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.