Chapter 4
Everett Scarborough’s house was a big colonial off River Road in Bethesda, Maryland, surrounded by large oak and maple stands, and several cherry blossom trees. He’d bought it in the mid-sixties when he’d moved to Washington to take on the position as Chief Scientific Consultant for Project Blue Book, and had stayed on after the project had shut down. Washington was full of consulting positions for a bright and personable scientist like Dr. Everett Scarborough, and Scarborough lived well off these while he started to build his side-career as a writer of nonfiction articles and books. He and Phyllis had fallen in love with the sturdy brick house to the northwest of a city they found to have just the right mixture of cosmopolitan culture, interesting people, and attractive countryside. They decided that it was here that they would start a family.
It was very late that night of the shooting, when Scarborough pulled his Mercedes into his macadam driveway.
He had been treated at Holy Cross Hospital for superficial facial cuts, and several thick splinters had been extracted. He wore a bandage, and carried a packet containing adhesive tape, cotton, and a fresh bandage for tomorrow, along with a disinfectant. The hospital did not keep him long; the police, after questioning him, let him go. They would have preferred that he stay with a friend or at a hotel for the night, but Scarborough had assured them that he kept his place of residence highly secret, due to all the crank activity that buzzed around him. Still, the state police promised to notify the Montgomery County cops to keep a watch on the house.
Scarborough shut the door of his blue Mercedes, sighed, and looked up at his house, at the night lights glowing from the windows.
If only Phyllis were here. If only she were still alive and waiting for him, he wouldn’t feel so leaden and lonely inside now. His wife had died seven years before, and while Scarborough had been dating regularly for the past four, he’d only had one relationship that had lasted over six months. Plenty of women were attracted to him. He was a man of vast charm and appeal, perhaps even charisma. But when they actually got to know him, if they cared to make the relationship more permanent, they rapidly realized that they were competing with a ghost—the memory of his wife.
Generally, Everett Scarborough liked living alone. He had plenty of friends all over the Washington area, all over the world for that matter, and the Scarborough house often had guests, or dinner parties or just pals over for poker. Scarborough liked to control the influx of visitors, and preferred to have the option of being alone when he cared to be, so that he could finish a book, or write an article, or just immerse himself in his vast library and his record collection.
Tonight, though, he knew he didn’t really want company. He wanted Phyl.
As he walked up the stone pathway to the front door, he trod upon cherry blossoms that the front tree was just beginning to shed. The April season for them was very short, but they were so beautiful when they bloomed. Phyllis had them planted when they first moved in—she always associated Washington with cherry blossoms, she claimed, and wanted a couple trees for her very own, so she wouldn’t have to jostle with the tourists for looks around the Tidal Basin. Still, every year, Phyllis had to go visit them, tourists or no tourists, especially when their daughter Diane got old enough to appreciate them. Scarborough never cared much about the trees until Phyllis had died—and then suddenly they were very important to him.
Slotting the key into the lock, opening the front door, he immediately had an overwhelming urge for a drink. After the lecture tonight, and the horrible events afterwards, he was positively speeding with all the adrenaline pumping through his system. Now, although pure sadness and depression had slowed him down some, he still felt very ragged, very on edge. One of Scarborough’s vices was his fondness for good, twelve-year-old Scotch, and he could almost taste the wicked, bracing sting of a neat three-fingers’ worth as he opened his door.
As soon as he entered the house, he sensed that something was amiss.
There were no odd sounds, no odd smells—everything was in order. Clean, neat—maybe that was it. Yes, he decided, putting his briefcase down on a table near the staircase, remembering. Today was Mrs. Morgan’s cleaning day, and as he’d been over at the university since ten A.M. this morning, preparing for the lecture—the first of a planned nationwide series keyed to tie in with last month’s publication of Above Us Only Sky by Quigley Publishers—Scarborough had not run into her. The older woman, who’d been cleaning almost as long as he’d owned the house, had her own key with which to let herself in and out. The house felt different because it was all straightened up, vacuumed, dusted, mopped. There was a touch of Pine Sol to the air, a taste of Lemon Pledge.
Besides, Scarborough was not a man who dwelt on unsubstantiated feelings. He believed that such human properties as intuition were merely primitive sub-neocortex forms of mental logic, developed as defense mechanisms in early primates. Any hunches and such that he experienced were quickly brought to light, examined with his trained mind, and then acted on, or discarded. He counted this feeling of wrongness inside his house now as the paranoid result of the evening’s events. He knew that if he didn’t get a grip, he’d be checking under his bed for boogeymen.
Scarborough laughed gently to himself. “Good evening, boogeymen, the wounded soldier is home!” he called out to the silence.
His voice echoed through an empty house. There was, of course, no answer.
