Land Beyond the Map

V

Inside the gaunt rock of a house Crane stood for a moment disoriented, off-balance, bamboozled by that bleak, oak-lashed, iron-bound exterior. Inside he might have been standing in some super-luxurious hotel, with every modern convenience the hand of ingenious sybaritic man could devise for the well-being of indolent millionaires. Modern decor, subdued lighting, central heating, futuristic armchairs that swiveled at a touch and adjusted to the most comfortable positions. Wall-screen television. A bar backed by such a liquor display as might have stocked a whisky-distiller’s convention. Rugs ankle-deep in floating pile. Furniture that had been built by craftsmen to serve a purpose, in impeccable taste and scorning the rigid limitations of style and period.

Polly exclaimed rapturously.

Crane — who was a millionaire anyway even though he forgot it himself on occasion — smiled as he recognized with sympathy the drive of personality that had amassed this remarkable display of luxury. Around the walls large oblongs of emptiness frowned out, the picture lights still in position above them, and in alcoves desolate pedestals stood, their tops bare and shining. Liam dropped into a chair and reached out a hand. On the table attached to the chair’s arm a bottle and glasses appeared through a trap door with a promising click and he poured one each.

“Sit yeselves down, then.” They drank, relishing the thick fiery potency of the stuff.

“Now I see what Sean meant about the money,” Polly said.

Liam lowered his glass gratefully. “Aye. And it’s all gone. Every last penny.”

“But this house—” Polly checked. Her voice trailed. She’d only just then appreciated her own rudeness and Crane smiled again to himself as he saw the color mount in her cheeks.

The tousle-haired boy broke in again to save the situation.

“Ma says they’re not around here, anyway. In a fair flutter, sure she says they were.” The boy’s voice went from subject to subject as though each was as familiar as the other. “She’s after making the dinner now.”

Liam nodded affectionately. “You go and help. Mind now. Attend to your business.”

“Yes, Granfer.” And the youngster vanished through the far door from which appetizing if mysterious scents emerged.

“He’s a scamp…. I feel a dire responsibility for him.” Liam sighed and drank again. “When his father — when his father died, it fairly broke Ma’s heart. That map,” he finished savagely.

Crane leaned forward. “Tell us about the Map Country.”

A relationship had been set up between these three people, the sharing of common experiences, within the space of an hour or two; Crane recognized that the fact went far beyond this past hour and extended to a knowledge of the map’s existence and a desire to possess it — or the knowledge it could bring. For Crane’s whole purpose was undergoing a change. All his original reasons for the search remained intact but the balance of importance had subtly shifted; no longer was he seeking the map for the map’s sake, or for Adele’s; no longer was he merely interested in rescuing Allan Gould. He sensed something else, something greater and more frightening even than he had imagined — in the finding of the map.

What Liam told him, at first, merely awoke old memories.

Forty years ago, when Liam had been a reckless youth full of Irish bounce and living in a land torn by rebellion and war, when Irishman ruthlessly sought out and murdered Irishman, in the time of the Troubles, he’d needed a map for some dark and devious purpose of his own and had turned up the map — The Map — in some odd little corner shop where it had mouldered for decades. Using it, he had stumbled into the Map Country.

As he said, with a lopsided smile: “It was a lucky thing I was carrying a Lee-Enfield .303 and a bag of grenades.”

Thinking back, trying to pierce the blank of childhood memory, Crane wondered what good rifle bullets and grenades would have been against the clanking monsters.

“That trip I cleared enough to set me up in life, find me a wife and a fine house, and give me, as I thought, no more worries.”

Polly and Crane exchanged looks. Here was the old treasure story being trotted out again.

Liam didn’t know it; but neither of them was interested in the treasure — if it existed. Liam was making a pitch without need.

Crane said: “So you found some treasure. Bully for you. But what about the Map Country?

You went back. What is it like?”

This time Liam was taken aback. He set his whisky down and stared at them. “You’re after buying the map, are ye not? And if that is so, why else but for the treasure?”

