Kenneth Bulmer - Land Beyond the Map

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.

Eighteen people die every day on the roads of Britain, and although Ulster is part of the United Kingdom and not a part of Great Britain, Crane began to wonder with a savage self-motification whether it might perhaps turn out that he and Polly would raise that number to twenty. At that, it would be one way out of the mess. He knew as each minute passed he grew more and more frightened and reluctant to enter the Map Country. Big words tended to melt in face of the threat he knew lay over the hills.

Out of nowhere, Polly said: “Do you think that tommy-gun of Liam’s would be any use against that oval of light?”

The answer was self-evident; but Crane had to say: “No.”

“Well, so far we haven’t seen it. Maybe they didn’t spot us.”

“We hope.”

“Ma said they were following the dark evil one. That could only have been McArdle. She’d probably seen him when he was around here before searching for the map. I don’t blame Liam for having nothing to do with him. The old man was wise to wait for us—”

“Like Allan. But Liam didn’t know anyone else would come after the map, and he could sell only to someone who knew about the Map Country.”

“Poor Liam. He may have turned into a spineless blob; but he was saddled with a horrible predicament.”

“True. And I’m not all that sure I’d be happy to go back into the Map Country, despite all its wealth, if those clanking monsters had taken my son-in-law.”

The darkness lowered about them outside, streaks and lines flowing past the car windows with not a dot of light to show perspective. Polly said: “I’ll have to switch the main beam on soon. Can’t see a damn thing.”

“If they’d been following us I think we’d have seen their lights by now. All right.” Crane drew a deep breath. “All right. We don’t want to up the rate to twenty.”

Polly glanced at him, puzzled, but offered no comment as the light went on.

“You realize McArdle must have followed us to Omagh? He must have had pretty strong suspicions that the map was hidden hereabouts somewhere.”

“Yes. Now Liam has confirmed that there is treasure in the Map Country I suppose we can assign that motive to McArdle?”

By her tones no less than the form of her words, Crane knew Polly didn’t believe that theory any more than he did. That was a sensible, comprehensible motive for McArdle’s appearance in the search for the map — but Crane no longer believed in sensible reasons for anyone’s further interest in entering the Map Country. Proof of that lay in the lack of courage to enter of the single man avowedly solely after treasure.