The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  “Jesus, Rhonda, Clete?” The boy was a moron and a thug. “What did he do to him?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Paxton’s a little roughed up, but he’s fine.”

  “I told you last week,” Deke said. “You can take care of Harlan, God knows he needs it, but Paxton is off limits.”

  “Paxton put himself on limits when he tried to break into the Home. I chewed Clete out when I heard what happened. But honestly, Paxton’s acting like a drug addict. Next time he tries something like that they’ll shoot him dead. Besides, there’s no reason for him to break in.” She opened the car door. “His daddy’s gone dry again.”

  “Really.”

  “Hasn’t produced a drop since we brought him home from the church.”

  “Maybe he’s recharging. He was sure gushing that night.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I think it’s something else. Something between fathers and sons. You know how ugly that can get.”

  His gut tightened as if she’d jabbed a two-by-four under his ribs. Goddamn her. She was talking about Willie and Donald Flint. As if he could ever forget what happened, what she held over him.

  She tapped the top of the car. “You think about that fund, Deke. While you make your beautiful furniture.”

  There were four of them who found Willie that day, but it was Deke who’d led the way into the house, an ancient cabin that didn’t even have an indoor toilet. He practically knocked down the door getting in. Rhonda came in behind him, followed by Barron Truckle and Jo Lynn.

  It was Jo who’d come to Deke with the news of the charlie parties, the rumors of a new drug and bad things happening up in the woods. She’d convinced him they had to do something about it, and not only that, but since Willie and Donald were charlies, they had to bring Aunt Rhonda with them. Rhonda wasn’t mayor then, but Jo said she was the leader of her clade. It was the first time he’d heard that word.

  Donald Flint, Willie’s youngest son, was in the front room, sitting on the couch with a half-naked charlie girl on his lap, facing him. Another charlie girl lay on a pile of blankets on the floor; she’d been jolted awake by the sudden noise. The place was a sty, beer cans everywhere.

  Donald looked at them stupidly, then decided he should be offended. He pushed the girl off him and started to get up. Deke yelled something—he didn’t remember what—but it made Donald stick to his spot on the couch.

  Rhonda kicked the girl on the floor, told both of them to get home. She knew their families, and they knew she knew them. The girls scrambled for shirts and jeans and hustled out. Half a minute later they’d started up one of the six cars in the gravel driveway and peeled out.

  Deke told Barron to watch Donald, and then he followed Jo down the hallway. She marched straight to Willie’s bedroom as if she’d been there before. Or perhaps she was only following the smell. When that back bedroom door opened the stench rolled out in a wave: shit and rot and a strange sickly-sweet odor he didn’t recognize. It would be months before Deke would be able to name it as the smell of stale vintage.

  The old man’s corpse lay sprawled sideways across a pair of double beds that had been pushed together. He was wider than any human being he’d seen to that point. Willie’s body seemed to have collapsed in on itself like a rotted pumpkin, and his skin was pocked and cratered by infection and his son Donald’s inept needlework.

  Someone gasped, and Deke looked down and behind him. Rhonda had come into the room and burst into tears. He’d always thought that was just a phrase, but the tears were coming out of her like a cloudburst, a flood, making her cheeks gleam.

  Then just as suddenly the tears stopped. Her face went rigid and somehow she willed herself to regain control of her body. Later, Deke thought that this was the moment she became mayor of Switchcreek.

  I see now, Rhonda said. Or at least that’s what he thought she said. I see now.

  Rhonda turned and strode back down the hallway. Deke hurried after her, shoulders scraping the ceiling.

  In the living room, Donald was off the couch and barking into Barron’s face like a furious child. The boy was naked except for a pair of sweatpants hanging low on his hips. Two years before he’d been a skinny kid, and then the Changes had made him into a plump, round-faced charlie. Over the past few months, however, he’d transformed again, turning into a cartoonish mass of muscles: biceps too big for sleeves, shoulders swallowing his neck. A bodybuilder who’d been eating other bodybuilders.

