The Stairs, Chapter 28
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 45
THE STAIRS
© Tom Scocca, 2025
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, and events is entirely coincidental, with the exception of the events in Chapters One and Two, which happened more or less as written, on the line between Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, on Memorial Day weekend in 1999.
28.
Maxine and I must have had our shock wear off at the same instant. At least, we had reached the door simultaneously and were pounding at it in unison.
"Wait!" I yelled.
"Come back!" Maxine yelled.
We paused and listened, then pounded and yelled some more. There was no sound from outside. We stopped pounding and listened to the silence. Maxine jiggled the doorknob, just in case. "Nope," she said. "He really did lock us in."
"If we can't get back out to the landing on the stairs," I said, "then Theo can't let us back in." I looked at my watch. It was 1:46, our time. "He should have already tried once, while Warren Hartstock was giving us that necktie lecture. Now he's going to try again."
"What about the other way, out the other side of the apartment?" Maxine said. "Maybe we can go down and around and get back into the stairway somehow from below."
I tried the other door—our bedroom door, or Warren Hartstock's parlor door. The knob wouldn't turn. "He must have locked this one, too, before he ever let us in," I said.
"Milton went and warned him about us, while we were at the stables," Maxine said. "What did he tell Pythia? He hadn't left the apartment. Technically, this is still the apartment. The rat!"
"Well, he is a rodent," I said.
"Definition 2: a despised or untrustworthy person, especially one who informs on associates," Maxine said. "A stool pigeon. Pythia would never. She should shave his tail."
"She should if she finds out what he did," I said. "But we can't tell her. We're trapped." I scanned our surroundings: all the neat stacks of papers, the straight and even spines of the books.
"Not the sort of person who'd leave something useful lying around where we could get it, is he?" Maxine said. There was a cabinet beside the drafting table. She tried the drawers. "Locked, too."
She picked up a big metal ruler, with a triangular cross section, from the table. "If we could go 10 minutes back in time, I'd clobber him with this."
I checked in the bathroom. Bar soap, a safety razor, a flat hairbrush. Not even a hairpin to poke around in the locks with.
"What about the window?" Maxine said.
"The window?" I said.
She squeezed around the edge of the drafting table and looked down. "What is it, a 14-foot drop? If we hang down from the windowsill first and let go, it's more like 10."
"Onto the sidewalk?" I said. "We'll break our ankles. If our feet are what hit first."
"Or we stay put here and be squashed out of space-time?"
I checked my watch again. It said 1:52. I thought about Theo, alone with the squirrels in the dark bedroom, waiting and opening the door again and finding nobody there. "OK," I said. "Maybe we'll land in a pile of snow."
Warren Hartstock hadn't found a way to lock the window latches from outside, at least. They were cold under our fingers, but they moved. We popped them open and heaved up the sash. Frigid air blew in.
Maxine leaned out. "No snow down there," she said. "But we can probably make it. I'll go first." She swung one leg over the windowsill. "Here, help me get lower."
I grabbed her by the arms as she kicked her other leg over the sill, so she was hanging halfway out the window, with her head and shoulders in the room. "Are you sure?" I said.
"Just keep holding on while I scootch out a little more—what was that?" she said.
I'd heard it too: a scraping sound outside the apartment door.
"Get me back up!" Maxine whispered, wriggling back up the sill. "Hurry! Before he gets in!" I hauled on her arms and she slid back into the room. There was the clunk of the bolt again. Maxine scrambled to her feet and grabbed the three-sided ruler, then shoved a metal T-square at me.
"We're going to deck him," she muttered, as the key clicked in the lock.
The door swung open. I gripped the T-square.
"Guys, I'm sorry." In the doorway was Theo, bundled up in his coat and boots, wearing my backpack. Pythia was beside him. "You didn't come back, and I didn't know what else to do."
My little brother was wide-eyed and a little flushed. Still holding the T-square, I ran over and hugged him. "We were about to jump out the window," I said.
"You were?" Theo said, staring past me at the open sash.
"Warren Hartstock locked us in, so he could go power up the resonator," Maxine said. "We had to get out somehow."
"How did you get the key?" I asked.
"Turns out Hartstock keeps a spare on top of the door frame, out of sight," Pythia said. "Luckily I could smell the brass up there. Luckily for Milton, especially," she said, directing that last remark at the backpack. There was a faint rustling from inside it.
