She leaned over and kissed him on his cheek. “Thanks.”
Timothy Reilly was a graduate student at the University of Kansas, supposedly working toward a Master’s in psychology but actually just humoring his father, owner of the biggest car dealership in Missouri and intent on his son getting an advanced degree. He’d run out of money a couple of years back, after several years of vagabonding around the world. Dear old Pop had given him money on the condition that he finish his Bachelor’s Degree. The Bachelor’s Degree got finished, but by the time the sheepskin was in his hand, he had met Diane Scarborough. So he’d figured he’d hang around the university a while longer. A stab at a Master’s financed that tenure, and delighted the old man in Missouri to boot.
Many guys had gotten their Master’s Degrees on much poorer motivation: Diane Scarborough was beautiful, brimful of personality, and had a perverse and disarming sense of humor unlike any Tim Reilly had ever encountered. Her sense of adventure was amazing—and her imagination preferred petting in cornfields to pedestrian bed sheets. Diane Scarborough was the kind of woman that Alfred Hitchcock might have cast in a suspense thriller—and then woe the day. In fact, she had the looks of a young Grace Kelly, blue eyes smoldering with life framed by a cool blonde. But beneath this exceptional beauty, a complex and unusual individual, filled with wonder and dread, existed—unconventional and unpredictable.
Diane was the only child of Dr. Everett Scarborough, a Doctor of Physics and Engineering whose career had somehow veered into uncharted areas of science. While still working on his first Doctorate, Scarborough had met and married Phyllis Poindexter, a young Boston socialite. It had been a passionate romance, according to what Diane had heard, anyway, but this she found hard to believe. Her father seemed scarcely a romantic sort to her. As a matter of fact, ever since her mother had died, ten years ago of cancer, he’d been rather a cold fish. Oh, he was most attentive to her in odd ways, but he limited his physical contact to simple pecks on the cheek just when she needed to be held the most. His great dream was that she would follow in her mother’s footsteps. Phyllis Poindexter, despite a moneyed background that would usually lead to a classical education, had deviated into the computer sciences, specializing in artificial intelligence. But despite a high mathematical aptitude, Diane chose to take the money allocated by the trust fund toward her college education and get far away from dear old Dad, straight into a curriculum filled with liberal arts. To his consternation, her majors and minors had wavered like Washington, D.C. weather from subject to subject, none scientific or mathematical. Last semester, for example, she’d plunged headfirst into art history after a heady fling with Tim through the museums of Europe. It had been their first trip together— they had met a year before—and she had financed it from Mother’s trust fund, a source that kept her fortunately independent of her father’s academic pressures. They had gone to the museums of Florence—they had visited the Louvre in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid, and her absolute favorite, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Mere prints could not match the vibrancy and power of that crazed master’s colors, and they certainly could not imitate the depth and relief achieved by his brush strokes. But then, when Tim read her papers describing her emotions concerning art, he had claimed there burned a true writing talent. Diane, who had always wished to draw and paint but knew she wasn’t very talented with her hands, exulted in this assessment, immediately plunging into a creative writing major. Now, a few short stories and poems later, she was in the midst of a novel about Kansas at the turn of the century. She called it The Innocent and the Damned, and while it contained far too many passionate sex scenes for the tastes of her professors, she continued to write two chapters every weekend on her IBM computer—a Christmas gift from her father. He’d pointedly only supplied computer language and mathematical software, but it had been easy enough to pirate a copy of WordPerfect from Tim’s cheap cobbled-together IBM clone and immediately set about forging a literary career.
“I think I’ll have one of those,” she said, looking at his beer.
“Hey, lady. I heard a rumor that drinking age is twenty-one hereabouts,” said Reilly.
“So let me have a beer and then turn me in to the law,” she said, giving him one of her classic glares.
He laughed, and got out a can of beer for her.
“Boy, what I wouldn’t give to be a bug on the wall to hear you give your speech to Daddy,” he said, watching her sip.
