“Thank you, Lowell. You’re a true gentleman.”
“Ah, were that were true.”
Giggling with a big, happy-to-be-with-this-charming-man-on-an-intriguing-trip feeling, Marsha Manning followed him, albeit a little unsteadily.
Chapter 14
“That was wonderful,” she said. “Thank you.”
The stars! thought Marsha Manning as she descended the stairs from Lowell Davis’s telescope platform. All in all, it had been quite a stunning experience, staring up into the lights and chill of the universe, breath misting lightly about you like gentle curious spirits. And not unromantic, either.
“Yes, one of my pride and joys here in this house,” said Davis. “My telescope and platform! And Prescott is a wonderfully clear area in which to use a telescope, I must say.”
“I feel not only educated, but enlightened.”
“Wonder-instilling, yes. But come on... let’s make sure that Jake isn’t burning down the living room.” Davis reached out, took Marsha’s hand in his. Although it had been cold outside, the man’s smooth, large hand was warm as it enfolded hers; she accepted the firm but polite grip without objection, allowing him to lead her down the dark halls toward the lights of the living room.
‘The fire was still burning in the hearth safely, if perhaps a bit lower than before. Everything else was in good order as well, including Jake Camden, who was sprawled out luxuriously on the couch, cognac snifter still in his hand, snoring.
“He’s asleep!” said Marsha.
“Shh! Don’t wake him!”
“You want him on your couch all night? He might... umm... I don’t know, throw up or something!”
“Naw. Not Jake... Jake knows where the toilet is.” The writer let go of Marsha’s hand and stood at the entrance of the living room. A soft smile began to spread over his face, and his eyes began to light up with a mischievous glee. “However, as long as he’s asleep... we might want to try something else?”
“Pardon?”
“A little prank. A harmless little joke on your friend.”
“Well, he’s not really my friend... I hardly know him, I’m not even sure I like him...”
“Okay then. How about a harmless but... and I promise you this... a hilarious joke on your friend.”
Marsha shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
Davis grabbed up her hand. “Come on.”
“Where?” she said, balking for a moment at his insistent tug.
“Just come on. I want to show you something that very few of my visitors see.” It was Davis’s tum to be serious, and when Marsha looked at him she was instantly and incredibly intrigued. What was this secret he was letting her in on? Suddenly she had to know.
“All right, as long as it’s hilarious.”
“Oh, I saw how much Jake put away tonight. It will be uproarious!”
He led her back down the hallway, clear to the other side of the house, to his den.
“But you showed us this before,” Marsha said as he switched on the light, revealing the desks, the computers, the laser printers, the books and more books.
“Ah, but I didn’t show you this.”
He went to a bookshelf, and withdrew a handful of hardbacks which he placed on a coffee table by a pipe rack and humidor. He reached in and pulled some sort of latch. There was a clicking sound, and the whole shelf rolled back, revealing the entrance to a dark tunnel heading down, bottomed with carpeted steps.
“A secret room!” said Marsha. “How fun! But we’re clear on the other side of the house. How are we going to play a joke on Jake from the other side of the house?”
Davis turned on a light, illuminating the stairway. “Come on down. I’ll show you.”
She walked down the steps, ducking her head to fit under the ceiling. The light below was on, revealing a bed, a chair, and a desk, on plush carpeting. There was a thunking sound. Startled, Marsha turned around. Davis was closing the bookshelf panel behind them.
“Why are you doing that?” she demanded.
“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
“No... but like I said, we’re far away from Jake. Why do we have to hide?”
Davis just grinned. “You’ll see. Come on down, make yourself at home. Got a bar and fridge down here, got food and supplies... I could live for a month down here... Not that I want to.” Davis padded down the rest of the stairs, then gestured toward a wall. “There you go, Marsha. That should tell the tale.”
Cautiously, with uncertainty, Marsha walked down the remainder of the stairs. Only when the floor of the room was planted firmly below her feet did she look off in the direction that Davis indicated.
