The Shadowy Horses

"Well, yes, we do." He rubbed his neck, ruefully. "But I'm afraid I hadn't quite got around to entering my notes from Friday last, or Saturday."

Forgetting about the tea, I stood. "I'll go and take a look, j if you like. A fresh pair of eyes can work wonders."

Up at the Principia, having searched through Quinnell's desk and come up empty-handed, I shunted Adrian aside to check the floor beneath David's chair. "Are you sure you haven't seen it?"

"I'm positive." Patiently, he moved his feet to let me finish searching underneath the desk. "Shall I strip off, to prove I haven't got the thing stuffed down my trousers? Would that help?"

"It might." I banged my head on the desk, backing out, and straightened, massaging my scalp. "Honestly, Adrian, I can't think where that bloody notebook's got to."

"Maybe your friend took it."

"Sorry?"

"The Sentinel." He wasn't serious. I saw the smirk as he bent to key a command into David's computer, sending the nearby laser printer into action with a half-protesting whine. "If Peter thinks him capable of crashing our computers, I don't see why our ghost should balk at stealing Peter's field notes. Come to think of it," he said, clapping a hand to his cheek in mock horror, "my coffee cup's gone missing, too ..." And he whistled the theme of The Twilight Zone.

"Yes, that's very helpful, thank you," I dismissed his comments, looking around with hands on hips. "I'm glad you're taking this so seriously."

He leaned back, rather smugly. "Well, I warned you, didn't I? I told you something else was bound to happen. Bad luck, my darling, comes in threes—remember?" When I ignored him, starting on my search again with even greater vigor, he sighed and turned his chair from the computer. "Right, I'll help you hunt," he said. "Just let me get another cup of coffee, first. Want one?"

"No thanks." Returning to the tall steel filing cabinet on the end wall, I yanked the top drawer open for another look, even though I knew the odds of Peter's field notes being filed by mistake were slim. At any rate, the drawer was nearly empty. I was closing it again when I heard Adrian come back. "God, that was quick," I told him. "Look, I don't suppose that you could—"

I didn't manage to finish the sentence. Without warning, the drawer handle was wrenched from my hand as the filing cabinet slid a good foot sideways, scraping heavily along the hard clay floor. Startled, I spun around to look at Adrian, and found he wasn't there.

Nobody was.

And yet I knew, as I struggled to speak, to move a finger, anything... I knew that I wasn't alone. I screwed my eyes tight shut and pressed my back to the unyielding bulk of the filing cabinet, drawing reassurance from its cold solidity while phantom footsteps, faint but certain, slowly moved toward me ... paused ... and finally passed me by. Only when the sound had died completely did I dare to even breathe.

The clink of a spoon in a coffee mug brought my eyes open. "You'll put your back out, doing that," said Adrian, not noticing that anything was wrong.

I licked my lips, to make them move. "Doing what?"

"Shifting furniture." He nodded at the filing cabinet. "That's too heavy for you."

"Yes, well, I didn't. .."

"Still, I see you managed to find it," he said, cheerfully. "Well done."

Still rather numb, I peered around at the blank wall where the cabinet had been, and stared, transfixed, at the large red notebook lying there.

Adrian bent to pick it up, flipping through the dog-eared pages. "Quinnell must have left this on the cabinet, and somehow it got joggled and fell down behind. You see?" Handing me the notebook, he hid his superior smile behind the coffee mug. "Not everything," said Adrian, "can be the work of ghosts."

I could have told the truth to Peter—he would have believed me. But when I handed him his notebook he was so delighted I could barely get a word in edgeways, so J let the matter drop. Instead I sat with Peter in the comfort of his sitting room and had a gin-and-it to calm my shakes.

And if the ghost was on the prowl in the Principia, he didn't seem to interfere with Adrian, who, in an unexpected show of diligence, stayed up there working straight through until dinnertime. He didn't simply print off David's notes, as I had thought he would—he also took the time to summarize them, creating an impressive brief report, illustrated at appropriate intervals with sections of his own surveys and my drawings of our Roman-era finds.

Peter, scanning through the pages as we lingered over after-dinner coffee, was ecstatic. "Brilliant!" he pronounced it. "Marvellous, my boy. I knew those damned computers would be useful. Now, we just have to combine your report with this," he said, waving his own thick sheaf of handwritten jottings, "and we're all set."

Adrian's face sagged a little, but I had no doubt he'd manage the revisions. He did his best work when he stood to profit by it, and he had a vested interest in our learned lunch guest's final judgment of our site. If Dr. Connelly agreed to approve the Rosehill excavation, to let students from Edinburgh do their vacation work here, then our jobs would be safe for the season. But if Connelly refused... well, Peter was a proud man. I didn't know, myself, how he'd react.

Which left me feeling rather like poor Damocles beneath the hanging sword, expecting any moment that the slender thread might snap.