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by Spalding, Nick


  And there are things that also turn up on B-roads that we do not speak of.

  Things so abhorrent and ghastly that uttering their very name will bring you out in hives.

  I will say the name of these things once, so that you may revel in the anxious terror of it. I will not say it again, because I am on a B-road, and do not want to call them to me. They appear when they hear their name, you see. Like large, diesel-powered Voldemorts.

  They are . . .

  Tractors.

  No, no! No more! Never again shall I utter their name! Not while I’m bumbling along on the B3241, with my head half buried in my clear and concise road atlas.

  Get stuck behind one of those things and you can kiss your sanity, and decent miles per gallon, goodbye. I have a feeling that if Satan does exist, then he owns a trac— a large thing powered by diesel, and likes to drive it around the B-roads of the Cotswolds at three miles an hour on a sunny Sunday afternoon in July.

  Nevertheless, here I am, on a B-road (currently the B3134, but it’ll be the B3241 in no time, you’ll see) trying my level best to stay calm, consult my map and make it to the other side of the Mendips with enough time to drive the rest of the way to Weston.

  At first, while my progress is slow, I do manage to make headway without too much of a problem.

  There’s a hairy moment when a woman in a Nissan Juke nearly scrapes one bulbous wheel arch down the side of my driver’s-side door, but we both manage to slow down enough to give each other an awkward look, before going on with our stressful, B-road-travelling lives.

  I only get stuck behind seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand cyclists as well, which is pretty good for a weekday afternoon.

  There are no trac— big, fat, diesel-powered monsters, you’ll be pleased to know. I am spared that eldritch horror.

  In fact, I’m starting to think I might just get through this situation intact and sane of mind, when something happens which brings my progress to a grinding halt.

  I have pulled over in a gravel lay-by of the B3241 and am consulting the road atlas to see where I should go next, and everything looks clear and concise . . . until I turn the page.

  Suddenly the atlas is no longer showing me the western side of the Mendips, but has decided to show me the roads to the east of Hull instead.

  ‘Thorngumbald?’ I say out loud to myself in the confines of the car’s cabin. ‘What the hell is Thorngumbald?’

  For that is what I’m looking at, folks. A place called Thorngumbald. Which is close to the River Humber, and a good two hundred and fifty miles away from where I’m currently sitting.

  I flick the road atlas back to the previous page.

  Yep. There’s the Mendips, in all their Mendipian glory. When I turn the page I should be treated to even more Mendips. Nothing but Mendips as far as the eye can see.

  But nope. I turn the page again. Thorngumbald.

  One page Mendips. One page Thorngumbald.

  Mendips. Thorngumbald.

  West Country. Humberside.

  Now, one of two things is going on here . . .

  Either this road atlas is saying that right in front of me on the B3241 somewhere is an interdimensional portal that will instantly transport me from the south-west to the north-east, or when the atlas was printed it had some kind of serious problem that put the pages in the wrong order.

  In feverish hope, I flick through the atlas to the pages that cover the north-east, praying that the Mendips has been transposed to that area – in a direct, unintentional swap.

  Nope. More Thorngumbald.

  ‘Fucking Thorngumbald!’ I shout, squeezing the steering wheel tightly in one fist.

  I’m sure Thorngumbald is a perfectly nice place, with welcoming residents who would certainly offer me a nice cup of tea and a biscuit – but right now I could happily see Thorngumbald blasted off the face of the planet if it would mean that I could have my Mendips back.

  I need my Mendips!

  What am I supposed to do without the map for them?

  I’ll have to . . . gulp . . . rely on my own instincts.

  Instincts that have been dulled by years of inactivity.

  My sense of direction has been completely outsourced to Google Maps. What the hell am I supposed to do?

  I have to get moving. The meeting is in an hour!

  The B3241 was headed in a westerly direction – the direction Weston-super-Mare is in – so I’ll just have to keep driving along it, and hope it throws me out at the end of the Mendips and back into civilisation again.

