Land Beyond the Map

III

All Crane’s hopes were now centered on County Tyrone.

He checked his Ordnance Survey. Inquiries elicited the interesting information that much of the county was wild, sparsely inhabited, remote, forbidding. Tremendous areas of bog and wasteland seemed to him to promise far more than any neatly patterned fields of intensive agriculture. He retained the Austin for the next day and Polly used it for business of her own. At dinner she reported.

“Filed a story — can’t remember what, even now — and made some other investigations. Nothing. McArdle isn’t known around the newspapers. I checked a couple of booksellers and the name was on their list of catalogue customers, just as yours is; but that’s all. He buys maps and guide books. Only.”

“I know I’m becoming very impatient to get to County Tyrone. Tyrone. Brings up some memories from the well of recollection, eh?” He picked up his knife and fork and then laid them down again. “Seems odd that I’ve been to Ireland before, been to Tyrone, and yet can’t remember a thing about it. Nothing was ever said in the family.”

“That’s easily understandable.”

“Yes. Yes. I suppose it is.” And he began eating again.

After dinner Polly claimed she must indulge in some of the mysterious tasks women are slaves to before a journey of any description and, at loose ends, Crane wandered into the lounge. Silence, dabbed at by the clock and fibrillated by turning newspaper pages, daunted him. The night was fine, cool but dry, so he decided to saunter about Belfast a little, wondering why be bothered. He was afire to get started.

He had ditched all his theories about the Map Country.

He wanted to keep an open mind, completely open, and let the unraveling facts speak for themselves, form the truth without distortion by a too feverish brain. The facts, at this moment, were all at variance. If his childhood experience had really happened in Ireland as he now believed, then how — if in addition it had happened in the boglands of County Tyrone — could it be explained away on the supposition of the fogs and fury of an industrial factory town? And that was only one so-called fact that had to be juggled with. No — Crane hadn’t forgotten they were searching for a man and a girl who had disappeared here five years ago.

A light rain had begun to fall; nothing unusual about that — but it was enough to cause

Crane to turn back for his hotel. Lights gleamed slickly from the wet pavements and cars hissed

by with a swish. The sometimes comforting closeness of rain was all about him.

“Can you direct me to Queen’s Bridge, please?” Crane was momentarily startled. The man had appeared from the curtain of rain unexpectedly. “Why… why it’s down that way—” He pointed. “Thank you. Mr. Crane, isn’t it?”

“Ye — what?” Crane looked harder, feeling his senses drawing themselves together. “Who are you?”

“That is of no consequence. I just wanted a word with you.”

The man’s hat shadowed his face. A jut of chin showed beneath a livid slash of mouth. He had picked his spot well — midway between lamps. Rain splashed off the pavements, darkening the man’s raincoat, tinkled in the gutter.

“Go home, Mr. Crane. Go back to England, where you belong. We don’t want your sort here.”

Crane had heard of the times in Ireland when an arm would reach hungrily from the shadows of a doorway, clamping your neck, throttling you, and a voice would rasp in your ear: “What are ye?” You could be one or the other. Everybody in Ireland was; there were no non-combatants. And so you had a fifty-fifty chance — a fifty-fifty chance of the arm releasing and the hoarse voice bidding you be off — and a fifty-fifty chance of walking up in the hospital with broken ribs, broken nose, bloody and battered — if you were lucky. But this man was smooth and polite, and he hadn’t said: “What are ye?”

He knew.

Crane was over that first jolt of surprise. He let his body lean forward a trifle, not much, just enough to feel the weight come onto the balls of his feet. His hands hung limply at his sides. He said: “McArdle?”

The dark shadow before him, fussy in the rain, might have bowed ironically. It wouldn’t have mattered. “At your service, Mr. Crane.”

“On what grounds do you suggest I go home?”

“Now that you know of my existence, the grounds have changed. It might have been before that you were an Englishman. It might have been that I didn’t like your color — anything.” The stranger’s voice held the excruciating quality of emery cloth on a wheel. “But now you have found out my name and quick enough to realize that a stranger speaking to you is me — well, I can only warn you for your own good. You’ll run into a great deal of trouble if you persist in looking for this map. It is not for you. It never was intended for you — or anyone else. Forget about the map, Mr. Crane, and go home!”

“Why are you searching so desperately for this map, McArdle?”

