The Voice, by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

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                           - 12 -

"He was here again, wasn't he?" Alissa asked, spurring
Attila on.

"He's always here now." I said to my daughter, a young
woman whose intelligence and wit made her inquiries of my
dream-life increasingly difficult to side step.

"Maybe you should see somebody about it then," she said,
a look of concern growing in her eyes.

"I'm not crazy. I need to know who he is. I need to meet
him on his own turf because I know he understands what I'm
looking for."

Alissa huffed in genuine amazement. "On his own turf? How
are you going to meet someone who lives in dream?" .

"I don't know yet. But when I do I will instruct him to
dispose of Rick Kendall."

Alissa laughed deeply, the sadness in her eyes suddenly
disappearing. "Then you'd better get started. Your lawyer
called to say there's no way out of that contract. The
publisher owned all the rights including sequels and
Kendall's conglomerate bought the publisher. The book
belongs to them."

I'd hoped against hope, but I suspected something like
this was coming. Despite all my efforts to avoid it, Kendall
had my story locked up and there was nothing I could do. The
thought shot me back into the darkness-back into my
experiences with the Black Knight. At night I was haunted by
dark images of the past, stalked by my look-alike dressed in
the black armor of a medieval assassin. By day, I was hemmed
in on all sides by a book contract that had drawn me into
the clutches of what was rapidly becoming an omniverse of
huge "entertainment" conglomerates bent on controlling every
means of human communication.