The Basement Ch. 01

The Doctor had always warned Nina never to go into his basement laboratory, and to drive the point home he always kept the sturdy door to the workroom locked. He was so fastidious about this that Nina had never even managed a peek around the corner as he entered the room on days he researched from home or left the room at the end of the day to head to the liquor cabinet for, as he termed it, "some well-earned relaxation." Naturally his secrecy didn't dissuade Nina but, if anything, stoked her curiosity intolerably. So too did the strange odors that sometimes emerged from the laboratory despite the thickness of the basement door, and the implacable sounds that she either heard or imagined: rustling that sounded neither human nor animal; halting footsteps that seemed less like walking than its arrhythmic attempt; grumbles and murmurs that sounded as though they came from a man's throat but had no solid anchor in language.

Nina was apprehensive to learn what her stepdad was doing these many hours and days, what he could be creating that would make sounds of that kind. But the more she asked—and, particularly, when she specifically mentioned the sounds and smells she'd discerned—the more secretive he got, telling her gruffly to concentrate on her own studies and not concern herself with matters above her intellectual station.

Nina's father, the esteemed Dr. Brownmiller, had set the bar high for her. In the thirty years since he'd gotten his Ph.D. from MIT, the Doctor had worked at the Naval Warfare Systems Lab and NIH, performing groundbreaking research on disease and mutation. After that he'd spent 15 years at AgronCo—the biggest bioengineering firm then working in genetically modified crops—and after that, BioFense Ventures. BioFense had been a startup bioweapons counterterrorism research company that soon became DARPA's main private-sector partner in bleeding-edge bioweapons R&D.

During the highly classified work he'd done for BioFense, the Doctor had learned secrets he'd never unlearn: about the fragility of peace, the ease with which terrorists or rogue states could spread deadly organisms, but also how simple it would be for someone in the Defense Department itself to release such agents. But he also felt that things had taken place in the labs at BioFense and DARPA that had been deliberately swept from his mind. Sometimes today, five years after he'd retired and BioFense had been shut down in a cascade of funding and ethics scandals, he'd flash back on those days the same way one sometimes is dogged by the feel but not the detail of a dream one still owns the impact of but can't recall. Sometimes when he saw white tiles, metal trays, test tubes, any other trappings reminiscent of the biolabs he'd spent so much time in, he'd have the same flash: as if the night before he'd dreamed about monsters, gray, synthetic flesh, something wholly alien, something with appetites but without any intelligence as normal people might understand it. But he could never fix on any image and the impression was fleeting, and a moment later it was easy for him to dismiss the strange flash as a fit of paranoia (after all, such could be expected after years of classified defense work)—at least until it happened again.

In any case, if his work at BioFense had cost him something psychologically, it had also proved lucrative financially and in terms of his esteem among his colleagues. Not only had he earned a reputation as one of the finest scientists ever to work in the field, he'd gotten a generous package from BioFense before they'd gone out of business, enough to buy a brownstone in Georgetown and then, after his retirement, a country farmhouse far from civilization in West Virginia. When Nina's mother—the Doctor's wife, Agnes—had been alive, the family had alternated between G-town and West Virginia, but when Agnes died the Doctor retreated to the farm with his stepdaughter Nina, and it was here they'd lived, in relative seclusion, for the past ten years.

There not being much in the West Virginia public school system to recommend it, the Doctor had home-taught Nina in her early years (she'd been eight when Agnes died), and then enrolled her in Nautica Fallows, an exclusive all-girls' academy, in ninth grade, hoping she would follow in her stepfather's footsteps. But in terms of academic status Nina didn't have a lot to brag about. Although she had just turned nineteen she'd yet to graduate despite all the individual attention paid to her. This had been a frustration to both her and the Doctor, though for different reasons. Nina, seeing the respect her stepdad commanded, doubtless coveted the same respect for herself. The Doctor, meanwhile, found his simple-minded and unambitious adopted daughter a nuisance and embarrassment and was disappointed that she showed few of his gifts. After all, though, she wasn't blood.

The gifts Nina possessed, instead, were physical in nature, though sequestered at the academy she wanted for chances—that is, boys—to develop them. Before Nina came of age, the Doctor had scarcely noticed her more fleshly gifts, but now he found himself eyeballing his stepdaughter more and more as she went about the house. With the boldness that comes of innocence, Nina would pad to the kitchen in the middle of the day in nothing but a tight white t-shirt and sheer girlish knickers, and the doctor found his eyes drifting to her ample nates, bouncy and smooth under her satiny underpants. He would ogle her denuded thighs, callow and tan with youth, and her narrow waist, and think of getting a hold of her amidlengths and stabbing his wrinkly cock in her teenage oyster. Even though he was nearing seventy, he could still get hard, and every time Nina absent-mindedly teased him with her underclad body, he'd feel the stirring of a man half his age.

He found little ways to get his jollies. He liked to give Nina's flapjacks a greedy pinch or pat her on the backs of her plump, naked thighs while exhorting her, disingenuously, to "put some pants on." Or as they sat together watching TV he might comment on her ripening bosom; adolescence had come to her late but was zealous when it arrived, and Nina's goodly udders were now somewhere between C and D cups, the doctor speculated. "That's quite a tasty pair of biscuits you're growing there, Nina," he'd observe with a long leer at Nina's chest through her snug tee. When some delectable dish came on TV—Jessica Tisdale in a skimpy bikini, say, or Ashley Alba in a revealing tube top—he'd pretend to compliment Nina. "Man, that sure is one hot tart," he'd say, and then ogle Nina's boobs once more. "You've still got a better set than her, though."

"You're always talking about my bubbies," Nina would observe. "Why can't you respect me for my mind?"

"Because you haven't got one, dear," the doctor would observe—somewhat cruelly, Nina thought, though he pretended to be joking—and Nina would fall silent, looking down at her own ripe body and wondering if that was really the only worthwhile thing about her.

Perhaps partly because he was secretly ashamed at his lustful thoughts and acting out over slender Nina, perhaps because of the burden of whatever project he was working on in the basement, his trips to the liquor cabinet became more frequent and longer. On TV night he'd invariably come to the couch with a fat drink in his hand and it seemed to Nina scarcely ten minutes would go by in which he didn't get up for a topoff. As the evening wore on and the movie of the week gave way to the late news and finally Letterman, the smell of liquor on stepdad's breath would wax and it seemed as though each time he returned from the hooch cabinet he'd sit down a little closer to Nina on the couch. At first it was okay but Nina started not to like it so much after stepdad started patting her on the inside of her leg or even laying his palm on her ungarbed inner thigh, rubbing his hand up and down against her whiskerless drumstick, squeezing her juicy meat. Just when the touch started to feel gross and Nina was mustering up the resolve to complain, stepdad would pat her and stand, making the pretense that he was only playfully petting her in the process of rising. It made Nina uncomfortable and gave her the willies, a bit. She started to consider putting on pants during TV night because sitting next to stepdad in only a night shirt and panties didn't feel as natural as it used to. But it was hot in the house and she kept hoping, against hope, that he would someday tire of feeling up her naked legs and stop doing it.