Crane’s first thought was that Liam, knowing who Roland Crane was, knowing he was the son of Isambard Crane, the inheritor of the biggest engineering concern in all the west country, must have debated long and painfully with himself to arrive at that round figure of one hundred thousand. Oh, sure, he could find a hundred thousand in liquid form without too much trouble — annoying, but nothing his office couldn’t handle. As to the worth of the map — how, after all that had happened, could mere money be measured against the uncanny power vested in that scrap of paper?
He thought: “To live with an emperor’s ransom on the other side of the hill — and too scared to go across and fetch it!”
Slowly, speaking with care, he said: “Would you trust us with the map, Liam, to go into the Map Country and bring you out the treasure?”
“You want the map, you pay me — now!”
“Trust is a beautiful thing,” Polly said, amused.
“Aye,” Liam nodded sourly. “You were maybe wondering why I didn’t ask Sean to go for me? Well, you know now. When I heard you were poking about the booksellers, Mister Crane, asking for a rather peculiar map — I felt it. I felt my chance had come at last…”
“You mean you hadn’t dared offer the map for sale before,” Polly said, an odd and to Crane an inexplicable edge to her voice, “because you knew no one would believe you and you couldn’t prove the Map Country existed because you were too frightened. But when we turned up — we must have seemed like manna from heaven to you!”
“Maybe. You bring out the treasure and you can have your hundred thousand back. But, of course, you wouldn’t want to then. A pocketful of gems is worth more than a mere hundred thousand.”
“And a truckload.”
The thrust went home. Liam said: “The truck’s still there.”
Polly favored Crane with one of her enigmatic looks.
Whenever she did that he wanted to turn her over and tan her stern, and that, to him was a surprising admission that their relationship was undergoing change. He contained himself manfully, realizing that the question of the money had been settled as soon as Liam spoke.
“All right,” he said. “Where’s the map?”
Polly put a hand to her lips, surprised despite herself. One thinks of a man as being rich; but when he gives evidence of it, it still astonishes. Crane smiled sourly at her. He didn’t blame her.
“Hey, Ma —what is it?”
They all swung first to look at Colla Junior and then at his mother. Her face shone pallidly, her eyes rolled back, the eyelids fluttering about the white of eyeballs like fronds undulating erratically undersea. She trembled all over and every now and then her body twitched. She stood upright, head back; she did not fall over.
“Petit Mai…” breathed Polly.
Liam jumped up, his face livid.
“They’re about; The damned dratted things, they’re about!”
He ran out of the room like an old bearded crab scuttling irritably between rocks on a sandy shore.
Watching him go, Crane caught a strange upright streak of light from the corner of his eye, whirled to the curtains. The drapes hung in long stiff folds, the velvet material’s softness dragged from it by its own weight. They completely blacked off all light, did those curtains against the windows; but through a narrow crack a wan light waxed and waned, pulsing like a distant beacon through fog.
Crane moved to the windows, drawn by a compulsion to see outside.
“No!” Colla Junior scrambled across, leaving his mother, his face wild. “No! Granfer wouldn’t like you to—”
But Crane had put a finger between the curtains, looked out.
At first he did not understand what he saw: a round gleaming, color-running orb stared unwinkingly back into his face. His eyes shifted to adapt to the increased light input and he saw… He saw… An eye. An immense sad eye staring at him through the chink of the curtains, an eye surrounded by a living whorl of flame that he had last seen engulfing poor Barney in the parking lot.
For a timeless second he stared out into the eye and the living pillar of flame, his fingers hard and constricted on the velvet of the curtains; then he jerked the curtains to and shut out the light.
He was shaking all over and sweat stung the corner of his eyes.
“They’re about…” Ma’s gargling warning swung him around from the curtains, brought his appalled vision back from that unwinking eye of light back into the room, back to sanity and to the people here bargaining over a torn map, a torn piece of paper that was the gateway to another world, being bartered for a hundred thousand pounds — brought him back, indeed, to sanity!
“The living light—” he said, stumbling over the words, incoherent. Strange shapes and colors burned against the screen of his mind, memory bringing back details of that light and of that eye — that eye that had been prying into this room to tear from them the secret of the map!
Polly began to speak, checked on a breath, went stiff-legged, her leather coat swinging, across to the window. She reached out a hand for the curtains.
“No!” said Crane. And could say no more. Polly swung the curtain aside and Crane saw the darkness beyond with the glinting reflection of the light in the room reflecting on the glass of the window. Instinctively, he thought of his smashed map glass, the fifteen eighty of the Florida Gulf and the westward islands.
“Put that curtain back, girl! What are ye thinking of with the map so near!” Liam’s harsh voice snapped Polly’s hand across; the curtains rippled sluggishly and fell once more into their stiff vertical velvet folds.
Liam carried a submachine gun cradled under his old arm. The blue steel caught the light, carrying on the sequence of reflections from the now hidden window. But Crane knew as well as he knew anything of this weird business that what he had seen had been no mere light reflection; he had seen the living light, and in the light had been an eye….
“Granfer!” Colla Junior spoke accusingly. “There was one outside! I saw the light.”
“It’s all right,” Crane said placatingly. “It could have seen nothing. Except my face.”
Gray tiredness dragged at Liam’s face, drawing the skin tight, pinching the eyes. His mouth trembled and the submachine gun’s muzzle moved in jerky little circles. “Write me a check and a note to cover it,” he said harshly. But the harshness brazened with a hollow mockery of the strong man he once had been.
Crane did as he was bidden, adding a separate note to his office. “They’ll pay, without question,” he said, tapping the note.
“They’d better—” Liam began, taking the slips of paper.
Polly cut him off. “What have you to lose? You’re too scared to use the map yourself. The — thing — outside has stripped your mind. If we don’t come back, you’re no worse off. Give us the map, Liam, and let us be off.”
He glared at her, resentfully, shifting the tommygun.
Crane now felt he had no time to waste on sympathy for the old man. That recent experience with the eye had shaken him, given him a hallucinatory vision of his own soul, refleeted and distorted. Liam was a poseur, a husk, a worn-out shell that once had housed an intrepid youth. Living in indolence had sapped not only his morale and self-respect; it had sapped his will-power. He watched as Liam edged to a window, using a little finger to open a slit in the curtains, peered through, the cords in his neck taut and shadow-filled as his head thrust forward.
“They’re about,” Liam said uneasily, fidgeting with the gun.
“The map,” Crane said harshly.
Reluctance stiffened Liam’s fingers. He put a hand into his pocket, withdrew it, fingered the gun.