Land Beyond the Map

Polly slithered out, her short leather coat flaring.

“Those damned things—”

“Run, Polly. For the torn edge and the mist. Run!”

The glow in the air beat all about them. They ran struggling over the road, their shadows black and distorted, fleeing before them, and to Crane the feeling of being an insect scuttling along the beam of a torch exploded the boil of anger. He stopped deliberately to turn and hurl another grenade. The violence of the fire in the sky made as nothing the grenade blast. But the pursuing tank slowed and skidded, shedding a track, and a writhing arm struck the car’s roof with a note like a gong, sheared it away in gleaming metal. They ran on, panting.

Unsure of his landmarks Crane could not know when they would reach the mist, as yet invisible to them in that limbo between worlds; all he could do was run on, willing, hoping, desperately urging the mist to form around them at each fresh step. As far as he could see before him, with eyes that were adjusting to the intolerable glare, stretched the road and the countryside. A countryside, he was aware, he might never reach with the torn map in his possession.

“Oh, God!” Polly screamed. “Look!”

In the air, hovering a few feet above the ground directly before them, a pale lozenge of fight winked into being. It shone with a pallid reflection of the monster glow in the sky.

He tried to halt his stumbling feet, to draw back, to recoil from the eerie phantasm. Slower than Polly to pull up, he collided with her and his left hand wrapped around her waist as they both staggered forward. He could hear her breathing, a tearing, rasping sucking for breath that drove him into savage action. He fumbled out a grenade and with vicious intent prepared to hurl it straight at the lambent oval of light.

His hand was raised, the pin out, the lever already easing up as his palm flexed forward, when the voice struck through to him. The lozenge of fire vibrated in time to the words. “Do not struggle longer, little man. We are taking you away—”

Crane hurled the grenade with all the lost desperation in him.

The lozenge of fire swelled, grew, bloated with a chiaroscuro of living color rippling over it like tinted waters of a fountain. Crane knew — knew — that the alien oval of light had absorbed the bursting energy of the bomb within itself, feeding on it, containing it, neutralizing it.

Then the living fire swooped down to engulf them both.

Blackness shot through with the fire of agony and defeat crushed down on Crane so that he cried out in futile wrath. Polly lay in his arms, her body beneath the wide-opened leather coat firm and soft against him, her head lax on his shoulder. He gripped her tightly in blind defiance of what might happen. The blackness muffling them now must lie in the core of the living light as an alien paradox defying human nature.

The voice said: “Misunderstanding is always the lot of those who seek to improve the worlds.”

Crane tried to answer and proclaim his defiance; but no words came. He could feel his heart thumping, deeply and painfully, against Polly. Then a wind caught at him, a wraith wind blown down no Earthly skies, and he felt with profound shock and panic Polly’s body slipping from him.

The voice said: “Who is this man who possesses the Amullieh?”

And a voice answered from a great distance: “He is not Trangor… He is a man like the others… But he possesses the Amullieh….”

And Crane’s arms circled emptiness and Polly had gone.

His feet rang on the road surface. He stumbled as though clumsily dropping from a wall. Through water-brimming eyes he saw the road white with dust in the light of the sun. Thoughts pirouetted through his dazed mind. An ominous clank from somewhere to the rear swung him around, lurching, one arm half-raised defensively.

A tank rattled along the road towards him, another following in the tracks of the first. He saw the wrecked Austin in the ditch; beyond, Colla’s smashed truck and the ditched tank showed half around the curve. But of the livid light in the sky and the lozenges of fire no sign remained to show they had brought with them terror and taken with them — Polly.

Crane did not think. The terror of the unknown festering in him drove his muscles into action and propelled him in a desperate lunge away from these onrushing monsters of destruction. He ran along the white road and he ran as a mindless idiot, gibbering in fear. The leather grenade satchel thumped against his hip and had there been time to take it off he would have done so, and flung it from him so as not to impede his flight.

All thought of Polly, and the map, and the gems, and of his avowed intentions, fled from his brain. He ran and ran and ran.

With the grinding of tracks and the horrible swishing of grapnel-armed tentacles in his ears he plunged headlong away from madness.