Ghost Healer

The concrete floor of the warehouse was cold against my cheek.

I had been lying on it for what felt like a long time. My right side had two broken ribs. Something in my lower back reported a problem I didn’t yet have the clarity to classify. The ceiling above me was high and industrial, the structural members exposed, a skylight at the center that had been painted over long ago. No light came through it. The building smelled of printer’s ink so strongly I could taste it on the back of my tongue.

I tried to get up.

Something hit me back down. Not a hand. Not anything I could point to or describe to the paramedics who would eventually find me.

Something that worked through me, not on me, that knew where to press to produce the most damage and pressed there with the deliberation of something that had been thinking about this for a long time.

The second rib went.

I went back to the floor.

I pressed my palm flat against the concrete and breathed in the short careful way broken ribs require and looked at the ceiling.

I was in an empty warehouse in Charleston, South Carolina. I was thirty years old. I’d driven here on a Tuesday morning and I’d come through the loading dock door and now I was on the floor and I wasn’t going to get up the way I usually got up.

The pain in my lower back worsened. My left ear rang in the way it had been ringing for a year, the sound I’d given up expecting to leave. My vision went gray at the edges.

Through the gray I was aware that the gap between a functional Cal Rourke and whatever was on the other side of losing consciousness was narrowing in a direction that was going to resolve against me.

I had one thought before the gray took it.

The cylinder. Augusta. Six feet to the left of where it should be.

That was the ninth month of the third year.

This is how it started.

* * *

I was twenty-six years old and taking a semester off from college and I’d driven down from Los Angeles on a Tuesday morning because I remembered hating this place on a high school field trip and wanted to see if I still did. That was the reason I gave myself.

The actual reason was harder to look at: the high school trip was one of the last things I did before my parents separated, and the mission had become tangled up in my memory with the period just before everything changed, and I wanted to stand in the place again and feel whatever I felt.

I paid my admission and walked into the complex. Mud brick walls, worn stone pathways, the ruins of a stone church that an earthquake had knocked down in 1812 and nobody had bothered to rebuild. The stone in the walls was old in the way that only certain stone is old, not weathered, not worn smooth, but settled. The mortar between the bricks had gone soft in places and been repointed and gone soft again. The pathways were worn into slight channels by the accumulated footsteps of everyone who had ever walked this route, the stone dished out in the middle where most feet had fallen.

I read every sign. I’d never been able to walk past a sign without reading it. The one about the swallows. The one about the bells. The one about the founding priests that someone had recently improved with a marker pen.

Around eleven o’clock I started feeling wrong.

Not sick. I’d eaten that morning and my heart rate was normal. Not dizzy in the way that means you need to sit down and drink water.

This was something else, a pressure behind my eyes that wasn’t quite a headache and a sound in my ears at a frequency I could feel more than hear, like being near a piece of machinery that was running at a tone just below audible.

I stopped walking and stood still for a minute, taking stock. Nothing hurt. I wasn’t nauseous.

The air in front of me was doing something it had no business doing.

It shimmered. Not the heat shimmer you get over hot asphalt on a summer day, the kind that resolves into ordinary air if you wait for it. October in Southern California wasn’t warm enough for that and the stone pathways of a Spanish mission weren’t the right surface for it.

This was something else, a slight distortion in the air about ten feet ahead of me, like looking through glass with imperfections in it, glass that warps what’s on the other side in a way that’s not random but consistent. The shimmer didn’t move with the air or the light.

It just stayed there, a fixed wrongness in an ordinary afternoon.

The hair on my arms stood up.

A smell had been building for a few minutes without my registering it. Sweet on top, like flowers, but underneath the sweetness something coppery, and underneath the copper something that had been sitting in a warm enclosed space for too long, the smell of organic matter past its moment. Sweet bait and rot in the wrong proportions. I looked around for the source. Stone path. Old walls. A tree. Nothing that should smell like that.