  With fear clutching at my heart (and a letter of complaint already forming in my mind, to be sent to the publishers of my not-so-clear-and-fucking-concise road atlas), I drive out of the lay-by and into the realms of the unknown.

  Four hours later, I’m still in the Mendips, and it’s now starting to get dark.

  My sanity has long deserted me.

  There have been three tractors.

  THREE.

  Each one slower, larger and smellier than the last.

  There have been nine hundred and forty-seven million cyclists. I have looked at more middle-aged men’s arses than a football stadium of proctologists.

  The B3241 has become a snaking, unending path towards oblivion.

  Any thoughts of the McGifferty’s Pies contract have long since departed. Now, all I am consumed by is the need to escape this green hell. This maze of small, claustrophobic B-roads, which never, ever end.

  I have stopped for directions. Of course I have.

  The people of Bog were very helpful.

  Bog is a very small village in the Mendips that makes Nompnett Humpwell look like downtown Manhattan on a Friday night. I arrived there after having been stuck in the B-road maze for two hours, running out of petrol and with tears in my eyes.

  Bog has a petrol station. It consists of one pump and a bloke called Cob sitting in a small kiosk that looks like it was built around the time of the pharaohs. Cob is a squat, red-faced little fellow, replete with bushy brown beard and tremendous eyebrows.

  Cob of Bog is very helpful indeed. He fills my petrol tank for me while I stare at the ground and twitch a little.

  Cob of Bog also gives me directions.

  ‘Well then, you’ll want to leave here on the B3457. Then turn left on to the B3327, until you reach the crossroads of the B3445 and the B3961. Take the B3445. That’ll get you north of Sidcot and on to the A38.’

  Needless to say, Cob of Bog’s directions might as well have been written in hieroglyphs and hidden inside the tomb of Nefertiti, for all the good they do me.

  Two hours after my stop in Bog, I am still in the B-roads of the Mendips and considering just lying down in one of the nearby fields, waiting for the inevitable heat-death of the universe to end this nightmare.

  If only I had my phone.

  If only I had my apps.

  If only I had any sense of direction whatsoever.

  But I have none of these things, so I’m just going to drive around aimlessly until one of the roads spits me out into a place containing street lamps, or my engine seizes up.

  I arrive at a crossroads.

  It’s the crossroads of the B3245 and the B3234.

  Have I been down either of these roads before?

  Probably.

  In the four hours I’ve been trapped in the Mendips, I must have driven down every single B-road that exists. Twice.

  So, what decision do I make this time? In the near-dark. With no map. And no hope.

  I have a go at the B3245, because it’s only four digits away from the B3241, which it will inevitably turn into in about four hundred yards anyway, so why prolong the agony.

  As I do, I notice a small road sign pointing along a rough-looking road that goes off to the left. The sign says ‘Nompnett Humpwell’.

  I know that place!

  I know it!

  I went through it twenty thousand years ago, when I started this odyssey through Mendipian hell!

  If
I can reach it, I can get out of here!

  Without thinking any further, I bump the car on to the rough, barely tarmacked road and squeeze the accelerator, sending me in the direction of the friendly Nompnett Humpwellians, and my salvation.

  So now I am on what can only be described as a C-road – which is to say it’s barely a road at all. More a dirt track, really, with some tarmac thrown on here and there to provide a little light relief. Quite why I believe this clearly unmaintained strip of road will magically take me all the way to the Humpwellians is beyond me. I have clearly lost all sense of perspective, thanks to the hope that has blossomed in my heart because of that bloody sign.

  In more sanguine, logical times I would never have taken this route, obviously. The sign has no indication of how far away Nompnett Humpwell is, and – if we’re being honest about it – is only vaguely pointing in the direction of the half-tarmacked road anyway.

  Nevertheless, my course is now set, and I am determined.

  This determination stays with me for about the next two minutes, until the C-road veers sharply off to the right and into a thicket of trees. Whatever pretence the tarmac has made of making this seem like an actual road gives up the ghost, and I now find myself driving along compacted, hard earth in the direction of God knows what.

  The trees loom around me in the fading twilight like grand sentinels, watching my fearful progress. High in the branches I can see a lonely crow, staring down at me like a harbinger.

