Alyzon Whitestarr

  “Poor thing,” I murmured, wondering if the person who lit the fire had any idea or even cared about the harm they had done. “I suppose Gilly’s mother will come back now?”

  “She won’t know what happened unless she logs on tae a local news link or gets a local paper. From what Gilly says, she doesnae make contact very often.”

  We came to a bench and Harrison suggested we sit for a bit. “I want tae tell you what happened with your sister last night.” My heartbeat quickened.

  “I spotted her easily as she came out the school gate, because she had changed out of her school uniform intae black clothes,” Harrison said. “She went straight tae the city bus stop and caught the bus tae the library.”

  “So she does go there,” I said.

  Harrison ignored my interruption. “She went inside, sat down, and got out some schoolbooks. Then a whole bunch of little kids poured in for some sort of story-reading session. I was distracted for a second, and when I looked back tae where your sister had been sitting, I got the shock of my life because she’d gone.”

  I stared at him. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Gone. Her, her bag, her books. I raced outside, thinking she must have spotted me, but she was nowhere tae be seen. I figured she must have just gone tae the toilet. But when I got back inside, I saw her going intae one of those side meeting rooms with a bunch of other people.”

  “She was going to a meeting?” I could hardly believe it.

  “I waited until the door shut, then I went tae the desk and asked who was meeting. The guy said it was a poetry group called the Morality Complex that meets every week on Monday nights. They’ve a regular booking.”

  “A poetry group!” I said explosively, relieved and also exasperated. Trust Serenity to make a poetry meeting so secretive! I felt like strangling her.

  Harrison went on. “A pretty weird sort of poetry group. I went back tae the meeting room. I was going tae barge in and pretend I’d got the wrong door, but it wouldnae budge. There are no locks, so someone had tae be holding it closed from inside. I knocked and finally this tough-looking guy with a shaved head came out and asked what I wanted. I told him I wanted tae join. He said they werenae looking for members right now. I asked when would they be, and he said it wasnae possible for anyone tae join who’d not shown proper commitment. Commitment tae what? I asked. Tae idealism, he said. I asked how you showed commitment tae idealism, and he said that was the challenge. Then he told me tae push off. I didnae press it, because for all he was talking about idealism, he actually looked like he wanted tae ram his fist down my throat.”

  “A poetry club,” I said. I felt stupid for having sent him on a wild goose chase, and said so.

  He smiled. “I didnae mind it. The truth is I felt like James Bond, only shorter.”

  I laughed, lightened by his self-deprecating humor, but also by the fact that my dark imaginings about Serenity seemed to be unfounded. Harrison glanced at his watch and said we should go in. I had to lean into the wind as we came back through the park. Leaves were whipping around us and flying up into the air from the ground as if they wanted to turn back time.

  Hotel Marceau was a big fancy building facing the park all along one side, and the doorman—it was that kind of hotel—gave off a disparaging smell of Drano when he opened the door for me, although his face was smoothly polite. I felt self-conscious in my shabby school uniform and scuffed school shoes and realized I ought to have had the sense to bring clothes to change into. Harrison’s dark corduroy trousers and gray wool sweater and jacket were expensive and tasteful, and as he approached the gleaming desk, I saw that he was far more at ease in the surroundings than I was.

  The sleek blond receptionist told us we were to wait in the restaurant. I thought her eyes flickered as they passed from Harrison to me, but when I extended my senses, she only smelled of flowers and toasted cheese, which was a lesson to me not to be so paranoid.

  Nevertheless, when I saw how fancy the restaurant was, I panicked because Da had given me twenty dollars and I had the feeling that a glass of water might cost more than that here. A waiter appeared, so smooth he might have been oiled, checked a list, and said we must be Miss Gilly Rountree’s guests. I felt like we had stepped into a novel set early in the previous century and tried to control a mixture of extreme unease and hysterical amusement as we followed him to a table by the window.