Crane said: “Your daughter married and you and your son-in-law went back into the Map Country for more money — or whatever the treasure may be. He was trapped there. Now you’ve come to the end of the money and need more. Am I right?”

Liam’s white head bowed. “Yes, son. That’s about the way of it.”

Polly clucked sympathetically.

Crane went on prodding. “You’ve come to the end of the cash and your grandson is too young to go in and you’re — you’re not too old, Liam,” he said, altering his attack as understanding came. “You’re scared!”

Liam did not answer. He sat hunched, the hand holding the whiskey glass tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing.

At last he said: “For forty years I’ve lived in the shadow of them. They seem to sense the map is somewhere hereabouts. I’ve never really understood them and sure isn’t that natural, weird unearthly beasties they be…? But I’ve beaten them so far and I’ll beat them still.” The conviction in his voice was dulled and chill. “I have to have money, enough to tide me over ’til — enough for Ma and the boy. I can’t last out much longer.”

“How about Sean?”

“A flea bite.” The fingers tightened and relaxed, tightened and relaxed. “Faith, haven’t I been the big man of these parts? You might understand, you with your factories and offices in England. Open-handed I was, joying in largesse, respected, envied, admired — the big feller himself.

And then came the thin gruel days, and the selling of pictures and statues and the pinching and scraping. And my pride turning in my guts like a sword….”

“And the Map Country—”

“Ah, the treasure trove, the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow…” Liam lifted his head and looked up at them and the passion and sorrow in his ravaged face was a terrible thing to see.

“You don’t know what it’s like, living with the knowledge that a paladin’s fortune lies over the hill and you too scared to run across and fetch it.”

“I can imagine,” said Polly, softly.

“Colla and me went in just before the boy was born. I had some of the old wealth left; but Colla was mad to go, to bring back a fortune that would set his son among the highest in the land — or to buy a husband from the nobility for his daughter. Even then I didn’t really — So I took the submachine guns from the war and Colla the grenades. We loaded the truck well enough and started to run out; but they caught us. Colla… Colla…”

Polly said firmly: “Clanking monsters with arms?”

“Aye,” Liam said dispiritedly, recall draining him even of remembered fear. “Aye, I might have guessed you’d know. I don’t know how you know what you do; but you don’t know the whole truth and that’s a fact.” He wheezed spitefully. “But you don’t have the map. Don’t forget that.”

“So you want more money, Liam. And if you haven’t the courage to go into the Map Country yourself after it, you’re willing to sell the map in lieu. All right. How much?”

The tousle-haired boy, Colla Junior, put his head in the door. He had a gift for doing that with dramatic effect. “Dinner’s ready. Ma says she’ll flay you if you let it go cold.”

Liam rose slowly, rolling the whiskey glass between his hands and then swallowing the contents in one gulp. His blue eyes did not leave Crane’s face. “How much?” he repeated, and then turned abruptly, and made for the door.

Perforce, Crane and Polly followed.

Over dinner, a simple meal eaten in luxurious surroundings, nothing was said about the Map Country. Ma turned out to be a wispy, neat-figured woman with the penetrating blue eyes of her father. Her distant but polite manner did nothing to invite warmth of human contact; her aloofness from the world seemed to Crane to come from a personality blockage rather than a defect, as though she was perfectly happy to remain forever embedded within a certain circumscribed series of events — and he thought of his sister Adele….

To the watchful Crane Ma wore a perpetual air of listening, as though ready to start up at a sound.

He ate his meal in silence. Polly did the same. Ma and her son chatted desultorily about local tittle-tattle in which, surprisingly, Liam joined. He spoke with a grave and habitual authority about the things of the soil that are important to a man. There was no embarrassment here.

Crane felt a touch of sympathy with this family, given a head start in life by Liam and the treasure from the Map Country and then fallen on evil times, unable to continue with their standard of living and no man in the house to shoulder the responsibility and venture once again into that eerie other world beyond the mist. Clear evidence showed that in every room valuable items had been sold from the house. Despite Liam’s assertion that the loan had been a flea bite, how did these wholesale pawnings or sales tie in with the loan of money to Sean? Why didn’t Liam ask Sean to go into the Map Country?