  Rhonda reached the boy in two strides and turned his head sideways with a slap.

  Donald blinked, touched his cheek. Rhonda shouted something—Deke thought it was something dramatic like, You killed him, but perhaps it was only a string of curse words—and then she hit him again, this time with her closed fist.

  Donald frowned, shook his head. Then he leaped on her.

  Rhonda fell to the floor, Donald on top of her, his hands locked around her throat. Donald was fast, and strong. But still no argo.

  Deke’s memories of the next few minutes were disjointed, a collection of snapshots. He remembered his arm swinging down like a wrecking ball. He remembered Donald suddenly on the other side of the room, sprawled on the floor. An armchair and a lamp between them had been knocked over.

  Then suddenly Donald threw himself toward the couch, reaching under it. Was there a gun? Deke couldn’t remember if there was a gun.

  The next moment Deke was across the room and Donald was tumbling through the open door like a rag doll. There was a sickening whump as he struck something outside—a car, as it turned out.

  Deke wanted to destroy the man. It was that simple. And he got what he wanted.

  Outside, Donald lay half sitting up against the crumpled front fender of Willie’s Ford pickup, his head bent at a too-steep angle, as if he were trying to look inside his own chest.

  Rhonda, Barron, and Jo came out sometime later. Maybe it was only a few seconds. “I fucked up,” Deke remembered telling Jo. “I fucked up.” Jo leaned over him and circled her arms around his gray neck.

  A little later Jo and Rhonda would work out where Barron would take the body, who would call the authorities, what mix of manufactured and true facts they could agree upon—the standard bookkeeping of conspiracy. Rhonda would take care of the charlie girls who’d fled from the house. It would turn out to be almost comically easy to convince them that now that Donald had run off, and who knew if the police would ever find him, the only way they could avoid being charged with Willie’s murder—accessories, at least—was to follow Rhonda’s instructions to the letter. Rhonda told him that by the end they were thanking her, tears in their eyes, for protecting them.

  But before all that, they waited for Deke. He took a long time to get to his feet. When he stood, Barron looked at him like he was a monster.

  But not Jo, and not Aunt Rhonda. “You saved my life,” Rhonda told him. “And this thing here?” She jerked her head toward Donald Flint’s body. “You will not spend one second regretting the day you took this evil piece of shit out of the world. I’m only sorry you beat me to it.”

  Words.

  He thought about Donald every day.

  He walked downtown to Donna’s Sewing Room—a too-quaint name for such a noisy workshop. He stepped through the back door and into a big room loud with the growls of industrial sewing machines, the blare of country radio, and the deep-voiced chatter of half a dozen argo women. Donna stood at the end of a row of machines, a huge bolt of cloth on her shoulder, explaining to her youngest employee how to clear a jam in her machine. The girl, Mandy Sparks, was only seventeen, and the bulky, secondhand JUKI sewing machine was older than she was. All the machines were secondhand and prone to breakdowns. Donna spent half her time playing mechanic.

  She frowned to see him there—they usually didn’t bother each other during the day. He said, “You got a second?”

  Donna told the girl to cut the cloth and start over—“But slow down, for goodness’ sake. Slow is steady and steady is fast”—and set the
bolt of cloth down against one wall. She led him out to the smaller showroom, which was empty of customers.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He slipped his arms around her waist and looked up at her. She was nearly a foot taller than him, but both of them were still growing. No one knew how long argos could live. Some days he felt in his bones that they had decades in them, maybe centuries. Years of slow growth, their bodies stretching up and out and into each other like trees. And some days he felt the future coming at them like an axe.

  “Come on, Deke, I have to get back to work.”

  He wanted to make something better than him. Something as beautiful as she was.

  “I’ve got some good news,” he said.

  Chapter 12

  THEY’D COME TO him Sunday morning as he lay sprawled out on the grass. The voices crooned to him, making pitying, motherly sounds. Hands brushed the hair from his eyes, caressed the welts on his face.

  Pax pushed himself onto his back, groaned. A voice like chocolate said, “There there. We got you.”

