Crane turned at once. The divertisement was welcome. Perhaps, just perhaps, the map was at last on its way to them now.
The man was young, strongly built, with a square browned face and the square and amusingly blunted features of a clown. Crane had time to glimpse the stubbornness in the line of mouth and jaw, a strange erratic movement in the man’s gait. Then a pale oval of silver light grew like an unfolding lily in the air above the man. Crane stood open-mouthed, quite still and silent, watching.
The running man held something in his hand, a scrap of bright blue, holding it out to Crane. He must only have then realized he was running forward in a bath of silver light for he looked upwards, startled. He began to shout. This time the shouting was a scream; high and harsh and terrified. The oval of lambent light hovered and descended. It dropped like a ghostly parachute, like a monstrous shimmering jellyfish, enveloping the man, starting at his head and running down over his shoulders, engulfing his body, enfolding his legs and entwining itself about his feet.
There was only a tall and narrow oval of liquid light there in the parking lot, with the sun shining and the clouds high in the sky and the old market town all about. Then there was only the sun and clouds and the parking lot in the town.
IV
Polly said: “Oh, my God!” but faintly. Crane turned to her at once, freed from the mesmeric spell, and put an arm about her waist. She stared at him. Her face was drained of blood. He moved around the car, opened the door, put Polly onto the seat. He sat himself behind the wheel, started the Austin, put her in gear and went slowly out of the car park. He drove mechanically. It began to rain and he switched on the wipers. His eyes followed the metronomic tic-toe across the windshield and saw the ripples and balloons of water rilling down. He did not say anything at all. He just sat there, driving the car, watching the rain and the silver-gleaming pavement.
There was nothing to say that would help.
Polly shivered and straightened in the seat. She began to tidy herself up — fresh make-up, a moistened finger along her eyebrows. She did not look at Crane. He kept his face stonily ahead, watching the road as they left the town, not knowing which way he was going, lost in more than the slanting rain.
The downpour had broken suddenly in heavy driving lines of rain; as suddenly it passed with the lightening of the sky and the rolling away of gray cloud masses. A watery sun shyly peeked down on the soaked land. “Where are you going, Rolley?”
“Huh?” He glanced at her, bemused. “Oh — going. Hell, I don’t know. Anywhere. Anywhere away from that damned parking lot and that — that—”
“We’re in this thing right up to our necks now; you know that, don’t you?” Her voice was steady and grave.
“Yes. We’ve been mixed up in it for some time without knowing just how far committed we were. Who was that poor devil, anyway? What did he want? What—”
“You ask the questions, Rolley. I don’t know the answers.”
“Who does?”
Crane swung the wheel, turning the car, and brought her around and back again onto the road leading into Omagh. His mouth hurt from the pressure of his teeth and he had consciously to relax his tension. The decision to go back helped.
Polly tapped him lightly on the elbow.
“You’re going back? Is that wise?”
“Wise or not — it’s the only decent thing we can do.
Some poor devil back there may be lying on the ground, badly hurt, dying. We can’t just skip out on a responsibility; we witnessed the accident.”
“You’re talking as though this was just a road accident.”
“Of course! Maybe he was struck by lightning.”
“Have you ever seen lightning like that, Rolley? Act your age, man!”
“Have you ever seen anyone struck by lightning?”
“Well.” She fidgeted. “No. No, I haven’t. But that’s just a quibble.”
They were bowling down the main street again, heading back through rapidly drying puddles to the parking lot.
“Well, then, Polly. You tell me what you think happened.”
“You saw the same as I did.”
“All right. This is a civilized country, Polly, although occasionally you’d never believe that. You can’t just go around ducking your responsibilities just because you think there was something — something odd about it all.”
“That wasn’t a civilized act, Rolley.” She was angry now. “And you damn well know it. That man was killed — kidnapped, made to vanish — taken. He’s not lying on the ground with a broken skull from a lightning stroke. Turn the car, Rolley. Let’s get out of here!”
The vehemence of her words, the tremble of her lips, scared Crane. Polly Gould was a tough girl; yet she was plainly very frightened, with a fear she tried to cover by anger. As for himself, he felt a detached desire to investigate, to find out more. And now Polly, to whom he had looked for the iron core of determination in their expedition, was begging him to take her away.
He said slowly: “I’m like the character who kept calm because he didn’t know the full details. Is that it, Polly?”
“Some. You can turn at this next corner.”
“I fear nothing very much about this… this flicker of light. It could easily have been lightning. You get very odd effects with the ball variety. But, Polly—” He turned to look at her and then swung back as the car’s tires hit a pothole.
“I’m scared when I think you may crack up. If you really think so, we’ll head straight back to Belfast and take the next plane home.”
After a time, during which Crane halted the car by the curb, she said slowly: “No, Rolley. We can’t run out now. You know as well as I do that that man wasn’t struck down by lightning. The rain hadn’t started then, anyway — and did you hear thunder? Whoever — whatever — wants the map tried to stop what he — or it — thought was an attempt to pass it on to us or to contact us in some way.”
Crane remembered he had thought that the man had shambled across to them. Now he said: “Supposition.”
“But a pretty conclusive supposition, don’t you think?” She blazed the query at him, her eyes wide, her bottom lip trapped between her white teeth as soon as she had finished. Crane had to make a decision, then, a decision he knew he was making incorrectly.
As usual, he found an excuse to avoid an immediate decision. A small white-painted teashop with a narrow red door stood on the opposite side of the road. The tiny windows beckoned with loaded cake-stands and brightly colored tins. The reassuring smell of hot fresh buns wafted across the rain-wet road. The teashop looked pert and charming, smiling amid the frowning rows of stark gardenless houses.
Crane locked the car and ushered Polly across, not meeting her eye, knowing she had guessed the reason for his actions. But, at that, they both needed a cup of tea. The experience in the parking lot, for all their acceptance of it and their matter-of-fact attempts to rationalize it away, had been nerve-shattering to an alarming degree. Over a cup of tea and a thickly-buttered slice of barn brack, Crane faced the problem again.
They had reached the crossroads in this enterprise.
They could go back home, thankful still to be alive, and forget about the Map Country. Correction: try to forget. But they’d be out of it and no worse off. Or— they could go on, probe deeper, face the meaning behind that sinister oval of silver light and McArdle’s passionate desire to gain possession of the map, enter, if they were fortunate, the Map Country.
He knew he ought to say: “Okay. If that’s how you feel we’ll go back home right away.” But some unsuspected devil of obstinacy deep within him resented such a tame ending. With distaste he remembered how during training he had wished, with a frightful lapse from his normal personality, that his men’s ammunition had not been blank but sharp. The moment had come on him suddenly and overwhelmingly, when a red regiment had enfiladed his company in a gulley and the umpires were knocking him out left and right. A sergeant had got a Bren going in reply for his own blue company; but the umpires had not been impressed. Crane recalled with cold horror how he had had to crush down the hot words, the violent wish that the Bren had been firing live ammunition — the umpires would have been proved wrong then.