The walls were paneled in soundproofed decorative tiles. On the wall Davis gestured at what was a bank of black and white television monitors. The desk looked like Houston Ground Control for a space launch, complete with knobs, dials, buttons, and a standing high-tech microphone.
“My God, what is this?” Marsha said stepping forward and running her hand down the highly polished work-station setup. “Alien Contact Central?”
Davis laughed. “Hardly so celestial. No, Marsha. It’s just audio-video monitoring of most rooms in this house. With an interesting and quite sexy addition, which I’ll show you in a moment.” Davis leaned over the counter and flicked a series of switches. Images—most low-lit or entirely dark—popped up on the screens. “There you go. You see?” He stepped forward and pointed to one of the better-lit images. “Yes, right. There he is.”
“Who?”
“Look there on the couch.”
Marsha looked. Sure enough, there was the fire in the distance, a couch... and lying on the couch, still passed out, was Jake Camden. “Oh.”
“Now listen to this.”
Davis twiddled a dial. Marsha heard the sound of crackling fire and something much louder and odder, then suddenly recognizable: snoring.
She laughed. “Amazing. Why do you bother, though?”
“An exercise of a small childish fantasy, Marsha. A little kinky sometimes, perhaps... I get to listen to guests talking… or doing other interesting activities... and watch as well.”
Marsha was half-horrified, half-intrigued. The notion somehow excited some voyeuristic segment of her libido. “So we just get to sit here and watch Jake sleep while we listen to him snore.”
“There’s more. Now, I want you to promise to be quiet for the next part.”
Marsha shrugged. Sure. Why not?
“Do you want a drink or anything before we start?”
“No, I’m fine.” She was more than fine; she was absolutely flying.
Davis sat down on a wheeled chair, leaned over, and flipped some toggles. “Here we go, sweetheart. Watch this.” Davis grabbed the standing microphone, pressed a button, and brought it to his mouth.
“Jake! Jake Camden!”
The sleeper stirred.
Davis swiveled and winked at Marsha. He turned the button at the base of the microphone off. “Reverb and voice distortion.”
“I thought it sounded a little strange coming back through the speakers.”
“It’ll sound like the voice of God Himself. If we can ever wake the fellow up!” Davis turned back to his endeavors, switching off the button and bringing the microphone back up to his mouth.
He cranked the volume knob up two notches.
“Camden! Jake Camden!”
His name bellowed into Camden’s unconsciousness like an articulate gong, dragging his awareness up and out of a very pleasant dream involving Jake, two naked women, and a bathtub of lime Jell-O. He spluttered up, spitting out imaginary gelatin, peering around groggily from the couch.
Where was he?
The warm fire in the hearth, the sting of the cognac still in his mouth, the pleasant drunkenness hanging about him like a security blanket: That’s right; he was at Lowell Davis’s house. The living room, to be exact.
Automatically sensing the presence of a glass in his hand, he lifted it to his mouth and was rewarded with
a splash of cognac down his gullet. The alcohol woke him up the rest of the way and he sat on the edge of the couch, blinking. Had the voice just been his imagination? He felt groggy and very drunk and not at all in control of his faculties. It could have been his imagination, some speck of undigested cheese in his stomach, some bit of bread in his intestines…
“Jake Camden!”
No, it wasn’t! Jake shot up off the couch, standing wobbly and wide-eyed on the carpet, goggling around like some cartoon caricature, animated. The voice seemed to be swelling all around him, like he was in the middle of a giant’s larynx.
“Who’s... Who’s that?” Because he hadn’t the foggiest notion, it was just some gigantic voice engulfing him.
“Call me... Mr. X.”
Jake’s mouth opened and closed like a beached fish. Oh my God, he thought, it couldn’t be. He tried to reason this through, but it felt like his brain was wrapped up in saltwater taffy.
“The alien… the creature who talks to Lowell Davis?”
“That is correct,” boomed the voice, omni-directional. “Where is Davis?”
“I... I don’t know... I must have fallen asleep on the couch... I was just sitting here by the fire and....”