“You’d get smushed, I’m afraid. Dad abhors bugs.”
They were well into a discussion of the conversational tactics best suited for this onerous task, when it happened.
It started as a vibration.
A kind of thrumming seemed to shake the red Datsun, the trees and air around it—Diane could feel it shaking the fillings in her teeth.
“What the hell?” said Tim, looking around for the source of the vibration even as the can propped on the dashboard fell off, sending a splash of beer into his crotch. “Yeow!”
The radio station, halfway into Cat Steven’s “Moonshadow,” suddenly erupted into a haze of squeaks and static. The field before them, furred with light grass waiting to be turned over by a plow, seemed to ripple like a giant creature, shivering.
Diane’s heart started beating wildly and she grabbed Tim’s arm, clutching as though he were a life preserver. Beyond the vibration, she sensed something. Something imminent; something terrifying. It had an otherworldly quality she’d felt when that channeler last week had summoned up that 10,000-year-old spirit from the lost continent of Mu. She felt a deep sense of the numinous.
“Good grief, I don’t believe it,” said Tim, pointing upwards and craning his neck to peer out the top of the windshield. “Look!”
Diane looked.
Hovering over the edge of the field, right above a shallow forest, was a cluster of lights. As Diane’s eyes adjusted, she was able to make out a form, holding those lights together.
The lights were red and blue, the blue were separate pinpricks in the body of the object, the red a soft, radiating band delineating what appeared to be a lower, disk-shaped section from the upper and smaller bubble-top extension. As she stared, shocked, she could see a soft fog emanating from the bottom—a haze that suddenly turned bright orange as the hovering thing began to lower, past the trees, going out of sight, but taking its time and leaving no doubt in Diane Scarborough’s mind as to what she’d seen.
“Did you see that?” whispered Tim.
“Daddy would shit,” she said, staring at where the thing had been.
“Yeah,” said Tim, his tones reverent with awe. “I can’t believe it. I think we just saw a UFO, and it landed.”
Before even she realized what she was doing, Diane popped the latch of the door, and got out of the car.
“Hey,” said Tim. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get a closer look!”
“What?! Are you crazy?”
“No. This could be an opportunity of a lifetime!”
She shut the door on him and strode through a tangle of underbrush out into the field. The moon, though not quite full and partly obscured by a cloud, bathed the spring grass in soft light. She could see nothing past the copse of trees beyond which the object had settled. No lights, blinking or otherwise. Had she and Tim experienced some kind of hallucination or mirage? She’d heard her father’s monologues on the subject all her life (though she’d studiously avoided reading his books and articles—on UFOs anyway), so she was well acquainted with all the natural explanations available. The thing—if it was not an illusion—could be some military balloon; some weird weather blimp; some wacky high-school prank. God knew that astonishing tricks could be performed with lights these days, now that lasers and neon were easy tricks in the technical canon. But Diane forged ahead nonetheless. She had to see. Some inner alarm was going off. Intuition? Perhaps—but whatever it was, it pulled her toward those trees like a magnet.
“Hey!” cried a voice from behin
d her. “You wanna wait up?”
She turned. Tim puffed toward her, tripping on a clump of weeds, recovering. As he reached her, he grabbed her arm to recover his balance. “Lose your jitters?” Diane asked, sarcastically.
“Give me a break! I haven’t got the instant nose for trouble you do,” he said, and she could see a nervous smile in the moonlight. “I have to think about it a bit, and then I jump in headfirst.”
She grabbed his hand. “Okay, but we’ve got to hurry, if there’s something behind there, it might go away.”
“Not such a bad idea,” said Tim, but when Diane started toward the trees, picking up the pace, he kept abreast with no complaint. They hustled along for a minute in silence, Diane becoming more and more excited the closer they got to the thick stand of cedars, which were now obscuring their view with new spring shoots and thick spring leaves. As they approached, she began to smell honeysuckle.
Tim was getting excited. “This is just great!” he said. “Nothing like this has happened to me before. Thanks for kicking my butt, Diane. Leave it to you, to show up a soldier of fortune like me.”
