Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  That night Dad joined us, and between them they made it sound very simple, almost commonplace. When the staircase appeared, I could make it disappear by saying we don't have an upstairs. We should not make an issue of it with Jason, who seemed unaware of it. And Dad would find us a house as soon as possible where Jason could spend a lot of time outside. Also, Dad would spend more time with us, and with three of us no one person would be burdened by being watchful at all times. We especially should not let Jason realize there was anything weird about stairs that appeared and vanished. It was just another part of the mysterious world he found himself in.

  Dad found the house we're living in now, a few miles from Roanoke, in an affluent subdivision with two sections, A and B. The A section is completed and most of the houses there are occupied. The B section is mostly empty lots with only three complete houses. Two on the far end, and ours. Apparently the developer ran out of money, couldn't get credit, lost interest or something, and Dad was able to get a good deal on a lease for this house.

  Across the street from our house is a park with a clubhouse, a large children's playground, a wading pool, and a covered pavilion. In our own fenced back yard we have a whole playground, swing, sliding board, a jungle gym to climb, and a sandbox.

  Jason is enraptured by trucks, and has a fleet of ten or twelve that he plays with in the kitchen when I'm busy there. If there's a pause in the roars, the whooshes and crashing sounds, I'm quick to glance around and say the magic words if necessary. “We don't have an upstairs.” The roars and whooshes and crashes resume and all is well.

  My ordinary days might strike others as extraordinary, but I've found that anything that you get used to takes on the cloak of ordinariness rather quickly.

  We all share household chores, and Dad's available as a babysitter when he's at our house. Vernon and I go to the movies, have dinner out now and then, and there's bus service nearby to a big mall and also to downtown Roanoke. I know why both Vernon and Dad want to make my life as easy as possible. Vernon's mother abandoned them when he was four, and Vernon's desperately afraid I might decide to go back to my old job in New York. Not a chance. I worked for a soulless insurance company. Besides, I love him too much to think of leaving. I think his mother was a twit who probably ran off with the UPS man.

  Most mornings Jason and I go to the park and playground, where I read or chat with other adults and Jason romps and plays with other children. We get back to the house in time for lunch and then a nap for Jason.

  The day everything changed, we arrived back home and saw two men talking to Dad in the living room. They were both wearing dark suits, and my first thought was missionaries.

  That day, with the strangers in the house, I hurried Jason past the open arch to the living room and on to the kitchen. I was fixing his lunch when Dad entered.

  “Insurance salesmen,” I said. “Missionaries.”

  “Nope. Researchers. They're studying memory loss and drafted me to be one of their subjects.”

  I stopped cutting up an apple. “What do you mean, drafted you?”

  “It seems,” he said, “they're into a study of a new drug to arrest memory loss. It starts at an early age, but after about sixty it speeds up. They want people from sixty to sixty-five to participate in a fifteen-year study to see if the stuff works. They enrolled a couple of guys at the clubhouse, and someone mentioned that I was sixty-two, and they came after me to add to the study. They give tests now and then to see what's going on. They'll be back the day after tomorrow to give me the first test before the stuff has had time to take effect.”

  “Dad, please don't tell me you've agreed, that you let two strangers give you a drug without checking them out thoroughly first. Please tell me you didn't do that.”

  “April,” he said, “they showed me their credentials. They're medical researchers.”

  I called Vernon out from his study. “Tell him what you just told me,” I said to Dad.

  “Well,” he said in a very deliberate way, after he retold it, “I said they gave me the drug, but I didn't say I swallowed it. Now did I? See?” He fished in his pocket and came up with a little white pill.

  “We don't have an upstairs,” Vernon said in a loud voice then, and I didn't even bother to turn to see the staircase before it vanished.

  “Brain drain dudes,” Jason said. “Brain drain dudes.”

  Vernon rolled his eyes and I said helplessly, “Some of the older kids at the playground. He's picking up a lot of words there.”

  Dad held the pill in the palm of his hand and regarded it thoughtfully. “Funny thing,” he said. “I'm sure I never mentioned to anyone how old I am.”

  We were all looking at the pill, and Vernon said in a strained voice, “Dad, I think you'd better put that in something.”

  The pill in Dad's hand was changing—there were tiny thread-like wisps emerging on one side. Dad touched it gingerly with his fingertip, enough to roll it a bit, and the threads vanished.

  “I think you're right,” Dad said. Vernon got a plastic baggie out and Dad let the pill fall into it. He zipped the baggie closed. He tilted his head slightly in the direction of Vernon's study and said to me, “I guess we'd better let you get on with giving Jason his lunch.” They walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway to the study, entered and closed the door behind them.

  It seemed to take forever to get Jason to eat, then to read him a story and tuck him in for a nap. The staircase never appeared while he was in bed, and I was free as soon as he was bedded down. I hurried to the study. No one was there.

  They could have gone out without passing through the kitchen, and evidently that's what they had done, and I was furious. A pill that grows and retracts tendrils, strange men passing out pseudo drugs, appearing and disappearing staircases, suddenly it was all too much. At that moment if the UPS man had come knocking, I would have been tempted to get in his brown truck and go wherever he was going.

