The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  “Listen, girls,” he said. “I need you to go home tonight.”

  Sandra said, “But we’re making supper! Spaghetti and garlic bread.” She wore a billowing green dress. “Plus we need you to unlock the other bedroom. We couldn’t clean it.”

  “Enough cleaning,” Pax said. “And we can have the spaghetti tomorrow. Right now I just need some time alone, okay?”

  “What’s in the bag?” Rainy asked.

  Pax looked down at the black plastic baggie. He hadn’t realized he was carrying it in his hand. “Look,” he said, “tomorrow before you come, why don’t you go to the grocery store.” He put the bag into his front pocket, then handed Sandra two of the twenties Rhonda had given him. “Buy us some food. Get whatever snacks you want.”

  “We need baby food,” Sandra said.

  Rainy glared at her. “We have to show you something first,” she said, and then went into the kitchen.

  “Oh, right,” Sandra said. Then, “We don’t really need baby food.”

  Pax said. “Rainy, I don’t have time for games tonight, okay? You can show it to me tomorrow.” The refrigerated bag felt cool against his thigh.

  The girl came back into the room carrying a thin white laptop. She handed it to him. “We need you to open this,” she said.

  “Whose is this?” he asked, even though he was sure of the answer. Taped diagonally across the lid was a black-and-white bumper sticker of two fish: a Christian fish symbol, and right behind it, a larger Darwin fish with stick-figure legs, its mouth wide open to swallow the fish in front of it.

  “It was Mom’s,” Rainy said. “It’s ours now.”

  He sat on the couch and put the laptop on the coffee table. “Where did you get this? Your house?”

  They didn’t answer. He looked up, and Sandra was looking at Rainy. “Can you open it?” the girl said.

  He thumbed the latch and lifted the lid. “Okay, what next?”

  “No, unlock it,” Rainy said. “It has a password.” She sat next to him and pressed the power button. The computer started booting up.

  “Why did you hide this?” he asked.

  “We didn’t hide it,” Sandra said. “Reverend Hooke took it. Her and Tommy.”

  “What? When?” Pax asked.

  “The morning after,” Rainy said. “We saw her take it, and Tommy saw her too, but he didn’t say anything.”

  “Why didn’t you speak up? This is important. It could have Jo’s—” He started to say “suicide letter,” but thought better of it.

  “Can you open it?” Rainy said. On the screen was a prompt for a password. “We can’t get past this part.”

  “How would I know the password?”

  “Just try,” Sandra said.

  He shook his head, put his fingers on the keyboard. He thought for a moment, then typed “BrotherBewlay” and pressed return.

  “Incorrect password,” he said.

  Rainy was looking at him intently, but as usual he couldn’t read her expression. “You’re not even trying,” she said.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. He tried “BewlayBrother,” then several variations with different capitalization and spaces and plurals. Then “hunkydory” and “changes” and “prettythings.”

  Pax said, “If we keep putting in bad passwords we may lock it up permanently.”

  “But you could hack it, right?” Sandra asked. “You know about computers and everything.”

  “What? No. I mean, I’ve used computers, but I don’t even own one right now. I use my roommate’s.”

  “But you’re from Chicago!” Sandra said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Forget it,” Rainy said, and slammed the lid down. Pax put a hand over hers.

  “Wait. Leave it with me.” He looked at both of them. “I can call some people who are good at this kind of thing. Maybe we can figure out how to boot it without the password.”

  “Really?” Sandra said, sounding relieved. Rainy seemed less sure.

  “It’s ours,” Rainy said. “The laptop belongs to us now.”

  Pax said, “I know that. I promise you I won’t let anyone else have it. Let me try some things, okay?” The twins didn’t reply. “But right now I’m exhausted. How about you come back tomorrow.”

  He closed the door behind them and walked to the guest room. The vintage, frozen when he’d gotten it from Aunt Rhonda, had warmed to liquid again. He sat on the bed and swirled the plastic container, proving to himself that he didn’t need to rush into this. He could wait even longer if he wanted to.

