The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  When the snoring reached full production, Pax went into the kitchen and tore off a square of paper towel from the roll. He went back to the living room and crouched next to his father. A blister near his father’s knuckles had already split, weeping vintage. Pax touched a corner of the towel to the spot, let it soak up the substance. Then holding the darkened tip away from his fingers as if it were a lit match, he walked out to the front porch. It was evening but not yet fully dark.

  He held the paper towel for a long time, not looking at it. He felt like he was readying himself to jump into a cold pool. He laughed at himself, then quickly opened his mouth and touched the tip of paper to his tongue—a quick, light tap. He felt nothing. After thirty seconds he touched it to his tongue again. Then he sat and waited for something to happen.

  His arm itched, but he let the mosquito finish its meal. He felt its happy fullness as it lifted off from his skin. He could picture the world through its gemstone eyes, feel the weight in his thorax as he weaved drunkenly toward the trees, humming like a clarinet, winging mightily to keep his bloated body in the air. …

  He slipped back into his body with a lurch. Something was watching him from the trees.

  He sat very still. Not out of fear—though he realized that any other time he might have been afraid—but out of curiosity. About twenty feet up one of the big pines, he could just make out a dark mass that clung to the trunk. It had stopped moving as soon as he’d looked directly at it, or else it was about to move. He slowly tilted his head, trying to tease out its outline—but then headlights sliced through the trees and the spell was broken.

  A car came down the drive. More chubs? Pax thought tiredly. He’d just about had it with the fat boys.

  He pushed the paper towel into his pocket.

  The vehicle parked behind his father’s car. It was a classic Ford Bronco from the seventies with a white hood and red body, big tires, shiny rims. It still looked good.

  The cab lit up as the door opened, and a figure in a baseball cap climbed out of the truck and came around the hood. It was a beta man, dressed in a loose button shirt and jeans.

  “How you doing, Tommy?” Pax said.

  The man stopped abruptly. “I didn’t see you there,” Tommy Shields said in that soft voice. “I hope I—I know I’m coming awfully late. I just came to drop something off.”

  “It’s fine. I was just getting some fresh air.” Pax decided that his own voice sounded perfectly normal. “My dad’s asleep, though, if you came to see him.”

  Tommy gave no indication of hearing the old man’s snoring. “No, no,” he said. “It’s for you. I’m glad I caught you before you left town. I found something in Jo Lynn’s things, and I thought… well, I thought you might like it.”

  “Just a second,” Pax said. He stood quickly and had to pause for a moment, lightheaded. He opened the front door and reached in to flick on the porch light. Gnats immediately converged on the light, fizzing. He blinked up at them.

  “Are you okay?” Tommy said. “You don’t look so good.”

  Pax turned back to him, shaking his head. “I’m fine. I was just… What you got there?”

  Tommy lifted the thing in his hand. “Jo Lynn kept this on her dresser,” he said. “When we used to live together.”

  It was a framed picture. Pax took it from him and tilted the glass face to catch the light. Pax, Jo, and Deke, twelve or thirteen years old, a couple summers before the Changes. They stood in bright sunlight, sheer gray rock behind them. The boys were skinny and shirtless, Deke in cutoff jeans and Pax in real swimming trunks. Jo wore a one-piece suit, her brown hair hanging to her shoulders, wet and straggly. The three of them beamed at the camera.

  He didn’t remember the day the picture was taken—not exactly—but he felt the overlay of dozens of days like it: skin and sunlight and cold mountain water. “My parents used to take us all swimming,” Pax said. “This looks like it was up at the Little River.”

  “She talked to me about you,” Tommy said. “You were important to her.”

  “Well, Jo was—” He wanted to say, She was important to me too. But his life had made a lie of that. After leaving Switchcreek he’d never talked to Jo again, and never talked to anyone about her. Then he’d moved into the city and set about making his old life into fog, too indistinct for anyone to ask about or remember. Erasing the past was easy, like walking in a snowstorm. The footprints filled in by themselves.

