Polly glanced at him, puzzled, but offered no comment as the light went on.
“You realize McArdle must have followed us to Omagh? He must have had pretty strong suspicions that the map was hidden hereabouts somewhere.”
“Yes. Now Liam has confirmed that there is treasure in the Map Country I suppose we can assign that motive to McArdle?”
By her tones no less than the form of her words, Crane knew Polly didn’t believe that theory any more than he did. That was a sensible, comprehensible motive for McArdle’s appearance in the search for the map — but Crane no longer believed in sensible reasons for anyone’s further interest in entering the Map Country. Proof of that lay in the lack of courage to enter of the single man avowedly solely after treasure.
Only a moment thereafter, or so it seemed to Crane aroused from his somber brooding, he saw the big saloon parked at the roadside. Polly swung smoothly out to pass; but the man with upraised arms, pinned in the beam like an enemy bomber, halted her. She brought the car to a stop.
A face peered in at Crane’s window. A man’s voice said: “I’m so sorry to stop you on a night like this, but we’ve run into a spot of trouble—”
Polly turned towards the man and said something sympathetically and Crane wondered with a part of his mind that wasn’t scurrying frantically for shelter if she welcomed the interruption. The situation was one where her practical knowledge of cars could show to best advantage. Crane crouched low in his seat, thankful the dome light was off.
Oh, sure, he recognized the man looking in. Probably he was stopping all the cars out of Omagh, just to make sure.
Crane felt completely useless, dewed with the sweat of fear, slouching back in the darkness of the car.
Polly put her hand on the door handle and Crane moved. If she opened the door the courtesy light would go on and McArdle would know he had found his quarry.
“What—?” began Polly.
A torch beam cut through the gloom, fastened like a fly in a spider’s web on Crane’s face. He winced back, throwing up an arm, blinded.
“It’s him!” He could hear McArdle breathing, hoarse and rasping, and then a hand grasped his collar. His own hand snapped down to that hand, wrenched and tore, slipping along to a thick hairy wrist. His fingers caught in a smooth cold metal chain and he tugged desperately, feeling McArdle’s hand dragging him up, and seeing only a blood-red haze beating through his closed eyelids. Polly cursed. Crane felt her body press against him and heard a soggy thump. McArdle’s clawing hand slackened and through a haze of dancing blood-red specks, Crane glimpsed vaguely the torch disappear, McArdle vanish, and the sudden, bent-forward apparition of Polly’s face in profile with a ferocious look of fierce hatred plastered all across it. Then the car lurched forward in a gasping tearing of gears and spinning tires.
“Duck!” shouted Crane automatically.
Polly bent above the wheel and the windshield followed the rear window into shattered confusion. Cold, wet night air whipped in. More shots must have been fired lost in the roaring of the engine and the throaty shouting of the exhaust and the whickering crack of wind blustering through the car.
“Cripes!” Polly said. Then she threw back her head and laughed. Crane, slowly straightening, stared at her in amazement.
“You all right, Polly?”
“Of course.”
“Oh—I see.” Then: “What hit McArdle?”
“He wasn’t the only one with a torch. He didn’t know me, of course. Your warning was only just in time. I hit him with my torch — a rubber-covered beauty — but it laid him out on the ground.”
“But he’ll follow.”
“Yep. So — what now?”
“It’s damned cold in here. I suggest you get moving as fast as you can away from here. We’ll have to sit and shiver.”
“Right. One thing remains the same. We still have the map.”
Crane smiled at the girl. “Thanks, Polly.”
A cold sliding touch in his fingers brought his attention to tho chain he must have wrenched from McArdle’s wrist as Polly slugged the man.
“What have you got there, Rolley?”
He held it up so that the dashboard lights glowed on its intricate golden entwining of chain and link, its strange symbols deeply etched on golden medallions like a girl’s charm brarelet. Intaglio work of a supreme artistry showed the chain to be no cheap manufactured item.
“Odd sort of ornament for a man.”
“McArdle’s a weird enough customer for me to believe anything about him.”
Crane laughed softly, reaction from that brief, fierce encounter leaving him calm and pleasantly relaxed. “I’ll put it with the map, snugged down in my pocket. That makes two things McArdle wants from us. If he does catch up—”
“Not if the old bus holds out.”
The car responded magnificently, streaking along the dark roads beneath the occasional twinkle of stars as they cleared one patch of drifting cloud and its attendant rain before plunging once again into the fine downpour. Stray patches of mist floated past in the headlights like spider-silk, whirling upwards, sparkling, as the car spun through. The threnody of wind and rain began to work insidiously on Crane; his face and hair and clothes were becoming wetter every moment and he wondered anxiously how long Polly could keep it up. He began to fret about their route; they seemed to be fixed on this single strand of road so that McArdle would have no difficulty at all in following. He was thinking that he ought to consult the map about alternative routes and then take over the driving when the streaky mist blotched and coalesced and real fog clamped down.
“Blast!” Polly said in her best ladylike way. “We could have done without this. Still, it’ll slow McArdle, too.”
“Two speeding cars, chasing through fog — what a laugh,” Crane said. He felt like beating the air with his fists. If McArdle got hold of Polly there was no knowing what might happen.
“I’ll have to slow down, Rolley.” The car slackened speed as she spoke. “Can’t see a damn thing.”
They groped forward in the dank gloom, tendrils of mist writhing in through the smashed screen, chilling them with a miasmic breath. Crane coughed a couple of times.
Polly nodded forward. “Looks like a fire. What—?”
Crane peered ahead, through the curling banks of fog. Up there the world expanded into a roseate halo, a round, chromatic whorl of incandescence that neared as the car crept forward. Glints of silver and gold light reflected in the swirling fog. The color deepened, brightened, took on a ghostly all-pervading golden glow that reminded Crane of something that he knew, that he should know with familiarity, some commonplace fact of everyday life that for the moment escaped his memory. It was like —
“Like coming out of fog into sunshine!” said Polly suddenly, sitting up and gripping the wheel hard.
“Sunshine!” Crane echoed. “But it’s night-time!”
Now the golden radiance was all about them, creating a nimbus of glory that irradiated the whole world. Then they had broken through, and the mist dissipated behind them, and the green countryside lay all before them, bathed in the warm and glorious rays of the sun.
Polly stopped the car with a jerk and they both sat there, conscious of the warmth about them, yet numbed, frozen, chilled to the core of their beings.
Crane took a deep breath. At last, licking his lips and moving his tongue as though it belonged to someone else, he said: “Welcome to the Map Country.”
“The Map Country!” echoed Polly. They both looked ahead, bemused, trying to take in their new surroundings, lost to the danger following them along the road.
For the road still ran between green hedges and low stone walls, still curved gently over rounded hills, with the distant purple and gray mountains dotted with scraps of naked rock. The road ran slantwise before them, empty, waiting, sinister.