“You have been drinking, Jake Camden. You passed out.”
What was this, the voice of his conscience? “Well, sort of, I guess. Look, what do you want?”
“What have you done with Davis?”
“What have I done? I haven’t done anything... He went off to show Marsha something... but... but what do you want?” It had taken him awhile to realize it through his drunken condition, but he was shaking; he was frightened almost senseless by this disembodied voice thundering down upon him mercilessly and accusingly.
“We need... BLOOD!” said the voice. “Red, human BLOOD!”
“Blood?” repeated Camden, feeling a downright earthshaking shiver travel down his spine. He found himself backing up as though his cowardly feet had suddenly taken control of his body.
“Yes. Lowell Davis lures unsuspecting guests to his house and thus supplies us with our need for human hemoglobin. Type 0 is our favorite.”
Type O. Christ, that was his kind of blood!
“Um... Oh, uh... gee... You know, I think I might just know where he is! I’ll just go and get him, okay?”
“Yes, bring him here immediately. Or suffer the consequences!” The voice was brain-numbingly loud now, so that Jake could barely think. It seemed to fill whatever space in his head that wasn’t occupied by fear.
Jake shuffled backwards a little further. “Oh, yeah, right! I’ll get him ASAP. He might have stepped out for a breath of fresh air!”
Scarborough, he thought. Everett Scarborough will know what to do!
Jake grabbed his jacket from the coatrack, and without further words of promise, he opened the door, stumbled out into the bracing chill of the Prescott night air, and got the hell away from the god-awful voice.
Davis had to tum off the microphone so that Marsha’s laughter wouldn’t boom out through the living room’s hidden speakers and alert Jake Camden to the true nature of the voice.
“Shhh!” he said, grinning, motioning her to pipe down.
“I’m sorry,” she said, holding her hands up to stifle her laughter. “This is just so... just so hilarious!”
“I told you making the trip down here would be worth your while!” said Davis, eyes merrily gleaming. “Hello! What’s he doing now?”
Marsha turned back to the appropriate video screen. What Jake Camden appeared to be doing was running out of the house, hell-bent for leather, his face looking like a character from Ghostbusters after having seen a ghost.
She’d been feeling giddy and loose before, what with all she’d been drinking, compounded with the sight of sleepy-eyed Camden with his jaw on his chest. But now, as she saw Jake tearing out of the house, goggle-eyed, she just lost it. With her laughter coming in peals and sobs, she staggered backwards, falling onto the bed, trying to muffle herself in the pillow but failing. Still, even as she went down, she had to keep her eyes glued on the video screen to catch each nuance of this incredible real-life farce.
Swiftly, Davis jerked the microphone back to his mouth, switched it back on. “Jake Camden! Leave upon pain of death! We will follow, Jake! We will hound your trail!” His finger stabbed over to another video camera focused upon the front walk. Jake Camden ran down it now like a man on fire, tripped, staggered, fell, got back up, kept on running. It was truly a marvelous tableau of drunken flight and even Lowell Davis had to give in to a few guffaws as Camden madly careened out of view. He set the microphone down on the table; then, shaking his head and wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, went over and sat down on the bed by Marsha, patting her on the back like an old comrade in arms. “Oh, goodness. That was fun. Nice to have an accomplice to appreciate fine art!”
“Oh, I appreciate...” she said, “I certainly do appreciate—” even as she spoke, more laughter tumbled from her lips. It was a paroxysm of laughter, a temporary insanity that she lost herself in gleefully—and when she came out of it, she realized that her arms were around Lowell Davis.
Abandon.
She felt swirled upon into total, wild bacchanalian abandon; here she was, holding onto a handsome fellow, absolutely bursting with sexy cologne and virility, and suddenly she was back in college, back before responsibility, back before the Air Force and AIDS and reality had smacked her around and she’d been wild, a partier, a beer drinker, and a guy chaser. Davis’s mouth was doing incredible things on her neck, and his hands were running up and down her back like mad passionate pixies.