  He took up the white table napkin, unfolded it with a practiced snap, and laid it on my lap like a magician. The waiter left after performing the same service for Harrison, then Harrison leaned close and said in a pompous voice, “Is everything in order, Miss Alyzon?” That finished me. I burst out laughing, and even though I clapped my hands over my mouth at once, the sound seemed to reverberate around the near-empty restaurant, making irises tremble in their vases.

  Harrison said seriously, “Laughter is forbidden in places like this. You are permitted tae smile discreetly so long as ye dinnae show any teeth.” As it always did when he was messing around, his accent had grown stronger, and I realized how much I liked it.

  The waiter returned and asked if we would like to have an appetizer, and my amusement fell into the hole that opened up in my stomach. “I—I didn’t realize we would be eating,” I stammered. I could feel my face burn.

  Before he could respond, Gilly appeared and I felt immediately guilty that I had not been thinking about her and her house burning down. But she only threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. I stiffened, but fortunately all she was feeling was a rush of gladness at seeing me; it didn’t hurt a bit. I hugged her back, relishing the clean sea scent of her. Then she let me go and hugged Harrison, too. To my relief, the waiter had gone away again.

  “I’m so glad to see you both!” Gilly said, flopping down between us.

  “Gilly, I’m sorry about your house,” I said.

  She sighed. “I know. Gran just can’t understand why anyone would want to do such a thing. She seems so old and frail all of a sudden.”

  The waiter came back and asked if we were ready to order, and Harrison announced rather brusquely that he didn’t have any money with him. Gilly only shrugged and said, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because Gran insists dinner is her treat. You have to accept or she’ll be offended.”

  I felt Harrison look at me. Then he said. “OK, why not.”

  I nodded, relieved that it had been decided without my having to admit my own poverty. The waiter had stood like a statue throughout this, but he came to life as we ordered.

  “What about Raoul?” Harrison asked.

  “He called just now to say he’ll come for dessert and coffee. He’s trying to finish a job,” Gilly explained.

  The meal came quickly, and as if by consensus, we didn’t talk about anything serious while we ate. I was surprised how hungry I felt, and the food was really good. Once the waiter had cleared the dishes away, Gilly told him with a poise I envied that we would wait for coffee and dessert because we were expecting another friend.

  “What will your gran do now?” Harrison asked.

  She shrugged. “We’ll find another house. We’re lucky that the insurance will pay. It must be dreadful if a house is burned down and there is no money for another one. But the idea of getting all the furniture and stuff for it …,” she sighed. “It won’t be so bad for me, but poor Gran, she put that house together over her whole life with Grandad. All the furniture and paintings and rugs she bought with him or with her sister who died or with friends who are dead or far away. Or she bought them on her travels. Each bit was like a piece of her history. It’s not like a house burned down for her. It’s like someone burned up a whole lot of her past.”

  Harrison had started to tell her of an organization he had read about that decorated houses for families relocating from another country, when Raoul appeared. As he rolled across the room toward us, dark and handsome in a suit and yellow shirt, I thought that he managed to make a wheelchair look sophisticated.

&nb
sp; Gilly’s eyes lit up when she saw him and, as he smiled at her, the air between them bent first one way then the other. So that’s what love looks like, I thought.

  My neck prickled, and I turned to see Harrison watching me. I flushed, realizing he knew that I was eavesdropping with my extended abilities. Gilly began talking about Harrison’s idea of how to set up a new house for her grandmother, and Raoul said it might also be possible to shop online in some of the places where Mrs. Rountree had once traveled.

  “I could show her how to log in here at the hotel,” he said.

  “A cyber trip down memory lane with real mementos,” Gilly murmured, looking excited. “I think Gran might like that.”

