Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Mine’s Jimmy Waggoner.”

  “Get in, Jimmy Waggoner.”

  He did. I locked his door from outside (the passenger-side door cannot be opened from within) and then took my place behind the controls; soon we were airborne, gliding smoothly and quickly over the cityscape.

  Jimmy looked out the window and down on the world he was no longer a part of. “This is soooooooooo neat!”

  “Glad you like it.”

  “Uh-huh, I really do. This is the best birthday present I ever got, ever!”

  “It your birthday today, Jimmy? December eighteenth?”

  “Uh-huh. Mommy says I was her ‘Christmas Baby.’ She let me watch The Searchers on tape and then she gave me some pizza money.”

  Something cold and ugly crept up my back. “How, uh...how old are you today, Jimmy?”

  “I’m seven,” he said proudly, pointing to his chest.

  Then he saw his hand—

  —the thick hair on his arms—

  —felt the beard on his face—

  —and before I could I activate the autopilot and stop him from doing so, he grabbed the rear-view mirror and turned it toward himself, getting a good look at his face.

  “That ain’t me!” he cried, his voice breaking. “Where’d I go, mister? Where’d I go?”

  I had to sedate him a few seconds later. If I hadn’t, we would have crashed.

  Jimmy was one strong child.

  * * *

  I put the hover-car down in a clearing right smack in the middle of a patch of woodland that surrounds three-quarters of our safe house. A long time ago Parsons and I agreed that the more remote our workplace, the better. This area was near impossible to get to by standard automobile, and if anyone ever did manage to get this far, there was only one road leading to the house. Even without the hidden security cameras that lined the final stretch of that road, we’d see them coming from three miles away.

  I radioed in for a medical team to bring a stretcher. Parsons got on the horn and asked me if I’d managed to get any information from the kid—and kid is how I thought of Jimmy, his age be damned.

  “Just enough to give me the creeps,” I replied.

  Jimmy was still out of it from the tranquilizer shot I’d given him earlier, and as I stared at his peaceful, sleeping form, I figured it was probably for the best.

  I didn’t know which VR cult this kid had belonged to—there were dozens that had temples in this part of the country—but what I did know was that none of them were in the habit of simply dumping their converts in the street and then calling the likes of us to come and clean up the mess.

  The VR cult phenomenon didn’t really get going until 2020, though it had its genesis back in the mid 2000's. Back in the 90's, personal VR equipment was bulky, clumsy to use, and expensive—forget that virtual reality itself on the net was more of a curiosity than anything else, and most of the VR worlds were fairly crude by today’s standards. Then there were the computers and servers themselves; the 90's saw the beginnings of the ISDN proliferation, the introduction of NFSnet—God bless fiber-optic cable—but even those couldn’t manage a transfer rate faster than 2Gb/sec. Then, around 2017, slowly but surely, the faceless Powers-That-Be began giving people a taste of the Next Big Thing, and like lemmings to the sea they lined up.

  Now—Christ, now you were in the dark ages if your system functioned under 1000 MIPS and transferred less than 4 million polygons/sec. The power required for color- and illumination-rendered, real-time, user-controlled animation of (and interaction with) complex, evolving, three-dimensional scenes and beings was widely available. The VR equipment needed to function in these worlds was streamlined into little more than a pair of thin black gloves, a lightweight pair of headphones, and some slightly oversized black glasses with a small pair of sensory clips; one for your nose (to evoke smell) and one that you tucked into the corner of your mouth (to evoke taste). In a world overrun with people, where personal space was moving its way up the endangered species list, VR worlds and servers offered people the chance to “get away from it all” without leaving the confines of their computer terminal.

  Problem was, when you give an apple-pie American something with endless possibilities, they find a quick way to either pervert or trivialize it. It wasn’t long before “cyber-diets” were all the rage—Lose Weight Fast! Slim Down For Summer! Log in, and we’ll give your senses the illusion of being fed. 3D interactive kiddie porn. Sites where you could virtually torture your enemies.

