Land Beyond the Map

VIII

Those distant specks of bright vermilion stained the white road like spots of blood. Polly caught her lower lip between her teeth. “You think—?”

“They’re coming out to find out what happened to their buddies, why the two we knocked out don’t respond to signals.” He looked more closely at the city. “I think we’d better get out of it while we still have the time.” He felt unnaturally calm.

That roaring, fiery, gleaming monstrosity over there had last been seen by him when, as a child, he had been enjoying a country holiday with his father and mother and sister Adele. Now his father and mother were dead and Adele was — well, Adele was now just as she had been then in everything except physical age. Distance hazed detail. He caught tantalizing glimpses of that monstrous branched tree and that silver bowl from which flames licked ruddily. His memory had not played him false, then. The lowering Gehenna had existed — did exist still. Through the surging currents of memory and anger and fear the impudent thought occurred to him that he should have a camera. But, then, people would scoff at what they would dub camera trickery. He slid back and stood up.

“Come on, Polly. We can’t do any more. You’ve just got to face it about Allan.”

She didn’t answer. But her face distressed Crane.

Back in the car and driving fast in retreat along the way they had come, Crane wrestled with the heavy sense of defeat permeating his acknowledged relief in traveling in the right direction. Hell! What more could two rational people do? If they had gone towards the city, or whatever it was, the tanks would certainly have dealt with them as they must have done with Allan Gould and Colla. The best bet was to return to the normal world and prepare for another expedition into the Map Country. They’d been pitchforked into it without warning, quite unexpectedly, without arms, food or a reliable method of long-term transportation. He glanced at the gasoline gauge.

Just enough to take them back to the torn edge of the map.

He continued to drive. The feel of the controls beneath hands and feet gave him a sense of purpose and a material task on which to fix his impatience. The miles fled back as the road unrolled. Twice the surrounding country went through stomach-churning upheavals with the solid land rolling like the mid-Atlantic; but through it all Crane kept the Austin going stolidly, compensating for each treacherous lurch of the queasy road surface. Polly sat huddled up at his side, not speaking.

They were, Crane realized with savage self-mockery, a forlorn little band.

Going back they saw, not only more perambulating bushes, but a whole forest on the march. The unceasing frieze of sky-pricking mountains changed, too, and from gaunt, coned summits fire and fury vomited forth, scorching the earth, spreading lava in a wicked trickle of flame all across the ground until the oven-heat licked at them from the roadside and they could hear the ominous hissing and bubbling and smell the rank sulpher odors from the depths of the earth.

Shining white under the sunshine, dappled with cloud shadows from the belching volcanoes, the road tamed the lava and the furnace-filth recoiled from the highway.

Great birds swooped from the sky and once a raking talon scored all along the paintwork of the car’s hood. Crane gunned the car, bashed it solidly into the bird’s body, felt a sadistic satisfaction as the feathered reptilian flyer spun away, screeching.

Monsters with greenish-gray hides, slimy and rank, blundered from the river and stood glaring stupidly at the road and the fleeting car; but they did not venture further.

“They’ve been tamed by the tanks,” Crane said. “This road is a single lonely streak of sanity running through the chaos of this world.”

Up hills and down long slopes the car sped with smooth precision, the tires hissing and the air blustering through the smashed windshield. The rear-view mirror showed an odd glimpse of a clanking machine far off. The Austin had the legs of them. They passed the wrecked tank tumbled at the side of the road where they had left it. Ahead a black object appeared on the road and Crane tensed up. Then he relaxed, consciously slackened the grip of his fingers on the wheel.

“Colla’s truck. And the first tank. Nearly there.”

There was no warning.

The fuel gauge needle still confidently showed that half a gallon or so should be in the tank. But without a sigh or a cough the engine stopped and the car ran gently forward and gradually slowed to a stop.

Even as Crane cursed and jumped out, the leading tank breasted a distant rise behind them. There was one last, desperate, seemingly hopeless chance.

“We can’t run for it!” Polly shouted. “It’s too far! They’d be on us…” For the first time she sounded really scared. Their situation was enough to make the toughest of tough characters drool in fear.

“Come on,” Crane said, and started running for the wrecked truck.

Their footfalls battered the road and their breathing gasped raggedly in straining throats. The gasoline can he remembered seeing lashed to the back of the truck’s side, alongside the suitcases stuffed with diamonds, beckoned. If the heat that had burned the diamonds had not touched the can… He panted up to the truck, wiped his forehead, took a couple of quick breaths, then unlashed the can. He shook it.

“Empty!”

“Oh, Rolley — what can we do? What can we do?”

The clanking monsters bore on remorselessly, nearer.

There was no time for finesse. Crane snatched out his big pocket knife, opened the spike, and, crawling under the truck, found the gas tank. He jabbed savagely with the spike. After half a dozen frenzied blows it went through.

