Ahhhhhh ...
Douse them, but not all of them; just enough to get control and ease the raw pain. No, some of them he kept aside, nursing, almost cherishing like a dog worrying a wound... A little pain was good, a little pain kept him awake and aware, conscious that he was Doctor Everett Scarborough! and nobody else, awake to his righteous indignation, and above all still clinging to his purposes:
Find his daughter Diane.
Vindicate himself.
REVENGE himself.
He may well die trying for these aims, but if he did die it would not be for lack of trying.
From the bluff where he sat, Scarborough could see a landscape of hills, and in the distance, higher mountains. In the near distance, obscured by the wealth of ponderosa pine that covered the area like an unruly fragrant homogenous garden, were the lights of houses peeking from the branches like eyes of intelligent crystalline creatures. Scarborough took another long pull of Coors and let the beer relax him further, as he immersed himself as much as possible in the sky, the stars, the moon, the trees, the wind—the wind’s sound was a sweet music and it lulled him away from the confrontation that had just happened.
The lingering sadness, of course, was Marsha. Yes, maybe he had acted like an ass... But he hoped she realized how important his pride was now, how he simply could not countenance the kind of attacks that Davis was hurling at him... She’d understand, eventually... And he felt a little worried about her... Clearly, she’d been drinking too much, he’d never seen her drunk before, and it wasn’t really a pretty sight. Hope she didn’t get sick, he thought.
Well, not too sick, anyway.
And Camden! That jerk had promised he wasn’t going to guzzle any more alcohol until this business was through. Well, at least Camden’s state was predictable, if lamentable. Still, there was some space here for indulgence, he supposed. Just as there was space now, and time, to linger here, sipping this beer and gazing at the sky, listening to that damned old owl add his eerie baritone to the music of the night.
Scarborough finished the beer, then opened another. He hoisted it up to the stars, saluting a memory.
“Here’s to you, Mac MacKenzie. I wish you were here with me, buddy. I truly do.”
He bent his elbow, lifting the beer back and letting the alcohol slide down his gullet. He closed his eyes, savoring it, feeling not exactly drunk but high, very high, and getting higher, his anger decreasing with every ounce of liquor he consumed. He would stop in a while; stop drinking before he got as idiotic as his companions down there supping at the table of his rival...
Yes, he would stop, but not now, not while he was holding Mac MacKenzie’s memory aloft and joyous in a fountain of sparkling brew...
When Scarborough lowered the beer can, almost empty, he saw something quite remarkable.
A light.
A very large light.
At first he thought it must be a star, its brightness somehow amplified. It was in the air, and there could be no question that it was unattached to the hill from which it had just emerged. Yes, a very large light, red and green, its colors somehow twirling, twirling rapidly.
Then Scarborough said to himself, ‘It’s an airplane; an airplane or a helicopter.’
Please, dear God! Let it be a small airplane with its tail and wing lights blazing…
But it wasn’t flying like an airplane...
Let it be a helicopter then…
But it wasn’t shaped like a helicopter… and no helicopter he’d ever seen before had lights remotely like this one...
A hot air balloon? But even as the thought entered Scarborough’s head, he had to dismiss it immediately. The lights were simply traveling too quickly to be connected to something that was merely drifting.
A blimp then? Like the Goodyear Blimp? That would be possible...
But even as he watched, the lights speeded… speeded up to a degree unsupportable by the blimp theory. As Scarborough watched, startled, the thing increased its airspeed, swooping over the valley in a kind of figure-eight maneuver, and then stopped, hovering, perhaps two hundred yards away from him.
He could see its shape now, outlined by the stars and its own lights, as well as the lights from below. It looked to be some kind of craft fifty feet in diameter... Convex, like two lenses glued together with bulges at the top and bottom. The lights blinked as the thing floated there in the air, rippling as though through some sort of phantasmagoric steam.
A UFO.
A flying disk, flying saucer… A flying machine unlike anything manufactured by humankind. The phenomenon that Doctor Everett Scarborough had denied for years… There, stalled in the middle of his vision, an enormous accusation, the final underscoring to the fallacy upon which Scarborough had built his public reputation.... and much of his personal belief system...
Somehow the realization of the exact nature of this thing hung back in Scarborough’s mind. He felt himself almost detached from the whole experience, as though emphatically denying it to himself.
No. No, this wasn’t possible.
It couldn’t be.
Almost as though it had only paused for a picture, or to brand itself indelibly in its observer’s mind, the vessel took flight again, streaking off at an incredible speed, losing itself once more in the hills.
The night and the stars hung silent and profound, unmoved in the wake of the thing’s passage. The air was still and quiet and then the wind whooshed again, as though the woods had held their breath in awe of this incredible sight and were only just now letting go of it...
The immensity of the stars and the sky and the whole universe twinkled, shifted, and seemed to reach down and into Everett Scarborough...
Shifting… changing him…
He’d seen it… Something his senses could not deny. There was no way he could tell himself that this thing before him had not been there. This had been no delusion. And even as the impact of the sight crushed in upon his consciousness, the universe seemed to pour in upon him… New connections were made, synapses sparked with flash-welded neurons which skip-jumped into dark sections of his mind and body heretofore subconscious. With instantaneous majesty and finality, his skin and eyes and ears seemed to melt away, and his entire being seemed to flow out, and all the universe seemed to flow in, unimpeded by the membrane of his being.
