Читать онлайн «The Devil's Alphabet»
Автор Дэрил Грегори
BY DARYL GREGORY
To Darrell and Thelma Gregory
acknowledgments
Many people helped make the book you’re holding (or viewing, or listening to) and I owe them my sincere thanks. Chris Schluep, with a deft hand on the editorial stick, guided this book the final miles over the chilly Hudson. Many more people at Del Rey worked to get these words in front of you, including some—Fleetwood Robbins (who acquired this book when its title was
My gratitude goes as well to the early readers: Charles Coleman Finlay, Sarah Kelly, Cathrynne M. Valente, and the rest of the Blue Heaven workshop crew who critiqued the first draft; Heather Lindsley, who fine-tuned the second; and Kathy Bieschke, Gary Delafield, and Elizabeth Delafield, who marked up hundreds of pages in between. Emma and Ian Gregory read none of it, but informed all of it.
And to all the Gregorys, Barbaras, Meyers, Riddles, and Heatons, the multitude of aunts, uncles, and cousins—so many cousins!—scattered over the Smokies: thanks for feeding your Yankee relation every time he came to town. Even more than the bizarre residents of Switchcreek, the lonely boy in this book is a creature of pure imagination.
Chapter 1
PAX KNEW HE was almost to Switchcreek when he saw his first argo.
The gray-skinned man was hunched over the engine of a decrepit, roofless pickup truck stalled hood-up at the side of the road. He straightened as Pax’s car approached, unfolding like an extension ladder. Ten or eleven feet tall, angular as a dead tree, skin the mottled gray of weathered concrete. No shirt, just overalls that came down to his bony knees. He squinted at Pax’s windshield.
Jesus, Pax thought. He’d forgotten how big they were.
He didn’t recognize the argo, but that didn’t mean much, for a lot of reasons. He might even be a cousin.
The neighborly thing would be to pull over and ask the man if he needed help. But Pax was running late, so late. He fixed his eyes on the road outside his windshield, pretending not to see the man, and blew past without touching his brakes. The old Ford Tempo shuddered beneath him as he took the next curve.The two-lane highway snaked through dense walls of green, the trees leaning into the road. He’d been gone for eleven years, almost twelve. After so long in the north everything seemed too lush, too overgrown. Subtropical. Turn your back and the plants and insects would overrun everything.
His stomach burned from too much coffee, too little food, and the queasy certainty that he was making a mistake. The call had come three days ago, Deke’s rumbling voice on his cell phone’s voice mail: Jo Lynn was dead. The funeral was on Saturday morning. Just thought you’d want to know.
Pax deleted the message but spent the rest of the week listening to it replay in his head. Dreading a follow-up call. Then 2 a. m. Saturday morning, when it was too late to make the service—too late unless he drove nonstop and the Ford’s engine refrained from throwing a rod—he tossed some clothes into a suitcase and drove south out of Chicago at 85 mph.