Gasoline spurted out, raw and red and beautiful.

“Black market stuff,” he said. “I might have known.”

He shoved the can under the flow. When it was full he stumbled out, scrabbling on the road, not worrying about the gasoline splashing away to waste. He sprinted back to the car.

“Stay there!” Polly, running behind him, checked at once. Then she went back to the wreck.

Running, he realized with detached amusement that this was the first time she’d heard his parade-ground voice.

His trembling fingers made a hash of opening the Austin’s gas tank cap, then the divine splash of gasoline gurgling into an empty tank reached him. His hands shook and gasoline splashed over the side of the car, rilled to the edge of the mudguard, dripped to the road. He stuck it until half the two-gallon can had been emptied, then raced to the driving seat, propping the can against the passenger seat, and switched off. Hood up, priming pump, thump up and down, the clank of treads in his ears like the trump of doom, race back to the driving seat, switch on, starter…

The starter whirred. Whirred again. The engine caught — and died… Starter again, whirr, whirr, whirr… Then the engine caught and held and he slammed into gear and moved forward. The mirror showed him the leading monster a scant twenty yards away. The tires spun.

He slithered to a stop beside Polly.

“Jump!” he shouted. They were racing forward again. “This petrol by rights should have evaporated in the years the truck’s been here. You must be right. Time doesn’t function here.”

“Hurry, Rolley! Hurry!”

He hurled the car along the road, the accelerator banged to the floorboards and the clangor of the tracks behind began to fade. Yes, he began to think with tremulous hope, yes, they’d make it. He even began to look ahead, such was the elation of relief filling his brain, to the stories they might or might not tell about this mad escapade. And, there were always the gems…

A light outrivaling the sun grew in the air. Shadows wavered and then fleeted all together away from a blinding spot somewhere above the car. Polly shouted. Crane twisted to see but the car roof obscured his vision — a part of his mind recognized his luck — light of that intensity would blind him.

“Don’t look up!” he shouted.

The car lurched and careened from side to side, tires screeching. He was flung cruelly against the door, his wrists cracking hard on the wheel. More pieces of glass dislodged and fell with a tinkle lost in the bedlam. A tire blew. The car slewed right around with a sickening sensation of loss of control, skidded backwards, vibrating, then toppled in a clangorous crunch into the ditch. The hood pointed at the sky. One wheel still revolved.

And Crane and Polly, unhurt, cowered in their seats as the fiery glow smote upon them. For a heartbeat that might have lasted an eternity nothing happened. Crane risked cracking one eyelid. The light still beat strongly, still coruscated powerfully so that his eyes watered; but he could see enough to chance a quick slither to the road. He hunkered in the shadow of the wrecked car. In quick lurid glimpses he tried to make out what was happening. The first and most important was the sight of the leading tank bearing down on him with arms outstretched, its vermilion hide glistening in the glow. Big grapnel-like jaws swung purposefully. He reached for a grenade, feeling the heat of the metal, and tossed it as well as he could.

The blast fell short of the charging tank.

Panic clawed at Crane. He had to get out of here, fast. “Polly! You can risk half-opening your eyes now. Come on. We’ve got to run for it.”

Polly slithered out, her short leather coat flaring.

“Those damned things—”

“Run, Polly. For the torn edge and the mist. Run!”

The glow in the air beat all about them. They ran struggling over the road, their shadows black and distorted, fleeing before them, and to Crane the feeling of being an insect scuttling along the beam of a torch exploded the boil of anger. He stopped deliberately to turn and hurl another grenade. The violence of the fire in the sky made as nothing the grenade blast. But the pursuing tank slowed and skidded, shedding a track, and a writhing arm struck the car’s roof with a note like a gong, sheared it away in gleaming metal. They ran on, panting.

Unsure of his landmarks Crane could not know when they would reach the mist, as yet invisible to them in that limbo between worlds; all he could do was run on, willing, hoping, desperately urging the mist to form around them at each fresh step. As far as he could see before him, with eyes that were adjusting to the intolerable glare, stretched the road and the countryside. A countryside, he was aware, he might never reach with the torn map in his possession.

“Oh, God!” Polly screamed. “Look!”

In the air, hovering a few feet above the ground directly before them, a pale lozenge of fight winked into being. It shone with a pallid reflection of the monster glow in the sky.

He tried to halt his stumbling feet, to draw back, to recoil from the eerie phantasm. Slower than Polly to pull up, he collided with her and his left hand wrapped around her waist as they both staggered forward. He could hear her breathing, a tearing, rasping sucking for breath that drove him into savage action. He fumbled out a grenade and with vicious intent prepared to hurl it straight at the lambent oval of light.

His hand was raised, the pin out, the lever already easing up as his palm flexed forward, when the voice struck through to him. The lozenge of fire vibrated in time to the words. “Do not struggle longer, little man. We are taking you away—”

Crane hurled the grenade with all the lost desperation in him.

