Land Beyond the Map

VI

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.

Only a moment thereafter, or so it seemed to Crane aroused from his somber brooding, he saw the big saloon parked at the roadside. Polly swung smoothly out to pass; but the man with upraised arms, pinned in the beam like an enemy bomber, halted her. She brought the car to a stop.

A face peered in at Crane’s window. A man’s voice said: “I’m so sorry to stop you on a night like this, but we’ve run into a spot of trouble—”

Polly turned towards the man and said something sympathetically and Crane wondered with a part of his mind that wasn’t scurrying frantically for shelter if she welcomed the interruption. The situation was one where her practical knowledge of cars could show to best advantage. Crane crouched low in his seat, thankful the dome light was off.

Oh, sure, he recognized the man looking in. Probably he was stopping all the cars out of Omagh, just to make sure.

Crane felt completely useless, dewed with the sweat of fear, slouching back in the darkness of the car.

Polly put her hand on the door handle and Crane moved. If she opened the door the courtesy light would go on and McArdle would know he had found his quarry.

“What—?” began Polly.

A torch beam cut through the gloom, fastened like a fly in a spider’s web on Crane’s face. He winced back, throwing up an arm, blinded.

“It’s him!” He could hear McArdle breathing, hoarse and rasping, and then a hand grasped his collar. His own hand snapped down to that hand, wrenched and tore, slipping along to a thick hairy wrist. His fingers caught in a smooth cold metal chain and he tugged desperately, feeling McArdle’s hand dragging him up, and seeing only a blood-red haze beating through his closed eyelids. Polly cursed. Crane felt her body press against him and heard a soggy thump. McArdle’s clawing hand slackened and through a haze of dancing blood-red specks, Crane glimpsed vaguely the torch disappear, McArdle vanish, and the sudden, bent-forward apparition of Polly’s face in profile with a ferocious look of fierce hatred plastered all across it. Then the car lurched forward in a gasping tearing of gears and spinning tires.

“Duck!” shouted Crane automatically.

Polly bent above the wheel and the windshield followed the rear window into shattered confusion. Cold, wet night air whipped in. More shots must have been fired lost in the roaring of the engine and the throaty shouting of the exhaust and the whickering crack of wind blustering through the car.

“Cripes!” Polly said. Then she threw back her head and laughed. Crane, slowly straightening, stared at her in amazement.

“You all right, Polly?”

“Of course.”

“Oh—I see.” Then: “What hit McArdle?”

“He wasn’t the only one with a torch. He didn’t know me, of course. Your warning was only just in time. I hit him with my torch — a rubber-covered beauty — but it laid him out on the ground.”

“But he’ll follow.”

“Yep. So — what now?”

“It’s damned cold in here. I suggest you get moving as fast as you can away from here. We’ll have to sit and shiver.”

“Right. One thing remains the same. We still have the map.”

Crane smiled at the girl. “Thanks, Polly.”

A cold sliding touch in his fingers brought his attention to tho chain he must have wrenched from McArdle’s wrist as Polly slugged the man.

“What have you got there, Rolley?”

He held it up so that the dashboard lights glowed on its intricate golden entwining of chain and link, its strange symbols deeply etched on golden medallions like a girl’s charm brarelet. Intaglio work of a supreme artistry showed the chain to be no cheap manufactured item.

“Odd sort of ornament for a man.”

“McArdle’s a weird enough customer for me to believe anything about him.”

Crane laughed softly, reaction from that brief, fierce encounter leaving him calm and pleasantly relaxed. “I’ll put it with the map, snugged down in my pocket. That makes two things McArdle wants from us. If he does catch up—”

“Not if the old bus holds out.”

The car responded magnificently, streaking along the dark roads beneath the occasional twinkle of stars as they cleared one patch of drifting cloud and its attendant rain before plunging once again into the fine downpour. Stray patches of mist floated past in the headlights like spider-silk, whirling upwards, sparkling, as the car spun through. The threnody of wind and rain began to work insidiously on Crane; his face and hair and clothes were becoming wetter every moment and he wondered anxiously how long Polly could keep it up. He began to fret about their route; they seemed to be fixed on this single strand of road so that McArdle would have no difficulty at all in following. He was thinking that he ought to consult the map about alternative routes and then take over the driving when the streaky mist blotched and coalesced and real fog clamped down.

