Land Beyond the Map

For a timeless second he stared out into the eye and the living pillar of flame, his fingers hard and constricted on the velvet of the curtains; then he jerked the curtains to and shut out the light.

He was shaking all over and sweat stung the corner of his eyes.

“They’re about…” Ma’s gargling warning swung him around from the curtains, brought his appalled vision back from that unwinking eye of light back into the room, back to sanity and to the people here bargaining over a torn map, a torn piece of paper that was the gateway to another world, being bartered for a hundred thousand pounds — brought him back, indeed, to sanity!

“The living light—” he said, stumbling over the words, incoherent. Strange shapes and colors burned against the screen of his mind, memory bringing back details of that light and of that eye — that eye that had been prying into this room to tear from them the secret of the map!

Polly began to speak, checked on a breath, went stiff-legged, her leather coat swinging, across to the window. She reached out a hand for the curtains.

“No!” said Crane. And could say no more. Polly swung the curtain aside and Crane saw the darkness beyond with the glinting reflection of the light in the room reflecting on the glass of the window. Instinctively, he thought of his smashed map glass, the fifteen eighty of the Florida Gulf and the westward islands.

“Put that curtain back, girl! What are ye thinking of with the map so near!” Liam’s harsh voice snapped Polly’s hand across; the curtains rippled sluggishly and fell once more into their stiff vertical velvet folds.

Liam carried a submachine gun cradled under his old arm. The blue steel caught the light, carrying on the sequence of reflections from the now hidden window. But Crane knew as well as he knew anything of this weird business that what he had seen had been no mere light reflection; he had seen the living light, and in the light had been an eye….

“Granfer!” Colla Junior spoke accusingly. “There was one outside! I saw the light.”

“It’s all right,” Crane said placatingly. “It could have seen nothing. Except my face.”

Gray tiredness dragged at Liam’s face, drawing the skin tight, pinching the eyes. His mouth trembled and the submachine gun’s muzzle moved in jerky little circles. “Write me a check and a note to cover it,” he said harshly. But the harshness brazened with a hollow mockery of the strong man he once had been.

Crane did as he was bidden, adding a separate note to his office. “They’ll pay, without question,” he said, tapping the note.

“They’d better—” Liam began, taking the slips of paper.

Polly cut him off. “What have you to lose? You’re too scared to use the map yourself. The — thing — outside has stripped your mind. If we don’t come back, you’re no worse off. Give us the map, Liam, and let us be off.”

He glared at her, resentfully, shifting the tommygun.

Crane now felt he had no time to waste on sympathy for the old man. That recent experience with the eye had shaken him, given him a hallucinatory vision of his own soul, refleeted and distorted. Liam was a poseur, a husk, a worn-out shell that once had housed an intrepid youth. Living in indolence had sapped not only his morale and self-respect; it had sapped his will-power. He watched as Liam edged to a window, using a little finger to open a slit in the curtains, peered through, the cords in his neck taut and shadow-filled as his head thrust forward.

“They’re about,” Liam said uneasily, fidgeting with the gun.

“The map,” Crane said harshly.

Reluctance stiffened Liam’s fingers. He put a hand into his pocket, withdrew it, fingered the gun.

“They can see things.” Again his fingers hovered over his pocket. “But they can’t see through a brick wall or through a thick curtain — and they can’t hear too well. But how did they know to follow us? We’ve never been followed like this before.”

Surprising them all, Ma said: “When my man was taken and me near my time I felt them. I knew! I know them and their ways! I can feel them. And these foreigners have been followed here — not by them. Oh, no, not by them! But they’ve followed that other, that dark one — beware him, for he means evil… .”

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.”