  Small hands slipped under thighs and waist—“One, two …”—and then he was off the ground and swaying. Bruised skin awoke. Nerves totaled up damages.

  “Wait,” he said. His voice cracked.

  He forced open one eye. Two beta children cradled him between them, moving sideways toward the house. The girls were identical, with placid faces the color of wine.

  “I can walk,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” the girl to his left said, and the other one said, “We got tired of waiting.”

  The sky vanished as they carried him inside the house. His father’s house; even with his eyes closed he would have known it from the smell.

  They lifted him easily onto the couch. They carefully peeled off his shirt, damp from dew, and tsked at his bruises. They found washrags and dabbed at the crusts of blood on his face, then plastered him with Band-Aids. He asked for aspirin and they brought him two ancient powdery tablets and a water glass. The water pinked with his blood.

  They tucked a blanket around Pax, then one of them sat next to him while the other attended to him. The girls traded places every ten or fifteen minutes. Sometime in the early afternoon they brought him Campbell’s tomato soup and packets of Lance crackers they dug out of their backpacks.

  The girls seemed most comfortable when Pax was asleep; several times he dozed, and he’d wake to hear them babbling to him and over him—about his injuries, or what was on TV, or some minor adventure they’d had in the woods—but when he spoke or asked them a question they would go silent, change the channel, or slip from the room to bring him Ziploc bags freshly packed with ice cubes.

  He woke once to the phone ringing. He shouted for them not to answer it, and the girls obeyed: They looked at the phone as it rang seven, eight times before going silent. A few minutes later it rang again and he told them to unplug it.

  Sometime before dusk they said that they had to leave, but they wouldn’t stop fussing over him.

  “Girls,” he said. He still couldn’t tell them apart. Was it Rainy in the jeans with the torn knee, and Sandra in the dress? “Thank you. I’m fine now.” His lips were swollen and his jaw ached, so the words came out glued.

  “We’ll be back in the morning,” one of them said, and the other said, “Don’t you worry.” They slung their packs onto their shoulders and slipped out the door.

  ———

  The nightmares woke him, or else it was the pounding headache, or the stale scent of his father lingering in the air. He tried to sit up and his ribs scraped painfully. It took him many small movements to ease onto his side, then lever himself onto his feet. He shuffled to the bathroom, edged past the gigantic toilet, and flicked on the light above the sink. He opened the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet before he could look too closely at his reflection.

  He turned on the faucet, splashed water onto his face and let it run down his neck. He pushed a handful of aspirin into his mouth and bent, wincing, to drink from the tap.

  He’d been dreaming of fists, and elbows, and knees.

  It had taken him only seconds to surrender everything, to submit. One punch, really. He was on the ground, his cheek scraping the pavement, before he registered the blur of the fist that struck him. He raised his hand as if signaling, Yes, that was a good one, you got me. Then Clete began the beating in earnest.

  Pax didn’t even try to fight back. When he was on the ground he tried to curl into a ball. When they held him against the car it was all he could do to raise his forearms to deflect some of the blows, but even that token of defiance seemed to anger Clete more. At first Pax had tried pleading with them—God knows what he tried to say—but soon he gave up trying to speak. He didn’t disassociate. He didn’t retreat to some safe place in his mind. He didn’t endure. The pain seemed to turn him inside out like a reversible coat. All the nerves on the outside. Every thought was the same thought, over and over: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  He walked back past his old bedroom to the guest room. Without turning on the light he found the bed and gingerly lay down. Sleep seemed impossible now. Each strained muscle insisted on reporting in, each cut and bruise jostled to inscribe its name and serial number on his brain. His head throbbed. Incredibly, none of these sensations drowned out the ache he felt for his father. The craving was still there, skulking like a coyote outside the circle of a fire.

  We don’t live in our bodies, he thought. We are our bodies. A simple thing, but he kept forgetting it.