“Blast!” Polly said in her best ladylike way. “We could have done without this. Still, it’ll slow McArdle, too.”

“Two speeding cars, chasing through fog — what a laugh,” Crane said. He felt like beating the air with his fists. If McArdle got hold of Polly there was no knowing what might happen.

“I’ll have to slow down, Rolley.” The car slackened speed as she spoke. “Can’t see a damn thing.”

They groped forward in the dank gloom, tendrils of mist writhing in through the smashed screen, chilling them with a miasmic breath. Crane coughed a couple of times.

Polly nodded forward. “Looks like a fire. What—?”

Crane peered ahead, through the curling banks of fog. Up there the world expanded into a roseate halo, a round, chromatic whorl of incandescence that neared as the car crept forward. Glints of silver and gold light reflected in the swirling fog. The color deepened, brightened, took on a ghostly all-pervading golden glow that reminded Crane of something that he knew, that he should know with familiarity, some commonplace fact of everyday life that for the moment escaped his memory. It was like —

“Like coming out of fog into sunshine!” said Polly suddenly, sitting up and gripping the wheel hard.

“Sunshine!” Crane echoed. “But it’s night-time!”

Now the golden radiance was all about them, creating a nimbus of glory that irradiated the whole world. Then they had broken through, and the mist dissipated behind them, and the green countryside lay all before them, bathed in the warm and glorious rays of the sun.

Polly stopped the car with a jerk and they both sat there, conscious of the warmth about them, yet numbed, frozen, chilled to the core of their beings.

Crane took a deep breath. At last, licking his lips and moving his tongue as though it belonged to someone else, he said: “Welcome to the Map Country.”

“The Map Country!” echoed Polly. They both looked ahead, bemused, trying to take in their new surroundings, lost to the danger following them along the road.

For the road still ran between green hedges and low stone walls, still curved gently over rounded hills, with the distant purple and gray mountains dotted with scraps of naked rock. The road ran slantwise before them, empty, waiting, sinister.

“This is no road in Ireland,” whispered Polly.

“We’d better turn back—” Crane said.

“McArdle?”

“At least he’s a man. Here, we could find anything.”

“True on the last. But, McArdle, I wonder…”

They were saved further argument. Crane glanced at his watch. “If McArdle was still following us he would have been up on us by now. Let’s face it, Polly. We have the map — the half that gives ingress to the Map Country from the east — and McArdle doesn’t. We were following that map and we came here. He won’t.”

“That’s his hard luck.” Polly stared ahead, trying to see over the brow of the hill flanking the curving road. “All right.” She frowned. “But what’s that up ahead?”

Crane looked. At first he thought it was a brewed up tank; then he recognized it as the wreck of a truck.

“That’ll be Colla,” he said flatly.

“Well—” Polly took a breath and started the car. “We’re here. So let’s do some of the things we said we’d do when we started out on this.”

Crane realized, as they rolled forward slowly, that events hadn’t panned out as they’d expected. His whole entry into the Map Country had been as different as he could have imagined. But then, difference, strangeness, the very breath of the unknown — all these were implicit in the present precarious situation. He waited as the car pulled up beside the shattered truck.

Liam had spoken the truth. Three suitcases lay on the splintered wooden floor in the back. They were scratched and blackened, as though subjected to heat, and when they were opened some of the diamonds within must have been burned. But the remaining flashed a stunning sparkle of light in the sunlit air.

“Cripes!” Polly said, flabbergasted.

“Remember, you’re a lady, Polly. And sling the cases into the boot. Remember, they’ll have cost me a cool hundred thousand.”

“Mercenary, blood-sucking capitalist,” Polly said. They both knew the infantile line of back-chat was covering the fear that made them want to drive screaming from this spot.

Crane took one quick look around the cab. There was no sign of Colla.

