Land Beyond the Map

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.