Kenneth Bulmer - Land Beyond the Map

“He gave his address as some place in County Tyrone.”

“Well now,” said Crane.

“Only trouble is that the place name has been obliterated by burns. The whole register is badly charred They keep it in the safe and regard it as a curio. A memento of the Great Fire, if you follow me.”

“Yes. Well, it’s too late to do much more today. Any ideas?”

“I ought to try to find a story this afternoon.”

“Huh?”

Polly looked at him reflectively, almost calculatingly, pulling her lower lip.

“You’re a rich man, Mr. Crane — very rich, I mean?”

“Why, I suppose so. And what’s all this Mister Crane stuff, anyway?”

“Rolley?”

“I’ve grown accustomed to it.”

She laughed. “Well, Rolley, hasn’t it occurred to you, living in your ivory tower buttressed by a financial empire, that a young unmarried girl has to work for a living?”

It hadn’t — not in Polly’s case, at any rate.

“Why — huh—” Crane said intelligently.

“I’m a reporter. I kid myself I’m a journalist; not yet, but that’ll come. My paper thinks I’m onto a big story here, as I well might be, but—”

But Crane was blazing with anger.

“Is that all you’ve dragged me here for — to get a story for your confounded paper?”

She blazed right back.

“Your sort are all so high and mighty your feet never touch the ground! I mention that I have to earn my living and I’m trying to find a story — I barely manage to open my mouth telling you what I’ve told my paper and you jump down it with both hob-nailed boots!” Dots of color in her cheeks and sparkles in her eyes couldn’t stop Crane from riposting — and even as he spoke he felt the meanness of his words.

“You know what those few people I’ve spoken to about the Map Country think of me. Dolally-tap! And you propose to smear the whole story across the front pages. I can see it now! ‘Multi-millionaire map-hunts for phantom world!’ You’d soil and degrade the whole object of our search here — and I trusted you!”

Polly stood up to him, chin tip-tilted aggressively.

“With a headline like that thank your lucky stars you don’t have to earn your living writing for the papers! And you still haven’t given me a chance to tell you what I told my editor! That’s just like you — typical. If everything doesn’t go your way — blooey! Fire everyone!”

“Now look here, Polly—”

She brushed aside whatever he was going to say.

“No! You look here! You know why I’m in Ireland with you. My editor will get nothing from me that in any way can cause you distress — because that would do the same things to me.” She was breathing deeply now, angry and annoyed, and yet, Crane somehow knew without doubt, partially angry with herself and understanding what he’d so clumsily been trying to say. “Have you forgotten about Allan?”

At once he saw the enormity of what he had been saying, the attitude he had taken, and contrition swamped him — tinged, thankfully, with a dash of mocking humor. Talk about the grindstone and the steel — the sparks generated here would have done O’Connell’s conception of McArdle no injustice.

“Sorry,” he said, meaning it. “Sorry, my dear. Just that, well — I’ve become so bound up in this thing that the thought of millions of gawpers prying into it over their breakfast cereal turns my stomach.”

“Don’t worry. There’s a time for everything. By the time the story is finished with us — or us with it — and I file it you’ll be as blasé£ as the next.”

Thinking of the thoughts that had crowded his brain in O’Connell’s neat cottage, of the dark enchantment of Ireland, of the potentialities of the Map Country, Crane said slowly: “I wonder.”

Polly had regained her composure, her strong ironical sense of balance in the world. She sensed those vague forebodings disturbing Crane. “This isn’t any supernatural hocus-pocus we’re mixed up in, Rolley. That man McArdle points that up for us. There are some mighty queer goings on going on, but they can all be explained away in the naked light of day, never you fear.”

This time Crane didn’t say: “I wonder.” But the chilling thought still lodged in his brain and refused to be ejected.

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?”