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.
