Chapter 2
Dr. Everett Scarborough, she thought.
Here she was, in a parked car in Make-Out Lane in the middle of the night, with her boyfriend’s left hand on her breast, his right one under her dress struggling with her panties in a deliciously slow way, and all Diane Scarborough could do was to think about her father.
“Uh—Tim,” she said, raising her voice above the rasp of his breaths. Suddenly, she wasn’t turned on at all by his dousing of Obsession for Men, a cologne that generally turned her extremities to the consistency of hot oatmeal. In fact, the scent made her feel a little ill. She turned away from it toward the open window, toward the trees beyond, shadows of spring below the moonlight. “Tim, can we give it a rest.”
The guy came up for air from the smooth juncture between her neck and shoulder, blinking and sputtering. “What—something wrong?”
“I guess I’m just not in the mood, that’s all,” she said, sitting up a little, pulling her dress down in a time-honored female signal of sexual disinterest.
Timothy Reilly was silent for a moment, his face inert in the red light from the dash radio. The Eagles were droning “One of these Nights” from a soft-rock FM station. Then he lifted his hands up as though an imploration to heaven itself. “You drove me out here!”
She tapped the wheel of her ‘89 Nissan, Tim’s ring clicking rhythmically. “I thought it would get my mind off things.”
“You mean your goddamn father, don’t you,” he said, words a little heated. “Diane, I’m pretty sick of hearing about the old man, and I’m generally not uncompassionate!”
“He’s not old, Tim, and you’re hardly a man.”
“He’s almost fifty, that’s old. I’m almost twenty-five, and that’s far enough past twenty-one to be a man. As for the hard part—well, I guess I can take a cold shower later.”
She laughed. “Sorry. I can be a real bitch. It’s just that I’m so worried about him.”
Tim Reilly sighed with exasperation, looking out at the stretch of Kansas fields and roads that faded into the distance. He was a slender fellow, with a cap of long curly reddish hair, light eyes, wearing Levi jeans and a Sears red checked flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up. Everything from his gift of gab to his square, cleft chin said “Irish” except for his accent, which was pure Middle American.
“The guy’s in great health, he’s got a book on the Nonfiction Bestseller List of the New York Times, he’s raking in the dough on a lecture tour, you’re going to see him next week for spring break ... and you’re worried about him?”
“He’s in danger,” said Diane, softly but emphatically. “I know he is.”
“He’s not in danger,” said Tim. “Don’t worry.”
“Tim, the Tarot cards say ‘Danger,’ his astrological chart is flashing red flags like crazy——and I’ve got this intuitive feeling...”
“God, ever since you talked to that psychic last week, you can’t let this go, can you? That’s when this started, right? When that loony channeler started going on about your old man!”
“She wasn’t loony; she said a lot of fascinating, truthful things about everything, including us.”
“Look, I’m as interested in this stuff as you are, though it’s quite apparent that I’m far more of a skeptic than you. I’ve been studying it for years, I’ve done the ashram trip, I’ve been to India, I’ve studied plenty of psychic phenomena—and dearest, you can’t take any of it too literally. That’s the whole point. One rides with the Tao of existence, and all this shit is just frequencies for your personal TV set. You tune them in, you tune them out.”
“My father might be in danger, and it’s because of what he does—he has to be warned. I’ve decided.”
Tim nodded. “Oh, I get it. You just didn’t know whether or not to call out the National Guard, or to just tell him and take his abuse, huh?”
Diane flinched a bit inside. Hammer to head of nail. Her father, the eminent Everett Scarborough, Ph.D., was Mr. Rationality himself, Mr. Spock of “Star Trek” without the eyebrows and the flickers of humanity. Normally, Diane delighted in teasing her father about his dedication to the realm of logic. Much of her adolescent life was a rebellion against cold analytical numbers, bare brass facts. Her interest in the realm of the spirit world—an interest that had led to participation in the Lifespring movement, a brief tenure as a disciple of Sri Hasha Rodani, a brush with astral projection and trance channeling, to say nothing of the weekend seminar she’d taken taught by Shirley MacLaine—made her father positively livid. He’d spent hours upon hours attempting to reason with her, pointing out the fallacies and follies of her New Age spiritual pathways. But now she felt like the boy who had cried wolf. She really did have a bad feeling about her father’s future, with no proof but a turn of the cards, a few words from a psychic, and a bellyful of heavy intuition. Chances were that at the merest mention of the causes of her trepidation, therein might lie the actual cause of the danger itself: he’d go purple with apoplexy and die of a heart attack.
Still, she had to warn him.
Something was going to happen to him.
Something bad.
“I’ve got to try, Tim. I’ve really got to try.”
“Great. Lay it on him next week in D.C. when you go back home. I don’t understand why it’s giving you all this distress. Meantime, long as we’re out here—“ Tim reached into the back seat and pulled a can of beer out of a foam ice-chest, “let’s relax a bit. It’s exactly 11:00, the moon looks like a big white pizza with extra amore on, I’m with my honey, and even if she doesn’t feel like satisfying my molten, desperate urges, I feel like being with her.“ He popped the top off the Coors and offered it to her. “So let’s make nice, huh?”
“I’m sorry, Tim. Maybe you should find someone else. I let my moods get to me too much.”
Tim finished his long sip of beer. “Sorry, kiddo. I got this terrible problem, you see. I’m stuck on you.”
