of their symptoms now coursing through my body. I walked into my second drawing room, a room that is the complete opposite of the one I use for the treatment of patients. While that one is full of light, with windows uncovered, bringing the outdoors in, my second, private one is dark, with the windows covered by heavy curtains. Instead of the pair of old fashioned wing backed chairs, I lay on the most expensive piece of furniture in my home, a bed with a fantastic mattress. While I sleep on just the basic mattress in my bedroom, when recovering from a healing, I lay on a sophisticated piece of engineering that feels like I’m lying on a cloud. It’s the only change I’ve made in this house’s furnishings since I took over after my mother’s death.

I lay on the bed and tried to will away the nausea so that I could sleep off the rest of the symptoms.

I woke up a few hours later feeling again like myself. And I was hungry, always a good sign with illness. I got up and put a slice of the lasagna I’d made the day before into the microwave. I’d left the Dozier’s check on the table in the foyer, so I picked it and the rest of that week’s payments up and took them back to the kitchen with my ledger. I filled out the deposit slip and recorded that week’s income in the ledger while I ate the lasagna. After I finished, I checked the time. It was only 7:00. I looked at my appointment book. My next patient wasn’t until the following Tuesday. I had an entire weekend to myself, the first in a long time. That is the problem when the majority of your patients are cancer patients. Chemotherapy treatments tend to be regularly scheduled and in my case, the majority of my patients had their treatment at the same time. I’d spent the past three weeks with barely one day without the nausea and body aches and the cycle would start again in a week or so. I hoped that my next group of cancer patients would be more spread out. It might seem callous, but so long as cancer exists, my descendents and I will continue to be in business. This business had spread purely by word of mouth since my “too many greats to remember” grandmother helped her neighbor during childbirth and I didn’t realize how wide it had spread until a woman with a French accent had rung my doorbell asking for relief from an ulcer. She’d heard about me from a pen pal and made a special stop during her vacation in the United States. I had a suspicion that the doctors at the local hospital were doing a lot to help my business, but I had never asked my patients how they had come to hear about me. Few people will admit to seeing a witch for treatment and most only around the closest friends. A lot of my patients use a fake name and pay with cash for fear that I will use their name to control them or some other such nonsense. Not to say that I can’t control someone using their name, but to think that I would bother is silly. I spend a good deal of my time feeling sick and in whatever free time I can find I enjoy reading and hiking and doing stuff that just can’t be done with a headache and/or nausea.

I went into my treatment drawing room and picked up Fahrenheit 451. It had been such a busy week that I hadn’t gotten much read of the book. I was just settling into my chair when the doorbell rang. I sighed as I set Fahrenheit aside and went to the door.