  Dad's car was still in the driveway and our car, Vernon's and mine, was still in the garage, so they couldn't have gone far. Sometimes when Vernon was stuck on an article he went for long walks through our half of the subdivision, and I decided that was what they were up to.

  Walking, talking, leaving me out of it altogether, whatever it was. Thinking about it only made me angrier. Then I heard a dog barking and Vernon came into the living room where I was and he was leading a dog on a leash.

  I sank down onto the sofa and closed my eyes for a moment. They were both still there when I opened them again. “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  “Pet store,” he said. “Cute, isn't he? He's a cocker spaniel.”

  “Vernon, I may be losing my mind,” I said carefully. “Would you like to explain anything to me? Anything at all before I start screaming.”

  The dog had black and white spotted long fur, with the requisite oversized silky ears, big soulful eyes, a plume of a tail that was wagging his whole body at the moment.

  Vernon sat down next to me and unleashed the dog. He began to run around the room sniffing everything, including me.

  “He's for Jason,” Vernon said. “He's housebroken, not quite two years old and answers to the name of Spotty.” He took a rubber ball from his pocket and held it up, as if to prove a point.

  “What in God's name is going on here?” I demanded, and heard my voice rising before I even thought of yelling.

  Vernon took my hand. “April, please believe this,” he said. “I never meant to deceive you, lie to you, but there are a few things I didn't mention before. I was afraid to,” he said, and he sounded sincere, abject even. “I was afraid I'd lose you,” he added in a low voice. “I love you so much it scared me, thinking that I might lose you.”

  It's hard to stay mad at a man who sounds like that and says that, but I did. “So, what lies, what deceit? How did you get that dog home from a pet store? Both cars were here! Where's Dad, and why did those men come and give him a pill that puts out tendrils?”

  I would
have gone on, but he put his hand on my mouth and said in an agonized voice, “I've been a fool and I'm sorry. Please promise you'll hear me out before you say anything else.”

  I nodded and he removed his hand. “That night, when I told you about our family, it was clear that you didn't believe me,” he said, holding my hand. “I should have told the rest, but ... Anyway, I didn't. He'll outgrow it at about six or seven, that's true. But not forever,” he said. I yanked my hand loose. “Just hear me out,” he said again and I put both clenched hands in my lap, prepared to listen before I lit into him.

  “When I reached puberty,” he said, “I began seeing the staircase again, and I knew I was doing it myself. Dad knew it was happening almost as soon as I did. He ... he educated me. I had to learn how to use the stairs.”

  I shook my head. “What do you mean, learn how to use the stairs?”

  “They're real, April,” he said.

  He talked until Jason woke up and went crazy excited when he saw the dog. It was love at first sight, both ways. After he was dressed, he and Spotty went to play ball in the back yard, and Vernon and I sat on the patio where he finished telling me.

  The stairs are real and Jason has no idea where they lead or that he's responsible for them. He can't be allowed to go up them or even suspect how real they are. He'll have to be taught how to use them when he reaches puberty, and Vernon and Dad will be his teachers. The stairs will end up wherever he decides he wants to be, but first he has to know exactly where that is. After he has learned his lessons thoroughly he will no longer need the stairs to go wherever he wants to be.

  At about that point I suddenly craved a long tall gin and anything. Or perhaps straight gin. And I seldom drink anything alcoholic.

  “Vernon,” I said, sitting on a sunny patio in a subdivision near Roanoke, Virginia, watching my child play with his dog, so typically mid-American, it was right out of Norman Rockwell, “you're telling me that both you and your father can teleport. And that my son will be able to do it too as soon as he's old enough.” My words were spaced as if I had already had that long tall glass of straight gin.

  Vernon nodded.

  His biographical sketches always make a big deal of the fact that he was graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and that for the next six years his father took him traveling. Exotic places, cities in just about every country anyone ever heard of, villages that no one ever heard of, places so remote they had never been mentioned in any tourist guide.

  I thought of the articles he had written, the places he had been, and I said, “Those years, you didn't bother with airplanes? Is that right? You just went there?”

  He nodded again.

  I thought of all the photographs he had accumulated during those years, he had always said. Most of those pictures were digitized, and few of them had negatives, which some publishers wanted more than the prints. “You're still going to those places, aren't you? To take pictures with your digital camera.”

  He nodded.

  I began to think about Dad's stash of wine, which he likes with his dinner every day. I stood up and said, “I'm going to get drunk now.” I went inside to start, and he remained on the patio looking miserable, watching our son play with his new dog.

  I didn't believe him, I decided, but that was a lie. I hadn't believed it about Jason, either, until proven. Dad had a big assortment of wine, completely unfamiliar to me, but a five dollar bottle or fifty-dollar bottle meant nothing. I opened a red wine and poured a lot into a water glass and took a drink, and then I sat down in the kitchen and the questions began piling up. Where was Dad? Why the dog all at once? Who were those men and what were they after? The list got longer and I began to make notes. In a little while Vernon came in and sat at the table, and I started down the list.