He hung his jacket in the hall closet. Now, about that drink. His face still ached. The stinging was gone, but still, a good solid drink would numb the ache, and relax him. Maybe he’d even be able to sleep tonight, though that was an iffy prospect.
He went through his living room, into the porch that he’d converted into a study. The louvered windows still remained, which made the study very bright and cheerful during the day. As he switched on his light, the most prominent feature of the breezeway/study was immediately displayed: not his old IBM PC huddled in his corner, nor his desk, piled with papers—but a huge walnut bar that ran half the length of the brick wall, filled with Victorian bric-a-brac and mirrors, populated by six stools, a copper footrest-railing, and English-style taps connected to kegs of Bass Ale, Watney’s Red Barrel, and John Courage, the only British beers he could get in the United States in that form. This was the centerpiece of Scarborough’s social events, and had been dubbed by his poker buddies as “The Bar That ET Built,” since it was the result of an abundant royalty payment from his third UFO exposé bestseller, Cultural Profiteers and Alien Visitors, a study of how mass media affected the mythology of weird phenomena, with a large part devoted to the famous Steven Spielberg blockbuster movie, E.T.
Scarborough went behind the bar to where his spirits were neatly racked. He scanned his selection of Scotches, and selected a half-empty bottle of Dewar’s. From the overhead glass-rack, he pulled a long-stemmed glass. He uncapped the bottle and poured himself a liberal dollop, which he sipped slowly, savoring the woody aroma as though it were the finest of wines.
Like alcoholics say, thought Scarborough as the knot in his interior slowly untwisted, the thing about a drink was it worked every time.
He was about to go to his stereo and put on some Chopin, or something similarly restful, and stretch out on the divan across from the bar, when he heard the noise.
It sounded like someone moving around in the basement.
Adrenaline pumped again. He froze, his hand gripping the glass so hard he almost crushed it. He put the drink down and listened. The sound continued—someone was definitely in the basement. Then there was a clatter and crunch of something falling and scattering.
His heart racing, he went to the fireplace. He pulled open the bottom drawer, and moved aside a cloth concealing a loaded .38 revolver. He wasn’t a gun person by nature, but after his second searing indictment of UFO fanatics, he had started receiving hate mail, including death threats. As these threats were usually indirect, promising retribution from the skies in the form of death rays and disintegration, he did not take great notice. But since he’d had a family at the time, he thought that the logical thing to do was to get a gun—just in case. And make damn sure his place of residence was kept a secret.
But there was someone in his basement, and it was almost two o’clock in the morning.
He thought about calling the police, but then realized that they couldn’t get here quick enough. He’d have to deal with whoever it was downstairs himself. After watching that poor Tamowitz fellow get gunned down this evening, he almost welcomed the intrusion. It would be a way to deal with his frustration at being able to do nothing before. Now, he held hard cold metal in his hand; now he could deal with things.
Cautiously, he made his way into the foyer, not turning on the lights, treading on the rug and avoiding the side table with the fake flower arrangement by simple touch and memory. From the foyer, a flight of carpeted stairs led to the second floor. Beneath these stairs were the steps that led down to the basement, where Scarborough kept his library. He eased quietly through the darkness to the closed doorway, carefully turning the knob and looking down the steps.
There was a light on in his library.
He hadn’t left a light on, had he? He searched his memory. Mrs. Morgan generally never ventured down there, unless he specifically asked her to. The library was the one place he allowed his tendency to clutter full reign. This was also where he kept the bulk of his record and CD collection, and there were always new stacks of recordings waiting to be shelved, which he did not want the cleaning woman to tamper with.
There were no other noises. Had one of those stacks simply toppled over? A possibility, though unlikely. He had to check.
The basement steps were not carpeted, so he took them one by one with care and quiet. He kept his breathing controlled and silent. Holding the gun up, he clicked the safety off, and continued the descent.
His blood hammered in his ears, and he felt his heart thumping away with tension in his chest.
At the bottom of the steps, he paused.
Another sound. A squeak. It sounded like his Eames chair—he never got around to oiling it lately, and the damn leather monstrosity tended to squeal like a wounded cat when you swiveled. Scarborough hardly needed his training in logic to come to the conclusion that there was somebody sitting in his chair.
He took a deep breath, made the final step onto the landing, swinging around for a full view of the library, holding his .38 out in front of him. He barely noticed that his hand was shaking.
The entirety of the large basement room’s walls was lined with shelves, and upon these shelves were thousands and thousands of books. Old books, new books, paperbacks, magazines. More books and journals sat on the two coffee tables and the large Oriental rug on the floor. On the far wall was a fireplace, the room smelled of the un-cleaned flue and the charred wood still lingering on the grate, mixed with the tobacco smells from Scarborough’s pipe collection and his humidor, which lined the walnut mantel.
