“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.