“Now look, Polly. We can’t go on. It’d be madness. So okay. We’ve found the Map Country.

And it isn’t as we expected. We’re pretty sure we’ll be killed. Let’s get out.”

“What about Allan?”

“He’s been gone five years, Polly. You’ve grown accustomed to thinking of him as dead, Why try to change that now? And, anyway,” Crane finished with a brutal directness that sought to cover the flaws in this new argument, “he is probably dead now. Like Colla.”

A set look of stubbornness fixed itself on Polly’s face and Crane sighed and felt an impending and unpreventable disaster. But to his surprise, she said: “And you?”

“I’ve discovered there is more to worry about in life than a map or map-hunting. So I wanted to reenter the Map Country. I don’t think I can help Adele now. I feel badly about that; but to me it seems an unshakable truth. So I’m here. Now all I want to do is get the hell out of it.”

Polly gave a strangled laugh. “Maybe that’s an impossibility. Maybe we got to hell in it, already.”

“Maybe. Come on—”

“No, Rolley. I’m sorry. Look, you can walk back to the mist line and walk out safely by yourself if you must. But the sun is shining and there is no immediate sign of danger, it all looks quite and peaceful — and I feel rebellious. I came here to find Allan. I can’t turn around now, now I’m almost there, wherever he is, just because—”

“Because you might get killed?”

She made a face. “It’s not quite like that.” She stood beside him in the dust of the road, stirring patterns with her toe. The countryside lay around them, still and peaceful, charming, restful.

“Anyway, I’m going on for a little.”

She looked determined. She was determined.

Remembering his first encounter with her, Crane did not try to argue any more. A leather satchel lay in the dust of the road and he bent to pick it up. Grenades. He remembered Liam speaking of them. Oh, well, he had used them before and had a good throwing arm. He put his arm through the shoulder strap and adjusted the satchel so that it rested comfortably on his left hip. The weight there and the purpose contained in the satchel reminded him with a vivid stab of memory of the regimental grenade-throwing competitions. He’d always managed to do adequately in practice and competition; but the memory of the times he’d used grenades live against those terrorists remained most strongly — his range and accuracy had gone up by over fifty percent then. But he’d never taken to it as he had sharpshooting; effective — but messy — grenades. His fingers were fumbling with the stiff leather of the strap and the corroded metal of the buckle when Polly screamed.

He looked up fast.

A memory of his childhood rushed back. He felt bleakly exposed.

Across the grassland angling towards the road, sprung apparently from nowhere, rushed a shining, fire-breathing, many-armed clanking monster.

His childhood remembrance had not played him false, then. Maybe the distant fire and smoke and towers he had seen as a child were not visible now — they must be on the far side of this fantastic country, accessible if you held the other portion of the torn master map — but the monsters were real enough. Real, and clanking and flailing prehensile arms — real, and charging straight for him.

There were two of them. Critically, with the experience of the years and his training in antitank techniques draining away much of that enervating supernatural fear, he recognized the tank tracks, the prehensile jointed arms and the tentacular coiling arms, the ruddy flare of some inner power source vomiting through venturi-styled exhausts, the low-domed turret-type excresence riding the main body of the vehicle, and he could rationalize the whole into a vehicle of war, made by — and then smart rationalization broke down. These charging tanks had never been made by the hand of man.

His own hand reached for and found the familiar pineapple feel of a grenade, an old World War Two Mills Thirty Six, and his brain was in the middle of wondering if the thing would still work as his body went through the motions of pin extraction, of checking and of hurling with muscle wrenching force. Then he was diving into the car and Polly’s foot was pressing the accelerator to the floor and the engine was threshing in agony as the tires spun.

“Come on, you brute!” Polly was yelling.

Crane remembered his father and the way the big old red tourer had roared with spinning tires. He sweated. The grenade fell beautifully.

The leading tank reared to one side like a hamstrung horse, a track blasted from a sprocket wheel and flailing into smaller and smaller whippings as it coiled around the driver. The banging sound of metal on metal reached him clearly over the Austin’s engine noise. Bad design, Crane thought fleetingly, as he watched the second clanking monster gain with every yard.