She lost it.
All the alcohol and emotion and laughter and circumstance, the whole big ball of whatever was left unleashed inside her, just exploded into instinctual response to a responsive male presence. She pulled Davis’s head up and almost devoured his mouth in a warm, wet, and tongue-probing kiss.
There was absolutely no thought to her at all. She was just a ball of responses and unleashed need and frustration and anger and lust and passion. Davis broke away from her lip lock, and, breathing heavily into her hair, whispered, “I want you, Marsha. I want you badly. From the moment I saw you I knew you had to be mine.”
It was the last straw. It was a line out of a bad romance novel, but it worked. Marsha grabbed him and flung him down onto the bed. In a heartbeat she was on top of him, ravishing him with kisses.
Moments later, the clothes began to fly. What with the alcohol, the lust, and the need for total escape from that tension that had imprisoned her for so long, everything began to strobe. One moment they were fully clothed. The next, somehow she’d lost her shirt and her bra and she was leaning over, her large breasts loose and hard and being sucked and licked and handled with great ardor by Davis, who had the air of a little boy alone in a candy shop who could not believe his luck. The next moment, Davis had somehow gotten loose of most of his clothes and was pulling off Marsha’s jeans. Things became a jumbled mess of tangling limbs and heaving bodies at this point, flashing through Marsha’s mind like her own auto-erotic creation.
When she was aware of it, she even seemed to be enjoying it, though at times it seemed as though she was just an interested observer, watching a porno film with intermittent interest.
And finally, when it was all over with, and Lowell Davis was whispering words of afterplay into her ear, it seemed to Marsha Manning that about the only polite thing to do was to pass out.
And so she did just that.
Chapter 15
The first thing Everett Scarborough did when he got back to the Winnebago Recreation Vehicle was to go to the refrigerator and yank out a six-pack of cold Coors beer.
The second thing that Scarborough did was to leave the RV.
Damn the man! That self-righteous son of a bitch Davis had to jam in the spikes, even when a man was down. He should never have gone in there at all; he should have known that they wouldn’t have gotten along!
/> Scarborough’s face was flushed, and despite the cool of the night he felt warm and agitated. No way was he going to be able to hang around in the RV, not for a while, anyway. He needed space, he needed room to roam, room to stretch, room to bloody scream if he needed to; and though the RV was spacious for what essentially amounted to a souped-up, self-powered trailer, as soon as he’d clumped and clattered in he knew he couldn’t linger.
He grabbed the brews and slammed the door behind him without locking it. Go ahead, burglars—steal what you like, but answer to the actual Owners... I don’t give a shit! A gibbous moon hung in a clear sky along with a wealth of stars, so there was plenty of light for a jaunt. Scarborough, clutching the cans under an arm as though they were his last grip on reality, stumped off down a clearly marked trail toward what appeared to be something approaching wilderness.
The trail was a winding thing, cutting between clumps of ponderosa pine. It angled up a hill, the pine needles on the clay appeared silver, the rocks in the path’s midst jutting with sharp shadows from the moonlight. Scarborough climbed it, his breath coming in short bursts.
The walking was good for him. There were owl sounds in the woods, and calming breezes whispering through the limbs. Somewhere nearby he fancied he heard the burblings of a brook—and this settled him down as well. By the time he’d reached a place that seemed a good place to light—a side trail that led to a bluff overlooking the valley—he had cooled down considerably, literally and metaphorically, to the extent that he had to zip up the L.L. Bean jacket his Otherly benefactors had so thoughtfully provided.
He picked his way up a number of slate-like outcroppings of rock, and perched himself beneath the branches of a fragrant pine tree, focusing on keeping his breaths full and regular, focusing on the details of nature around him and not the humiliating experience he’d just endured. The chill curled around him like a river, and he sucked it in, sucked it down deep, letting it dash away some of the heat that still burned inside him.
Then, with a sigh, he cracked the Coors, tilted it back, and let the chill, clear stuff douse some of the smoldering embers.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 88
