Land Beyond the Map

When mist swirled feathery tendrils about him he did not stop but careened on, lurching drunkenly like a man in a seizure, still hearing the metallic clanking behind him, loud and resonant through the beating of blood in his head. The mist thickened, coagulated, clotted into fog that roiled about him, thick and greasy and heavenly.

Mouth open and gasping, nostrils distended, hair tangled and sticky with sweat, he stumbled on, a scarecrow figure from the pits of hell, haunted, driven, tortured, a man running from himself.

For gradually thoughts formed in his overheated brain, a single word, remorselessly repeated over and over again in time to his hammering footfalls on the road. Polly… Polly… Polly…

The fog turned into real fog now, raw vapor that seared his throat and stung his eyes. The strength drained from him.

He was out of the Map Country. He knew that without elation, without any sense of relief.

When he stopped running the ghastly whispered voice in his mind continued to chant: Polly… Polly… Polly… He was a beaten man. With the return of thought came the birth of conscience and remorse and deadly self-loathing.

He was out of the Map Country. Out of it. All the weariness he had not felt inside that accursed place struck him now. He could do no more. His stumbling feet carried him across the road, tripped against the tussocky edge, pitched him face down into the ditch. He lay there, exhausted, drained, and when at last he slipped into unconsciousness he went with a glad welcome for oblivion.

How long he lay in that rain-sodden ditch he did not know, but when he opened his eyes the sky above still lowered darkly but the rain had stopped. Polly. She had been taken by the living lozenge of light. And he had run away.

He had turned tail and run away like a gibbering idiot.

Crane licked his lips. He sat up. He looked at his watch. Five o’clock. The fog had gone and soon it would be dawn. It all figured.

There had been something odd — something wrong — about his reactions after the lozenge of light had taken Polly and rejected him. He had run and stumbled away in such fashion as would turn the stomach of any man. Why?

Oh, sure, the Map Country held enough horror to make any man a craven; but he’d been through it, he’d held onto his manhood, he’d met each threat and dealt with it.

“Something damn queer about that,” he said, and stood up and stretched.

The whole sequence of events had been wrong; he felt that strongly. He wasn’t a brave man, had never pretended to be; but he just couldn’t envisage himself snapping and letting go so completely. He’d been behaving as though overacting the part of a coward in a cheap melodrama. The only answer lay in the evil lozenges of light; they had deliberately driven him mad with fear and hurled him on wings of his own cowardice from the Map Country. Maybe that explained Liam’s reluctance to go back; maybe the old man had been subjected to those mental pressures. Since awakening there had been in his mind no other thought than that his next line of action would be to return. He couldn’t just tamely walk off now and leave Polly there. Oh, sure, he was still afraid; deadly afraid. But his fear had no chance against the burning conviction that he had to return.

He checked the grenade bag. Only one left. He took it out, held it a moment, then thrust it into his pocket and took off the satchel, tossed it down into the ditch.

He was hungry, tired, mentally exhausted. He had one grenade. He knew what he faced. But he began to march back up the road,*heading steadily towards the Map Country.

“And that’s damn queer,” he said aloud. “Why did they take Polly and not me? When I have the map? Why didn’t they snatch me?”

The muscles in his legs began to ache and stiffen and he stamped his feet as he walked. Darkness lay all about him, chill with the pre-dawn hush of waiting. At each step he expected the fog to return but still the stars winked cynically high above.

In that pervasive quietness he heard the car before he saw its lights and so was not completely sure from which direction it was traveling. He was aware of his quick relaxation of tension as the headlights appeared in front.

He crossed to the left of the road and waited, giving the car plenty of room to pass. The brilliant white beams splashed the road before him, hesitated, clung for an instant, and then whipped past. He didn’t think it was McArdle; but he still was not thinking too clearly, convinced that McArdle must be miles away by now, still vainly searching for the Austin.

Stepping back to the crown of the road as the car sped past, he set his face towards the Map Country and slogged on.

The engine note faded rapidly and soon he Lad the quietness to himself once again.