The Law of Nines

No one thought the old man was crazy, exactly. Most people thought that he was merely “eccentric.” That was the polite word people used when a person was a little loony. His grandfather’s impishly innocent outlook on life—the way he always smiled and marveled at everything, and the way he became distracted by the most ordinary objects, along with his utter lack of interest in the business of others—reassured people that he was harmless. Just the neighborhood nut. Most people regarded Ben as a meaningless old man who tinkered with the likes of tin cans, tattered books, and odd assortments of mold that he grew in glass petri dishes.

It was an image that Alex knew his grandfather cultivated—being invisible, he called it—and was quite different from the kind of man Ben was in reality.

Alex never thought that Ben was crazy, or even eccentric, merely . . . unique, a singular, remarkable individual who knew about things that most people could not even imagine. From what Alex gathered, Ben had seen enough death. He loved life and simply wanted to investigate everything about it.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Ben asked.

Alex blinked at the question. “What?”

“It’s your birthday. Shouldn’t you be with a young woman, out enjoying yourself?”

Alex let out a deep breath, not wanting to get into it. He forced a smile. “I thought you might have a present for me, so I came by.”

“A present? What for?”

“My birthday, remember?”

The old man scowled. “Of course I remember. I remember everything, remember?”

“Did you remember to get me a present?” Alex chided.

“You’re too old for a present.”

“I got you a present for your birthday. Are you too old?”

The scowl deepened. “What am I to do with, with . . . whatever that thing is.”

“It makes coffee.”

“My old pot makes coffee.”

“Bad coffee.”

The old man shook a finger. “Just because things are old, that doesn’t mean they’re of no use anymore. New things aren’t necessarily any better, you know. Some are worse than what came before.”

Alex leaned in a little and lifted an eyebrow. “Did you ever try the coffeemaker I got you?”

Ben withdrew the finger. “What is it you want for your birthday?”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought you’d get me a present, that’s all. I don’t really need anything, I guess.”

“There you go, then. I didn’t need a coffeemaker, either. Could have saved your money and bought yourself a present.”

“It was meant to show respect. It was token of love.”

“I already know you love me. What’s not to love?”

Alex couldn’t help smiling as he slid onto the spare stool. “You have a funny way of making me forget about my mother on my birthday.”

Alex immediately regretted his words. It seemed inappropriate to even suggest that he might want to forget his mother on his birthday.

Ben, a tight smile on his lips, turned back to his workbench and picked up a soldering iron. “Consider it my birthday gift.”

Alex watched smoke curl up as his grandfather soldered the end of a long, thin metal tube to the top of a tin lid.

“What are you making?”

“An extractor.”

“What are you trying to extract?”

“An essence.”

“An essence of what?”

The old man turned in a huff. “Sometimes you can be a pest, Alexander, do you know that?”

Alex lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I was just curious, that’s all.” He watched in silence as solder turned to liquid metal and flowed around the end of the tube.

“Curiosity gets you into trouble,” his grandfather finally said, half under his breath.

Alex’s gaze dropped away. “I remember my mother saying—back before she got sick—that I got my sense of curiosity from you.”

“You were a kid at the time. All kids are curious.”

“You’re hardly a kid, Ben. Life should be about being curious, shouldn’t it? You’ve always been curious.”

In the silence of the basement room, the only sound was the “tick” made each time the plastic tail of the black cat went back and forth, marking each passing second on the clock in the cat’s stomach.

Still hunched over the bench, Ben turned his dark eyes toward his grandson. “There are things in this world to be curious about,” the old man said in a soft, cryptic voice. “Things that don’t make proper sense, aren’t the way they appear. That’s why I’ve taught you the way I have—to be prepared.”

A shiver tingled up between Alex’s shoulder blades. His grandfather’s chilling tone was like a doorway opening a crack, a doorway into places Alex could not begin to imagine. It was a doorway into places that were not the realm of lighthearted wonder that usually seemed to make up Ben’s life. It was the flip side of lighthearted, seen only during training sessions.

Alex was well aware that, for all his tinkering, his grandfather never really made anything. Not in the conventional sense, anyway. He never made a birdhouse, or fixed a screen door, or even cobbled together lawn art out of scraps of metal.

“What essence are you extracting?”

The old man smiled in a curious fashion. “Oh, who knows, Alexander? Who really knows?”

“You must know what you’re trying to do.”