“If I could take my own advice… But it’s no concern of yours.” The stranger in the darkness was disconcerted by Crane’s matter-of-fact manner. His eloquence failed him.

“But it is of concern to me, McArdle. There is only one map. Why shouldn’t we pool resources, try to track it down together?”

McArdle’s bark of explosive sound, there in the rain-filled darkness, was not a laugh and Crane for a moment wondered if the man was sane. But anyone who would go to the lengths these two men were going for a map couldn’t be regarded as sane, could they? Yet — this was no ordinary map. Crane remembered that old car ride, and he thought of Allan Gould. His fists clenched at his sides as he spoke.

“You won’t tell me why you want this map, McArdle.

But it must be obvious to you that I know why. I’m looking for it as well, am I not?”

“A blind man, searching for a corpse in the night. That’s all you are, Crane.”

“A corpse! Is Allan Gould dead, then?”

“Dead, rotted, cremated — how do I know. He went… where he went.” McArdle took a step nearer, making Crane stiffen tensely. His tones changed, almost wheedled. “Just drop the whole thing, Crane. That girl with you will never find her cousin. That I promise you. Once you go in — that is, you’re running foul of a nasty death, Crane, a most unpleasant demise. You think that with the map you will find Gould. But I tell you that map is not for you — it is not for any man of this world! I’m trying to help you, Crane, to warn you. I know how to deal with the map when I find it—”

“If you find it,” Crane said savagely. “I suppose you’ll burn it. That’s all your sort ever have done, throughout history; burned the things they couldn’t understand.”

“But I do understand and you do not. And I cannot tell you anything about this map.”

“Cannot — or will not?”

“Make of that what you will. You have the crazy notion that if you find it you will also be able to find Gould. I tell you this is not so—”

“No?”

“Well, then — you may find Gould or what is left of him. But you will also be destroyed yourself!”

Crane’s impression of McArdle had altered violently during their conversation; the man’s emotions changed like a chameleon’s skin. Now Crane felt the blast of near hysterical anger barely controlled and a screaming frustration pouring up from a tortured mind. “That map will never be yours, Crane — never! It is mine! I — and I alone — will have that map! All you putrid little fools whining for things you cannot grasp, wonders you cannot understand — and interfering with me, getting in my way! But I will root you all out, every one of you… for the map is mine!

The hurricane of tumbled words stilled. McArdle caught himself on a breath, his somber form straightened against the drifting lines of rain.

Crane knew this man would tell him nothing more. Whatever else there was to learn about the map he must find for himself. And the determination to do just that flowed in a strong black tide within him, bolstered by his own anger.

A cruising taxi idled past with a lick of tires; neither man took any notice of it. Wind gusted more strongly, sheeting silver clouds across the ranked spears of rain beneath the lights, wrapping Crane’s raincoat around his legs, flinging stinging drops into his face. He felt the growing chill of the night. McArdle stood, tall and spare, rain glinting from the brim of his hat. Each droplet caught and split the distant lamplight so that, for an odd timeless instant, Crane glimpsed something more than a mere man standing there on the prosaic rain-slicked Belfast pavement.

Then he shook his shoulders; feeling the wetness seeping through, and brought himself back to the present. McArdle was just a man. That he could imagine anything else showed how off balance he was about all this. This damned map — this whole damned affair — was throwing him for a spineless, addle-pated ninny. He opened his clenched fists and moved his fingers slowly, feeling the blood pumping back.

“If you have nothing else to say, McArdle, then goodnight!”

He turned away, tensed again at this moment of arbitrary parting, still ready for anything that might happen.

McArdle was no fool. The man simply said, a mocking voice ghosting from the rain-lashed darkness: “And goodnight to you, too, Crane. Just forget all about this foolishness and go home. I’m doing you a favor.”

Crane did not answer; he walked off, head bent against the rain, hands now thrust deeply into his raincoat pockets.

Damn McArdle! And damn the map! In fact, taking everything that had happened — damn the whole business!

And then he remembered Polly and immediately reconsidered his decision. No map, no Polly.

The map had at least done something positively good for him. He was aware of the selfishness of the idea when set beside the tragedy of Adele, but that could not stop him from recognizing it. He luxuriated in the warm glow spreading in him as he thought of Polly. He walked back to the hotel in a remarkably good humor.

She was waiting for him in the lounge, a woman’s magazine folded on her knee, a cup of coffee — stone cold — on the table and a cigarette burning into an inch long ash drooping from her mouth. She smiled weakly as he walked in.