The answer to that came as Liam laid down his knife and fork, looked across unwaveringly with those startling eyes, and said quietly: “One hundred thousand. Yes or no, Mister Crane?”

Crane’s first thought was that Liam, knowing who Roland Crane was, knowing he was the son of Isambard Crane, the inheritor of the biggest engineering concern in all the west country, must have debated long and painfully with himself to arrive at that round figure of one hundred thousand. Oh, sure, he could find a hundred thousand in liquid form without too much trouble — annoying, but nothing his office couldn’t handle. As to the worth of the map — how, after all that had happened, could mere money be measured against the uncanny power vested in that scrap of paper?

He thought: “To live with an emperor’s ransom on the other side of the hill — and too scared to go across and fetch it!”

Slowly, speaking with care, he said: “Would you trust us with the map, Liam, to go into the Map Country and bring you out the treasure?”

“You want the map, you pay me — now!”

“Trust is a beautiful thing,” Polly said, amused.

“Aye,” Liam nodded sourly. “You were maybe wondering why I didn’t ask Sean to go for me? Well, you know now. When I heard you were poking about the booksellers, Mister Crane, asking for a rather peculiar map — I felt it. I felt my chance had come at last…”

“You mean you hadn’t dared offer the map for sale before,” Polly said, an odd and to Crane an inexplicable edge to her voice, “because you knew no one would believe you and you couldn’t prove the Map Country existed because you were too frightened. But when we turned up — we must have seemed like manna from heaven to you!”

“Maybe. You bring out the treasure and you can have your hundred thousand back. But, of course, you wouldn’t want to then. A pocketful of gems is worth more than a mere hundred thousand.”

“And a truckload.”

The thrust went home. Liam said: “The truck’s still there.”

Polly favored Crane with one of her enigmatic looks.

Whenever she did that he wanted to turn her over and tan her stern, and that, to him was a surprising admission that their relationship was undergoing change. He contained himself manfully, realizing that the question of the money had been settled as soon as Liam spoke.

“All right,” he said. “Where’s the map?”

Polly put a hand to her lips, surprised despite herself. One thinks of a man as being rich; but when he gives evidence of it, it still astonishes. Crane smiled sourly at her. He didn’t blame her.

“Hey, Ma —what is it?”

They all swung first to look at Colla Junior and then at his mother. Her face shone pallidly, her eyes rolled back, the eyelids fluttering about the white of eyeballs like fronds undulating erratically undersea. She trembled all over and every now and then her body twitched. She stood upright, head back; she did not fall over.

“Petit Mai…” breathed Polly.

Liam jumped up, his face livid.

“They’re about; The damned dratted things, they’re about!”

He ran out of the room like an old bearded crab scuttling irritably between rocks on a sandy shore.

Watching him go, Crane caught a strange upright streak of light from the corner of his eye, whirled to the curtains. The drapes hung in long stiff folds, the velvet material’s softness dragged from it by its own weight. They completely blacked off all light, did those curtains against the windows; but through a narrow crack a wan light waxed and waned, pulsing like a distant beacon through fog.

Crane moved to the windows, drawn by a compulsion to see outside.

“No!” Colla Junior scrambled across, leaving his mother, his face wild. “No! Granfer wouldn’t like you to—”

But Crane had put a finger between the curtains, looked out.

At first he did not understand what he saw: a round gleaming, color-running orb stared unwinkingly back into his face. His eyes shifted to adapt to the increased light input and he saw… He saw… An eye. An immense sad eye staring at him through the chink of the curtains, an eye surrounded by a living whorl of flame that he had last seen engulfing poor Barney in the parking lot.

For a timeless second he stared out into the eye and the living pillar of flame, his fingers hard and constricted on the velvet of the curtains; then he jerked the curtains to and shut out the light.

He was shaking all over and sweat stung the corner of his eyes.