He felt one with the universe.
He was the night, he was the stars. He was the trees and the wind and the wonder that glued them all together in a throbbing pixilating energy.
Epiphany.
Ecstasy.
The nearly empty beer can that he’d been clutching all this time simply dropped from his hand, rolling away to clatter amongst a group of rocks. He shook his head, feeling as though he’d just awakened awe-eyed from a faint.
The kairos.
The opening of the universe, the connection. He’d read about it, of course, the cosmic consciousness connection.
Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, blinded by the light of Christ...
Guatama Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree, receiving enlightenment...
Oh, dozens more, the very crux of and soul of religious experience...
And he’d felt it.
One with the universe. Everything opening up to him like the blossom of a wondrous flower.
Scarborough stood up, feeling clear-eyed and elated. Was this something similar to what the psychedelic chemicals produced? He doubted it... It was much too clean, too essential... It was much too obvious. And to think it had been brought about by the sighting of a UFO. That was what many of the contactees had reported, and Scarborough had never denied the interior experience, just the physical reality implied... And now he felt it, storming through him like the fire, the love of God himself…
And then, suddenly, Scarborough put the brakes on.
“No!” he gasped. His fists clenched so that his fingernails dug into his palms. “Nooooooooooooooooo!” He fell to his knees and bit into his lip until blood and pain ran
.
He fell onto his face, gasping and struggling, stamping out the fire in his head.
No, he thought. You are not this experience. This is wrong. You are Doctor Everett Scarborough. Hang on, man! Hang on to yourself. Fight the joy, fight the connection. It was like drugs, it was worse than drugs, it changed you, it undercut your identity!
He’d read about the experience, of course. He’d written a whole article entitled “Flying Saucers and the New Mysticism” for The Skeptical Inquirer, which had later appeared in his most recent book, Above Us Only Sky. He’d speculated that this condition, this kairos, this ecstasy, was a rare combination of a ceasing of neocortical activity combined with a flood of neurochemicals such as endorphins and serotonin for Nature’s perfect drug rush. That was what it was, of course. A drug rush, an evolutionary anchor to experience and awareness. The trouble was, Scarborough hypothesized, individuals who experienced it tended to either equate it with a religion they were currently involved with, invent a new one to fit around it—or, in the case of people who experienced it upon the sighting of unexplained aerial phenomena, interpret it as the result of some sort of cosmic beam that had zapped them.
Scarborough took a deep breath. He crawled over to the remaining beers, took one, opened it, and ran the cold stuff down his face. He opened another one, and forced it down his throat until the harsh, cold violent liquid forced him to retch.
He was sick on the ground.
Gagging and gasping and coughing out the beer and his dinner, he reveled in the spasm that jolted him out of this spell, this ruinous experience.
When he was finished he staggered back and lay propped up against the rough-barked bole of a tree. He did not look up at the sky; he stared off into the shadows.
He could not deny what he’d seen. However, there could be an explanation. And even if there wasn’t an explanation, even if that thing up there had been a goddamned flying saucer containing creatures from Beta Centauri or a return of the star characters from Plan 9 from Outer Space, the cosmic rush experience was inappropriate. He had to hang onto himself, hang onto his identity if he was going to maintain his sanity, rescue Diane, see this damned thing through, for Christ’s sake!
When he felt better, he realized that he was exhausted. He felt as though he could just pull up a piece of turf here, bed down, and call it a night.
He couldn’t do that. Oh, he wouldn’t die of exposure; the night was too mild for that. Chances were, though, that he’d get a cold, and he could use a cold about as much as he needed a dose of cosmic consciousness.
Scarborough laughed ruefully to himself.
He picked himself up and started picking his way back through the woods toward the RV, turning his back on the stars.
When he got back to civilization, the first thing that Everett Scarborough saw was Jake Camden running from the Davis house out to the RV, tripping ludicrously on the way.
What the hell was going on?
When he reached him, Jake was struggling with the door of the RV, crying out, “Doc! Doc Scarborough! Help! You gotta help me …”
From his slurred words and his staggerings, and from the fact that for the life of him Camden just couldn’t seem to get that door open, Scarborough could tell that the man was still drunk.
“Jake?” he said, stepping up and tapping Camden on the back.
“Awwkkk!” screeched the man, almost jumping out of his shoes, banging into the door. When he looked around, Camden had an almost comical look of terror on his face, discernible even in the dim light available.
“Hey. Jake. It’s just me. Scarborough.”
“Oh, man, you scared the shit outta me!”
“Looks to me like something already did that. What’s going on?”
Camden pointed back to the house he’d just left. His mouth started working, but he couldn’t seem to get anything out. “The voice...” he finally managed. “The voice... it was looking for him!”
“Voice? Looking for who? What are you talking about, man?”
“Mr. X!” blurted Camden, spittle flying. “It was looking for Davis!” The reporter grabbed Scarborough by his shirt. “The aliens, Scarborough! The aliens drink blood!”
