Alyzon Whitestarr

by Isobelle Carmody

  “Alyzon Whitestarr,” he said.

  “What do you want?” I asked, terrified despite my brave words to Harrison.

  “I want nothing,” he said. He gave a soft whispering laugh that made my skin crawl, and I realized it was true in some ghastly way. Whatever he—it—was wanted to devour all light and life and love and hope until there was nothing.

  “What is it that you want?” he asked me, and now there was a black mindless savagery in his eyes.

  “I want to go and see my father and sister,” I whispered.

  “Then what are you doing here,” he asked, nodding over his shoulder without taking his eyes from mine, “talking to that journalist?”

  My heart gave a great lurch. I glanced away toward the fire to give myself time to think. Then I shrugged. “I saw him when my class visited the newspaper. I was just telling him he should find out how come the security guards didn’t stop Serenity from getting up there.” I let a petulance tinge my voice; let it come out thin and childish.

  “Journalists have their place,” Rayc said after a long pause. “Well, I daresay our journalist friend will do his job.” Again he gave his weird giggle that made the hair on my neck stand on end. Then he held out his hand.

  I forced myself to take it, because it was a test. I put my hand into his with a strange feeling of sorrowful triumph. Because he suspected that I was able to perceive the sickness, and that was no longer true: what I had done to save Serenity had killed the extended parts of my senses. Once again, I was just ordinary Alyzon Whitestarr.

  Aaron Rayc released my hand, his face a bland mask. “I understand your father and sister have been taken to Baron Central Hospital in town. I can arrange for a car ….”

  “No, thank you. I came with … with my brother,” I said evenly, resisting the urge to wipe my hand on my clothes. “We wanted to surprise Da, but …”

  He blinked once, slowly, like a lizard sunning itself on a rock, then he said, “Go.”

  It was a dismissal, a release, a signal of disengagement.

  I went past him into the deeper darkness beyond the dying fire glow and the blaze of lights that had been rigged up on poles to light the area so that the firefighters could aim their hoses. I was walking away from the light, but it seemed to me that I was walking away from some greater and more irrevocable darkness.

  * * *

  In the car on the way to the hospital, I told the others what had happened.

  “Then he knows what you can do?” Gilly asked fearfully, and I saw from her expression that she was thinking of the fire that had destroyed her grandmother’s house.

  It was so hard to say it out loud. My voice came out in a whisper. “He felt nothing, because there is nothing to feel.” And I told them.

  There was a long silence after that, with only the sound of rain patting on the windshield and the tires swishing along on the wet road, the sound of the car heater humming industriously. No whispers. I looked out into the darkness and prayed that I had not lost my extended senses for nothing. Prayed that Da and Serenity were all right.

  The others began to talk about what had happened before Da had sung, and I forced myself to listen, to add what I knew or guessed to their speculations, because it distracted me from the gaping emptiness inside me, and from the terrible flatness of a world seen through normal senses.

  “It’s a battle we’ve won tonight, not the war,” Raoul said at length. “We may have lost Alyzon’s powers, but we will have Sarry and Davey, and I am certain there will be others. It is not over.”

  Harrison leaned over and asked softly, “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I whispered, and he reached out and drew me into his arms. I could not feel his emotions, only his great, mute warmth and the strength of his embrace.

  I buried my face in his woolly gray sweater and wept for what I had lost.

  At the hospital the first person I saw was Dr. Reed, who had treated me all those months ago when I had fallen into a coma. To see her was like coming full circle in a weird sort of way. It was so strange and sad not to smell her essence.

  “Alyzon,” she said. “My poor dear girl. I’ve just been to see your father, but he’s sleeping.”

  “How is my sister?” I asked.

  “They’re both up in the burn ward. I’ll take you,” she offered with the brisk kindness I remembered and had once been able to smell.

  Harrison caught my arm as she pressed an elevator button, saying he would go back and find Raoul and Gilly and they’d wait in the foyer downstairs. I nodded.

  I was too frightened to ask how Serenity was. But I kept seeing Mum’s painting. The blank, dead eye in the burning cavern of her face.

  Dr. Reed brought me to a desk on the fourth floor and talked with the nurse who was behind it. Then she pressed my shoulder and said she would come back later if I wanted to talk. The woman behind the counter suggested kindly that I wash my face before going into the ward. She showed me a washroom, and I stared at my white-, black-, and red-smeared face, feeling tired and heavy and sad. Then a nurse ushered me along a hallway in her squeaky shoes.

  “This is the ward where your father is, Alyzon,” she said. “He’ll be a little groggy because we’ve given him some painkillers for his hands.”

  “His … hands?” I saw his fingers on the guitar strings and felt sick.

  “He’ll be scarred but OK.”

  “My sister …,” I began, dreading the answer.

  “She’s had some surgery, so she is still recovering from the anesthetic. When she fell, two of her ribs broke and punctured her lung.” She caught me as I swayed and brought me to sit down on a hard plastic chair by the door, peering professionally into my eyes. “Your sister will be all right, love. A punctured lung is serious, but she got here in time and the bones will heal.”

