Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

The smell of the vintage blossomed to fill the room. Aunt Rhonda came out of her office holding a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. She put one hand on Paxton’s shoulder. “Good boy,” she said.

Half the linen closet seemed to be flapping on lines strung across the front yard. The twins had been cleaning again.

They were waiting for him in the house. They saw his face and one of them said, “Did something happen?” That was Rainy. She seemed years older than her sister, a young woman deigning to act childlike on occasion for the sake of the smaller children.

“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.”