“They’re about…” Ma’s gargling warning swung him around from the curtains, brought his appalled vision back from that unwinking eye of light back into the room, back to sanity and to the people here bargaining over a torn map, a torn piece of paper that was the gateway to another world, being bartered for a hundred thousand pounds — brought him back, indeed, to sanity!

“The living light—” he said, stumbling over the words, incoherent. Strange shapes and colors burned against the screen of his mind, memory bringing back details of that light and of that eye — that eye that had been prying into this room to tear from them the secret of the map!

Polly began to speak, checked on a breath, went stiff-legged, her leather coat swinging, across to the window. She reached out a hand for the curtains.

“No!” said Crane. And could say no more. Polly swung the curtain aside and Crane saw the darkness beyond with the glinting reflection of the light in the room reflecting on the glass of the window. Instinctively, he thought of his smashed map glass, the fifteen eighty of the Florida Gulf and the westward islands.

“Put that curtain back, girl! What are ye thinking of with the map so near!” Liam’s harsh voice snapped Polly’s hand across; the curtains rippled sluggishly and fell once more into their stiff vertical velvet folds.

Liam carried a submachine gun cradled under his old arm. The blue steel caught the light, carrying on the sequence of reflections from the now hidden window. But Crane knew as well as he knew anything of this weird business that what he had seen had been no mere light reflection; he had seen the living light, and in the light had been an eye….

“Granfer!” Colla Junior spoke accusingly. “There was one outside! I saw the light.”

“It’s all right,” Crane said placatingly. “It could have seen nothing. Except my face.”

Gray tiredness dragged at Liam’s face, drawing the skin tight, pinching the eyes. His mouth trembled and the submachine gun’s muzzle moved in jerky little circles. “Write me a check and a note to cover it,” he said harshly. But the harshness brazened with a hollow mockery of the strong man he once had been.

Crane did as he was bidden, adding a separate note to his office. “They’ll pay, without question,” he said, tapping the note.

“They’d better—” Liam began, taking the slips of paper.

Polly cut him off. “What have you to lose? You’re too scared to use the map yourself. The — thing — outside has stripped your mind. If we don’t come back, you’re no worse off. Give us the map, Liam, and let us be off.”

He glared at her, resentfully, shifting the tommygun.

Crane now felt he had no time to waste on sympathy for the old man. That recent experience with the eye had shaken him, given him a hallucinatory vision of his own soul, refleeted and distorted. Liam was a poseur, a husk, a worn-out shell that once had housed an intrepid youth. Living in indolence had sapped not only his morale and self-respect; it had sapped his will-power. He watched as Liam edged to a window, using a little finger to open a slit in the curtains, peered through, the cords in his neck taut and shadow-filled as his head thrust forward.

“They’re about,” Liam said uneasily, fidgeting with the gun.

“The map,” Crane said harshly.

Reluctance stiffened Liam’s fingers. He put a hand into his pocket, withdrew it, fingered the gun.

“They can see things.” Again his fingers hovered over his pocket. “But they can’t see through a brick wall or through a thick curtain — and they can’t hear too well. But how did they know to follow us? We’ve never been followed like this before.”

Surprising them all, Ma said: “When my man was taken and me near my time I felt them. I knew! I know them and their ways! I can feel them. And these foreigners have been followed here — not by them. Oh, no, not by them! But they’ve followed that other, that dark one — beware him, for he means evil….”

And then Polly deliberately broke the spell conjured by the bizarre happenings within this room. “Oh,” she said brightly, “we know all about him. He’s after the map, too; but then, he doesn’t have a hundred thousand pounds! Why don’t you hand it over, have a good drink of whiskey and pop off to bed? Do you the world of good!”

Furiously, Liam thrust his hand into his pocket as though plunging into the ice-hole on Christmas Day, pulled out a leather wallet, and tossed it on the table.

Crane’s and Polly’s hands met over the wallet.

She withdrew, laughing a little shakily. “Sorry, Rolley. You paid for it. Yours, of course.”

