– It’s been hours, and the motorway has blurred into an endless conveyor of orange cones and yellow lights. Your eyelids begin to droop, so you follow a brown sign with a knife and fork dimly visible beneath the layers of grime. It leads you around roundabouts, down country roads that gradually narrow to lanes, and you lose track of time and place between the high hedges. Eventually, you arrive at a carpark choked with weeds, surrounding the ancient ruins of a small, brick building. The sign lying in the rubble reads “Little Chef.”
– The Circle Line used to be a real circle, flowing through London like water in a prayer wheel. Nowadays it stops at Paddington, a victim of efficency drives and budget cuts…or at least, it usually does. You fall into a kind of trance one day, on the way home from work, a soggy copy of the metro under one arm from when you used it as an umbrella. When you snap out of it, Paddington station is receding. The car is empty, and the train plunges on into the dark, the track curving subtly as it heads downward. Too late, you notice that the paper lists the status of the Circle line as “Severe Delays.”
– Those old, red telephone boxes are still around, although they don’t work anymore. The council probably keeps them maintained because they look pretty, but you’ve always been more aware of the vague smell of urine that surrounds them than their aesthetic charms. The one at the end of your road has broken panes, chipped paint, and a spray-painted cock and balls on the door. Not exactly a tourist attraction. The last thing you expect when you wander past it on the way to work is to hear it ring. Obviously, you ignore it (you’re not mad, after all). On the way home, it rings again. For a month, every red phone box you walk past does the same, until finally, on a drizzly Tuesday morning, you answer the call.
“What?” you snap, “What the hell do you want? What the hell is so important?”
On the other end of the line, a voice laden with forced cheer says “Ah! Hello, so glad we’ve caught you! This is BT, I was wondering if you have time to complete a short survey? It shouldn’t take more than a thousand hours of your time!”
Behind your back, you hear a click the door to the phone booth locks itself.
UK Gothic
Published
callanswall 