  Their talk about the Internet reminded me of my own abortive attempt to learn more about Aaron Rayc. When there was a lull in the conversation, I asked Raoul if he had ever heard of a company called Rayc Inc. He hadn’t, but when I explained about its strange Web site, he looked intrigued and offered to look into it, just as I had hoped. I gave him Aaron Rayc’s card and explained my misgivings about Da and the entrepreneur. Even to me they sounded vague, and finally I said weakly, “I’d just like to know what sort of man he is and what he does.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Raoul promised. “Maybe I’ll have something for you when you come to my place on the weekend. I hope you’ll be able to come to help us test a new game, Alyzon,” he said, then he glanced at Gilly. “Of course, we can postpone if you don’t want to leave your grandmother alone.”

  “I’ll see how she is,” Gilly said. “Harrison told me you’ve managed to get the hospital to let Sarry go to a private convalescent home.”

  Raoul smiled. “The papers have been signed, which means she’s out of Dr. Austin’s clutches.”

  This was the same phrase Harrison had used, and when I glanced at him I was startled to find him watching me, his eyes expectant.

  “What’s with you two?” Gilly asked curiously.

  I was suddenly filled with doubt. “Look, I … I want to tell you something, but I don’t know if this is the right moment. The fire—”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Gilly said. “The fire happened and it’s horrible, but Gran and I are OK and we’ll get over it, because even treasured mementos are only things, not people. So spill.”

  “We’re friends,” Raoul added in his deep, gentle voice. “But being a friend doesn’t mean you have to tell us what you are not ready to tell.”

  “Raoul!” Gilly said indignantly.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said, half laughing. “I do want to tell you, but it’s so weird.”

  “Weird is OK,” Raoul said.

  Right then the waiter appeared. Hearing these words, he looked uncharacteristically startled. “Desserts?” he asked, resuming his bland expression.

  “I have the feeling I might need a serious dessert for this,” Gilly said decisively. “I’ll have the chocolate mousse.”

  We all laughed and the tightness of the last few minutes evaporated, carrying my nervousness with it. After all, Harrison had believed me. And what would happen if Gilly and Raoul didn’t? I wouldn’t fall down dead.

  Some time later, after I had told them everything, Gilly looked surprised and bemused. “What does it mean that I smell of the sea?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure it means anything more than you having brown hair does. The transient smells are more revealing than essence smells, when I can figure out what they mean. When you’re worried, for instance, I smell seaweed, and when you’re happy, I smell cotton candy. My da smells of ammonia when he’s worried.”

  “Worry smells different on different people,” Raoul marveled.

  Even Harrison had been shocked at the true extent of my abilities. “Can you smell your own essence?” he asked.

  I shook my head and was about to tell them I couldn’t smell Aaron Rayc’s either, when Gilly gave a gasping cry.

  “Harlen!” she said. “That’s why you don’t like him getting interested in you, isn’t it? It has to do with how he smells.”

  I nodded, and had to fight a powerful reluctance to speak. “He smells really horrible. Worse than anything I’ve ever smelled. Even worse than Dr. Austin.”

  “Dr. Austin? You don’t mean the same Dr. Austin who treats Sarry?” Raoul’s voice was sharp.

  I repeated what I had told Harrison, and then Harrison added our conclusions. Raoul’s expression was bleak. “If you’re right about the terrible smell meaning Dr. Austin has the same sickness as Sarry, it could be that she doesn’t smell because she won’t allow her sickness to become active.”

  Harrison gave me a worried look. “If that’s so, this guy at your school who smells like Dr. Austin must be contagious.”

  “He may be,” Raoul cautioned. “Remember, this is all speculation. Infecting someone else could be no more than a matter of making physical contact, although I tend to think it has to be more complicated, otherwise every second person would be infected. The point is that there are lots of sicknesses where the person, the carrier, is not aware they are infected or infectious. If you think about it, the sicknesses are served by the ignorance of their hosts, and so it may be that this sickness is driving its victims to seek situations where infection can occur.”

  “You’re making it sound as if this sickness is alive,” Gilly said, looking revolted.

