Land Beyond the Map

“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…”