The lozenge of fire swelled, grew, bloated with a chiaroscuro of living color rippling over it like tinted waters of a fountain. Crane knew — knew — that the alien oval of light had absorbed the bursting energy of the bomb within itself, feeding on it, containing it, neutralizing it.

Then the living fire swooped down to engulf them both.

Blackness shot through with the fire of agony and defeat crushed down on Crane so that he cried out in futile wrath. Polly lay in his arms, her body beneath the wide-opened leather coat firm and soft against him, her head lax on his shoulder. He gripped her tightly in blind defiance of what might happen. The blackness muffling them now must lie in the core of the living light as an alien paradox defying human nature.

The voice said: “Misunderstanding is always the lot of those who seek to improve the worlds.”

Crane tried to answer and proclaim his defiance; but no words came. He could feel his heart thumping, deeply and painfully, against Polly. Then a wind caught at him, a wraith wind blown down no Earthly skies, and he felt with profound shock and panic Polly’s body slipping from him.

The voice said: “Who is this man who possesses the Amullieh?”

And a voice answered from a great distance: “He is not Trangor… He is a man like the others… But he possesses the Amullieh….”

And Crane’s arms circled emptiness and Polly had gone.

His feet rang on the road surface. He stumbled as though clumsily dropping from a wall. Through water-brimming eyes he saw the road white with dust in the light of the sun. Thoughts pirouetted through his dazed mind. An ominous clank from somewhere to the rear swung him around, lurching, one arm half-raised defensively.

A tank rattled along the road towards him, another following in the tracks of the first. He saw the wrecked Austin in the ditch; beyond, Colla’s smashed truck and the ditched tank showed half around the curve. But of the livid light in the sky and the lozenges of fire no sign remained to show they had brought with them terror and taken with them — Polly.

Crane did not think. The terror of the unknown festering in him drove his muscles into action and propelled him in a desperate lunge away from these onrushing monsters of destruction. He ran along the white road and he ran as a mindless idiot, gibbering in fear. The leather grenade satchel thumped against his hip and had there been time to take it off he would have done so, and flung it from him so as not to impede his flight.

All thought of Polly, and the map, and the gems, and of his avowed intentions, fled from his brain. He ran and ran and ran.

With the grinding of tracks and the horrible swishing of grapnel-armed tentacles in his ears he plunged headlong away from madness.

When mist swirled feathery tendrils about him he did not stop but careened on, lurching drunkenly like a man in a seizure, still hearing the metallic clanking behind him, loud and resonant through the beating of blood in his head. The mist thickened, coagulated, clotted into fog that roiled about him, thick and greasy and heavenly.

Mouth open and gasping, nostrils distended, hair tangled and sticky with sweat, he stumbled on, a scarecrow figure from the pits of hell, haunted, driven, tortured, a man running from himself.

For gradually thoughts formed in his overheated brain, a single word, remorselessly repeated over and over again in time to his hammering footfalls on the road. Polly… Polly… Polly…

The fog turned into real fog now, raw vapor that seared his throat and stung his eyes. The strength drained from him.

He was out of the Map Country. He knew that without elation, without any sense of relief.

When he stopped running the ghastly whispered voice in his mind continued to chant: Polly… Polly… Polly… He was a beaten man. With the return of thought came the birth of conscience and remorse and deadly self-loathing.

He was out of the Map Country. Out of it. All the weariness he had not felt inside that accursed place struck him now. He could do no more. His stumbling feet carried him across the road, tripped against the tussocky edge, pitched him face down into the ditch. He lay there, exhausted, drained, and when at last he slipped into unconsciousness he went with a glad welcome for oblivion.

How long he lay in that rain-sodden ditch he did not know, but when he opened his eyes the sky above still lowered darkly but the rain had stopped. Polly. She had been taken by the living lozenge of light. And he had run away.

He had turned tail and run away like a gibbering idiot.

Crane licked his lips. He sat up. He looked at his watch. Five o’clock. The fog had gone and soon it would be dawn. It all figured.

There had been something odd — something wrong — about his reactions after the lozenge of light had taken Polly and rejected him. He had run and stumbled away in such fashion as would turn the stomach of any man. Why?

Oh, sure, the Map Country held enough horror to make any man a craven; but he’d been through it, he’d held onto his manhood, he’d met each threat and dealt with it.

“Something damn queer about that,” he said, and stood up and stretched.

