For gradually thoughts formed in his overheated brain, a single word, remorselessly repeated over and over again in time to his hammering footfalls on the road. Polly… Polly… Polly…
The fog turned into real fog now, raw vapor that seared his throat and stung his eyes. The strength drained from him.
He was out of the Map Country. He knew that without elation, without any sense of relief.
When he stopped running the ghastly whispered voice in his mind continued to chant: Polly… Polly… Polly… He was a beaten man. With the return of thought came the birth of conscience and remorse and deadly self-loathing.
He was out of the Map Country. Out of it. All the weariness he had not felt inside that accursed place struck him now. He could do no more. His stumbling feet carried him across the road, tripped against the tussocky edge, pitched him face down into the ditch. He lay there, exhausted, drained, and when at last he slipped into unconsciousness he went with a glad welcome for oblivion.
How long he lay in that rain-sodden ditch he did not know, but when he opened his eyes the sky above still lowered darkly but the rain had stopped. Polly. She had been taken by the living lozenge of light. And he had run away.
He had turned tail and run away like a gibbering idiot.
Crane licked his lips. He sat up. He looked at his watch. Five o’clock. The fog had gone and soon it would be dawn. It all figured.
There had been something odd — something wrong — about his reactions after the lozenge of light had taken Polly and rejected him. He had run and stumbled away in such fashion as would turn the stomach of any man. Why?
Oh, sure, the Map Country held enough horror to make any man a craven; but he’d been through it, he’d held onto his manhood, he’d met each threat and dealt with it.
“Something damn queer about that,” he said, and stood up and stretched.
The whole sequence of events had been wrong; he felt that strongly. He wasn’t a brave man, had never pretended to be; but he just couldn’t envisage himself snapping and letting go so completely. He’d been behaving as though overacting the part of a coward in a cheap melodrama. The only answer lay in the evil lozenges of light; they had deliberately driven him mad with fear and hurled him on wings of his own cowardice from the Map Country. Maybe that explained Liam’s reluctance to go back; maybe the old man had been subjected to those mental pressures. Since awakening there had been in his mind no other thought than that his next line of action would be to return. He couldn’t just tamely walk off now and leave Polly there. Oh, sure, he was still afraid; deadly afraid. But his fear had no chance against the burning conviction that he had to return.
He checked the grenade bag. Only one left. He took it out, held it a moment, then thrust it into his pocket and took off the satchel, tossed it down into the ditch.
He was hungry, tired, mentally exhausted. He had one grenade. He knew what he faced. But he began to march back up the road,*heading steadily towards the Map Country.
“And that’s damn queer,” he said aloud. “Why did they take Polly and not me? When I have the map? Why didn’t they snatch me?”
The muscles in his legs began to ache and stiffen and he stamped his feet as he walked. Darkness lay all about him, chill with the pre-dawn hush of waiting. At each step he expected the fog to return but still the stars winked cynically high above.
In that pervasive quietness he heard the car before he saw its lights and so was not completely sure from which direction it was traveling. He was aware of his quick relaxation of tension as the headlights appeared in front.
He crossed to the left of the road and waited, giving the car plenty of room to pass. The brilliant white beams splashed the road before him, hesitated, clung for an instant, and then whipped past. He didn’t think it was McArdle; but he still was not thinking too clearly, convinced that McArdle must be miles away by now, still vainly searching for the Austin.
Stepping back to the crown of the road as the car sped past, he set his face towards the Map Country and slogged on.
The engine note faded rapidly and soon he Lad the quietness to himself once again.
The hypnotic rhythm of walking worked on him more powerfully than the brisking chill in the pre-dawn air, and through his anticipatory fears of what lay ahead a mental drowsiness sluggishly drew the present away into vanishing perspectives, and the memories swimming endlessly in his mind rose seekingly for the light. Why Polly? What did he know of this girl who had erupted into his life one filthy rain-lashed night, clad in short leather coat and slacks, to bring with her a resurrection of a past he had thought his own alone? Who was she? She claimed to be a journalist and was modest about that. As the cousin of Allan Gould she came from a background with which he was unfamiliar, the intellectual, iconoclastic, middle-class new generation unhappy with their positions in life, hating the bomb, half-heartedly believing in free love, posing as authorities and lovers of jazz, proclaiming their rugged individualism against an acute and ever-present comforting awareness of the welfare state that made such postures safe. Maybe that was the world from which she came — but Crane sensed from his own desires of what he wished to be rather than from any external observation that she had left that world, denying its trashy values, keeping what was of value, and had become truly herself.
She had become a person, a fully-rounded personality in her own right, and for that he envied her.
Envied? There were so many emotions tangled in his estimation of Polly Gould that to track down each one of the conflicting skeins would be worthless, would add up to a minus value; all he knew was that she had been trapped in the Map Country and he had to go back and bring her out.
Allan Gould himself had made a break with that background when he’d joined the army; but the girl to whom he had turned, Sharon, typified one aspect of it so clearly as to illuminate Allan’s inability completely to reject his own roots.
Crane had been wrong to be surprised at Allan’s choice of second-best girl friend. A great longing for a comrade to march at his side swept over Crane. Allan, now, tommygun at the ready, bush-hat tipped casually back, smiling, walking at his side as they had marched after the terrorists — that would have made sense, would have made of this expedition a joy — except for the horror of the living lozenge of light that had taken Polly.
It seemed clear to Crane, slogging back to what might be his own certain death, that Polly’s efforts to reach the Map Country and find Allan could mean only that she still loved Allan Gould.
He remembered the occasion when the terrorists’ ambush had worked perfectly and point had gone down screaming and he and Allan had plunged face-first onto the soggy ground with bullets kicking up muddy splashes into their eyes. He’d nailed the first charging fanatic with a snap burst; and then Allan had flung himself sideways and buried his commando knife into the lithe stinking body that dropped catlike onto Crane’s back. Crane had scarcely felt the weight drop away, had time to say: “Thanks, Allan,” when the other terrorist had risen ghostlike at the side of the trail, captured Lee-Enfield centered malevolently on Allan’s back. His automatic pistol had awoken to life it seemed of its own accord and his lumbering charge had carried him across Allan so that the three-o-three took him in the shoulder instead of Allan’s back. The terrorist’s body, chewed as though in a mincer, had toppled away from the blast of lead. Yes, he wasn’t likely to forget incidents like that… And if Polly wanted Allan then Crane saw plainly that he had to find them both, for the sake of his own peace of soul.