Alyzon Whitestarr (51 page)

Gary Soloman nodded slowly. “I don’t know the answer to that, and there is no clear proof that Aaron Rayc deliberately set out to change people or harm their lives. And there is no clear proof of what you are saying about tonight.”

“You can interview people. Ask them about when the lights went on Serenity, make it clear in your story that the lights and camera and sound were all set to capture the action.”

“My editor will refuse to print the story. He’ll call it libel. If you want a reputable paper to cover this, you need proof,” Gary said.

Then I remembered. “I saw a girl filming the stage from behind the barrier. I bet she got Serenity climbing up into the scaffolding, and maybe she even got a shot of whoever was helping her.”

“So what?” the journalist said. “It’s no good if some anonymous person has footage—”

“She dropped the camera over there,” I pointed, wondering if it was possible that it was still there; that it hadn’t been trampled or destroyed by water or falling debris. “If you could find it and show it to the police, they’d have to find out who gave the orders to have the microphone and camera set up in the first place.”

I was sure the camera would contain footage that would incriminate Harlen, but I also had a strong unfounded certainty that it might show Aaron Rayc, too, because the sickness in him would want to watch, would not be satisfied to see it on a television screen.

I took Gary Soloman to where I had seen Sylvia Yarrow, and he got out his key ring and switched on a tiny flashlight. Then he began searching. I looked, too, but it was the journalist who found the camera, miraculously intact, and held it up with a cry of triumph. I could see that the record button was still glowing like a little red eye and wondered if it was possible it had fallen in such a way that it could have captured all that had happened.

Gary Soloman trained his flashlight on it and began examining the mechanism.

I took the chance to slip away. He had the scent now, and he would run with the story. If we were lucky it would tear Aaron Rayc and his reputation to pieces and maybe even put him away. And if the camera didn’t contain anything that Gary Soloman could use, next week I would send the stuff Daisy had unearthed.

I had just about reached the ragged outer rim of the light from the fire when someone stepped out of nowhere to bar my way.

Aaron Rayc.

His eyes reflected the flames behind me, and to my horror and revulsion, he was smiling widely, his teeth oddly long and yellow-looking in the queer light. I had never seen a sight
more frightening in my whole life, because it was not just the bloated, consuming sickness that he carried looking at me, but a man who had accepted and embraced it.

“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 she 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.