The Black Unicorn Read Online Free PDF Page A

quickly. The fairies had helped him once, and he should have felt comfortable among them. But he did not. He felt alien and alone.
    Faces materialized and vanished again in the mists, sharp-eyed and angular with hair the consistency of willow moss. Voices whispered, but the words were indistinct.Ben was sweating. He hated being in the tunnel; he wanted out of there. Ahead, the darkness pressed on.
    Ben’s fingers still clutched the medallion in a death grip, and he thought suddenly of the Paladin.
    Then the darkness before him brightened to dusky gray, and the tunnel’s length shortened to less than fifty yards. Indefinable shapes swayed unevenly in the half-light, an interlacing of spider webs and bent poles. Voices and movement in the walls of the tunnel gave way to a sharp hissing. A sudden wind rose and howled sharply.
    Ben peered ahead into the gloom. The wind whipped at him from the edges of the tunnel’s end and carried the hissing sound into his face with a wet, stinging rush.
    And there was something else …
    He stepped from the tunnel’s shelter into a blinding rainstorm and found himself face to face with Meeks.

Ben Holiday froze. Lightning streaked from skies leaden and packed with low-hanging clouds that shed their rain in torrents. Thunder boomed, reverberating across the emptiness, shaking the earth beneath with the force of its passing. Massive oak trees rose all about like the staked walls of some huge fortress, their trunks and leaf-bare limbs glistening blackly. Shorter pine and fir bristled in clumps through the gaps left by their taller sisters, and the rugged slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains lifted darkly against the nearly invisible horizon.
    The spectral figure of Meeks stood pinned against this backdrop. He stood without moving, tall and bent and old, white hair grizzled, craggy face as hard as iron. He looked almost nothing of the man Ben remembered. That man had been human; this man had the look of an enraged animal. Gone were the pressed woolen slacks, corduroy jacket, and loafers—the trappings of civilization that had complemented an urbane, if gruff sales representative of a highly respected department store. Those reassuringly familiar business clothes had been replaced by robes of gunmetal blue that billowed like sailcloth and seemed to absorb the light. A high collar jutted from the shoulders to frame a ghastly, pitted face twisted by fury that borderedon madness. The empty sleeve of his right arm still hung limp. The black leather glove that covered his left hand was yet a claw. But each was more noticeable somehow, as if each were a scar left bare for viewing.
    Ben’s throat constricted sharply. There was a tension in the old man that was unmistakable—the tension of an attacker poised to strike.
    My God, he has been waiting for me, Ben thought in shock. He knew I was coming!
    Then Meeks started for him. Ben took one step back, his right hand tightening frantically about the medallion. Meeks was almost on top of him. The wind shifted, and the sounds of the storm echoed through the mountains with renewed sharpness. The rain swept back against his face, forcing him to blink.
    When he looked again, Meeks was gone.
    Ben stared. Meeks had disappeared as completely as if he had been a ghost. Rain and darkness cloaked the whole of the surrounding forestland in a shroud of gray wetness. Ben glanced about hurriedly, disbelief twisting his face. There was no sign of Meeks.
    It took only a moment for Ben to regain his scattered thoughts. He caught sight of the dim outline of a pathway directly before him and started for it. He moved quickly ahead through the trees, following the pathway’s curve as it wound down the mountainside and away from the time passage that had brought him back to his old world from Landover. And he was indeed back—of that much he was certain. He was back in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, deep in the George Washington National Forest. This was the same