Free The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls by John R. King Page B

retreats to the box and positions one hand on top and the other on the crank.
    “What should I expect?” I ask.
    “Health,” the doctor responds, and he begins to furiously crank the crank.
    Electricity surges into my ears, my hands, my feet. At first, the energy feels like bees swarming me and stinging my skin. Then the voltage sinks deeper. It stands nerves on end and makes every muscle turn to metal. It delves deeper still, past muscle and into mind, into soul.
    I see visions. It is like that twilight place between waking and sleeping, when your conscious mind gazes on the panoply of the unconscious … .
    I see an upstairs study with books lining the walls and a cabinet filled with little cross-referenced cards: a murder, a theft, a rape, a betrayal. Names of the perpetrators and names of the crimes, lists of evidence, of tools used, of ways of using them.
    And then, there are more visions—of a pipe at my lips, a bowl filled with fragrant tobacco and spewing blue smoke and smoldering with red embers. A breath moves through those embers, and one leaps free to fall on my palm and burn it—one of many little freckle scars on my right hand.
    But something else is in my left hand now—the finely wrought, finely curved neck of a violin caught between thumb and forefinger, nestled in the soft couch of the palm, with fingers ambling languidly over the strings. There is a long song in the air, a long, low, melancholy song, a melody
by Beethoven, pulsing slowly through the air, a sonata for piano that I have learned for violin— Moonlight.
    And there is a listener beside me. He is a stocky man with an intelligent face and sensitive eyes. His skin is sallow, as if he had spent years beneath the Middle Eastern sun only to return for years beneath an English fog. He has a reddish mustache, this man, and a square jaw, and trained hands. I look upon this slumping figure, who takes in my violin playing as a drunkard takes in gin, and I see greatness in him. Greatness and friendship.
    But then, the pain is too powerful.
    I feel my body transfixed, like a Sioux brave pinioned to the prairie earth and waiting for the warriors to ride past and hurl their spears down into me. I feel stretched out, like the man on the cross to demonstrate the power of Roman rule over Jewish mysticism. I feel like the wicker man, deformed or demented or perverse, wrapped in a cage of reeds and entombed in fire by the Celts.
    My every cell is on fire. They burst and burst and burst, giving up the water in them and turning the rest to fire—to burn and burn and burn.

16
    IN DEFENSE OF SILENCE
    H ere’s the conundrum about nurses: the young ones are beautiful but incompetent, and the old ones are competent but ugly. When my complaint is mild, I seek out a young, beautiful nurse. She will take twice as long to dress my wound (and do half as good a job) as an old nurse, but her wide eyes, smooth skin, and rose-red lips—these have a healing power that well-applied bandages do not. When I’m in grave shape, though, I look for the oldest, ugliest nurse around. She will work with grim dispatch, doing exactly the right thing and not relying on weeping eyes or pouting lips to heal me.
    The charge nurse at the Prefargier Sanatorium was ancient and hideous—and thus brilliant. She unwrapped my shoulder wound and picked two more bits of bullet from it and debrided it of dead flesh and sanitized it and stitched up the gulf, all while wondering why a young man would run for his life when his father was in mortal danger. She also redressed the wound on my neck and taught me why Scotch—in any proof—is not equal to wood alcohol administered by an expert.
    “All right. You’re fine,” she said, “better than you could’ve hoped—and for free. Now, you’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got no beds for folks that don’t pay”
    I was about to agree—the streets of Bern are not inhospitable to the man who knows how to purloin an apple or a carrot—but