“You’re so drunk, Camden, I wonder you can stay on your feet. Look, get hold of yourself. That sounds like something out of the cheesy film you consulted for.” He looked back at the house, pointed back toward it. “Look, I don’t see any three-headed monsters chasing you, Camden. Looks to me as though you’ve been had.”
“Had?” said Camden, weaving in Scarborough’s grasp, blinking back at the house, taking in the fact that indeed he wasn’t being pursued.
“Some kind of trick. Look, Davis is known for his little tricks, isn’t he? I mean, that’s the rumor I heard about him, anyway.”
Camden looked as though he’d been slapped in the face. “Oh. Yeah. He does have kind of a rep for that.” He blinked, still clearly confused.
“Come on, Camden.” Scarborough opened the RV door that had been such a trial for the man. “Let’s get in there and make some coffee. I think we both need it. “
“The voice, though. Jesus ... it scared the bejesus out of me!” Camden looked back skeptically at the house.
“Has it occurred to you that Davis clearly is an electronically capable individual?”
“Huh?” Camden clumped into the RV, missing his footing and rocking the vehicle as he fell down heavily upon a seat.
“Some sort of speaker system. You don’t really think Mr. X or whoever he is comes to Davis as a disembodied voice, do you? Hardly! Davis says he gets phone calls.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Scarborough turned on the light. He went over to the sink, poured some water in the kettle, and put it over the gas.
Then he turned back to Camden.
“We’re only a little more than a day into this phase, Jake, and everything’s a mess already. They’re playing me for a pawn, Jake—whoever put us in this van, pulling our puppet strings. They’re in control... And I won’t have it. We’re going to get some coffee inside us and then get some sleep. We’re going to have a serious change of plan tomorrow, but we’re going to have a serious talk about it first.”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure, man. God, I’m happy to see you. That voice. It was terrifying.”
“I think we’re going to have to deal with things more frightening than voices before this thing is through.”
Scarborough went to the cabinet and got out the coffee.
Chapter 16
She woke up, snarled in sheets.
Where am I? she thought as she stared blearily out into the dimly lit room. But before she could grope through her memory for an answer, the hangover hit.
It hit like the implosion of a bomb. Headache, churning of stomach, general pall of not-rightness. She was thirsty, very thirsty, and she closed her eyes to try and go back to sleep and shut this pain out, escape.
She couldn’t of course. She couldn’t go back to sleep—but worse, she remembered what had happened last night.
Oh my God!
She shuddered with horror and embarrassment. This kind of thing had happened a few times back in college. Once she’d woken up with a frat guy whose name she didn’t even know. In a way, all that had been part of the pre-AIDS college process for a free-thinking, free-drinking girl, but as soon as she’d joined the Air Force, she got serious and cut out these kinds of silly shenanigans.
But not last night.
If it wasn’t so horrible, it might actually be funny... but considering the circumstances she was in—AWOL, on the run with an alleged felon—it was simply insupportable.
She tried to get up and a groan escaped her mouth. Her long curling hair draped down over the side of her face and she looked up through it, recognizing the consoles of instruments and the banks of monitors, dead and blank. There hung a sour smell in the air she noticed now—the smell of old alcohol and shame.
Was it day or was it night?
Marsha groa
ned again, but this time it came out more a sigh, more a moan. As though this was the proper cue, the door of the little secret room—this technological voyeur’s passion pit—which had been merely ajar, opened and Lowell Davis walked in. He wore a bright red bathrobe inscribed with his initials over blue silk pajamas. He carried a tray with a coffee service on it, along with rolls and a large pitcher of water and a tumbler.
“Good morning!” he said brightly. Light cascaded from behind him, illuminating the once dusky room.
Marsha scrabbled up handfuls of sheets and covered her nakedness all the way up to the neck. She fell back against the mattress, feeling terrible. “Is that what it is?”
“Yes, it’s morning.”
“No. I mean ‘good.’ You could have fooled me.”
“Yes,” he said, putting the tray down on the console. He rattled a bottle of aspirin. “That’s why I brought these.”
“You’re so thoughtful,” she said sarcastically.
“I can also make you an exceptionally potent morning-after concoction, if you’d like it.”
“No. I deserve this. I want to relish my pain.”
“Coffee then?”
“Just my clothes. Where are my clothes?”
“I took the liberty of folding them and putting them at the bottom of the bed.” He went, got them, handed them to her.
“Thanks. Now would you mind leaving so I can put them on?”
“I sense some hostility here. Or is it just the hangover talking?”
“You took advantage of me. That was the real reason you brought me down here, wasn’t it? To get rid of Jake and to get me on this bed. Oh, God, I should have listened to my instincts.”
“It would appear that we both were pretty much in contact with our instincts last night, hmmm?”
“Well, at least one of us regrets it thoroughly. And I suppose that I could use some of that coffee, if you put cream in it.”
“Gladly.” He poured her a cup, gave it to her, and folded his arms as he watched her drinking it. “For what it’s worth, I apologize. I suppose I drank too much as well.”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 89