Scarborough immediately noted that the lights of his Fischer stereo system were on. A coiled wire stretched from a jack to behind the Eames chair, turned away from him. Scattered by the chair was a pile of his latest CD purchases. From the chair to the footstool stretched a pair of legs wrapped in jeans, shod in black Reeboks.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, after a heavy sigh and a shake of his head. He lowered the gun.
There was no answer. He noted the toes moving back and forth in rhythm with some unheard music. Scarborough put the safety back on the gun and placed it on a free space on a nearby shelf. Whatever she was doing here, it wouldn’t do for her to see him coming toward her holding a gun. Besides, the possibility of scaring her also played havoc with her image of him as an unshakeable stalwart man. He checked to see if his hands were still shaking. They were. Mentally, he ordered them to cease. After a few seconds, and a few more deep breaths, they did.
Scarborough went to the stereo amplifier and hit the power button to the off position.
The result was immediate. The Eames chair swiveled around, bearing the surprised blonde face of his daughter Diane, framed by a set of Koss headphones. She focused on her father, her shocked expression rapidly changing into a big, happy smile.
“Daddy!” she cried, taking her headphones off, getting up, and rushing to him. “Dad, you’re home.”
She was about to hug him, when she noticed the bandage.
“My God, what happened to you?”
“Tell you later.”
Scarborough wanted to hold her. He wanted to grab her and hold her a very long time. But instead, as he did ever since she had reached puberty and filled out, he confined himself to a peck on her cheek. When she put her arms around him, and hugged him, he tensed up. She was too much like a young Phyllis. Besides, he simply wasn’t a physically warm man; he hadn’t been brought up that way by his parents. He let his daughter hug him for two seconds, and then he gently pried her away. “You’ve cut your hair,” he said. “I liked it long. But what are you doing here? I thought you weren’t going to be here till next Monday?”
“Change of plans.” She backed away from him, reaching out and touching the white bandage gently. “There’s something I have to talk to you about. Something very important. But that can wait. I want to know what happened to you! You’re home so late! I’m still on Midwest time, so I just thought I’d sit down here awhile and listen to your wonder box here.”
“What ... You’re into jazz and classical now?” he said, startled.
“Na...“ she said, pointing to a CD carrying-case, lying amidst a sprawl of Wise potato chips, onion dip and a half empty bottle of Classic Coke. “I brought my own.”
He went over to the CD player, and picked up the empty jewel-box. “Depeche Mode, huh? Sounds fashionable.”
“Electronic pop, Dad. Do you want to hear some?”
“No thanks, Diane. I just hope that my Fischer hasn’t been hopelessly offended by youthful garbage.” He smiled when he said it—they always playfully sparred about their different musical tastes. It was safe territory for a release of the many tensions between them.
“Well, if it can take the dying cat howls of Mingus and Coltrane, then it can probably bear up to D. Mode. Although, this is a very sonically full recording, Daddy dear. I just hope I didn’t blow any tubes or anything.” She picked up her Coke and sipped it.
Scarborough was pleased to see that she was wearing the red blouse, and the necklace that he had given her this past Christmas. She was also wearing Opium perfume, her mother’s favorite. Scarborough wasn’t so happy about that.
“No, really, Dad, what the hell happened to your face?”
He sighed. “I guess you’ll hear about it eventually. I don’t want you to worry, though.” The tremors again, inside. He went to the table where he kept a couple bottles of Scotch and poured some Glenlivet into a clean glass. “It’s an isolated incident, and I guess I knew that it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Whatever are you talking about? Out with it, Dad! You hem and haw so much when you’ve got something important to say. I can’t stand it.”
He took a gulp of the amber stuff. “I had a lecture today. University of Maryland. Some nutcase took a couple potshots at me.”
“Daddy!” She nearly dropped her bottle of Coke, her expression changing entirely. She was staring, horrified, at his face.
“Oh, none of the bullets actually touched me,” he said, reaching up reflexively and touching his wounds. “Splinters from the podium. Very superficial. Unfortunately, a man who was on stage was hit by one. Killed, too.”
“That’s awful!”
He drank the rest of his Scotch. “Yes.”
It was clear she wanted to go to him and hold him again, but he countered the possibility by turning away to his bottle and pouring himself another drink. “I’m okay, though. A little shaken up ... more by the shooting and the death than by this little wound here.”
“Well, I just thank God you’re okay.”
“If God had anything to do with it, I’d probably be in the morgue now,” he said, a touch of bitterness in his voice.
Diane said nothing. Religion was one of the touchy points of their relationship, and she clearly didn’t care to deal with her father’s thoughts on God. Awkwardly, she put the Coke down and wrapped her arms around herself, as though she were cold. “You must be really wired now, Dad.”