When he told her of his meeting with McArdle in the rain he began to think there was something odd in her reaction when she lost that little smile and blue arc-lights began to snap — as Crane thought, aghast — from her eyes.

“You idiot!” she blazed out as he lapsed into silence. “You nitwit! You utter jackass — you — you…”

Crane sat down. “I thought you’d—” he began. Then: “What’s the matter? I’m not allowing McArdle to frighten me off. I told you so.”

“That’s not it!”

“I was ready in case he started anything funny. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d tried to lay me out. He might just have thought I had the map on me.” Crane studied her. She glared at him with such wrath that he wondered the wall at his back did not burst into flame.

“That’s it, Rolley! That’s the whole trouble —the whole trouble with you! You were ready for him — my God!” Her sarcasm scorched. “You were ready, tensed up with clenched fists in case he tried to shake the truth out of you. Well, you benighted nitwit, why didn’t you grab him instead? You were there with the man who know the answers and you let him get away! Rolley — what’s up with you? You should have grabbed him, run his arm up his back and frogmarched him back here so we could have had a little chat with him. Well?”

Crane had nothing to say.

He could, of course, have said that it hadn’t occurred to him. He could have said that, anyway, even if it had, he wasn’t accustomed to snatching strangers in the street and handling them forcibly. He might have pointed out that McArdle might have resented being manhandled and have called out. A policeman might have agreed with McArdle. That, at least, was a reasonable assumption.

He could have said all this. Instead he lowered his head and looked away. Hell! This girl made him feel like a criminal.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, lamely.

Quite deliberately, Polly stood up. She let her cigarette ash fall into the cup of coffee, creating a disgusting sight. “Are we still going to County Tyrone in the morning? Now that McArdle’s here in Belfast? Is there any point?”

“I think so.” Crane was tired and his head had begun to ache. “I think so. Allan went that way, and, if what we believe to be true is true, then so did I. I might recall something on the way….”

“A faint hope,” she said, still with that cold and distant voice, standing, looking down on the ruined coffee. “But at least, something. Good night, Rolley. If you run into McArdle again, just let me know. We might get somewhere then.” And she walked off as though she’d just missed a six-inch putt on the eighteenth at Portrush.

Staring after her, Crane returned to his old philosophy.

“Damn the map,” he said under his breath. “And damn all cocky, super-efficient women, too.” And went to bed.

The Austin strode sweetly out along the gray roads next morning, skirting south of Lough

Neagh, dappled with cloud shadow and the glint of sunshine, pushing towards the west. The morning had begun with constraint between the two seekers after the map, and silence filled the car deafeningly. The wastelands and rolling hill-clumps, boggy and sparsely clothed with stunted bushes, enveloped them in a friendly desolation. Every now and then the road ran along a causeway raised above the low-flying marsh. This was turf country. The air smelled sweet. Despite his own impotent inward-directed anger, Crane began to feel good. The horizons extended, the sky expanded — his lungs expanded, too, in keeping with the mood of this vast, desolate and open space — and he realized once more that the world was indeed a great and wonderful place.

They passed very few people. Isolated farmhouses, each ringed with its protective screen of trees, looked somehow forlorn and tattered, as though they stood outposts of humanity, forgotten, and awaiting the final dissolution of the world. Sheep formed white dots on the hillsides, clearly seen, yet so far off they might have been white blood corpuscles in the veins of giants, sleeping through the ages.

The road meant nothing to Crane. The brooding land, the sense of isolation and the broad sweep of the wind, all conveyed no spark of remembrance. He stared through the windshield at the unwinding road, half-conscious of Polly lounging competently behind the wheel, trying to recapture the feelings and impressions of a five year old.

“Nothing, Rolley?” It was the first time she had spoken in miles.

“Not a thing. Sorry.”

“For God’s sake! Don’t keep on being sorry.”

“Sor — all right. Maybe we took another road.”

“Might have. North of the Lough from Belfast. Longer. Have to try it tomorrow.”

“Lunch in Omagh?”

“Check.”

A sort of preparatory friendship had been restored, then.

Later on, Polly said out of the blue: “Just who is McArdle, anyway? I’m after the map because I believe it will lead me to Allan. You want it because of an experience of your childhood. We’re both following this will o’ the wisp on the shakiest of foundations; our whole deductive process can collapse at any minute. But we want the map for a positive reason. Two positive reasons. Why does McArdle want it?”

