The Magic Kingdom of Landover , Volume 1 (56 page)

He felt something catch in his throat. Shadows moved through the mist and rain, darting and sliding from view. Each time, he saw Meeks. Each time, he felt the wizard’s gloved hand reaching for him.

Just keep moving, he told himself. Just get yourself to that phone.

It seemed to take much longer, but he reached the courtesy phone some thirty minutes later, climbing down from among the trees and crossing the
parkway to the weather shelter that housed it. He was soaked to the skin and freezing, but he felt none of it. The entirety of his concentration was focused on the Plexiglas-enclosed black and silver metal box.

Please let it be working, he prayed.

It was. Rain beat down on the shelter roof in a steady thrum, and mist and gloom closed tightly about. He thought he heard footsteps. He rummaged through his duffel for the coins and credit card he still carried in his wallet, rang information for the name of a limo service out of Waynesboro, and called for a car to come up and get him. It was all done in a matter of minutes.

He sat down then to wait on the wooden bench fastened to the side of the shelter. He was surprised to discover that his hands were shaking.

B
y the time the limo reached him and he was safely inside, he had regained his composure enough to reason through what had happened to him.

He no longer thought that he had imagined the appearance of Meeks. What he had seen had been real enough. But it hadn’t been Meeks he had seen; it had been an image of Meeks. The image had been triggered by his crossing back through the time passage. He had been meant to see the image. It had been placed there at the tunnel’s end so that he would see it.

The question was, why?

He hunched down in the backseat of the limo as it sped down the parkway toward Waynesboro and considered the possibilities. He had to assume that Meeks was responsible. No other explanation made any sense. So what was Meeks trying to accomplish? Was he trying to warn Ben off—to chase him back through the time passage? That didn’t make any sense. Well, no, the warning part did. Meeks was arrogant enough to want to let Ben know that he was aware of his coming back. But there had to be more to it than that. The image must have been placed there to accomplish something else as well.

He had his answer almost immediately. The image had not only warned Ben of Meeks; it had warned Meeks of Ben! The image was a device to alert the wizard that Ben had come back from Landover!

It made perfect sense. It was only reasonable to expect that Meeks would employ some contrivance—magic or otherwise—to warn him when Landover’s failed Kings crossed back into their old world with the medallion. Once alerted, Meeks could then come after them …

Or, in this case, after him.

It was late afternoon when the driver deposited him at the front steps of a Holiday Inn in downtown Waynesboro, the rain still falling, the daylight completely gone. Ben told the fellow he was on vacation and had hiked the parkway north from Staunton until the bad weather forced him to abandon the
plan and call for help. The driver looked at him as if he were nuts. The weather had been like this for better than a week, he snapped. Ben shrugged, paid him in cash, and hurried inside.

On his way to the front desk, he paused long enough to check the date on a newspaper someone had left lying on a table in the lobby. It read Friday, December 9. It was ten days more than a year since he had first walked through the time passage from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia into Landover. Time in the two worlds did indeed pass synchronously.

He booked a room for the night, sent out his clothes to be cleaned and dried, took a steaming-hot shower to warm himself, and ordered dinner sent in. While he waited for the meal and his clothes, he called the airport for reservations to Chicago. There was nothing until morning. He would have to fly to Washington, then transfer to Chicago. He booked the reservation, billed it to his credit card, and hung up.

It was while he was eating dinner that it occurred to him that using a credit card to pay for his air fare wasn’t exactly the smartest thing he could have done. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in front of the TV, the tray balanced on his lap, a Holiday Inn towel wrapped about him, and the room temperature at about eighty. His clothes were still out. Tom Brokaw was giving the news, and it suddenly struck Ben that in a world of sophisticated communications a computerized credit-card trace was a relatively simple matter. If Meeks had gone to the trouble of placing that image at the opening of the time passage to warn of Ben’s return, then he would almost certainly take the matter a step further. He would know that Ben would attempt a visit to Chicago. He would know that Ben would probably elect to fly. A credit-card trace would tell him the airline flight, date of travel, and destination.

He could be waiting when Ben stepped off the plane.

That possibility ruined what was left of the meal. Ben put the tray aside, clicked off the TV, and began to consider more carefully what he was up against. Abernathy had been right. This was turning out to be more dangerous than he had imagined. But he really didn’t have any choice. He had to go back to Chicago and see Miles long enough to discover whether there was any truth to his dream. Meeks would probably be waiting for him somewhere along the line. The trick was to avoid bumping into him.

He permitted himself a brief smile. No problem.

He had his clothes back by nine o’clock and was asleep by ten. He awoke early, had breakfast, shouldered the duffel, and caught a cab to the airport. He flew to Washington on the previous night’s reservation, then canceled the balance of the ticket, walked over to another airline, booked a seat to Chicago on standby under an assumed name, paid for this ticket with cash, and was airborne before noon.

Let’s see Meeks pick up on that one, he thought to himself.

Eyes closed, he leaned back in his seat and reflected on the strange set of circumstances that had taken him away from his home in Chicago to Never-Never Land. The memories made him shake his head reprovingly. Maybe, like Peter Pan, he had just never grown up. He had been a lawyer then, a damn good one, one from whom great things were expected by those who were the movers and shakers in the business. He was in practice with his friend and longtime associate Miles Bennett, a shared partnership in which the two complemented each other like old shoes and work jeans—Ben the outspoken, audacious trial lawyer, Miles the steady, conservative office practitioner. Miles often deplored Ben’s judgment in taking cases, but Ben always seemed to land on his feet despite the heights from which he insisted on jumping. He had won more courtroom battles than the average bear—battles in which his corporate opponents had thought to bury him under an avalanche of money-backed rhetoric and paperwork, legal dodges, delays, and gamesmanship of all sorts. He had so surprised Miles after his victory in the Dodge City Express case that his partner had begun referring to him as Doc Holiday, courtroom gunfighter.