  “The burns—”

  “Are bad, but they will heal, too, in time, and she can have plastic surgery. They were both very lucky. But now, why don’t you go in and see your father?”

  I went into the ward. Dimly I registered that there were other men in the other beds, but I had eyes only for Da, who lay in the bed nearest the window, farthest from the door. His hands were fatly bandaged in white and lay on either side of his long lean shape under the white hospital coverlet. His eyes were closed, and he looked so tired that my heart ached, because I loved him so much and I hadn’t been able to stop the awful thing that had happened.

  Fighting tears, I stumbled to the side of his bed and looked down at his hands; I couldn’t bear to look into his face. “Oh, Da,” I whispered, half suffocated by grief. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry about what, my sweet, brave Aly Cat?” Da rasped. “We saved her.”

  I looked at him in astonishment and found him smiling his wonderful, kind, radiant smile. I felt a burst of joy that seemed to split my heart. Because that smile told me that the unbearable hadn’t happened. The sickness hadn’t won. Da hadn’t been broken.

  I did cry then. Such a wild storm of uncontrollable tears that one of the other patients rang for the nurse, who came hurrying in and wanted to give me a sedative.

  I collected myself and looked at her. “I’m sorry. I’m fine. You can’t imagine how fine I am.” I laughed and burst into tears again.

  “She’s fine,” Da said.

  “Well, I’m glad everyone is fine. Do you think you could be fine a little more quietly?” the nurse asked with asperity.

  Da promised we’d be good, and then he told me to sit on the bed close to him as she marched out.

  “Your hands—”

  “Will hurt if you sit on them,” Da said earnestly, and I laughed and sniffed and scrubbed at my cheeks before pulling myself onto the bed carefully.

  “Da, I’m so glad you’re all right. I was so frightened.”

  “So was I, my love,” Da said, understanding that I had not meant his burns.

  “Serenity didn’t mean what she said up there. What happened with Aya hurt her, and sh
e got more and more sick. Only we didn’t see because she kept it locked up inside of herself.”

  Da was nodding. “I should have got help for her, but I guess I thought, given time, I would find a way to unlock the hurt and help her. My arrogance almost brought us all to disaster. When I looked up and saw her there tonight …” He stopped for a bleak moment. Then he looked at me. “If you hadn’t called out to me to catch her, I’d never have realized that she meant to jump. I’d never have got there in time to break her fall and put out the flames …. I still can’t imagine how I could have heard you above all that noise.”

  I swallowed. “Da … I …”

  “Da!” It was Mirandah’s voice, and I turned to see her coming toward us, makeup smeared blackly around her eyes. Behind her were Jesse and Mum carrying Luke, the agitated nurse flapping in their wake and trying to say something about the number of visitors.

  I slid off the bed. “I’ll go out for a while.” I looked back to see Mirandah fling herself on the side of the bed and begin to cry. But when I tried to pass Mum, she caught my hand. I looked up into her eyes and thought of what lay inside her, the darkness that she had been fighting for longer than I had been alive, which she was fighting even now.

  “Oh, Mum,” I said.

  “My darling girl,” Mum said. “You did it. I knew you could, and nothing else matters but that Serenity is fine and so is your da.” She kissed me and then let me go.

  * * *

  I went out into the hall and asked to see Serenity then. The nurse told me that she was still unconscious, but I asked if I could see her anyway.

  She was in a small room, alone, surrounded by green and chrome hospital equipment. There were tubes protruding from her nose and mouth and chest, and parts of her neck and face were swathed in bandages along with both arms. Her hair lay in lank burnt clumps, and there was a singed smell coming from her that made me feel ill. And what would I have smelled if I had still possessed my extended senses? I wondered. Because we had saved her life, her body, but what about the invisible parts of her? The spirit that had been wounded by our failure to save Aya from heartless bureaucracy, and which had been brought so low that she had been ready to kill herself? And most of all, would she be able to recover from what she had almost done to Da, the dreadful scalding hatred that had taken her to the top of the scaffolding with such a ghastly intent? Could anyone recover from that?

  If she was like Sarry and Mum, and had the courage to fight, I thought. Given time and lots of love and people who she could talk to, who might be able to bring her to understand how she had been manipulated … maybe.

  It might even be that what Da had done in catching her and beating out the flames would help her to recover. Because it was something to know someone loved you that much.

  But whatever else happened, when Serenity woke, she would be questioned by the police, and what she said would add to what Gary Soloman would reveal, and seal the doom of Aaron Rayc. I thought of Harlen and wondered what would happen to him, because he had been a victim, too. Only he had no one to save him. No family to love and be loved by.

  I reached out to touch Serenity on the cheek, feeling a stab of anger at the dreadful game that had been played with her life. She had been nothing more than a poor little pawn to kill the soul of a king.

  My head ached as I instinctively tried and failed to reach into her. I sighed, leaning to kiss her cheek and thinking that simple human warmth was still a pretty powerful thing.

  “I love you,” I told her softly, and her eyelids fluttered but she did not wake. “We all do, and you better hurry up and come back home to us.” I kissed her again and crept out.

  * * *

  Harrison was waiting outside the room, and I went into his arms as easily as if they had been made for me.

