Land Beyond the Map Read online

  “I must have been five or six at the time. We were touring — father, mother, Adele and myself — but touring where I cannot remember. The experience was so strange that none of us mentioned it afterwards, and now that my parents are dead and Adele is — well” — he swallowed and went on — “that doesn’t matter in this context. She cannot tell me. Finding out just what did happen is what matters.”

  “I know about your sister,” Polly said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, they look after her well. She plays with her dolls and her pretty ribbons and lets them wash her face and dress and undress her. She’ll be thirty-four next birthday.”

  Polly remained silent.

  After a moment Crane said: “We had a big red car. I remember that because all cars were black in those days. A big tourer and I loved to sit up front with the hood down and let the slipstream whip into my face. I can feel it now.” He put one hand to his cheek and rubbed, thoughtfully. “We were going from one town to another — naturally, I don’t know where — and I was anxious to get there for an ice cream. I remember bits and pieces, flashes of memory, elusive patterns; not the whole thing in a nicely ordered sequence. To remember anything at all from that age means it must have impressed me very forcibly. This did.”

  “Yes?”

  “Just as we were leaving the outskirts father realized he didn’t have a map. I believe it was my fault; I’d used his map to make a paper hat. Anyway. There was a junk shop, you know, old stuff people toss out and that lies in windows gathering dust for years on end. Then a rich American happens by and pays enough to keep the owner living for another five years. There was a book tray outside. Twopence each. Nothing much under a shilling these days. Father asked the man if he had a map. He had. He had a map all right.”

  “The map.”

  “Yes. The map. It was folded into the back of a guide book. Father just tossed the book onto my lap and we set off. The next flash that comes is of father using words I didn’t understand and of mother shushing him. There was only half the map there. Someone had torn half of it off.”

  “Wasn’t a remark passed…”

  “My mother, I think. She had a whacky sense of humor. It may have been father; it doesn’t matter. They said: ‘I suppose when we reach the torn part of the map we’ll all fall off the edge.’ It made me laugh.” Crane fiddled with the teacups, thinking back, feeling the sun and air and the way the big old red tourer rolled around corners. He could see the map spread out on the seat between him and his father, his father, upright behind the wheel, leather gauntleted hands so firm on the wheel, so gentle with the old paper of the map.

  “We drove on in the sunshine through green fields, not a house or a soul in sight. The telegraph posts were all leaning at crazy angles and the road was very white and dusty. Then father said: ‘Well, hold on, folks. This is where we all fall off.’ And we all laughed. We were still laughing when the gray mist closed down dankly from nowhere.”

  He shivered.

  “You couldn’t see a thing. One minute we were driving in the sunshine, doing fifty along the white road. The next we were groping forward in a dense mist. It was still warm. The car still ran. Father dropped the speed to ten miles an hour, and we groped on. Then I started to cry.”

  “You were frightened?”

  “Yes. Well, scared, wondering what it was all about and what it would be like to fall off a map. When Adele said: ‘We’re not really going to fall off the end of the world, silly!’ it only made it worse. I cried all the harder. Eventually father decided to turn back. We retraced our course and came out into the sunshine again. When father checked the map, and mother, too, we found that the mist began at exactly the place where the map was torn.”

  Polly Gould shivered and moved closer to the fire.

  “Father laughed it off. He was a big man. Isambard Crane. Biggest engineer in all the west country. ‘Probably a local freak,’ he said. I didn’t know what he meant; but it sounded comforting. We went on again. We crept through the mist, hearing nothing apart from the rumble of the car. Then, after about ten minutes, the mist began to thin.”

  Crane put the cup down. He guessed he’d break it if he went on with story holding it in his hand.

  “The mist shredded away. We were out in the sunshine again. Father laughed and said that was that. We went on around a bend in the road and then — then—”

  “Yes?”

  “A confusion. A roaring from the engine as father turned the car around fast, tires spinning. A distant glimpse of turrets and towers, of fire and smoke and the thin keening of trumpets. I cannot bring that scene to mind though I have tried many and many a time. A silver globe from which spurted livid tongues of flame. A tall structure which I think of always as a tree, laminated, many branched, and yet so huge no tree exists on the same scale. A vibration in the air, a gossamer sheening of the atmosphere that set a rippling curtain, many folded, between us and the scene beyond.” Crane shook his head. “I have tried to recapture the feelings we all had, the inexplicable sense of dread, the heightened pulse-rate, the dread knowledge that this place was evil — and yet evil designed for one end, that of good — inexplicable as that sounds.”

  “Inexplicable — and almost crazy.”

  Crane smiled wryly at Polly. “Yes, Miss Gould. Crazy.”

  “You ran through an industrial fog-belt into one of those god-awful industrial towns, all smoke and soot and flame; and the feeling of evil, of men’s lives being warped and crushed, is strong enough there to curl a philosopher’s beard.”

  “So I have thought many times. That must be the answer. You travel through the Welsh valleys, some of the most beautiful scenery God put on this Earth — and then you stumble across the foulness of a mining town huddled under its reeking smoke — like a cess-pit at the bottom of a garden. To a child’s eyes a factory belching smoke and steam and flame as the Bessemers tilted would appear as a cacophonous mystery, a place of terror and fascination and repugnance. Oh, yes, Miss Gould, don’t think I haven’t thought about this.”

  “I believe you have, Mr. Crane. I merely said that to test your reactions. At least you’re not completely dominated by terror-memories; you can still be logical. You forgive me? Good. Now, Allan—”

  “Yes. Your cousin. He had this map—”

  “What happened afterwards? To the map, I mean.”