  He pried off the rubber cap, then lay back on the bed and tilted the vial over his mouth. The serum seemed to take forever to slide to the lip of the container; the first drop reached the edge and hung there, swelling.

  He didn’t know what dose to use; most of his experience had been accidental, and at the extremes. Just a drop now, he thought. There was more in the vial if he needed it. Later he could even swab out the inside with a Q-tip if he needed to, or add water and rinse it into his mouth. And, he reminded himself, there was more where this came from.

  He tapped the plastic with one finger and the drop broke loose, fell onto his tongue like a dollop of honey. He swallowed, and the warmth slid down the back of his throat. He put the cap back onto the vial and lay on the bed, waiting.

  “And he returns,” his father said each time Pax arrived for his visit. He sounded both sad and relieved.

  Rhonda had decided that the optimal interval was every other day. Pax would arrive with his armful of newspapers and they would sit by the big atrium windows. Harlan was most lucid and in control in the first hour. As they shuffled through the pages one of them would try to make small talk. It didn’t matter which one of them spoke first; it never went easily. One morning Pax said, “Did you know that some scientists think that the clades are an alternate strain of human evolution?” Harlan didn’t look up from his paper. He didn’t believe in evolution. “It’s got to do with quantum mechanics,” Pax went on. “These things called intron mutations prove that the disease is teleporting in from a parallel universe. They can prove it.” He tried to sound like he hadn’t learned this from an Internet weirdo a few weeks before. “People who went through the Changes are a whole different species. Technically, you and I may not even be related anymore.”

  His father chuckled without looking up. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  The conversation went better when Pax had specific questions—about the house, the car, the finances. Harlan could coach him through the bank statements and bills, tell him how to light the oven’s pilot light, or how to jumpstart the Crown Vic and get it started without flooding the engine.

  Harlan would grow more remote as the morning wore on. His gaze would shift to the middle distance, or else suddenly alight on Paxton’s face as if seeing him for the first time. Sometimes Pax seemed to be a beloved child, sometimes a rebellious teenager. “I won’t have this in my house!” he shouted during one extraction, and Travis had to put up a hand to stop Harlan from slapping the needle away. “Thank God your mother isn’t alive to see this, it would kill her. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

  “I know, Dad,” Pax said. He leaned forward but did not touch him. That was still against the rules.

  When the extraction began Pax would watch the serum color the body of the syringe, and then he would catch himself watching and look away.

  “Oh law,” Rhonda would say when Travis delivered the syringes. “He’s like Old Faithful.”

  Pax took his payment on Tuesday mornings with the rest of the employees. The chub boys started rolling in around 9:30, then sat around talking and looking at their hands until the clock struck 11:00 and Rhonda opened her office door.

  Pax kept his distance, trying to hang back until the rest of them had been paid, but Clete went out of his way to get next to Pax, hugging him, slapping his back, punching his shoulder. “Looking a little rough this morning, Paxton,” he’d say. “C
an’t wait to get that shot of ol’ Grandad, huh?”

  Each time Pax resolved not to flinch, to give nothing away. Weeks after the beating both men’s bruises had faded, but Pax was still aching: the ribs along his right side still grated like a tire rubbing at a sharp fender; the headaches still woke him at night. So he smiled tightly and said nothing, waiting for Clete to become distracted by another conversation, or for Rhonda to tell them to line up.

  The chubs were anxious to receive their checks and the little frozen vials they called the bonus, but their need seemed less immediate than Paxton’s. To hear the younger chubs talk, it wasn’t about getting high themselves, it was about impressing women and partying. “But you skips, man,” Clete said, circling an arm around Paxton’s neck. “You freak for it like the ladies, don’t you?”

  Pax smiled his fuck-you smile.

  The twins had become disappointed in him. He hadn’t been able to get past the computer’s log-in screen, and hadn’t even tried to find someone who could. “Never mind,” Rainy said, and the laptop vanished from his house.