  “How did you know where I was?” I asked in a voice that was husky from all the tears I had shed and from the yelling I had done a million years ago back in a dark field.

  “I always ken where you are,” he said softly, and I felt his breath in my hair. “But I heard you call my name at the concert. I heard your voice inside my head.”

  I pulled back a little so that I could look up at him. “I think some sort of connection formed between us that day at the library when you—”

  “Kissed you?” he said. He smiled at me. “Well, it was some kiss.”

  “It was,” I said shyly.

  His smile faded. “I thought I’d forced you tae respond, and that you were horrified by it.”

  “I was … I mean, I was horrified that you might be horrified.” I laughed, and then we were both laughing.

  Harrison said, “I really did kiss you tae stop that guy figuring we were spying on the poetry group. But when you responded, I … I couldnae help myself.”

  “I know. A guy reacts that way to any woman in his arms,” I said tartly.

  He grinned. “I couldnae just tell you I reacted like that because it was you in my arms and that I had dreamed of kissing you like that a million times,” he said softly but without embarrassment.

  I swallowed. Licked my lips. “Afterward there were times when I thought you might kiss me again. I … I wished it.”

  He laughed softly, shaking his head. “I wanted tae kiss you breathless every time you looked at me. I thought I was turning intae some sort of sex maniac, and I was terrified that you would pick up what I was feeling because of your extended senses. That’s why I was always so careful not tae touch you.”

  My own smile faded, and his arms tightened. “I’m sorry your senses are back tae normal. But you know, maybe it’s like Goethe said: ‘Great powers come tae those who need them.’ If it wasnae for them, your sister would have done what she tried tae do. She would have destroyed herself and your father, and it would have been a terrible victory for the sickness.”

  “But it’s not over.”

  “No. Like Raoul said, it is a battle we won, not the war, but you’ve done the main thing. You’ve made us see the sickness and understand a lot about how it works. We’ve just been talking about it downstairs. Eventually we’ll figure out exactly how transmission of the sickness happens, and then we can really fight it.”

  “I know how it happens,” I said quietly. “I figured it out when I saw Sylvia at the concert with the camera. That day at the shed, Harlen insisted that she had to film something.”

  “I suppose they intended tae use the footage tae hurt even more people,” Harrison murmured.

  “Maybe, but that wasn’t the main reason he wanted her to film it. You see, we were right in thinking a person has to be wounded spiritually in order to be opened up deeply enough to be infected. But we were wrong in thinking that someone else had to hurt them. Because the deepest wounds aren’t the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.”

  Harrison drew in a long breath and leaned back to look down at me. “Jesus, you mean they wanted Sylvia Yarrow tae film Serenity burning herself tae death—”

  “Because to film such a thing instead of trying to stop it would be so terrible that it would slash your spirit open to the core. Harlen was right there, hanging around, watching like a hawk, and he tried to stop me interfering with her. I think he was waiting for it to happen, and when Sylvia stood there and filmed Serenity burning herself, he would have infected her. He would only have to touch her. When Harlen tried to infect me, he just grabbed hold of me and put his skin against mine.”

  We stood for a while in silence, and I thought about Mum and Sarry and what they might have done to open their spirits to such a devouring darkness. But I did not wonder for long, because whatever they had done, they redeemed themselves each moment that they lived by fighting the corruption that they had allowed into their souls. I knew how hard it must be, and how frightening, because the sickness had touched me as well. But there had been no wound by which it could enter me, and I had been able to fight it just by showing it my spirit.

  And I
would go on fighting with the others. It didn’t matter that there was no longer anything special about me. I had shown myself that a whole spirit was all it took to drive off the sickness. That was worth knowing.

  “For goodness’ sake!” Gilly said, and Harrison and I sprang apart guiltily. She burst out laughing. “Oh, very subtle. I hung around for at least fifteen minutes waiting for the kiss, but since you still seem to be working up to it and I’m starving, I just wanted to tell you that Raoul and I are going to get the pizza that Harrison came to ask you about half an hour ago.”

  “Och, the pizza …,” Harrison said as he flushed and ran his hands through his pale hair.

  “I guess your mind isn’t exactly on food right now,” Gilly said kindly. She walked off, tossing me a look of delighted mischief as she passed around the corner. I looked at Harrison, and all of a sudden we both started laughing. We laughed so much that we wound up leaning against the wall.

  Then Harrison said. “About that kiss …”

  “Oh …,” I said.

  He rolled slowly sideways so that he was facing me, leaning lightly against me and pressing me against the wall. He looked into my eyes, refusing to let me look away or close my eyes as he moved closer. I felt the heat of his lips and the warm rush of his breath, and then he did what he had promised to do, kissing not only the breath but all the laughter out of me.

  “Oh,” I said when he let me go.

  “Very profound,” Harrison said, grinning. And he kissed me again.

  And this time, oh this time, I smelled wood smoke and lavender and chocolate.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to the real Alyzon Whitestarr and her family—strangers, then, whose names I borrowed after an extraordinary dusk encounter.

  Thanks also and perhaps most of all to Nan McNab. Grace in life is rare and friendship more rare still, so I count myself twice blessed in having both in such a brilliant editor.