  Oh, yeah—and the gods of cyberspace. Any nutcase with a religious manifesto could buy space and set up a virtual temple to beckon worshipers. Create-A-Deity, online 24 hours a day for your salvation, can I get a witness. Some of the bigger ersatz-religions—Mansonism, Gargoylists, Apostles of the Central Motion, Vonnegutionism (my personal favorite, they used a cat’s cradle as their symbol), the Resurrected Peoples’ Temple, and the Church of the One-Hundred-and-Eightieth Second—were granted licenses to set up their own servers—and because of that, Parsons and me would always have jobs. There would always be lost souls like Jimmy. First get them hooked on the net, alienate them from the world they know, then draw them into your virtual fold, blur the lines between the person they are on the net and the person they are off the net until you trap them forever in the spaceless space between, imprison them in the consensual loci.

  I was snapped from my reverie by the medical team, who gently loaded Jimmy onto the stretcher and into the ambulance. I signaled them I would walk to the house.

  I had a feeling that walk was going to be the last quiet time I’d have for a while.

  * * *

  Jimmy was still asleep in the recovery area when Parsons met me outside the computer room.

  “You say he thinks he’s seven?”

  “Yes. You should have seen him flip out when he finally got a look at himself.”

  “Did he give you any indication what cult he belonged to?”

  “None.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “We know his name. Let’s run it through and see if any bells go off.”

  “You just love talking in tough-guy clichés, don’t you?”

  I grinned. “Watched too many Clint Eastwood movies when I was a kid.”

  Parsons laughed. “You were never a kid.”

  “I feel so good about myself now.”

  I liked Parsons a lot. A former VR cult member himself, there was no scam, no form of reasoning so out there, no logic so convoluted, that he couldn’t work his way through it to awaken what lay at a subject’s core. In the six years we’d been working together I’d only seen him lose two subjects—one to suicide after her family took her away too soon, the other to law school.

  Parsons hates that joke, too.

  One of our latest residents, Cindy (she wouldn’t yet tell us her last name, even though we already knew what it was), age seventeen, approached Parsons and asked him about Jimmy.

  “I saw them bring him in downstairs,” she said.

  Parsons put a reassuring hand on her arm. “You don’t need to worry about him, Cindy; Jimmy’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t know him, do you?” I asked.

  “I don’t think—I mean, I don’t know. Something about him seems familiar, I guess.” She thought about it for a second, then shrugged and said, “I guess not. Sorry.”

  Parsons looked at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be helping with dinner preparation in the kitchen?”

  “Omigosh, I forgot all about it.” She hurried away toward the elevator.

  “She seems a lot friendlier than she did last week.”

  “I know,” whispered Parsons. “Amazing how fast she’s progressed, don’t you think?”

  We looked at each other.

  “Think she’ll try it tonight?” I asked.

  “Not tonight, but definitely before Christmas.”

  “I’ll double outside security.”

  “You do that.”

  Escape att
empts are commonplace here during the first three weeks; week one, they fight us tooth-and-nail because they see us as the evil ones who took them away from salvation and home; week two, they loosen up a bit, then decide to play along, hoping to give us a false sense of accomplishment; week three, they try to run for it. Cindy was a 3rd-Weeker. Time to try.

  We parted after that, Parsons going off to a scheduled session with some twelve-year-old from Indiana we snatched from the Resurrected Peoples’ Temple. I went into the computer room to run down Jimmy’s name.

  One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that you must take nothing for granted when tracking down a subject’s past. Not that we have to do it all that often; usually the family provides us with more than enough information to go on. There have been, however, a handful of burnout cases that have simply stumbled into our hands. These always take extra effort, but I rarely mind.

  At least with Jimmy Waggoner I had a name—and a possible temple affiliation.