For a few seconds it was touch and go.

Then the gallant Austin showed her speed and the clanking and fire-vomiting venturis lagged, faltered, and dropped away.

“That was a near thing,” Polly said quite calmly. She held onto the wheel and her trim body was firm and without a tremor. She’d probably had the shakes when Crane had been jumping about outside.

“Too near.” He looked back through the leering eye of the smashed back window. The clanking monster was still coming on along the white ribbon of road. The sun struck errant gleams of gold from its hide. For the first time he realized the things had been painted red, a bright, garish, out-of-place vermilion daubed against the serene rolling green countryside. The red dot followed on remorselessly along the winding white road.

“You realize, I suppose,” he said, “that we’re heading straight into the middle of the Map Country?”

“I had noticed.”

“So?”

“That’s where Allan is likely to be. You can knock out those clanking beasts, tanks or whatever they are, with your grenades. You’ve done it once. You can do it again.”

And that, he reflected with due solemnity, was Polly Gould to the life.

Around them as the car fled along the naked strip of road the country unfolded, green dales merging gradually into a broad and monotonously flat plain, dotted with clumps of trees and threaded by the glint of lazy rivers. Distant purple and silver mountains marched forever just on the edge of vision, hurling their peaks against the sky, a wickedly beautiful frieze of spears.

Aloof, the sky remained high and blue and distant, speckled with drifting cotton-wool clouds, and in the air mingled scents told of wild thyme and fragrant herbs and heavy-headed flowers sensually filling the world with a bouquet to relish. This was a country in which a man’s spirit could expand unconfined by pressing walls of concrete and steel and his lungs could breathe a pure air uncontaminated by carbon monoxide and diesel fumes. In other circumstances the scene would have been peaceful and enchanting. But not now, not in the wild and misty bog-lands of Ireland, not where it should be dark with night and hazed with mist and rain and the shredding scurry of the storm-wrack above.

The sun did not look to be at the right declination for this time of year. Crane took out his pocket compass — without which no map-enthusiast is correctly dressed — and flicked open the cover. After a moment he took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and then opened them and looked again at the compass.

“For your information, Polly,” he said carefully, “the north magnetic pole is now situated somewhere around the south pole. I thought you might be interested.”

“How can you be sure? Oh, yes, I know the north should be on our left; but we might have got twisted around—”

“No soap, Polly. For two reasons. One is the boastful one that like a number of people I have map-sense, natural orientation. Lead me around the maze and I know — but how I know I don’t know, if you follow — just which way is the right way to get out.”

“Lucky you.”

“Don’t mention it. The other reason is hanging up there in the sky. We might just have become twisted about enough to be traveling west instead of east, and I might be wrong in imagining my map-sense has stuck with me into the Map Country. But the sun shows we’re traveling east. The norm magnetic pole is now down deep south.”

The look on Polly’s face surprised Crane. He had expected incredulity, perhaps, after that first remonstrance, or a girlish indifference to odd scientific facts. Instead she nodded with certainty, and said: “Wasn’t the north magnetic pole in the Antarctic about a million years ago, last time?”

“Last time?”

“Well, even I know it has changed poles from time to time in the course of Earth’s development. I believe the last time compasses would have pointed south was a million years ago. Wasn’t that one of the results from I.G.Y.?”

“So you’re suggesting that the Map Country exists a million years ago, that we’ve gone through into the past?”

“Could be.”

She was damned matter-of-fact about it, Crane grumbled to himself. Far too contained and perky — or was it merely that he was the old woman of the party, the chicken-hearted, the frightened?

The tank had now dropped behind them, lost along the road beyond the gentle undulations that appeared so slight and yet were enough to hide the clanking monster’s metallic vermilion body. The flat plain was in reality like a petrified ocean, ridged with long rollers athwart their line of passage.

“And still only one damned road.”

“We can’t go back,” Crane agreed. “That’s certain. Not, that is, unless we knock out that second tank.” He was stubbornly determined to think of the clanking monsters not as that but as mere tanks. They were probably robotic or remote-controlled; he didn’t care to dwell on who or what might be driving them otherwise.

