“I’m fine. Everything worked out.”
“Fine, he says. Holy shit. Does Mom know? No, of course not, she would have told me. She would have told me, wouldn’t she? Holy shit.” He swept down on the rear end of a truck, and for the first time in the trip he slowed down rather than change lanes. “So what were you in for? Did you check yourself in, or did they commit you? Does Mom know?”
“I’ll tell her tonight. It’s not a big deal.”
“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” Amra said. “But you should feel free to talk about this. It’s not a stigma.”
“Come on, it’s sort of a stigma,” Lew said.
I nodded. “There are a lot of crazy people in there.”
Amra turned back around. “I’m trying to talk seriously. This is important.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said.
Lew laughed. “Every time you say that it gets more convincing.” He gunned the engine, swung around a station wagon, and swerved back right across two lanes, just in time to catch our exit. I braced myself against the door as we swooped into the hard curve of the off ramp.
“So what was it?” Lew asked. He glanced left and merged onto the street. “Thought you were Napoleon? Seeing pink elephants?”
“More like hearing things.”
“No shit.” I’d shocked him sober.
Amra looked at Lew, back at me. “Is this about the thing that happened when you were little?”
So Lew had told her. Which I should have expected—they were married. Family. “When I was possessed, you mean.”
Amra looked so sad I made myself laugh. “Come on, I barely remember it.”
“You ask me, he was faking,” Lew said. He steered the car onto our block. Familiar trees scrolled past the windows, bare limbs raking a close, steely sky. “Del would always do anything to get Mom’s attention.”
about the author
DARYL GREGORY’S short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, several year’s-best anthologies, and other fine venues. In 2005 he received the Asimov’s Readers’ Award for the novelette “Second Person, Present Tense.” He lives with his wife and two children in State College, Pennsylvania, where he writes both fiction and web code.
The Devil’s Alphabet is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2009 by Daryl Gregory