  Cindy of the No-Last-Name-Given had been snatched from the Church of the One-Hundred-and-Eightieth Second, who believed that they and they alone postponed the end of the world because they and they alone owned the last three minutes of existence. Their literature even claimed that these last three minutes were a physical object, one that their Most Holy Timekeeper, Brother Tick-Tock (I’m not kidding) kept safely hidden away, watched over by the One and True God of All Moments, Lord Relativity.

  I doubted that Cindy actually knew Jimmy, but at this stage anything was worth a shot. I fed all the information into the system, sat back, and waited.

  It took about thirty minutes. I’d guessed about Jimmy having come from the tristate area; most VR cults are localized religions and recruit their members close to home as a rule.

  I’d almost nodded off when the computer cleared its throat (a WAV file I installed as a signal) and the words MATCH FOUND appeared on the screen. I rubbed my eyes and pressed the mouse button—

  —and there it was.

  All the information on Jimmy Waggoner that there was to be found.

  * * *

  Parsons looked up at me from behind his desk. “Don’t bother to knock.”

  I shoved the printouts in his face. “James Edgar Waggoner, born December 19, 1986. Disappeared on his birthday, 1993, on his way to a pizza parlor half-a-block from his home. It’s all there, his kindergarten and first grade report cards, school pictures, health records, dental charts, all of it.”

  Parsons scanned the printouts, all the time shaking his head. “Dear God in Heaven.”

  “Do you have the medical report yet?”

  “Um...yeah, yes...it’s right here.” He handed it to me but I didn’t take it.

  “Why don’t you just give me the Readers’ Digest version?” I said.

  He put down the printouts and rubbed his eyes. “Those marks on his face and neck? There were identical marks on his chest, forearms, and thighs.”

  “Burns?”

  “No. Medical adhesive irritation.”

  “In English.”

  “That guy’s been hooked up to both an EKG and EEG for a very long time. Plus, there was an unusually high trace of muscle relaxants in his system.”

  “Muscle relaxants?”

  “That, and about a half-dozen different types of hypno-therapeutic medications.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Any traces of hallucinogenic?”

  “Good old-fashioned Lucy-in-the-Sky-with-Diamonds.”

  I felt my gut go numb. “So whoever took him has...has—”

  “—has kept him more or less snowed out of his skull for the better part of three decades, especially the last year or so,” said Parsons. “Tests indicate definite brain damage but we’re not yet sure of the extent.”

  “...jesus...”

  “I’ll second that. You got an address on his family?”

  I nodded my head. “The father died a couple of years ago. Coronary. His mother still lives in town at the same house.”

  “You suppose she stayed there because she believed he’d come back some day?”

  “Seeing as how it was the father who petitioned for the declaration of death, my guess is probably.”

  “Need anything to take with you?”

  “A photograph of the way he looks now.”

  “I’ll take it myself.”

  I stood staring out at I-don’t-know-what.

  “You okay, Carl?”

  “Almost thirty years,” I whispered. “What the hell were they doing with him for all that time?”

  “I’ve got a better question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “One minute the kid’s seven years old and off to buy a birthday-in-December slice of pizza, and the next—wham!—he finds himself in an almost-middle-aged body and doesn’t know how he got there. How do you explain to someone that they’ve been robbed of over one-third of their life and will never get that time back?”

  * * *

  Joyce Waggoner was fifty-seven but looked seventy. Still, she carried herself with the kind of hard-won dignity that, with the passage of time and accumulation of burdens, becomes a sad sort of grace.

  Her reaction to the news that her son was still alive was curiously subdued. I supposed (and rightly so, as it turned out), that she’d been scammed countless times over the years by dozens of so-called “cult busters” who, for a nominal fee, promise quick results. I assured her that I was not after any money, and even went so far as to give her the name and number of our contact on the police force. She told me to wait while she made the call, but then she did the damnedest thing—she stopped on her way to the phone, looked at me, smiled, and asked if I’d like some fresh coffee. “It’s really no trouble,” she said in a voice as thin as tissue paper. “I usually have myself some coffee about this time of day.”