  “I would call it a biological imperative,” Raoul said. “It might also be that the sickness is aware of people who are infected. That could explain why Dr. Austin is trying to drug Sarry. Remember how she feels that drugs lower her resistance?”

  “You think the sickness in Dr. Austin is trying tae help the sickness in Sarry tae break its host’s will?” Harrison asked dubiously.

  “It sounds radical, but this thing is so far outside normal that I think we have to consider it. And it would explain why Dr. Austin was trying to drug Alyzon as well. He, or the sickness in him, needed her will to be low and weak because it wanted to infect her.” He shot me a look. “I assume you’d know if you were infected.”

  His suggestion that Dr. Austin had been trying to infect me made me feel very strange. “I can’t smell my own essence, but … I think I wouldn’t be so scared of Harlen or so revolted by how he and Dr. Austin smell if I were.”

  “That makes sense,” Raoul said. “Gilly said this Harlen was showing an interest in you. When did that start?”

  I saw at once what he was going to say. “I’d been back at school two weeks before he asked me out, but now he is asking me out all the time and asking questions about me and my family and calling me.” I stopped, my skin crawling at the thought that all of Harlen’s determined pursuit might be nothing more than the prompting of some malevolent virus trying to find a way to infect me. Desperate to stop the terrifying direction of my thoughts, I told them about running away like a terrified deer after seeing Harlen, and not feeling any need to do so the next time I saw him.

  “That would fit with the sickness having cycles where it is stronger or weaker,” Harrison said to Raoul. “It might even be that when Alyzon returned to school it was in a weak phase, so it couldn’t react.”

  “Another possibility is that the sickness might need its host to be close for it to become aware of your extended senses,” Raoul pointed out. “And maybe the reason your danger sense is warning you not to show him how you feel is because that would alert the sickness to your awareness of it.”

  Suddenly Gilly gasped and turned to me. “Alyzon, with the fire and everything, I forgot to tell you I saw Harlen on Saturday afternoon and he was livid because you’d stood him up. Of course, I didn’t know what had happened with Sarry I just said that I was going to see you that afternoon. He gave me this killing look and said he didn’t suppose I’d be stood up.”

  I felt a strange chill at her words, and maybe I looked scared because Harrison said gruffly, “It cannae be that easy to infect you, because he would have done it already if he only had tae touch you. All you have tae do is avoid being
alone with him.”

  “I can’t keep evading,” I said, feeling a stab of despair. “It feels dangerous.”

  Gilly said, “Maybe the reason Alyzon feels scared is because some bit of her feels that the sickness could provoke Harlen to do something about her if it saw her as an enemy.”

  There was a deep silence between us, then Raoul shook his head. “I’d say the sickness would have a lot of trouble directing anyone to do actual physical harm unless it was already in the host’s nature, and even then, there would have to be circumstances that would allow the host to think the idea of causing harm was their own idea. Like a doctor who had a tendency to overprescribe being prompted to drug a patient.”

  At that moment the waiter came over to say that the restaurant was closing. I looked at my watch and was astounded to see how late it was. I asked if there was a phone I could use to call Da, but Raoul offered his cell.

  “It’s me,” I said gingerly when Da answered. “Sorry it’s so late.”

  “We’ve just finished rehearsing, and I’m sure it helped Gilly to have a good talk,” Da said.

  I felt guilty then, because we hadn’t talked about the fire for hours. We all got up and pulled on our coats, and I noticed the waiters were standing in a group by the bar, looking bored and talking in low voices.

  “I should have said I’d take you home to save your father the trip,” Raoul said apologetically as we walked down the ramp with him to the foyer.

  “It’s fine. Da was up rehearsing anyway. I think he’s going to do another gig for Aaron Rayc.”

  “I thought he wanted your da alone,” Gilly said.

  “He does, but Da is working on some new songs with Losing the Rope.”

  “How did he smell?” Harrison asked suddenly. “Aaron Rayc.”