  “Father turned the car around fast. We went out of there and through the mist without slackening speed until we reached the sunshine once more. Then we backtracked and found a fork which took us a longer way around. We didn’t speak much of what we had seen.”

  “All right. Frankly, Mr. Crane, I cannot see what this did to you. And your sister Adele’s reaction seems quite out of proportion. You ran into an industrial belt and saw the monstrous growth of factories with a child’s eyes. I had been hoping you would help me with my search for my cousin. It seems I was mistaken.”

  “Just a minute. I’ve told you the story that is current. I haven’t added further details, details I have told no one. It seems also pretty plain why I want the map…. Adele haunts me and there must be a chance for her…. Well, I won’t elaborate on that. But right now I think it only fair for you to give me your side of the story.”

  “That’s simple enough. Allan planned a long motoring holiday. He was on leave—”

  “He stayed on as a regular? Yes, of course. I decided that soldiering and Cranes didn’t go hand in hand. I think I was right.”

  “Maybe you were. He’d found a girl friend — Sharon something-or-other — and they were going to do the Grand Tour of Ireland.”

  “Ireland!”

  “Yes. You knew Allan had disappeared in Ireland?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. But I didn’t know he had the map. You mean — all this happened to me in Ireland?”

  “If it happened, Mr. Crane.”

  “What d’you mean — if? I may be crazy; but as surely as I sit here, I went through that mist and saw another world.”

  Ireland. So all his motoring excursions about the bylanes of England had been fruitless. He had no memory of crossing the sea, when, as a child, he had begun that momentous tour with his family. Ireland. Well, if enchantment did enter the picture then Ireland was the right place for that.

  Polly stared at him. “Did you say another world, Mr. Crane?”

  “Yes. And not only do I mean a different world from the one a child had experienced.” Wind caught terrier-like at the windows, soughing at the panes, shaking the stout walls of the old house. The fire leaped up in yellow and orange arabesques and shadows wavered eerily on ranked books. “Another world. A different world from anything we could ever know, or anything we could dream of.”

  “Perhaps you’d better finish your story.”

  “When you tell me what happened to Allan.”

  “He wrote that he’d picked up an old guide book and was intrigued by the illustrations. Steel engravings. He also said in his letter that there was an old map in the back that had been torn in half. He said that for the hell of it this girl, Sharon, was going to compare the old routes with the modern. She had a theory that the carriers could find their way about better than modern truck drivers. She was a bit of a crank on things like that. Low heels, hand-woven plaids, wooden utensils from Scandinavia, vegetarian. You know the sort.”

  “Hardly the type for Allan, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You didn’t see her.”

  “Oh.”

  “They left Belfast one bright morning and were never seen again. That was five years ago.”

  “I thought he wanted to marry you?”

  “This was after I told him no. Finally. In a terrible scene. Sharon was to assuage his pangs. Anyway, she’d have made him a better wife than I would have. But, you see, that’s why I feel responsible—”

  “No. No, not you, Polly. The map. The damned map. I tell you here and now, Allan did follow that map, he reached the torn-off edge, he groped his way through the mist and one of those blasted clanking monsters got him.” He stopped, realizing what he had said.

  “Clanking monsters?”

  He made a vague gesture. “Through a child’s eyes. I don’t know what they were. But they came running out of the little trees ahead of us, clanking and shining, with seemingly dozens of legs and spinning treads and long flailing arms reaching out for us. That’s why my father turned the car so fast.” He shook his head. “I haven’t told anyone that, before you.”

  “And that’s why your sister Adele is — is the same mental age now as she was then?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why you have this personal grudge against the map?”

  Crane scowled. “How can you have a personal grudge against a bit of paper? A loathing, a terror, a mortal fear it might reveal things better left undiscovered, yes. That might lead to you burning the accursed thing; but it would scarcely be a personal grudge.”

  “You never did tell me what happened to it.”

  “I didn’t think about it at the time. Out of the mist of memory I recall that incident itself. When my father died I went through his effects half expecting to find the guide book locked away in a japanned steel box, with its key attached to the ring he always carried on a chain in his pocket. Nothing, of course. I suppose you can say that the idea of regaining possession of that map has obsessed me. The guide books I’ve pawed through astound even me. But what must have happened is obvious. Father disposed of the book fast at the time. It’s been kicking about junk shops and second-hand bookstalls waiting for a buyer—”

  “Allan.”

  “Yes.” Crane hesitated, and then said: “Unless other people used the map, went through the mist into the — well, what can we call it but the Map Country — and vanished. And then the people — the beings, entities, aliens, what-have-you — who dwell there simply returned the map to our world and waited for fresh victims.”

  “But that presupposes—”

  “Yes. It does rather, doesn’t it?”

  The tea was cold. The butter melting in the dish looked greasy. All the buns had been toasted and eaten. Crane rang for Annie and when she had cleared away the table he went across to the cabinet and produced bottles. He raised an eyebrow at Polly.

  “Same as you. Scotch. Straight.”

  “Raw it is. Here.”

  As they drank slowly and reflectively, with the fire glow reddening their faces, Crane studied this girl with a slow and appreciative scrutiny that held nothing of insolence or rudeness. She was a woman many men would do many things to possess. She stared into the fire, oblivious of him, and he wondered if she were thinking of Allan and that last quarrel.

  Her cousin had rushed off to Ireland in a rage, with a second-best girl friend, had bought the guide book and the map and, thinking to deaden whatever pain he felt over Polly, had followed the map to — to where? To the Map Country.

  And that told him precisely nothing.

  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.”