“Yes. A bit paranoid, too. I heard you knock that stack of CDs over from upstairs. Thought you were some assassin, out to finish the job!”
“Did you call the police?” she asked.
“No. Maybe subconsciously I figured it was you. You do, after all, have a tendency to knock things over.” He looked at his glass, thinking about taking another sip. But he could already feel the whiskey singing in his veins, and clouding his mind a touch. He decided he’d had enough for now. “Anyway, everything’s okay now, Diane. But I want to know what this important thing is that you have to talk to me about?”
“Maybe we should wait till tomorrow,” she said, looking doubtful. “Maybe we both should get a good night’s sleep first. It’s been a long day for both of us and—“
Suddenly, she wasn’t twenty years old anymore. To Scarborough, she was just eight years old, in pigtails, gap-toothed and guilty. “Diane!” he said in a deep, commanding but fatherly tone. “Tell me now!”
She cringed a bit, and looked away. But then, recovering she stood up straight, took a deep breath and became more herself—damnably independent, frightfully like Phyllis at her most appealing.
“Dad, I’ve had the most incredible experience. And you’re the only one who can help me come to grips with it. Actually, Tim and I—we had it together. You can help us both—Tim thinks so too. But you’re going to have to grow for us ... reach into the unknown ... “
“Oh no, I see it coming ... What new religion is it this time ... the Quakers ... the Mystical Nabobs of Narcissism?”
“Dad, I’m very serious. Tim and I—well, we saw an Unidentified Flying Object.”
“What?” It was like a Kennedy child telling Papa Joe they were turning Republican.
“And there’s more, Dad. We think that we were abducted by creatures from the UFO. Abducted, and then released—but somehow ... changed.”
He was stunned. Scarborough couldn’t believe his ears. His own daughter—spouting this garbage!
“This is a joke, right?” he said, shaking his head as though she’d just struck him across his face. “You know how I feel about this subject, so you and your Irish hooligan have concocted a grand April fool’s joke for the old man!”
She shook her head no, standing her ground firmly, staring him straight on. “No, Dad. I wouldn’t joke about something so very serious. Two nights ago, Timothy Reilly and I were in our car. We saw a saucer-shaped vehicle, covered with odd lights landing beyond a field. We got out to investigate, and walked a ways, we think.”
“You think? You don’t know for sure?”
“No. Because the next thing we knew, we were back in the car and it was dawn. We had no memories of what had transpired the night before, Dad. Tim is arranging for a hypnotist to take us back through whatever experience we had. I knew I had to reach you right away, to talk to you about this. I figured you would want to share in our exploration of this ... well, this whatever it is.”
Everett Scarborough felt dizzy. For a long moment, his brain seemed to simply freeze up, unable to engage. He stared at Diane, and saw for the very first time, not his daughter, but a stranger, someone he didn’t know, didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand. All this New Age religiosity was hard enough to take. He knew that part of it was a normal rebellion against parental disposition. He’d humored her as much as possible, indulging in arguments with her as much for her sake as his own. If he agreed with her, her penchant for perverse rebellion would not be satisfied. Meditation was okay. Crystals? Harmless enough. Channeling and rebirthing? A bit outré, but he’d humored her. But abduction by beings from a flying saucer?
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” he whispered, going to his Glenlivet bottle.
“What? Dad, are we going to talk about this? Are you going to look at me even? Have you forgotten I am your flesh and blood? Don’t you care about me?”
He poured the Scotch into the glass, drank two swallows’ worth, knowing that a barrel of the stuff would be insufficient. “We’ll talk about this in the morning, all right, Diane?”
She looked down at the floor, her shoulders sagging, a moistness appearing in her eyes. “All right, Dad,” she said in a disappointed tone.
“Go to bed now. Mrs. Morgan’s already prepared your room. You know where everything is.”
“Yes. I’ll go. But there’s more, and we’re going to have to talk in the morning, okay? We never talk, and this is really something serious, something important that needs to be discussed by you and I, just you and I.” She said it in a flat voice, as though it were a previously prepared speech that she now recited simply by rote.
He mumbled a disgruntled “Yes,” and she started away, climbing the steps, while he finished his drink and watched her go, hearing her feet ascend.
He went to get another drink, then selected a Deutsche Grammophon CD of Beethoven’s Ninth, knowing he’d not be able to sleep for a while yet.
He knew Diane would get the message. He always played Beethoven’s Ninth when he was royally pissed.
Scarborough turned on the Fischer, and started the CD, sitting back in his Eames chair. Beneath him, a spill of potato chips crunched.
Maybe, he thought, it would have been better if that assassin, that guy in the black raincoat, hadn’t missed.