Land Beyond the Map

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.

VI