The car slid gently across the crown of the road, skimmed the offside verge and then, as Polly turned the wheel, surged back onto the left-hand lane again. Crane looked at her. “I don’t suppose they obey the Highway Code here,” he said. “And you needn’t bother about driving on the left; but what was that swerve for?”

He hadn’t yet sorted out an acceptable formula to enable him to suggest he take over the driving without upsetting her or running the risk of a blazing barrage of scorn.

Polly bit her lip. “I don’t know, Rolley. The car just went by itself — whoops — here we go again.”

The car snaked up the road. Crane gripped the door strap and held on anxiously. “I know we’ve had a hectic day, followed by a bizarre night and I should feel tired. But I don’t. Perhaps it’s the air here; but I feel more alive than I have in ages.”

“Me too.”

Polly wrested with the wheel, spinning this way and then, as the car skittered across the road, spinning that. The frown of concentration on her face, the grim set to her jaw, all added to Crane’s fear.

“Maybe the steering’s gone haywire…. Slow down!”

He was looking hard at her; yet a movement beyond her profile attracted his attention. Out there on the plain the trees thrashed in wild motion. He saw a clump with their strange towering trunks and feathery clumped heads bending and bowing, lashing down until they brushed the ground and then whipping back the other way like giant stockmen’s whips so rapidity he felt sure their trunks must snap.

“Slow down!” he shouted again, stricken with unreasoning panic.

Out there the whole plain was moving: the long rollers of grass were rolling in reality, were surging forward and up and down like the monstrous waves of a blasphemous sea. His mouth open in horror and his eyes staring, Crane saw that maelstrom of solid earth, and he cowered down on the seat of the car.

“Good God!” Polly screamed. She stamped on the brake.

The Austin slid to a halt. Now they could clearly see the sinuous writhings of the road; like a rippling length of white rope it gyrated away before them.

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. But anything can happen here — and it evidently does!”

“I feel sick, Rolley.”

“This is just about the most basic fear a man or a woman has to face, Polly. The ground beneath your feet is a part of everyday life, so natural and permanent a thing you don’t even think of it at all. But when you’re caught in an earthquake and the whole ground begins to move beneath your feet, then you’re faced with the destruction of sanity itself. You can hide from thunder and lightning, take shelter from rain and hail, fight free from a flood and even escape a volcano. But an earthquake when the very ground shivers in fear… there’s nowhere to hide then, Polly, nowhere to hide at all. And your mind can’t accept that. If you just let your unconscious instincts take over, you’re finished, old girl. You have to think and reason your way through — it’s the only way….”

Crane had been desperately wondering just how long he would have to keep up this pretentious line of talk before Polly caught the spark, hit back, regained her blend of scorn and cockiness towards him. She sat back, pressing her slender shoulders back into the leather coat, breathing deeply.

“Look, Rolley,” she said at last. “The road remains firm. It goes up and down and around; but it is nowhere broken. It stays there all the time.”

And Crane knew she had conquered her basic fears.

“Reminds me of those fantastic inventions the wheezes boys got up to during the war. They built a road from links and slats across the sea ready for D-Day. They sent a truck across it and then a motor torpedo boat sailed past at full knots. The road waved around just like the road we’re on now.” Crane smiled; but he didn’t reach across and touch Polly reassuringly. “But the truck stuck on as though glued; it looked somehow impossible, to see a truck chugging along a road swashing up and down in the sea.”

“I’ve seen film of that on television.” Polly pointed towards the clump of trees that had first taken Crane’s eye. “The trees — they’ve gone. They’ve been sucked down. And, look, over there — those rocky crags have just been upthrust.”

“Whatever’s happening out there, then,” Crane said slowly, losing some of his own elemental fear now that Polly had calmed down, “is purely on the natural level. The road, the man-made — or the what-have-you-made — artifact is unaffected. It’s all part of nature.”

Polly laughed, still a trifle too shrilly. “If you can call a sea of solid earth natural, then, yes, you’re right.”