On the road to nowhere

You are making an urgent journey across the UK from west to east. It is an overcast autumn afternoon, with a slight drizzle falling from the sky at that annoying rate where windscreen wipers can’t keep the road ahead in sight when set on ‘intermittent’, and squeal against the dry screen when running constantly. The journey is tiring for the driver, and atmospherics are messing up the radio, leaving a single worn audio cassette to entertain you all. There’s a distinct feeling that you should have taken the train, no matter how erratic or costly the journey would have been.

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After dusk, beyond Coventry, the M6 motorway merges with the M1, heavy with London-bound traffic. Here you turn off, moving onto a relatively empty A14. As the gloom becomes night the odometer records the rising mileage as you head into the black, flat emptiness of East Anglia on the rumbling concrete road. After an hour the signs are proclaiming the approach of the dreamy spires of Cambridge as the next city. You sweep around a bend, to see amber lights flashing in a wall of cones. The A14 eastbound carriageway is closed, with Police Warning signs and temporary diversion signs pointing a route towards Bedford in the south. You turn and follow these, which soon lead into narrow country lanes with high hedges winding through the darkness of the damp, overcast night...

Possibilities

1 There has been a fatal accident on A14 and both carriageways have been blocked. This is a diversion thrown together quickly by the Police. After 50 miles of winding, poorly signposted roads ,the investigators will rejoin the A14 at Cambridge.

2 Once the investigators are diverted into the wilds of the Cambridgeshire fens, the diversion signs disappear. The road has been closed as an over-enthusiastic student fresher’s week prank using traffic cones and signs appropriated from the spires. The biggest risk the investigators are threatened with is getting lost.

3 The investigators are diverted off the road and, after a wrong turn or two, find themselves on a country estate on what looks like a minor road. The estate belongs to cultists, who invite the investigators in for a coffee and to show them where they are. If the investigators try to leave, the cultists ram the investigator’s car with a Land Rover. Once they are out of the car the, preparations for a ritual and summoning begin - the cultist making good use of this fine bounty that has fallen unexpectedly into their laps.

© Dominic Mooney