"He confessed," Theo said. "When I looked for you and you weren't there, Pythia decided Milton must know something, and he did."
"I should have had that figured all along," she said.
"It's OK," I said. "You showed up just in time. Great work. We're free."
"No," Theo said. "No, we're not, Rollo." He clenched his jaw and blinked.
"What's wrong?" I said. "What do you mean?"
"That was why I couldn't just go with you, remember?" Theo said. "There's only one door. We couldn't open the apartment door to find you unless we closed the bedroom door behind us first. So we did. We had to. So now we can't get home."
Theo was right. The winter air from the window felt even colder as the situation sank in. There was no way back into our bedroom and summertime; the only way out was down the stairs.
"Well," Maxine said. "We were going to have to go up to Shinter's anyway."
"What about Mom?" I said.
"It's 2 a.m. in our time," Maxine said. "We've got at least three hours before she wakes up, right?"
"Four hours, usually," I said. "But what if she wakes up in the middle of the night and looks for us, and we're all gone?"
"Would she be less worried if she did know where we were?" Maxine said. "And that the entire future was about to be crushed out of existence, possibly taking her and us with it?"
"Crushed out of existence?" Theo said.
"Our talk with Hartstock didn't go well," Maxine said. "Even before he locked us in."
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, May 20, 2026
★ The roar of the air conditioners left the ears feeling muffled in the morning. The heat was a solid slab propped against the balcony doorway. The piles of white cloud were not menacing, yet, quite, were they? An otherwise ineffective breeze slipped between the unworn rain jacket and the arm it was draped over, to briefly cool the sweat gathering there. Out the high office window, a skinny white lightning bolt appeared off below Manhattan and a thick, wedge-shaped volume of blackish cloud hung down. White flecks of seagulls spun against the dark. The uptown-facing facets of the far downtown skyline still shone clear bluish-silver but a blurry gloom hung down to their east, over Brooklyn. Columbia graduation gowns had made it all the way to Hudson Yards, where they billowed in the erratic wind. Where was the rain? The people boarding the 7 train were bedraggled, but still only from the heat. The arriving B at Bryant Bark was beaded with drops outside and its floor was sheeted with water; a quarter lay in a fine bright ring where the meniscus caught the lights; but the people still seemed dry. Uptown, a strong smell of newly and heavily wetted ground had flowed down into the subway station, but what remained of the shower was only enough to call for halfway draping the rain jacket as a loose cape, not for stopping to put it on.
New York City, May 21, 2026
★ Cars idled by the stripe of accumulated tree debris, more brown than green now where it lay in the roadway, waiting for the sweeper to clean it up. The sky was a near-even gray and the air was cool for the wait out at the curb to catch a ride on something other than the stopped subway. An umbrella went by opened on a Midtown sidewalk and then drops began accumulating on the taxi's windshield, a scattering and then real rain for a while. Suddenly, at day's end, it was once again colder outside the office than inside. A few stray spits of rain fell but they didn't add up to anything worth hurrying to escape.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of a sandwich selected from Conservation Recipes, compiled by The Mobilized Women's Organizations of Berkeley, California, published in 1918 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
FISH SANDWICHES
Fish.
Mayonnaise.
Bread.
Butter.
Tuna, sardines, or any left over fish may be mixed with mayonnaise and spread on buttered bread.
Mrs. W. H. Cameron.
BAKED BEAN SANDWICHES
Cold baked beans.
Chili sauce or plain mustard.
Bread.
Mix beans with sauce or mustard and put between slices of any kind of bread.
OLIVE SANDWICHES
Queen olives, chopped fine.
Bread.
French dressing.
Cheese, finely grated.
Mix olives thoroughly with French dressing and spread on unbuttered bread. Sprinkle cheese on top.
Mrs. W. E. Leland.
CHICKEN SANDWICHES
Chicken.
Mayonnaise.
Bread.
Butter.
Mince chicken, add finely chopped celery, moisten with mayonnaise, and spread on any kind of buttered bread.
Mrs. W. H. Cameron.
If you are inspired to prepare a sandwich inspired by our continued offerings, be sure to send along a description of your experience and a photo or three to us here: indignity@indignity.net.
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