  “He's in Tennessee,” Vernon said. “He'll be back soon. We're going to give the dog the pill. We think it's a tracking device or something like it, that it embeds itself, the covering dissolves, and it lets them keep track of a person's whereabouts. About a month ago Dad attended a horse auction that turned out to be by invitation only, with tight security. The owner of the horses is a competitor and he spotted Dad and called security. Of course, Dad got the hell out of there, but the security firm was alarmed. Apparently it happened at least one other time. Anyway, we suspect that they are trying to find out how he shows up in places where they are responsible for security. Their reputation is at stake. They want to keep track of him and his possible contacts if we're right about the pill.”

  He said that some of his ancestors had been tried as witches, that one had been burned at the stake, and another one imprisoned. Since no prison could hold any of them, he had left and headed west, where he vanished. They, the family, had kept as much of the past a secret as possible—one reason for the big farm in Tennessee, where they had isolation to a point and felt safe. But, he added a bit lamely, a really good investigation might uncover some other events that were not easily explained. I assumed he referred to some of his own travels.

  “Why did Dad go to Tennessee now? What's he up to?”

  “He wants to make sure the house is ready for all of us if we decide it's time to go there,” he said reluctantly. “Only if we think it's necessary,” he added, when I shook my head.

  “Why would it be necessary?” I demanded. “What else are you leaving out?”

  He got up and poured himself a glass of wine, returned, and we both took long drinks. “Dad's afraid he might have to take off for a while,” he said. “He doesn't want to leave you and Jason with just me. It's too hard for you. The farm is safe, a one story house, big and comfortable, with some very loyal employees who accept that the family is a little peculiar. He can come and go there easily. No one can sneak up on him, or slip something into his pocket, keep him under surveillance all the time.”

  “So the dog will have the embedded tracking thing,” I said after another drink of wine. It was getting better. I might take it up with dinner, too. “They'll think Dad is at home most of the time while he's free to go wherever he wants to. And so are you.”

  Vernon nodded. He was turning into a regular bobblehead, I thought and giggled.

  “I need a little time,” I said then. “This is all too much for one sitting. I'm going to take a walk.”

  He nodded.

  I walked through the empty subdivision, and even got a little lost a time or two. The streets all wind about, change their names in a capricious manner, and there are few landmarks. But I did need to walk and think. It was crazy, but that didn't mean it was untrue. I could well understand why it had to be kept a closely guarded secret. What a prize they would be to a research neurologist. Not just a scientific goldmine, but for corporations, the military ... Geneticists would go crazy over them. Isolate the gene or genes responsible, and go on from there. To what end? Too many possibilities to contemplate.

  One thought persisted regardless of how many others swam to the surface. I had to protect Jason. Little else mattered. If the farm was the best place to do that, we'd move to the farm. Vernon had grown up there, and he had been safe there. I suspected that we lived in the leased house instead of the farm because that's where Vernon lived when his mother took off. He was afraid I'd get lonely or something. But I had already decided she was a twit. That was not a consideration. Jason's safety was.

  Our house unexpectedly came into sight and I went home.

  Vernon and Dad were both vastly relieved when I told them I agreed that we should move to the farm as soon as possible. Dad had been moving his belongings most of the day, and they both worked well into the night taking things they didn't want movers to handle. We should keep everything as normal appearing as we could, Vernon said that night, not raise any suspicions, and that meant that I should follow my usual routine, keep going to the park and playground and so on. He would arrange for a moving company to come and pack up whatever was left, and ship it. The brain drain dudes would be back the day after tomorrow in the afternoon
between two and three, and Dad would handle them. He would make sure that Spotty was nearby when they arrived, he said. He suspected they wanted to test the tracking device.

  We followed that scenario, and the next day was ordinary. The staircase appeared several times and I sent it away. Jason played with his new dog, and things kept disappearing. Dad's wine collection vanished. Most of Vernon's records, his CDs and DVDs, files, magazines that featured his articles...

  On the next day when we got home from the park, it was in time to see a car stop at the curb in front of our house, and the two men in suits get out and start up our sidewalk. They paused when I crossed the street holding Jason's hand.

  “We're a little early,” one of them said, “but we'd like to see the senior Mr. Branleigh.” He smiled an insurance salesman smile.

  “I'll see if he's home,” I said, unlocking the door, keeping a good grip on Jason's hand. I realized that if the tracking device worked, they believed Dad was there. A spasm of fear tightened my insides. They followed me into the foyer. “Please wait here a minute. Jason, why don't you go play with Spotty while I fix lunch?”

  He was interested in the two men in suits, looking them over soberly, and I had to pull him along with me to the kitchen. Spotty started to bark and Jason ran out to roll on the ground with him.

  I glanced inside Vernon's study, and went on to Dad's room, where I knocked on the door although I knew he wasn't there. Those men weren't expected until later and he was busy. But I went through the motions.

  When I returned to the foyer, I gasped. The staircase was there and the men in suits were gone. I said the magic words, but they had lost their magic. Jason had to hear it, I remembered, and ran to the back door and out. Jason was sitting on his swing, talking to Spotty, who was watching him. I said the words again, loud enough for him to hear me. He didn't look up or indicate that he had heard, but he seldom did. I ran back to the foyer. The staircase was gone. And the men in suits? Where had they gone?