Like anyone else in the city over the last two days—€”or in the world, for that matter—€”Alan Carter was feeling both happy over the miraculous recoveries, and uneasy about the mystery that was causing them. Yesterday had seen eighty-seven apparent miracles, and for the head of security at Ellis Island Hospital, the fact that nearly twice that number had been healed at his hospital alone made it an even more tangible experience.

   Six different units had been affected that morning, with all the terminally ill or severely debilitated patients having apparently made complete recoveries.

   It was 4:20 in the afternoon and there had already been another two locations after his hospital where more recoveries had taken place. But what occupied his thoughts at the moment was a potentially troubling situation having nothing at all to do with the recoveries.

   As he looked at the early-morning security footage from the lobby, his fears over his recent hiring had been realized. He should have gone with his gut before deciding to hire his best friend'€™s son for that shift, since nepotism usually came back to bite people in the ass.

   Jack Kern had little experience in the field, having such notable qualifications as holding a job as a security guard for a small movie theater, followed by a short stint as a guard at Burger King. Last night had been Kern's first night on the job, and all day today Carter had wanted to check the footage to make sure the kid wasn't some kind of fuckup. But with the events of the morning, which brought a media circus to the hospital, other matters had become more pressing.

     Carter again rewound the footage from lobby camera one to time code 01:33:00; only now he clicked the shuttle knob into slow motion and went forward at half speed to see if he was missing something.

     As he reviewed the footage again, the knot that had already formed in his stomach became even tighter. As chief of hospital security, it was Carter that would be blamed if anything serious were to happen as a result of the incompetence of one of his staff.

     He could clearly see in the low-resolution image that Kern moved to block a strange visitor who apparently thought he could just stride past security without being stopped. But after just a few words exchanged, Kern stepped to the side and let the Bob Seeger-looking vagabond go by without even showing ID, never mind signing the admissions registry. At that time of the morning, if you weren'€™t medical staff, you were usually entering through the emergency entrance on a gurney.

     Before calling the young guard at home and drilling him a new asshole, Alan decided to spot-check footage from several other cameras to see where the scruffy visitor finally went—€”he'd probably holed up in the corner of the mechanical room to catch a warm night's sleep.

    Thirteen minutes later, Alan Carter was shivering in his chair.

     Watching the footage from various cameras, he had followed the visitor down several hallways, through an elevator ride and a short interaction at a nurses'€™ station, before the stranger finally ended up in the pediatric cancer unit. This was the unit that had made the hospital famous—€”and was the same unit where forty-one children and teens had awoken this morning apparently cured of their respective cancers. Carter only started shivering when he watched the footage from hallway camera two. There, in the upper left corner of the grainy image, he watched as the stranger hugged a young hairless teen girl, who only moments before was crouched over and limping down the hallway using a metal cane for support. He watched the stranger hold the young teen in his embrace for maybe thirty seconds without either of them moving. Had it not been for a nurse walking nonchalantly past the two of them, Carter would have assumed that the recording had locked up on a frame. The stranger then stepped back from the young woman and walked into one of the nearby semi-private rooms. What happened next, Carter would remember for the rest of his life. The young teen, seemingly dazed and motionless for a few seconds, stood up straight, leaned the cane against the wall, and proceeded to skip effortlessly down the hall in the camera'€™s direction. When she passed the camera, she actually glanced up at it, bearing an almost cartoonish grin.

     Having found this footage, Carter then went on to search all recorded images for each of the other affected units in the hospital. In each one, the stranger could be seen going in and out of patient rooms, and in the sped-up view on the screen, it almost appeared like the mystery man was racing in and out of the rooms as he made his way down the halls of each unit. Carter did not witness another actual healing, and thought that perhaps the late hour was to blame, as most patients were asleep in their rooms, out of sight of the cameras. But he knew this would not be the case for all of the hospitals this man had apparently visited.

   Two hours after Carter had finished searching through all the recordings, clips from the footage he'd discovered were featured all over the late edition of the evening news. By the middle of the night, grainy images of a bearded man with long hair were shattering the news channels and the Internet across the globe. This prompted other facilities where similar recoveries had occurred to review their own security footage. By the middle of Wednesday afternoon, more angles and clearer images of the same man would be added to the media frenzy that had developed through the night and into the morning.