“Search me,” said Crane. “He seemed to be trying to create the impression he was warning me off for my own good, more in sorrow than in anger. I suggested that if he found it he’d burn it. He didn’t contradict or agree.” Crane could remember in vivid detail the events of that rain-filled night on the wet streets of Belfast, talking to a dark shadow in the darkness. “But his last violent outburst, when he said the map was his, told me quite plainly he meant what he said. He reminded me of a soul in perpetual torment in hell, tantalized by the unattainable and yet knowing that it existed, could be attained, if only people like us did not stand in his way.”

“Frightening.”

“Yes. Yes, Polly, frightening. That map is not for you or for any man of this world. He couldn’t be much clearer than that.”

The car rounded a curve and sped down a long shallow hill.

“If your idea — which you later rejected — did happen to be sound and the map is put into circulation again after people have gone through into the Map Country as victims, then maybe McArdle went through at some time and is searching for the way back.”

“I wish I’d had a look at the fellow. In the rain and darkness he was just a tall spare shadow. The raindrops made a halo around his hat brim.”

“Very pretty — but it doesn’t help.”

“No.”

“Huh — civilization ahead.”

“Omagh. Yes,” Crane said thoughtfully. “Maybe McArdle did go through into the Map Country and maybe he is desperately seeking a way back. If this is true, then I’d be a little sorry for the fellow.”

Polly glanced sideways at him, sharply, her face shrewd and calculating.

“Why sorry for him? What makes you say that?”

Crane could guess easily enough what she was thinking. In that acute brain of hers the idea was growing that perhaps he hadn’t told her the whole story, that he had held out on some vital detail. She half expected that he, too, might be seeking to return to the Map Country for — for what?

“What do you expect us to find there?” he asked with sarcasm too evident in his tone.

“Houris, fountains of wine, the secret of immortality, Aladdin’s lamp or the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow?”

She had the grace to flush slightly. The car increased speed and rounded a curve faster than Crane liked. He said: “We’re in this together, Polly. Maybe we have different reasons and maybe we don’t see the way ahead in absolutely identical terms. Oh, yes, and I have money and you’re a working girl. But as of now we work as a team. Check?”

She smiled, relaxing. “Check!”

Omagh turned out to be a neat little market town, hilly and subject to flooding. They found a parking place and had a meal. Then the specter that had been gnawing at Crane arose. What, exactly, had he hoped to accomplish by coming here? He had recognized nothing on the road.

McArdle was in Belfast. Polly was fretting. They found a bookshop and asked the question and received the expected answer. No map torn down the center, not at all, not at any price. Then again, the bookseller did not mention McArdle. Crane didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad.

Walking back to the car, Crane said with an attempt at confidence: “In a place like this word gets around. If anyone knows of a map torn down the center they’ll come arunning when they scent the money.”

Polly only sniffed.

It looked, and being as kind as possible, as though he had bungled it all again.

Inside the parking lot they halted for a moment beside the Austin. Polly was looking at him, not saying anything, just standing, looking.

Crane put a hand on the door handle. He tried to make the action sharp and decisive, as though he’d made up his mind.

The man crossing towards them must have interpreted it that way, because he began running, and shouted: “Hi! Just a minute, please.”

Crane turned at once. The divertisement was welcome. Perhaps, just perhaps, the map was at last on its way to them now.

The man was young, strongly built, with a square browned face and the square and amusingly blunted features of a clown. Crane had time to glimpse the stubbornness in the line of mouth and jaw, a strange erratic movement in the man’s gait. Then a pale oval of silver light grew like an unfolding lily in the air above the man. Crane stood open-mouthed, quite still and silent, watching.

The running man held something in his hand, a scrap of bright blue, holding it out to Crane. He must only have then realized he was running forward in a bath of silver light for he looked upwards, startled. He began to shout. This time the shouting was a scream; high and harsh and terrified. The oval of lambent light hovered and descended. It dropped like a ghostly parachute, like a monstrous shimmering jellyfish, enveloping the man, starting at his head and running down over his shoulders, engulfing his body, enfolding his legs and entwining itself about his feet.

There was only a tall and narrow oval of liquid light there in the parking lot, with the sun shining and the clouds high in the sky and the old market town all about. Then there was only the sun and clouds and the parking lot in the town.