The whole sequence of events had been wrong; he felt that strongly. He wasn’t a brave man, had never pretended to be; but he just couldn’t envisage himself snapping and letting go so completely. He’d been behaving as though overacting the part of a coward in a cheap melodrama. The only answer lay in the evil lozenges of light; they had deliberately driven him mad with fear and hurled him on wings of his own cowardice from the Map Country. Maybe that explained Liam’s reluctance to go back; maybe the old man had been subjected to those mental pressures. Since awakening there had been in his mind no other thought than that his next line of action would be to return. He couldn’t just tamely walk off now and leave Polly there. Oh, sure, he was still afraid; deadly afraid. But his fear had no chance against the burning conviction that he had to return.

He checked the grenade bag. Only one left. He took it out, held it a moment, then thrust it into his pocket and took off the satchel, tossed it down into the ditch.

He was hungry, tired, mentally exhausted. He had one grenade. He knew what he faced. But he began to march back up the road,*heading steadily towards the Map Country.

“And that’s damn queer,” he said aloud. “Why did they take Polly and not me? When I have the map? Why didn’t they snatch me?”

The muscles in his legs began to ache and stiffen and he stamped his feet as he walked. Darkness lay all about him, chill with the pre-dawn hush of waiting. At each step he expected the fog to return but still the stars winked cynically high above.

In that pervasive quietness he heard the car before he saw its lights and so was not completely sure from which direction it was traveling. He was aware of his quick relaxation of tension as the headlights appeared in front.

He crossed to the left of the road and waited, giving the car plenty of room to pass. The brilliant white beams splashed the road before him, hesitated, clung for an instant, and then whipped past. He didn’t think it was McArdle; but he still was not thinking too clearly, convinced that McArdle must be miles away by now, still vainly searching for the Austin.

Stepping back to the crown of the road as the car sped past, he set his face towards the Map Country and slogged on.

The engine note faded rapidly and soon he Lad the quietness to himself once again.

The hypnotic rhythm of walking worked on him more powerfully than the brisking chill in the pre-dawn air, and through his anticipatory fears of what lay ahead a mental drowsiness sluggishly drew the present away into vanishing perspectives, and the memories swimming endlessly in his mind rose seekingly for the light. Why Polly? What did he know of this girl who had erupted into his life one filthy rain-lashed night, clad in short leather coat and slacks, to bring with her a resurrection of a past he had thought his own alone? Who was she? She claimed to be a journalist and was modest about that. As the cousin of Allan Gould she came from a background with which he was unfamiliar, the intellectual, iconoclastic, middle-class new generation unhappy with their positions in life, hating the bomb, half-heartedly believing in free love, posing as authorities and lovers of jazz, proclaiming their rugged individualism against an acute and ever-present comforting awareness of the welfare state that made such postures safe. Maybe that was the world from which she came — but Crane sensed from his own desires of what he wished to be rather than from any external observation that she had left that world, denying its trashy values, keeping what was of value, and had become truly herself.

She had become a person, a fully-rounded personality in her own right, and for that he envied her.

Envied? There were so many emotions tangled in his estimation of Polly Gould that to track down each one of the conflicting skeins would be worthless, would add up to a minus value; all he knew was that she had been trapped in the Map Country and he had to go back and bring her out.

Allan Gould himself had made a break with that background when he’d joined the army; but the girl to whom he had turned, Sharon, typified one aspect of it so clearly as to illuminate Allan’s inability completely to reject his own roots.

Crane had been wrong to be surprised at Allan’s choice of second-best girl friend. A great longing for a comrade to march at his side swept over Crane. Allan, now, tommygun at the ready, bush-hat tipped casually back, smiling, walking at his side as they had marched after the terrorists — that would have made sense, would have made of this expedition a joy — except for the horror of the living lozenge of light that had taken Polly.

It seemed clear to Crane, slogging back to what might be his own certain death, that Polly’s efforts to reach the Map Country and find Allan could mean only that she still loved Allan Gould.

He remembered the occasion when the terrorists’ ambush had worked perfectly and point had gone down screaming and he and Allan had plunged face-first onto the soggy ground with bullets kicking up muddy splashes into their eyes. He’d nailed the first charging fanatic with a snap burst; and then Allan had flung himself sideways and buried his commando knife into the lithe stinking body that dropped catlike onto Crane’s back. Crane had scarcely felt the weight drop away, had time to say: “Thanks, Allan,” when the other terrorist had risen ghostlike at the side of the trail, captured Lee-Enfield centered malevolently on Allan’s back. His automatic pistol had awoken to life it seemed of its own accord and his lumbering charge had carried him across Allan so that the three-o-three took him in the shoulder instead of Allan’s back. The terrorist’s body, chewed as though in a mincer, had toppled away from the blast of lead. Yes, he wasn’t likely to forget incidents like that… And if Polly wanted Allan then Crane saw plainly that he had to find them both, for the sake of his own peace of soul.

A dark figure rose silently from the darkness before him on the road leading into the Map Country. A torch beam licked out, dazzling him. The gleam of a revolver muzzle showed beneath the light.

McArdle said: “And I’ll have the map now, Mister Crane.”