Alyzon Whitestarr Read Online Free Page A

Depression crawled like a mass of black beetles inside the smell. I wanted to speak, but it was too hard.
    * * *
    “Alyzon Whitestarr.” The same voice shouted at me, yelling my whole name like an incantation, stinking of flowers and wet dirt, pushing sorrow and roses down my throat and into my ears. I tried to open my eyes, but they were glued shut. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t find my mouth to let the words out.
    * * *
    “Alyzon. Come on, now. Wake up.” A hand lightly slapped a cheek that might be mine, if I could ever find it. The voice tasted of snot and tears and despair.
    I felt a finger on my eye, lifting the lid. Light speared into my brain, but the touch was worse. Despair leaked from the fingertips and burned into me. There was a flashing image ofan older man lying in a bed, pale and emaciated. I tried to pull away, but the movement started an earthquake that threatened to tear my head apart.
    “Better not to move,” the rose-scented stranger shouted, taking the hand away. Then: “She’s awake.”
    “Alyzon.”
    Da’s voice. He was yelling, too. I turned my eyes toward the voice and was enveloped in the smell of fresh coffee grounds, which was weird because Da didn’t drink coffee. Mingled in with the smell of coffee was a sharp ammoniacal stink that filled me with a sick, tense apprehension. I opened my eyes properly, and the skull-splitting brightness resolved slowly into white faces around the edge of a suspended light. I didn’t understand until it occurred to me that I was lying down and they were leaning over me; Da and a woman with short dark hair.
    “Good,” the woman yelled, leaning nearer and touching my hand. The smell of roses and wet earth pressed in on me, along with a feeling of terrible exhausted grief. “Alyzon, you’re in the hospital. Do you remember what happened?”
    Fear gouged into my heart, sliced through the anxiety and grief and the oppressive smells. “Luke …” It came out as a rusty creak of sound.
    Da gave a sobbing, bellowing laugh. “He’s all right, love. You managed to fall with him on top of you.” Pride and love blazed out of his eyes at me, and the smells of coffee and ammonia were swallowed up by the smell of caramelized sugar and the pungent tang of pine needles.
    “Who is Luke?” the woman shouted.
    “Luke is our baby, Dr. Reed,” Da yelled at her. “She was holding him when it happened.”
    Of course, a doctor
, I thought, as the woman leaned over me. I was afraid she would touch me again. I shrank back, and she frowned, a pulling together of black brows. I realized I could see all the hairs coming out of her skin as if I were looking at her through a magnifying glass. The pores on her face looked like gaping mouths. The smell of roses and wet earth pushed at me. I turned my head away from her to escape it. But I found myself looking at a row of other beds with patients in them, and doctors and visitors around the beds in little clots. A tidal wave of muddled smells flooded toward me, forced its way down my throat, up my nose, through my eyes, my fingertips, choking me, blinding me, suffocating me. My stomach revolted. It punched the world out of me in a great vomiting gout, and I fell back, empty, into the silent darkness.
    * * *
    “Alyzon?” The woman’s voice again. It reached into the dark, caught me, and dragged me up out of the peaceful void.
    I opened my eyes in fear, but this time the room was dim and quiet. The doctor was seated in a chair beside my bed. I could still smell her wet earth and roses perfume, but nowhere near as strongly.
    “I’m Dr. Reed,” she said softly, and I relaxed slightly, relieved she wasn’t going to shout at me. “Do you remember hitting your head?”
    “Yes. Luke—”
    “Your little brother is fine,” she said. The slight smell of cloves drifted to me. “Your family will bring him in to visit as soon as I let them know you’ve woken.”
    “What … what’s wrong with me?” I asked.
    “Just