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 behind 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 outdoorsperson, 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.
Only now she wasn’t in a sleeping bag, nor was she in a tent.
The smell of dew on leaf and grass was in the air. Dawn washed the sky with a pink and blue, moody clouds swirled into the mix. The taste of cinnamon was in her mouth. She stirred and yawned, stretching out. Her hands hit a steering wheel. Blinking, she realized that she sat in the driver’s seat of her car, and that the car was parked well off the road, situated between a couple of large oaks, the splendid view of a Kansas field before her, grass rippling with the tug of a morning wind.
She felt a sense of calm, of perfect peace. She felt one with the sky and the trees and the sweeping Kansas grass, as though she’d just been in some meditative trance.
Someone moaned beside her, and then the moan turned into a snore. She turned and saw that it was her boyfriend, Timothy Reilly, his seat back, mouth open, zonked out totally. She looked at him, his sandy red hair a mess, his handsome freckled features boyish and innocent, and she loved him very much. She was happy that he was here, and she reached over to touch him—and then the peace shattered like a gossamer bubble.
What were they doing here?
She had no memory of getting into a car. Her last memory was sitting at her desk, studying for a grammar class, figuring out the deep structure of a sentence and being very bored. After that—nothing.
Now, she was sitting in a car—her car. She instantly recognized the usual refuse near the stick shift, the gum wrappers, the comb, the empty coffee cup. Stuck in between the passenger seat and the emergency brake was a crumpled Coors beer can. In the rear seat was Tim’s battered, trusty beer cooler. Had she and Tim gone out drinking last night? Had they gotten drunk? Had she gotten drunk, and had a blackout?
Unlikely. Diane drank beer with Tim, but she rarely got drunk. And if she’d drunk a lot of beer, she’d be able to taste it in her mouth, to say nothing of feeling a hangover. No, physically she felt just fine. Awake. Alert. And semi-amnesiac.
What had happened last night?
She had the feeling that whatever had happened was terribly important, vital even. And now she was consumed with frustration that she hadn’t a clue as to what it was!
She shook Tim’s arm. “Hey! Tim, wake up!”
He snapped awake. He blinked, looked around him, a kind of dazzled wonder in his eyes. Then, as he focused on his surroundings and got his bearings, he looked over to Diane and said, “Wow!”
“Tim, what are we doing here?”
Tim shook his head. “Diane? I don’t know—I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Why did you say ‘Wow’?”
“Did I? I don’t know ... I just have the impression that I’ve just been someplace really profound!”
“How do you feel?”
“Terrific! Never better.”
“Me too. What’s the last memory you have...? Mine’s of sitting at my desk in my apartment, being bored, studying.”
Tim thought about this for a moment. “Lights,” he said with suddenly finality. “Yeah, colored lights. And ... people. Really far-out people, like I’d never met before ... But so filled with life, so electric. I don’t know, it had a dreamlike quality ... It could have been a dream.”
He shook his head, then turned, pulled the top off his cooler, then pulled a Coors out of the icy water, tiny fragments of ice tinkling. He popped the top and took a pull.
“Beer. In the morning?” she said.
“Doesn’t feel like morning ... Hey ... Beer in the back seat ... And I remembered it. We must have gone out last night. Parked here. Why? To talk ... No, to make out! That’s right, you were tired of making out in bed, and you said you needed fresh air. You’re a fresh-air fiend, and you wanted to go out and fool around and listen to the radio under the stars.”
It sure sounded right. Sounded characteristic of her. She was an impulsive sort, and hauling Tim out like that was just the kind of thing she was likely to do. Why couldn’t she remember a goddamn thing?
Tim drank more of the beer. And then, in mid-gulp, his eyes frosted over, and the stuff started foaming down his mouth, onto his jeans.
“Hey,” she said, pulling the can out of his mouth. “What’s wrong with you?”
He swallowed, and without looking at her said, “I remember now.”
“Remember what?”
“We were sitting here. Kissing, fooling around, but you couldn’t concentrate ... So we just talked ... And then we saw it. We saw it, coming over the field. It was incredible. A saucer-shaped object, with spinning lights. It landed past the field, past some woods. Looked like it landed, anyway, so we got out ... Yeah, we got out of the car ... And we went to check it out!”
Not exactly believing, but not disbelieving, Diane said, “And then…?”
“And then … lights. That’s all ... just lights!”
Diane sighed and closed her eyes. “I don’t remember ... I just don’t—” But as she closed her lids, a whole explosion of lights seemed to go off in her mind, like remembered fireworks. She recalled not as memory usually plays itself out, but as a ragged series of sensory impressions. The smell of cow manure as she hurried across the field, the dread of wondering what lay beyond the trees, the thrill of wanting to find out, the desire to grab hold of something with her mind ... some kind of proof to give her father, to get his attention.
“Daddy!”
“Jeez, is that all you can think about? We wake up in a car with a partial amnesia, and all you can think about is your tight-assed father ... “
“No. Sorry. I just realized, Tim. It’s coming back. Some of it ... enough,” she looked over to him, staring at him with awe and horror. “We’ve got to talk to my father. Tim, you’ve heard about all that business my father’s been investigating lately. That Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, Maximillian Shroeder stuff ... Missing time. That thing we saw ... Tim, we must have been abducted by a UFO!”
Timothy Reilly did not dispute her. He just finished his beer, then immediately got himself another.