  I’m not quite sure what a harbinger is, but this crow certainly is one. It’s full to brimming with pure, untainted harbinge. The stare it’s giving me suggests that I am the first human being to have been foolish enough to venture along the C-road to Nompnett Humpwell in a very long time.

  Turn back, the beady black eyes tell me. Turn back before you go too far, and drive directly into that duck pond.

  Duck pond?!

  WHAT?

  Yes, right in front of me, slap bang in the middle of my C-road, is a sodding duck pond. And I am going to drive right into it because I’ve been looking at a stupid crow rather than the road in front of me.

  I let out a squawk of terror as I feel the front of the Volvo pitch downwards at an alarming angle. Instinctively I slam on the brakes, but my tyres are entirely unsuited to hard, packed earth, so my forward progress is sadly not arrested.

  The front wheels of the car plunge into the waters of the inexplicable duck pond, sending a huge plume of water into the sky. The ducks – of which there are many, and who were probably having quite a nice, relaxing evening until I came along – fly into the air in a flurry of hectic wings and loud quacking.

  The car continues its descent into the pond, and I am only spared a trip right into the middle of the damn thing when the car’s front end slams into the soft, wet mud at the bottom, stopping it instantly.

  I am thrown forward in my seat and am only saved a nasty whack on the head from the steering wheel by my seat belt.

  ‘Jesus!’ I cry, my heart about to jump out of my chest. ‘Why is there a fucking duck pond?!’

  Answers to that question will be forthcoming soon – but for the moment, I just have to live with my ignorance, and try my hardest to get my heart rate back under control by taking a series of very long, deep breaths.

  As I do this, a duck lands on the bonnet.

  It gives me a look that speaks many ducky volumes.

  It is not happy with my sudden arrival and the subsequent disruption of its relaxed evening.

  ‘Duck,’ the duck says.

  I blink a couple of times.

  I think that duck just said ‘duck’.

  ‘Duuuck,’ it says again, waddling towards the windscreen. ‘Duuuuuck duck.’

  I’ve gone mad.

  Comprehensively insane.

  The Mendips have finally claimed what’s left of my sanity.

  Either that, or I’ve entered into a state of shock that is so enormous, I’m starting to hear things.

  Ducks do not say ‘duck’. I am no wildlife expert, but I just know they don’t. Not once has David Attenborough ever told me that ducks say their own name. I would have remembered something like that.

  ‘Duuuck,’ says the duck, disagreeing with me.

  When I think back on this day in years to come – and believe me, I will do that quite a lot – I will come to the logical and correct conclusion that the duck was merely quacking, and it just sounded a bit like it was saying the word ‘duck’.

  Right in the here and now, though, no such thoughts are capable of expressing themselves, and I am wholly convinced I have stumbled across a super-intelligent, self-aware strain of duck that has developed powers of speech.

  ‘Duuuuck, duck, duck, duck,’ it says, looking in at me with a curious expression on its . . . face? Beak?

  Maybe the shock of my car crashing into the pond has made the duck suddenly self-aware.

  If I had crashed into a cow shed, would all the heifers inside have started going ‘cow’ instead of ‘moo’? Would sheep go ‘sheeeeep’ instead of ‘baaaa’?

  If I’d have whacked into one of the trees that loom around my crashed car and the disturbed duck pond, would they have all started screaming ‘tree!’ at me?

  And how would I have reacted to that?

  Would I have sounded or acted any more insane than I currently feel?

  ‘Go away, duck,’ I tell the duck.

  ‘Duck, duck, duck,’ the duck replies.

  ‘Please stop saying your own name over and over,’ I implore. ‘I’ve just had a car crash, and don’t think I can deal with a super-intelligent, self-aware strain of duck.’

  ‘Duck, duck, duck, duuuuuuck, duck.’

  Perhaps I should try communicating with it in similar fashion? Maybe it’ll understand me that way?

  ‘Human,’ I say, in a quiet voice. ‘Human, human, huuuuuman, human?’