“Soldier of fortune,” she said. “Sure.”
“Even if we don’t see anything behind those trees, we’ve got plenty to report. I saw it, you saw it—maybe other people saw it. It’ll make the local papers ... And I’ll call Craig at the university rag. And you know what, Diane?”
“What?” Diane mused that Tim had a terrible penchant for gab when he got nervous.
“The National Intruder. I’ve always wanted to get into the National Intruder.”
“Right. I can just see the headlines: ‘UFO Wizard of Oz Lends College Student a Brain.’ “
“No, I mean it. The reporter they’ve got on this kind of stuff ... Jake Camden? I read his book a couple years ago. The guy takes this sighting stuff and makes it really interesting!”
“Nothing serves the truth in journalism like an imaginative writing style, huh, Tim?”
“Could you save the cracks for now? I’m with you, aren’t I?” His voice had a hurt quality, and Diane felt bad. She hadn’t meant that barb to really penetrate. Try as she might to repress it, she was her father’s daughter. Sarcasm dripped from her tongue like venom from a casual viper. Only in her open-mindedness, her credulity, and her bright good looks did she reflect her mother—she had her father’s steel-trap mind, his relentless need to know.
They reached the trees, and as they stopped to puzzle the best path through, Diane could hear the sound of the breeze rattling the branches. It was cool on her face as it touched the light perspiration there. In her excitement, she seemed intensely aware of every sensation now, from the cry of an owl in the trees to the smell of Tim’s cologne and sweat, stark and sensually feral against the honeysuckle.
“See anything?” he asked, catching his breath.
She saw nothing. The woods beyond were dark, with only a hint of a break beyond into the next field.
“Damn,” she said. “I wish I’d brought the flashlight!”
“Wait a sec ... What’s that!” Tim pointed off to the right, toward the thinnest part of the trees, where Diane could make out a cluster of bushes, their berries outlined in the meager glow of the moon.
Diane looked and she saw nothing at first. But then ... she noticed a brief dazzle of light, like a splash of bright orange airbrushed onto a shadowed canvas.
“Come on!” she said, excitedly, plucking at Tim’s shirt and then striking out ahead of him into the underbrush. Twigs and brambles and thorns tugged at her stockings, and she instantly regretted the dress she wore. Actually, jeans were her usual apparel, jeans and Izods, or maybe a blouse. But jeans were damned troublesome when you want to make out with your boyfriend in a cramped car, and besides, how did she know that tonight she was going to be chasing an Unidentified Flying Object in the woods?
“Slow down!” called Tim. She could hear him crashing behind her like a bull in a leafy china shop. No way would they be able to surprise anything on the other side. They’d just have to rely on speed, so Diane, who kept herself in shape by playing racquetball, instead of waiting for Tim, sped up. To hell with him—she was going to get a shot at seeing what was there.
The bright orange light blinked, then it was joined by a fuzzy magenta glow, radiating up from an incline beyond the trees like an alien sunrise. A faint humming sounded, like a fluorescent lamp being turned on. This was joined a few seconds later by an incandescent blue light that absorbed both—and then winked out, leaving an afterimage on Diane Scarborough’s retinas. The lights had totally disappeared, leaving only the moon-swathed wood and field beyond—and silence.
Diane, stunned, stopped in her tracks. Something was wrong ... something was wrong inside her head. Where excitement and curiosity had been, there was now fear and dread. It was as though some force had reached inside her head and twisted a dial on her emotions. Twisted hard. She was having difficulty breathing.
Then Tim caught up, almost knocking her down.
“Diane. What was that? Hey—are you okay?”
She was getting control. She sucked in some breath, feeling less like the world was vortexing in on her. She caught hold of Tim’s arm, reeled him in and held onto him.
“It was those lights...” he said, clearly realizing that something had happened to her. “Look, Diane, I’m feeling kind of spooked. Maybe we should just get the hell out of here.”
