Part 5
The morning light was gray and thin when Elena finally shuffled into the kitchen. She looked exhausted, her face pale and drawn tight with strain. She held her upper body perfectly rigid, moving with the cautious, unnatural stiffness of someone terrified that the slightest wrong step would trigger a collapse.
Mac was already awake, standing by the stove with a mug of black coffee. He watched her edge into a wooden chair, wincing as her weight settled. He set his mug down and got straight to the point.
“How bad is the back?” he asked, pulling up a chair opposite her.
Elena swallowed hard, blinking back a sudden glaze of tears. “It feels like a hot wire is buried right above my waist,” she admitted, her voice brittle. “It radiates down. My legs feel heavy, almost like they don’t belong to me. I can’t bend, and if I try to lift my arms, my breath just stops.”
Mac nodded slowly, his expression purely clinical. “Alright. Let’s figure out what’s locked up.”
He stood and gestured toward the hallway. “Come with me.”
Elena hesitated, but the throbbing ache in her spine gave her little choice. She followed him down the narrow hall to a door she hadn’t noticed the night before. Mac pushed it open and flipped a switch.
The room didn’t look like the rest of the house. It was sparsely furnished, smelling strongly of wintergreen liniment and rubbing alcohol. In the center of the floor stood a heavy, custom-built wooden table covered in thick, worn leather. It looked like a cross between a massage table and a doctor’s examination bed.
“Sit on the edge,” Mac instructed. He walked over to a small wooden cabinet, opened a drawer, and pulled out a dense, polished wooden tool shaped like a short T-bar.
Elena stared at the heavy piece of wood in his hand, a sudden wave of panic rising in her chest. She had no memory of who she was beyond her first name, and now she was standing in a closed back room with an imposing, bearded man holding a wooden implement. Her breathing hitched, and she took a half-step backward toward the door.
Mac stopped. He saw the sheer terror in her eyes and immediately lowered the tool, resting it on the table. He softened his voice.
“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” he said gently. “I’m trying to fix the pain, not add to it. I’m a bone-setter. Or a manual therapist, if you want the modern city word for it.”
He tapped the leather table. “My grandfather did this. My father, too. I’ve been straightening out spines and releasing locked muscles for thirty years. People drive up from the city, pay in cash, and leave. The locals in Apple Creek don’t know I do it, and I prefer to keep it that way.”
He picked up the T-bar again, turning it so she could see the smooth, rounded edges.
“You’ve got a severe muscle spasm compressing a nerve in your lower back. That’s what’s causing the numbness,” Mac explained calmly. “I can release it. But I’m going to be honest with you, Elena. To break a spasm that deep, I have to apply a lot of pressure directly to the trigger point. It is going to hurt.”
Elena looked at the table, then down at her trembling hands. The agony in her back was already a constant, suffocating weight. She had nothing to lose.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Lie face down,” Mac said, his tone shifting back to quiet professionalism.
She eased herself onto the leather surface, gripping the edges of the table as Mac arranged a rolled cotton towel under her hips to align her spine. He pressed his thumbs firmly along the rigid muscles of her lower back, tracing the line of tension until he found the exact epicenter of the spasm. It felt like a knot of solid bone hidden beneath the skin.
“Take a deep breath,” Mac instructed. “Hold it.”
He positioned the rounded edge of the wooden T-bar directly against the seized muscle cluster. Before Elena could exhale, Mac locked his elbows and dropped a massive, sudden surge of his body weight directly into the tool.
The pressure was agonizingly sharp. A blinding flare of pure, electric pain shot through Elena’s entire body, overriding every other sense.
Unable to stop herself, she let out a piercing, desperate scream that echoed right through the walls of the quiet farmhouse.