  Shock can do funny things to the huuuuuman brain, it appears.

  ‘Duck, duck,’ the duck replies. It then turns its back on me and waddles off to the other end of the car bonnet. Clearly, I said something it didn’t like. I have failed in my attempts at first contact.

  Suddenly, I feel something very cold and wet seeping into my trainers. I look down to see that the water from the pond has made its way into the car cabin, and is now starting to slosh around my feet.

  ‘Oh fuck!’ I exclaim, causing the duck to take flight.

  Spurred into motion by this latest nasty development, I push the car door open, allowing more of the freezing-cold pond water to gush into the car.

  ‘Aaaargh!’ I wail as I climb out, plunging both legs into about a foot of water. The wet mud beneath my feet sucks greedily at my trainers, and I half stumble up the bank to the safety of dry land.

  Once I get there I turn back to my stricken Volvo, and take in the full scene for the first time.

  The front of the bonnet is completely submerged in water. I can just about see the front headlights still working underneath the surface. There’s no doubt that the engine will be full of water by now. The car is a complete write-off.

  ‘Fuck!’ I cry in anger and frustration.

  ‘Duck!’ the duck replies, having taken up a new position on the bank next to me.

  ‘No!’ I shout at it, shaking my head. ‘I said “fuck”!’

  ‘Why are you swearing at that duck?’ a voice says from behind me.

  I spin around to find myself face-to-face with a squat, red-faced little fellow, replete with bushy brown beard and tremendous eyebrows.

  I am nonplussed.

  ‘Cob of Bog?’ I ask, stunned to see him here.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he says.

  I point at him. ‘You. You’re Cob of Bog. You gave me directions.’

  He stares at me from under those tremendous eyebrows for a second, before the light of realisation dawns. ‘Ah . . . no. That’s not me. That’s my brother you’ll be thinking of.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Ye
p.’

  ‘You’re not Cob of Bog?’

  ‘Nope.’ He points a thumb at his chest. ‘I’m Ham.’

  ‘Ham?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Ham of Bog?’

  Ham shakes his head. ‘Oh, no. I don’t go down into Bog. I like a quiet life, me.’

  This is an incredible thing to say. The only way you could possibly have a quieter life than living in Bog is if you were fucking dead.

  Ham not of Bog points at my stricken vehicle. ‘Why did you drive into my duck pond?’

  Which is a valid question at this stage.

  ‘I was . . . I was trying to get to Nompnett Humpwell,’ I tell Ham not of Bog.

  His tremendous eyebrows knit together. ‘You can’t get to Nompnett coming this way, young fella.’

  ‘No. I’d gathered that,’ I tell him. ‘What with there being a duck pond in the way and everything.’ Time, I feel, to enquire as to why there is a duck pond right in the middle of what’s supposed to be a C-road.

  Ham not of Bog shakes his head again, this time ruefully. ‘Oh. This hasn’t really been a road for donkey’s years. Not since they put in that B-road.’

  ‘Which one? The B3241?’

  Ham not of Bog nods. ‘Yep. That’s the bugger.’

  ‘But there was a sign,’ I say. ‘It told me Nompnett Humpwell was along this road.’

  ‘Oh? Well, I can tell you, young fella – that’s not right at all.’ Ham not of Bog scratches his hairy cheek. ‘Sign must’ve got turned around somehow. Can’t get to Nompnett this way, not through my farmland.’

  ‘Duck,’ the duck agrees, from Ham not of Bog’s side.

  I look down at the duck, and then back at my new non-Boggian friend. ‘Did that duck just say “duck”?’ I ask him.

  Ham not of Bog looks down at Duck. ‘I don’t think so. I think he just quacked, didn’t he?’

  I nod, happy to have it confirmed that I’ve not gone completely insane. ‘Yes. I’m sure he just quacked.’

  ‘Duck, duck,’ says Duck in agreement. But I can tell the little bastard is lying.

  Ham not of Bog looks at my car. ‘I don’t think you’ll be getting her going again.’

  I also look disconsolately at it. ‘No. Definitely not.’

 

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