“No!” she said. It took a great effort of will, but she pulled away from him, and teetered in the direction where the lights had blazed. “Have ... had to see what’s there.”
Even as she spoke the words, the dread returned threefold. Every part of her emotional being told her to turn, grab hold of her lover, and then race away from there, as fast as they possibly could ... Then get in the Nissan and put as much distance as possible between those lights and her soul. But her mind rejected these instinctual warnings. If there was some kind of strange flying machine just yards away, be it from Betelgeuse or Bethlehem Steel, Diane Scarborough was going to do everything in her power to get a look at it.
A good look.
The night seemed to swirl about her. The moon seemed monstrous, peering through the breaks in the leaves like a broken, swollen eye. The odor of dead vegetation on the ground suddenly swatted at her face. The breeze in the branches, the deep shadows connecting the trees—everything was accentuated, warped, as though her fear had unloosed not just a rush of adrenaline, but also some psychoactive drug as well. But a question drove her past the terror she felt, cold at the base of her spine: What was beyond the trees? What waited for her there?
Then, abruptly, she had a feeling of déjà vu. An ancient awareness opened up inside, like a flower of metal and crystal.
Somewhere, somehow, she had felt these feelings before.
She had seen those lights, experienced this peculiar mix of trepidation and anticipation. The memory bubbled up now from the dark mix of memory, shapeless yet familiar.
Diane could see the field now, beyond the trees. She could hear Tim behind her, running and calling her name. “Diane! Diane, wait!” And as she approached, she could see that the field beyond the trees was deeper down in a steep incline. She could make out a dome—glass—metal. Lights.
Even as she reached the edge of the wood, though, the lights blasted on like the heart of an exploding sun. She was swept through a river of colors, and she could feel herself falling, falling, falling.
“Diane!” Tim called behind her. “My God, I can’t see!”
Then the lights blasted off into blackness, and consciousness fled softly but fleetly.
Before she had reached puberty, become less of a tomboy, and begun affecting more feminine roles, one of Diane Scarborough’s favorite things was camping. She loved the sensations of the outdoors, the thrill of wandering through a forest, the taste of pinecones in the air, the smell of rushing rivers, the sound of still and mirror like lakes. Her mother, Phyllis Scarborough, had originally been the out
doorsperson, insisting that they take their vacations in tents and canoes and trailers amongst the woods and streams, the sky and the wild animals. Diane’s family had explored much of New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania and eastern Canada, and on one memorable escapade had made it as far as California, dipping into the splendors of the Rockies and Yellowstone National Park along the way. Everett Scarborough merely acquiesced—as far as he was concerned, he was happy taking vacations in a midtown Manhattan fleabag hotel, as long as he had his books and his equipment along with him. He objected that he really couldn’t take off time from work, but the objection was only token. Aware of her father’s interests as far back as she could remember, Diane’s great hope was that some night, after they had pitched their tent and were roasting marshmallows for that traditional trail-treat, S’mores, the great theater of the stars would unroll a proscenium before them and a Ooo Foo would spin down to dance for them in a bath of wild lights. (That’s what she called Unidentified Flying Objects, Ooo Foos—to the delight of her father, who dutifully reported her interest in the subject to his readers. Later, when she was older, Diane wondered if the Great Debunker didn’t secretly wish for such a celestial show himself, all his logic and venom in the cause of disproving their existence, a little boy’s disappointment that they didn’t come down and show him their ray guns.)
One of Diane Scarborough’s favorite sensations was waking up at a campsite. Yes, waking up, snug in your down sleeping bag by a dead campfire so you had that lovely charred smell stirred into the invigorating briskness of air alive with maple sap or grass smell, or even the lovely scent of creek. Coming awake inside could be awfully dreary and gloomy—too easy to just nod right back off again. But springing awake in the outdoors—ah! You were instantly roused to awareness, and your blood was up and you felt like eating a stack of pancakes, sweet and sticky with syrup.
That was the way Diane Scarborough felt now, waking up.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 5
