Land Beyond the Map

In a way he could not define he had begun in the last hour or so, talking to this girl, to believe he might at last solve the riddle that had bedeviled him throughout life. He had vague hopes that he might in some as yet only dimly understood way find a cure for Adele; but other reasons had driven him on to seeking the map torn down the center. The piquing of his pride, the knowledge that forces existed outside this normal ordered world, forces that both frightened and fascinated him, the unfounded but tenaciously held belief that his own incomplete personality might be made whole, and the sheer love of digging into the unknown — all these things drove him on in his search to regain the lost key to the Map Country.

He rose and picked from the bookcase the Ordnance Survey of North Ireland. The names rang sweet carillons in his ears. “From Belfast,” he said, musing. “No. The names mean nothing to me — apart from a tang of longing.”

“When do you leave?” Polly asked, with an upward tilt of her head.

He smiled. They were establishing a rapport already and he found the sensation pleasant, restful — and direfully alarming.

“In the morning. I can catch the early train and the plane—”

“I’m coming too, of course.”

“But—”

It took Roland Crane less than thirty seconds to realize that he was seldom going to win arguments with Polly Gould.

II

He was still pointing out when they left the plane at Nutt’s Corner and took the bus into Belfast that this didn’t seem the sort of adventure for a girl. She merely told him to contact his book-selling friends and start the hunt for a mid-nineteenth century guide book of some indeterminate part of Ireland, containing in the back cover the torn half of a map. Neither of them entertained much hope of success with that approach; merely coming to Ireland wouldn’t bring the catalogues of the booksellers any closer than back at Crane’s home, Bushmills. But it was one avenue of investigation, and they had so few it bulked larger in importance than it really was.

Polly went off tracking down the last people Allan had seen before setting off.

They reported back to each other, sitting at a low table in the lounge of their comfortable hotel. Results — nil.

“The booksellers were pleased to see me, naturally,” said Crane, leaning back in the deep leather armchair and yawning. “Whew, I’m tired. I’ve been a better than average customer. But they shook their heads and expressed a sympathy that was sincere and universal. Not a one.” He scratched his nose. “Except for one, that is. An old character who advised me to try Smithfield. I told him I was looking for a book and not a side of beef—”

Polly chuckled. “Yes, I know. It is disconcerting to find a general market and junkshop area called Smithfield. Difficult for an Englishman to disassociate his Smithfield Market from his mind.”

“I agree. Especially when Smithfield was the scene of many a tournament with knights in full armor jousting there — or didn’t you know that?”

“No. Anyway, what about it? That’s a world deader than the do do.”

“True. I’m no dreamer of medieval follies; but they did have values that make our material grasping look like the second-rate emptiness it is.”

“With your wealth you’d have been all right. Wait” — she held up a hand at his immediate protest. “That’s not meant offensively or even personally. I know the middle ages believed in values of service instead of money and we laugh at them for it. Our values are money from beginning to end, the lust after material possessions. But even so, if that is the price we have to pay for decent living and freedom from the foulness of those days, then the majority of people today pay it willingly.”

At another time Crane would have welcomed an argument about the progress of civilization; but right now a map that had been torn down the center obsessed him. He contented himself with: “One thing’s certain. People in those days before the Renaissance cult of the persona would readily believe the Map Country exists.”

She smiled obliquely at him, vaguely unsettling his impression that he was getting to know her better. “I think I believe you. I’d still be here even if I didn’t, so there’s no comfort for you in that. Anyway, did you go?”

“Smithfield? No. Tomorrow.” He frowned. “The biggest upset of all is what this same old character told me in passing. Apparently another man has been looking for a guide book, and from his description of what he wants to buy, I’d wager half my collection he’s after the same book as us.”

“Someone else — after the map!”

“That’s what the man said.”

“That sheds a totally new light on this—”

“Does it? I don’t really think so. If the map is being put back into circulation again, then it must be sought after.”

“I really can’t go along with your theory there—”

“You’re right, of course, Polly. It is only a theory and so wild and woolly a one as to make nonsense of the sanity of the world we live in.” He stood up, lean and tall, and smiled down on her. “Me for shut-eye. Tomorrow, Smith-field.”