  Tommy said, “You don’t understand, she talked to me about what happened.” The beta looked at him, that flat dark face intending something that Pax couldn’t interpret. “She told me what you did together. You and Jo and Deke.”

  Pax stood very still, a slight smile on his face. “We did a lot of stuff together. She was like a sister to us. My mother practically adopted her.”

  “She told me, Paxton,” Tommy said. “You don’t have to pretend with me. I was her husband. When you raise children together, you share a trust. A bond.”

  “A bond.”

  “I know it’s hard for someone like you to understand, but Jo Lynn and I—”

  Someone like me? “Jo Lynn left you, Tommy. She moved out on her own. So what kind of bond was that, exactly?”

  “Jo Lynn made a bad decision. And the past couple years … well, she hadn’t been herself. If you were around, if you had talked to her, you would know that. She wasn’t the same person anymore.”

  “Maybe she just figured out she didn’t need you—hell, didn’t need any of you. This husband thing …” He tried to remember what Aunt Rhonda had said about betas and husbands. “How’s that work exactly? You’re not the girls’ father, you’re not—”

  “Maybe not their biological father, but I am their parent,” he said. “That’s the only way that counts.”

  Pax almost laughed. He suddenly saw himself as Tommy saw him: a cocky skip, untouched by the Changes and untouchable, riding back into town to claim old rights he’d long abandoned. It was ludicrous, but a dozen other emotions jostled for Pax’s attention—anger, amusement, disgust, jealousy—and he felt them all at once. He couldn’t decide which of the emotions were his own and which were Tommy’s.

  Pax said, “And now you’ve got the girls back, you’re keeping ’em, huh?”

  Tommy closed his eyes, opened them. “Rainy and Sandra are my daughters. That’s not a secret, Paxton. Everyone in the Co-op knows that they mean everything to me.”

  “And you’re the sole owner now.”

  “Stop making it sound like that! This isn’t about—” Tommy shook his head and stepped forward. “I know what you’re thinking, Paxton. You’re remembering the old me. It’s true, I wasn’t the nicest guy. But the Changes woke me up, shook out all that bullshit. For the first time in my life I started thinking clear.”

  “Born again,” Pax said. Tommy stared at him. “You don’t understand anything, do you?”

  “Why don’t you explain it to me.”

  Tommy turned and began to walk back toward the Bronco.

  “Did you kill her, Tommy?” Pax said. “Come on, you can tell me, we’re buddies.” He realized that he was equally ready to strangle the little bald man or hug him. “Maybe you got angry that she took the kids away from you. That makes total sense. Anybody would sympathize with that.”

  Tommy put a hand on the fender and looked over his shoulder at him. “I came to tell you that Jo forgave you, Paxton. For running out on her, for never calling, never asking about the girls.”

  Pax blinked.

  Tommy shook his head. “Me, I couldn’t let that pass. But Jo’s a better person than I am.”

  Pax watched Tommy turn the four-wheel drive around and drive away. Then he rubbed his face with one hand, holding the picture to himself. Damn, he thought. This is mighty shit. He’d barely tasted the vintage. A dab. For a minute there he felt like he was halfway out of his skin and into Tommy’s.

  He turned toward the house, the glass of the picture frame smooth under his thumb. Inside, his fat
her was waiting for him, snores rattling the walls, his robe open like a medicine cabinet.

  “Show us,” Pax said. It began as simply as that.

  Jo tilted her head and said nothing. She sat in the armchair, one smooth leg draped over the arm. It had become so hard to read her new body that he couldn’t tell if she was angry, embarrassed, or amused.

  “Oh! You Pretty Things” played on the boom box. Jo was into old Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and earlier. She’d declared Hunky Dory to be the official soundtrack of the Switchcreek Orphan Society. From “Changes” to “Kooks” to “The Bewlay Brothers”—their whole story was there.

  “No,” she said finally. “All of us. Right now.”

