Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

Twenty seconds later he saw the lights flashing in his rearview mirror and he swore again.

THE MOSQUITO, INVISIBLE in the dark, tiptoed across the skin of his biceps.

Pax sat on the front stoop, all the house’s lights turned off, and stared at the moonlit tops of the trees, waiting. When the bite came he didn’t flinch. It was a kind of pleasure to keep his arm perfectly still, to let the little thing insert its needle snout and drink from him. He could almost feel its tiny body fill up with blood.

Behind him his father’s snores augered through the walls. Last night the sound had gnawed at him, keeping him awake until the early morning. Pax didn’t fall asleep so much as lie still until sleep fell on him. Now the snoring seemed less like a personal attack. Not quite background noise yet, but getting there. A couple more nights, Pax thought, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it, like those people in Chicago with their bedrooms next to the El.

A couple more nights. He hadn’t called his manager to tell him he wasn’t coming back soon. He knew he should call in, negotiate for more time. But fuck it, his father was sick, and if they didn’t give him his shitty job back when he got back to town, well, there were plenty of shitty jobs.

So instead of thinking about his nonlife in Chicago he’d spent the day doing everything required of a dutiful son. He made Harlan breakfast, helped him to the toilet, even finished cutting his hair. His father’s size complicated everything. The quarter ton of flesh didn’t seem to be part of his father at all, but some great cargo he was forced to carry, a penitential weight. Pax knew that his body was an effect of the Changes, a symptom as inarguable as Deke’s powdered skin, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking, Jesus, Dad, how did you let yourself get like this?

Pax helped him navigate back to the living room. Every movement had to be strategized, paced, evaluated. What would happen if he fell? There was no way Pax could get him up on his own. Finally he settled onto and into the creaking couch. Another task accomplished, another checkmark in Paxton’s column. When I leave, Pax thought, he won’t be able to say I didn’t help him. He won’t be able to say I didn’t try.

Harlan napped, and then in the afternoon Pax sat beside him and they watched TV together the way they always had, talking only during the commercials and saying nothing of consequence. His father liked the Discovery Channel. Animals killing animals and being killed, having sex, raising animal babies.

Paxton’s thoughts kept returning to the stack of legal papers he’d hidden under the bed. If his father sensed that Pax was distracted he didn’t mention it. He didn’t ask where Pax had been with Rhonda the day before, or when Pax was going back to the city. Both of them seemed determined to prove that they needed nothing of each other.

For dinner Pax made spaghetti and they ate on the couch together. His father fell asleep watching the news. Pax got a blanket from the hall closet and tucked it around his father’s shoulders. Harlan’s skin had started to swell and blister. Liquid gleamed on the backs of his hands.

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.