  “That would be very kind of you,” I replied, suddenly feeling like a welcomed guest.

  She made the coffee and then called Sherwood, our police contact, who assured her that Parsons and I were on the level and could be trusted.

  “May I see that photograph again?” she asked when she came in with the coffee. I handed it to her and spent several moments adding cream and sugar to my cup while she examined the picture Parsons had taken not two hours ago.

  “I guess it could be him,” she whispered, looking up at me. “I’m sorry if I don’t seem overjoyed at your news, but I’ve been duped by a lot of people over the years who claim to’ve had news of Jimmy’s whereabouts.”

  “I understand.”

  She looked up at the mantel. There were only three framed photographs there: one showed Jimmy as a newborn, still swaddled in his hospital blanket; the next, in the center, was a picture of herself with her late husband that had apparently been taken shortly before his death; and the last, at the far end of the mantel, was of Jimmy, taken on his fifth birthday. I raged at the emptiness up there, for all the photographs that should have been present but hadn’t been and now never would be—Jimmy graduating from grade school, his high school senior picture, college graduation, all the unlived moments in between, silly moments with Mom and Dad, maybe a picture of himself with his prom date, both of them looking embarrassed as Mom stood in tears while Dad recorded the Historic Moment on film...all the empty spaces where precious memories should have been, filled only with a thin layer of dust and a heavy one of regret. Even with the smell of air-freshener and what I suspected was freshly shampooed carpeting in the air, there was smell underneath everything that had to be grief. It had been clogging my nostrils since I’d come into the house.

  “He was watching The Searchers,” she said. “You know, that John Wayne movie?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it many times.”

  “It was his father’s favorite movie, you know. Anyway, he was watching it while I was making some last-minute arrangements for his surprise party later that afternoon and...you have to understand, Jimmy was always the sort of child who liked being kep
t in suspense. I guess that way he always had something to look forward to. So, about two-thirds of the way through the movie—and boy, was he immersed in the story—he had to use the bathroom, so he put the tape on “pause” and did his business, and about the time he was coming out of the bathroom his father was coming in the back door with Jimmy’s birthday present—his own VCR. Well, I didn’t want Jimmy to see it, so I gave him a couple of dollars and told him to walk up to Louie’s Pizza and get himself a couple of slices. Louie’s—it’s been gone for a lot of years now—it was right at the end of our block so Jimmy didn’t have to cross the street or anything like that, and he loved Louie’s pizza. So he said, ‘Okay. I’ll have it when I watch the rest of the movie,’ and he took off. That’s...that’s the last we ever saw of him.”

  “Mrs. Waggoner, I have to ask this question: in the weeks, days, or hours before Jimmy disappeared, do you remember seeing any—”

  “Yes.”

  The immediacy of her answer surprised me.

  She saw my surprise and laughed. “I didn’t mean to stun you, but the police and FBI must have asked me that about a thousand times. Yes, there was a man I saw walking through the neighborhood that I didn’t recognize and, yes, Jimmy once told me about this man trying to talk to him.”

  “Did you contact the police?”

  “Goddamn right I did. My husband had several friends on the force, and for weeks afterward I noticed more frequent patrols through our area. After Jimmy was taken, my husband started buying all sorts of guns, most of them from his friends on the force—old pieces of evidence, no serial numbers, like that. At one point, he had two guns in every room in our house. After he died I got rid of most of them.”

  “How much time elapsed between Jimmy telling you about this man and his disappearing?”

  “About five months.”

  “Did this man say anything to Jimmy that might—”

  “I’m way ahead of you.” She reached into the breast pocket of her blouse and removed a small, age-browned business card. “For years and years I couldn’t find this and then, this morning, I was looking through a few of Jimmy’s old Dr. Seuss books and this fell out of And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. That man had given this to Jimmy.”