  Deke laughed, a thump like a drum. He lay sprawled across the floor, surrounded by crushed Budweiser cans. Six months after the Changes he was almost eight feet tall and still growing; during a growth spurt his back would sometimes seize up, paralyzing him. Growing pains, the argos called them, even though nobody knew if they were temporary, or if they’d be part of their lives forever. Deke’s preferred treatment was to lie flat on the floor and try to get drunk, which because of his giant body required the openmouthed throughput of a storm drain. Pax and Jo drank with him, less in solidarity than because the quarantine and curfew left them few other entertainment options.

  “Y’all knock yourselves out,” Deke said.

  Jo slipped out of her chair and stood with her hands on her hips. She wore gym shorts and a cropped tank top that showed her smooth, flat belly. Her skin gleamed in the light of the single floor lamp. “As chairperson of the SOS,” she said, looking down at Deke, “I’d like to make a motion.” Jo was chair, Deke president. Pax, as a half orphan, could not hold office, but he could vote.

  “I second,” Pax said.

  Pax fell on Deke, pinning him across his wide chest while Jo unsnapped his jean shorts and began to tug them down. Deke grunted and laughed, halfheartedly pushed Pax aside. Even buzzed and immobilized by back pain he could have thrown them across the room if he wanted.

  Deke wasn’t wearing underwear. Pax had seen him naked dozens of times before the Changes, but this was the first time since.

  “Well would you look at that,” Jo said. “You’d think you argo boys would be bigger.”

  Deke roared, laughing, and reached for his pants. Jo pushed his hands away. “Come on now,” she said. “This is for science.”

  Deke stopped struggling, and Pax, sprawled across his chest, looked down the length of his friend’s body. The sunken stomach, the hip bones like shovel blades, a patch of gray pubic hair like a tuft of straw. His penis seemed too short for his giant body, though it was wide as Paxton’s fist. Pax had no idea if all argos were shaped like this. Probably Deke didn’t know himself.

  Jo pulled Deke’s shorts down his thighs. He raised his knees and she slid them the rest of the way off.

  The atmosphere in the room had changed.

  Jo touched her red-brown hand to Deke’s white thigh, only a few inches from his dick. She looked up and said, “You next, Paxton.”

  Jo, as always, was in charge. Even changed, she was the referee, the intermediary. Later she’d tell him, What choice did they have? There were no books for their people. No skin mags, no soft-core movies on Cinemax to show them what their bodies were supposed to look like. It was no crime to be curious.

  Paxton leaned back on his knees and pulled off his shirt. Then he stood and without looking at them slid down his shorts, stepped out of them. He was naked except for his white Hanes underwear.

  “Everything,” Jo said.

  He didn’t want to take off his underwear. He was already hard.

  Jo stood and walked to him. She slipped off her tank top. She wore a dainty bra, startling white against her wine-dark skin. She reached behind her, performed tiny magic with her fingers, and the bra fell away.

  Her chest was almost as flat as Paxton’s. Her nipples, dark red and small as dimes, were set a couple inches lower than he expected. She grasped Pax’s arms and guided him down to the floor so that he was lying shoulder to shoulder with Deke. Deke’s skin was cool and dry, and Paxton felt feverish.

  Jo squatted over his legs and with both hands peeled the waistband over his rigid cock. “There we go,” she said.

  Pax felt flushed with embarrassment and excitement. If she touched him he would explode.

  “Your turn, Jo,” Deke said.

  She seemed not to hear him. She was looking at their bodies, but seemed not to see them.

  “Jo?” Pax said.

  “You got nothing to worry about from us,” Deke said.

  She pushed her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts and stepped out of them. Her crotch was a smooth mound, her cleft like the jot of a pencil. Everywhere she was hairless as clay, her skin dark as raspberry syrup.

  “Nothing to see here, people,” she said. Her tone was light, but her voice trembled.

  “Shush,” Deke said, and held up a hand. Pax shifted over, and Jo lowered herself to lie between them.

  ———

  He woke to his father calling his name. Pax’s eyes opened to slits against the light. His father was looming over him, his shadowed face haloed by the overhead light. It was his father as he was before the Changes: the white shirt, the black pompadour.