  They didn’t like how long he slept in the afternoons; they didn’t like how little he ate. They disapproved of his long, stringy hair, the way he’d go days without shaving.

  “You’re starting to stink,” Sandra said.

  “It’s September,” Pax said. “Don’t you have school?”

  “They’re not teaching anything that’s important,” Rainy said. “Our mother taught us biology, evolution, physics. Quantum physics.”

  “Little Miss Einstein,” Pax said, but his tone was light.

  “That’s Rainy,” Sandra said.

  He lay on the couch, eyes half-closed, on the verge of bursting into tears or laughter. After a visit to his father he rewarded himself with a dab of the vintage, just enough to move himself a few inches out of his body, but even with that small amount it was all too easy to let his emotions run away with him. He knew Rainy and Sandra weren’t his daughters—weren’t related to him at all—but when they fussed over him and complained and told him their stories he saw right past their masklike faces, right into their wounded hearts. He knew how they yearned for Jo Lynn, and he began to understand how Jo must have ached for them. When they ran their smooth hands over his rough cheeks, tut-tutting at his lack of hygiene, he felt himself losing track of where he ended and the world began. He was both a man stretched out on the couch and a little bald girl regarding him with narrowed eyes.

  “So tell me,” he said. “If the argos and betas and charlies are alternate forms of humanity, where are the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals?”

  “Tals,” Rainy said. “Not thals.”

  “Whatever.” He scratched under his T-shirt. “My point is, if apes are our nearest cousins, where are the grunting, hairy clades? Where are the cavemen?”

  The girls looked down at him, then burst into laughter.

  The nights he took the vintage the house became alive with ghosts. He heard them clinking coffee cups, talking in low adult voices, assembling Christmas bicycles. He drifted asleep to the sound of “I’ll Fly Away” sung slow in two-part harmony.

  The headaches persisted. One night he woke curled up and shivering under the open window. Summer had ended while he’d slept, and chill autumn air had refrigerated the room. He shuffled in the dark to the bathroom, not willing to wake up completely. He peed, swallowed a few ibuprofen, went back into the hallway.

  Light silvered the edge of the door to his old bedroom.

  He watched the light for a long time, listening. Then he went to the door and touched it lightly. It glided silently away from his fingertips.

  His mother lay on the big hospital bed the government people had delivered. The guest bedroom was too small for it, the master bedroom too full of furniture. Paxton’s room was just right.

  She looked tiny in it, a shrunken ancient or a newborn. Her skin, blotchy with stains like coffee, seemed too tight for her. Nothing remained of her hair but a few wispy patches.

  “My son, my son,” she said. The fingers of her right hand lifted from the bed, summoning him forward. She smiled up at him. “Still handsome.”

  She wore the lightest of nightgowns; anything heavier caused her terrible pain. He sat on the floor and carefully put his hand in hers. Her palm was velvety, but her fingers were rough and chapped, as if her body couldn’t decide which direction it wanted to go.

  “How is Jo?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said. He didn’t want to tell her. She loved Jo like a daughter.

  “And Deke?”

  “Still growing,” Paxton said.

  “Good.”

  A minute passed. Then she said, “When you were born the nurse put you in my arms and … oh my.” She smiled through cracked lips. “The future just rolled open. Years and years. And I could see you, all grown up. Just like this. And I thought, I will know this little man the rest of my life.”

  “Yeah?” She’d told him this story before. He used to ask her to tell it.

  “The first and only time in my life that happened. Don’t tell your father.” She smiled again and closed her eyes. Minutes passed, but he knew that she hadn’t fallen asleep. He shifted his weight and she said apologetically, “You can go.”

  “No, I wasn’t—”

  “It’s okay, Paxton.” She opened her eyes again. “I don’t mind that you don’t like to come in here. I’m not too pretty. And you were just a boy. You’d already seen more than your share.”

  He shrugged. “Now that I’m here …”

  “Off to bed,” she said. “You need your sleep.”

  “In a little bit,” he said.

