Greywalker - Kat Richardson [4]
But I needed to go back to work—had to pay the hospital bills—and I had an appointment coming up, so I decided to submit myself to a day spa—a combination salon and torture chamber—and hope the staff could make me look more like a human and less like Frankenstein’s monster after a night on the town.
With my head in a towel, and padding about in a robe and slippers, I’d been deposited in a tiny steam room to “relax and open the pores” for fifteen minutes. I tried to sit still and relax, but my head felt stuffed with humming insects.
I put my hands up to my temples. I tried squeezing my eyes shut and taking long, slow breaths, but a scent of something like smoke made me open them again. The steam around me writhed and coiled into Chinese-dragon clouds framing a misty doorway.
I stared around. I was alone, no one to tell me it was just a trick of the light. The steam closest to me was thin, tingling warmth on my skin. But the stuff around that doorway was dense as smoke and dark, but chill as fear.
A pale spot of light seemed to twinkle from the middle of the doorway, throbbing a bit, growing into a narrow, pulsing column of watery light. My stomach wrenched and a stab of nausea ripped through my guts. The smoky odor had shifted toward ripe corpses and floodwater.
I put out my hand for balance, then jerked it back. I didn’t want to touch whatever that squirming cloud-stuff was. I wriggled back on my bench, thumping my head against the wall as an irrational horror crawled over me. My chest went tight with sudden anxiety, breath thin and metallic in my throat. I must have yelled, “No!”
Light sliced into the steam, chopping into the misty doorway. I jerked my head toward the light source. One of the perky spa employees looked in from the real doorway.
She asked if I was all right.
I gulped and looked around. Just steam—ordinary steam that smelled of clean water and a hint of pine from the benches. No column of beckoning light. No dragon smoke stinking of death.
I’d told her I was fine, had just fallen asleep. But a frisson had rattled down my spine.
I’d been more than ready to leave the room.
I paused to settle myself a bit before I went on. I frowned at the doctor, who only raised his eyebrows and waited.
I started in on the last tale. “I tried to jog this morning, but I couldn’t make it past a trot for more than a few seconds. I feel seasick, smell things, hear things. . . . This cloudy vision . . . I keep seeing eyes, shadows, crazy things . . . ,” I added, petering out. “I’m not sleeping well, either. But I have clients to see tomorrow and I need to get back to work. They told me I should be safe to return to work by now, but maybe I’m not as healed as the hospital doctor thought, or maybe the pills are making me hallucinate.”
Skelleher scowled. He’d already poked me with needles and sticks, and made the usual gestures with bright lights and cold instruments. “It’s not the pills,” he announced, “and your physical signs are fine. There’s nothing here that makes me want to challenge your original doctor’s recommendations—aside from my personal feeling that the least intervention is best. I’m a strong believer in letting the body and the mind do the work as much as possible.” He looked at my chart again and got quiet.
After a moment, he glanced up. “Look, I know this is kind of scary stuff. Head trauma is mysterious and unpredictable. The brain is an amazing thing and we learn more about it every day, but we don’t know all there is to know. And what we call the mind—it’s still pretty wild country. There are a lot of things that traditional Western medicine is a little uncomfortable with, and the whole issue of life and death, the physical and psychological effects of death on the mind—the metaphysical—is still pretty much in the dark.”
I was