  “Wake up, now,” his father said sternly, in that voice that could rattle the back pews. He leaned down, abruptly becoming a fat old man in a robe. A chub. “We don’t have much time.”

  Pax pulled himself upright, and the picture frame fell from his chest to his lap. It was deep in the night, 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. He’d passed out on the bed fully dressed, still wearing his shoes. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve only got a little while ’til I’m mad as a hatter again,” his father said. Then, “Why aren’t you in your bedroom?”

  Pax ignored the question, and his father turned and shuffled through the guest room door.

  Pax rubbed a hand across his face. He felt shaky, unbalanced. He picked up the picture Tommy had given him and put it on the bookshelf next to the bed. This guest room had doubled as his mother’s library. She’d been a voracious reader: mysteries, romances, true crime, anything she could get her hands on. During the Changes, when she was burning up from fever, she’d made him read to her.

  Pax got to his feet. The vintage still fizzed in his bloodstream. The room quivered with a strangeness that coyly refused to reveal itself, as if each book and article of furniture had been replaced by a subtly imperfect copy.

  He found his father in the kitchen, trying to open a can of Campbell’s soup, the manual can opener almost lost in his huge hands.

  “Here …,” Pax said, and reached to take the can from him.

  “I got it,” his father said. Pax sat at the table. Eventually his father did manage to peel the lid away. He dumped the soup into a pot on the stove and stood there stirring with his back to the room.

  “I suppose Rhonda took you to see her place yesterday,” his father said.

  Pax was surprised he remembered her visit. “It was nice. Homey. Very clean.”

  His father grunted. “You don’t think I can take care of myself.”

  “I never said that,” Pax said, unable to keep the annoyance from his voice. He didn’t know if it was fatigue or the vintage, but his emotions kept teeter-tottering between anger and grief.

  His father said, “I do things the way I want, when I want. I’m not going to go to her little … pet shop. All this—” He made a gesture that could have meant anything. “All this bother, I’m not usually like this. I manage just fine. God always provides a way.”

  “If this is providing, then you must have really pissed him off.”

  His father half turned. “Watch it, boy.”

  “Not just you, the whole town,” Pax went on. “The Changes? Now that was Old Testament–quality smiting.”

  “Not everything’s a punishment, Paxton. There are trials in life. Tests
that teach us something.”

  “Oh, got it,” Pax said. “The Job thing. God makes you into a monster, takes away your church, kills your wife—”

  His father swung toward him. “Shut your mouth!”

  Pax remained stock-still. He and his father locked eyes, but only for a moment. Pax looked away first, shook his head.

  His father turned back to the stove.

  Pax quickly pressed tears from his eyes. What the hell was the matter with him? He breathed deep, trying to master his emotions.

  After a couple minutes his father brought the pot to the table. He set it on a hot pad and picked up a spoon. Pax raised an eyebrow.

  His father looked up. “I can do this because it’s my house.”

  “Yeah. If Mom could see you she’d kill you.”

  “Trust me, she’s watching.”

  Pax couldn’t watch, though—Harlan was practically inhaling the soup. He looked away, but still had to listen to him. After a few minutes, Paxton said, “You remember your first sermon after they reopened the church?” Even though the town was in quarantine, the churches and schools had been shut down for several months for fear of spreading TDS to the remaining townspeople who were unaffected. When his father was finally allowed to hold a service, the pews were almost empty and the cemetery almost full. “You preached on the plagues of Egypt.”

  “Exodus twelve thirty,” his father said. “‘For there was not a house where there was not one dead.’”

  “Jo said you had it wrong,” Pax said. “It wasn’t the plague story we were in, it was the Tower of Babel.”

  His father wiped at his mouth, made a questioning sound.

  “I don’t remember exactly how she put it,” Pax said. “Something about humans growing too proud again. If a multitude of languages didn’t teach us anything, then maybe a multitude of bodies would.”

  His father grunted, then scraped the last of the soup from the pot. Pax rose and carried it to the sink.