With a maniacal screech, the rider bore down upon them once again and as the others scattered. Hunter stood and stared. astonished, as both the horse and rider vanished right before their eyes. leaving behind nothing but the echo of the horseman’s wild laughter.
“Holy Mary Mother o’ God!” breathed Macintosh, his eyes wide with disbelief. “Is it the drink. or did I really see that?
“I saw it. too!” said Dudley Brenton. “He had no head’ The rider had no head! “
“Your knife went right through him!” Eli Cruger said to Howard.
“No, he missed,” said someone.
“I didn’t miss.” insisted Howard. “I never miss.” He swallowed hard and crossed himself. “It was a ghost, sure as I live and breathe! A demon straight from hell!”
“ You saw it. Reese!” said Macintosh. his eyes bulging. “You saw! He vanished straightaway, before our very eyes! That was no man, Reese! Men don’t just disappear! It was a ghost! You saw!”
“Yes. Mac, I saw,” said Hunter. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out.
“A haunting!” Macintosh said hoarsely. “A haunting. that’s what it was! You all saw it same as I did, every man jack of you!”
Hunter bit his lower hp. His fingers felt the warp disc on its bracelet, concealed under his left sleeve. He turned and started walking quickly down the street.
Macintosh ran after him. “Reese! Wait! Where are you going’?”
“Go back, Mac,” Hunter said. “I have to go and see someone.”
“I’ll go with you!”
“No, Mac, I must go alone.”
“You’re going to tell Sam?”
“No, you go and tell him if you wish.” said Hunter. “But you’d best take some of the others with you, for I’m afraid he’s going to need a good deal of convincing. I have to go see someone else.” He paused. “They’ll take some convincing. too, but somehow I must make them believe me.”
He turned and walked away from the bewildered, frightened Macintosh and entered a dark and narrow alleyway. He looked around, pushed back his sleeve, and quickly programmed a sequence of transition coordinates into the warp disc. He took a deep breath and exhaled heavily.
“I sure hope I know what the hell I’m doing,” he said.
A moment later. Macintosh came running after him into the alley. “Reese, wait!” he cried. He stopped suddenly and looked around. “What the devil…”
The alley ended in a cul de sac. hut Hunter was nowhere in sight.
1
Lucas Priest was tired of being poked and prodded. For the past two weeks, he had been subjected to just about every type of medical examination known to man. He had been psychiatrically evaluated, biochemically analyzed, and holographically scanned until he couldn’t stand it any longer. Tall, slim, handsome, and muscular, with a bionic eye replacement as a result of being wounded on a temporal adjustment mission, he was in excellent physical condition, but the tests had worn him out. It seemed to him as if his mind and body had generated enough medical and psychiatric data to keep an entire team of doctors busy for a month. But then, he thought, that’s what you get for dying.
“Hey. Doc. are we going to be finished anytime this year’?” he asked, wearily running his hand through his thick brown hair as he sat up on the lab couch.
“Well unless someone upstairs thinks up anything else that we can put you through, that was it.” said Capt. Hazen, entering some data into her hand-held terminal “You’re all finished.”
“You’re kidding. Really?”
“Really. You can put your clothes back on.”
“You know, I never thought I’d be so glad to hear an attractive woman telling me to put my clothes back on,” said Lucas. with a grin.
She arched an eyebrow at him. “You never know. I just might ask you to take them off again sometime.” She grinned. “On the other hand, maybe not. I wouldn’t want to be accused of necrophilia.”
“Ver
y funny.”