He smiled. Those had been good, satisfying times.

But the good times faded when Annie died. The satisfaction disappeared like quicksilver. His wife had died in a car accident, three months pregnant, and he seemed to lose everything after that. He turned reclusive, shunning everyone but Miles. He had always been something of a loner and he sometimes thought that the death of his wife and baby had just reinforced what was always there. He began to drift, the days running together, their events merging indecipherably. He sensed that he was slowly slipping away from himself.

It was difficult to know what might have happened had he not come across the bizarre offering in the Rosen’s Department Store Christmas Wishbook for the purchase of the throne of the kingdom of Landover. He had thought it ridiculous at first—a fantasy kingdom with wizards and witches, dragons and damsels, knights and knaves for sale for one million dollars. Who would be foolish enough to believe that? But the desperate dissatisfaction he was experiencing in his life had led him to take the chance that something in this impossible fantasy might be real. Any risk was worth taking if it could bring him back to himself. He had shelved his doubts, packed his bags, and flown to Rosen’s New York office to see what was what.

He was required to undergo an interview in order to complete the sale. The interviewer had been Meeks.

The familiar image of Meeks flashed instantly to mind—the tall old man with the whispered voice and dead eyes, a veteran of wars Ben could only imagine. The interview was the only time they had ever met face to face. Meeks had found him an acceptable candidate to be Landover’s King—not to succeed as Ben had believed, but to fail. Meeks had convinced him to make the purchase. Meeks had charmed him like a snake its prey.

Meeks had also underestimated him.

He let his eyes slip open again and he whispered, “That’s right, Ben Holiday—he did underestimate you. Now be sure that you don’t underestimate him.”

The plane touched down at Chicago O’Hare shortly after three, and Ben caught a cab into the city. The driver talked all the way in, mostly about sports: the Cubs’ losing season, the Bulls’ playoff hopes with Jordan, the Blackhawks’ injury problems, the Bears at 13 and 1. The Chicago Bears? Ben listened, replying intermittently, a small voice at the back of his mind telling him there was something wrong with this conversation. He was nearly downtown before he figured out what it was. It was the language. He understood it, even though he had neither heard it nor spoken it for more than a year. In Landover, he heard, spoke, wrote, and thought Landoverian. The magic made it possible for him to do so. Yet here he was, back in his old world, back in good old Chicago, listening to this cab driver speak the English language—or a reasonable facsimile thereof—as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Well, maybe that’s exactly what it was, he thought and smiled.

He had the cab driver deposit him at the Drake, unwilling to return to his old penthouse apartment or to contact any friends or acquaintances just yet. He was being careful now. He was thinking about Meeks. He checked in under an assumed name, paid cash in advance for one night, and let the bellhop guide him to his room. He was increasingly grateful for the fact that he had decided to carry several thousand dollars in cash as a precaution when he had crossed into Landover a year ago. The decision had been almost an afterthought, but it was turning out to be a sound one. The cash was saving him from using the credit card.

Leaving the room with the cash and the billfold in one pocket of his running suit, he took the elevator down, left the hotel, and walked several blocks to Water Tower Place. He shopped, bought a sport coat and slacks, dress shirts, tie, socks and underwear, and a pair of dress loafers, paid cash, and headed back again. There was no point in being conspicuous, and a running suit and Nikes in the middle of the downtown Chicago business district was far too conspicuous. He simply didn’t look the type. Sometimes appearances were everything—particularly in the short view. That was exactly why he hadn’t brought any of his friends with him. A talking dog, a pair of grinning monkeys, a girl who became a tree, and a wizard whose magic frequently got the better of him would hardly escape notice on Michigan Avenue!

He regretted the superficial characterization of his friends almost immediately. He was being needlessly flip. Odd as they might be, they were genuine friends. They had stood by him when it counted, when it was dangerous to do so, and when their own lives were threatened. That was a whole lot more than you could say for most friends.

He bowed his head against a sudden gust of wind, frowning.

Besides, wasn’t he as odd as they?

Wasn’t he the Paladin?

He shoved the thought angrily to the darkest corners of his mind and hurried to catch the crossing light.

He bought several newspapers and magazines in the hotel lobby and retired to his room. He ordered room service and killed time waiting for his dinner by skimming the reading material to update himself on what had been happening in the world during his absence. He stopped long enough to catch an hour of world and local news, and by then his meal had arrived. He continued reading through the dinner hour. It was closing in on seven o’clock by this time, and he decided to call Ed Samuelson.

There were two reasons for Ben’s return to Chicago. The first was to visit with Miles and discover whether the dream about his friend had been accurate. The second was to set his affairs in order permanently. He had already decided that the first would have to wait until morning, but there was no reason to put off the second. That meant a call to Ed.

Ed Samuelson was his accountant, a senior partner in the accountancy firm of Haines, Samuelson & Roper, Inc. Ben had entrusted management of his estate—an estate that was considerable in size—to Ed before he had left for Landover. Ed Samuelson was exactly the sort of person one would hope for in an accountant—discreet, dependable, and conscientious. There had been times when he thought Ben clearly mad in his financial judgment, but he respected the fact that it was Ben’s money to do with as he chose. One of those times had been when Ben decided to purchase the throne of Landover. Ed had liquidated the assets necessary to collect the one million dollar purchase price and had been given power of attorney to manage the balance of Ben’s assets while Ben was away. He had done all this without having the faintest idea what Ben was about.