  He was still talking to her near dawn when a thick arm fastened around his neck and a voice spoke into his ear. “Hate to interrupt your conversation, Cuz.” The arm yanked him to his feet and dragged him backward out of the room. A moment later he was dumped to the floor. Three chubs loomed over him like planets: Clete, Travis, and the redheaded chub girl from the clinic—Doreen. She wore a pink hoodie open over a black tank top that exposed sweeping vistas of cleavage.

  Clete stood with his hands on his hips, a black pistol tucked ostentatiously into his waistband. Travis held a big roll of silver duct tape.

  “Just in case you were wondering,” Clete said. “This is not a hallucination.”

  Chapter 14

  THE VINTAGE WORE off but the headache did not.

  They’d taped his wrists and ankles and then tossed him onto a mattress in the back of a rusting, orange-brown Ford Econoline van with bare metal walls and no side windows. Clete hadn’t driven far—ten miles at most—and as the sun came up he pulled into the woods, backed the van around, and then parked with the nose pointed downhill. Clete and Doreen sat up front with Travis squatting between them on a stack of three cases of aluminum cans, one Mountain Dew, two Bud Light. Along one side of the cabin were Wal-Mart bags and cardboard boxes full of supplies a teenager would buy for an all-night kegger: bags of Cheetos and Cool Ranch Doritos, a four-pack of Red Bull, a pack of Fig Newtons, paper plates, a box of plastic utensils. It was only when he realized that one of the bags held a jumbo pack of adult diapers that he guessed what the chubs were going to do.

  They sat for what seemed like hours, Pax pretending to sleep. He wasn’t sure of the time—7:00 a.m., 8:00? From his position on the floor of the van, watching through slit eyes, he could see nothing through the windshield but treetops and gray sky. He tried not to shiver. The van’s heaters didn’t reach past the driver’s and passenger’s seats. The air smelled like stale vintage—but not his father’s.

  “There’s the Caddy!” Travis said.

  The chubs said nothing for half a minute. Then Clete said, “It’s payday.” It sounded like he was quoting from a movie. He cranked the ignition, forgetting that the engine was already started.

  Travis said, “Wait, I thought we were going to wait for a few minutes, let her get into the office.”

  “Not too long,” Doreen said.


  “I’m just getting ready,” Clete said testily.

  Doreen said, “When you get in there, don’t let that bitch push you around.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Travis said. “Just do your part.”

  “You know how she is,” Doreen said. “And don’t let Everett intimidate you.”

  “We got it, Doreen,” Clete said.

  The van jounced over ruts on its way downhill. They reached the highway, went along it perhaps a hundred yards, and then turned up the driveway to the Home. Travis glanced back at him, and Pax kept his eyes unmoving, his jaw slack.

  “Playin’ possum,” Travis said. “Just like his daddy.” Pax didn’t move, and Travis laughed. “Have it your way, man.”

  The van stopped and Clete said, “Hey, Barron.”

  “You’re here awful early,” the tinny voice said from the intercom.

  “We figure someday she’ll pay us early just to get rid of us,” Clete said.

  “Not a chance,” Barron said, laughing. A second later the gate buzzed and the van rolled forward a few dozen feet and stopped. Pax heard the gate squeal shut behind them.

  “Y’all ready?” Clete said.

  “You know I am,” Doreen said, her voice low. “And I know you are.” A wet smack, and Pax risked opening his eyes a fraction. Clete and Doreen were attempting to inhale each other’s tongues.

  “Guys …,” Travis said.

  “I love you, baby,” Doreen said.

  “Me too,” Clete said.

  Clete and Travis climbed out of the van, and Doreen scooted over to the driver’s seat. “Three minutes, tops,” she said.

  “We know, we know,” Clete said.

  Doreen put the van in reverse and started backing up. Pax entertained a brief fantasy of jumping up, throwing his bound arms around the chub girl’s neck, and choking her unconscious. But Jesus, he thought, he wasn’t Bruce Willis. Doreen was twice his size and probably twice as strong. She’d just reach back and bash him in the head.