Crane had no time for gallantry. He mumbled something, opening the wallet, unfolding waxed paper, prying down into a secret he had waited the best part of his life to unravel. Difficult to comprehend, unsettling — this was the moment he had been looking for all these years.

The packet was strangely thin for a guide book. Understanding brought with it a flash of annoyance at his own sluggishness of perception. Wax paper sibilated. Light reflected from smooth white paper, faintly browned with the mark of age, showed up a tracery of black lines, clung pooling from a map, from the map, and picked out jaggedly the roughly torn edge that ran clear from top to bottom.

The map.

Here in his hands, at last, in the strange luxurious penurious house of a family who had lived on the proceeds of the map, in the heart of the boglands of Ireland. His hands trembled now, unashamedly. He thought of his father, and of Adele, who played with her dolls.

“Where’s the guide book?” demanded Polly, suspiciously.

Liam said: “Faith, what more do ye want?”

Crane said: “It’s all right. Don’t you realize, Polly, this isn’t the map that my father and Allan had. Haven’t you understood? This is the part of the map that was torn off. This is the other half.”

In that moment of consummation Crane’s brain was like nothing so much as a detached and floating iceberg, drifting frozen in arctic seas. Everything he and Polly had learned about the map and the Map Country shrieked danger! with flashing red signals and the banshee wail of sirens. He had already decided he was going in alone; Polly must be left behind. But now, now the ice sheath began to melt and slither from his mind. He thought of the evil lozenge of light engulfing the parking lot attendant, the sad and baleful eye staring intensely into his face, the story of Colla left to rot with an abandoned truck and the gnawing fear that had destroyed the happy life of this family, of Allan, of Adele, and of his own time-distorted memories of fearsome monsters from otherwhere clanking with power and dominance and courage-consuming fire.

Ma sobbed, a thick bubble of sound that followed shockingly on the silence in the room.

Liam held the check again, stroking it. Polly stared at the half-map — the other map — and speculation and wonder moved her breast shudderingly, made her breathe faster, awed. Young Colla crossed quickly to his mother.

“Yes,” Liam said quickly. “They know! They know!”

Polly took the map from Crane with fingers cold and steady with purpose, refolded it, slipped it into the leather wallet. Her hands manipulated the old paper firmly, but beads of perspiration dewed in roseate drops across her brow. “Come on, Rolley. Let’s get out of here.”

He went at once, as though switched on, thankful, half-audible goodbyes guillotined by the closing door, the house drawing up behind him in a close secretiveness showing not a single chink of light. They stood outside on the porch in the windy wet darkness, the house brooding and somber at their backs. It seemed a long and naked way to the car.

“They don’t know we have what we have,” Polly whispered.

They stared about them, heads chafing collars of coats, daunted, expecting to see an evil lozenge of light and yet believing that that could not be.

“They can’t see through material objects,” said Crane, barely moving his lips, “and they can’t hear too well, or so we were told. The car…”

“Yes, the car…”

The car offered a haven, a warm, snug primeval place of privacy and comfort, isolated and adrift in a cold and hostile world. When the courtesy light went on as they bundled in Crane felt like an illuminated target in a shooting gallery. Then the two doors slammed and the dome light went out.

“No lights,” Crane said shortly.

Polly started up and they drove sloshily through puddles, groping slowly in third through the darkness, away from that house with its pitiful secrets and festering fears. They headed east.

“How well can they see us?” Polly said once, fretfully. “We ought to run with sidelights on, at least.”

Crane didn’t bother to answer, reached across and switched on the sidelights. He didn’t know how well they could see with that huge cold sad eye staring unwinkingly from the lozenge of living light. But he could feel the fear coiling in him, urging him on, wanting Polly to send the car slamming headlong through the rain-filled darkness. Above them the sky moved massively, in a black blur of swollen cloud. She drove fast, with all her natural skill so that the big car rolled around the bends with full traction, the tires scarcely murmuring.

His fingers felt the shape of the wallet in his pocket and he marveled. Even if it was the other half, it was still the map. And he had found it at last.