  In the morning he heard someone rummaging through the kitchen, clinking dishes and closing cabinets. He managed to walk down the hallway and found them setting out bowls and pouring candy-colored cereal from a box he didn’t recognize. A plastic gallon jug of milk sat on the counter.

  “Don’t you guys ever knock?”

  One of the girls yelped in surprise; then both of them erupted into quacking laughter. It was the first time he’d seen either one of them laugh.

  “You scared us!” one said, and the other said, “We’re not ready! Go back!”

  He raised his hands and stepped back around the corner. “I hope you’re not using milk from the fridge,” he said. “I can’t vouch for anything in there.” Come to think of it, there hadn’t been anything in the refrigerator but condiment bottles. The girls must have brought their own milk and food.

  After a few minutes they ushered him into the kitchen and sat him down at the table. One of them—the one in the yellow floppy dress—tucked a napkin into the neck of his T-shirt. The napkin dropped off a second later and he put it in his lap.

  The cereal was generic, some kind of Froot Loops knockoff. “I hope you didn’t steal this,” he said.

  “It’s ours as much as anyone else’s,” the other girl said. She wore a red T-shirt and jeans torn at one knee.

  “Tell me, which one are you?” he said to the girl in red. “Sandra?”

  “I’m Rainy,” she said.

  “Okay, red shirt Rainy, yellow dress Sandra. Whatever you do, don’t change clothes.”

  He chewed the cereal, the pain in his jaw and the alarming looseness of two of his teeth making him go slow.

  “You know,” Pax said to Rainy, “you’re named after my mother.”

  “Lorraine,” Rainy said. “She died in the Changes.”

  “That’s right,” Pax said. “You know, my mom loved your mom a lot. Like a daughter.”

  “We know,” Sandra said breezily.

  After perhaps a minute Rainy said, “You said you could tell us stories about her,” she said. “At the funeral.”

  “Oh, right. Your mom.” He started to beg off, but then he got an image of Jo Lynn at these girls’ age, eleven or twelve years old.

  “Once we were at the Bugler’s,” Pax said. “The checkout woman accused me of trying to shoplift a Chunky candy bar. Do you know about Chunky’s? They stopped making them for a while.” The girls looked at him. Quizzically? Patiently? He couldn’t tell. �
��Anyway, I’m standing there petrified, but your mom got mad—so mad. She lit into the woman, whipping out words I couldn’t even pronounce.” He shook his head. “It was like watching Jesus in the Tabernacle. The clerk didn’t know what to say back, she was just sputtering.”

  “What happened then?” Sandra asked.

  “Jo slapped down a dollar and didn’t even wait for the change. And then—” He shrugged, smiling. “Then we just strolled out of there.”

  Rainy said, “But you were trying to steal it.”

  “No! Well, okay, yes. But that was stupid; I shouldn’t have tried to do that. The point is, no one was going to accuse one of her friends of a crime. Your mom would have defended me either way, because she’d already decided—”

  He looked down at his cereal bowl, a sudden emotion closing his throat.

  “Decided what?” Rainy asked.

  He thought: She’d already decided he was a good person.

  “Nothing,” he said. He picked up his spoon, put it down again. “She just thought that that’s what friends do.”

  Sandra said, “Your face looks worse today.”

  He laughed. “Thanks.”

  “Really, it’s a lot more colors,” she said.

  Pax said, “Isn’t anybody wondering where you are? Did you tell Tommy you were coming here?”

  The girls exchanged a look. Pax had started to identify common facial expressions—the way their lips tightened and relaxed; the fractional droop of an eyelid, the slight downward jerk of a chin—but for most of those expressions he could no more interpret them than translate wind into words. But that look was easier—almost always it was Sandra checking in with Rainy, following her sister’s lead.

  Rainy said, “Where we go ain’t anybody’s business—”

  “—especially Tommy,” Sandra finished.

  Something in their tone alarmed him. “Girls, is Tommy … Is he hurting you?”

  Sandra looked at Rainy. Rainy said nothing.

  Pax said, “Look, if something’s happening—or if something happened that night your mother died? You can tell me.”