Gravel Lamb

What it looks like, and what it does

A low, rounded silhouette on four stub legs, coat of crushed grey stone that clicks softly as it moves. Two dark flints for eyes. A trail of bare tarmac behind it, paler than the road around it.

Follows a single walker who is alone and has been walking long enough to stop thinking. Keeps its distance. Lies down in the verge by the walker's door. By morning the verge is bare and it is gone.

What is known

Reported on unlit lanes after the last bus. The lamb keeps a pace behind the walker and a little to the left, and stops when the walker stops. It is warm to the touch and shelters a person from wind.

Surveys of the lanes where it is most often seen show that they have shortened. The same eleven kilometres measured in 1962 and in 2019 differ by three. No one has found where the road went.

What it can do

• Removes length from the road behind it, a few metres a night
• Gives off steady warmth and shelters walkers from wind

Where it stops

• Falls apart in heavy rain, leaving a damp heap of ordinary stones
• Re-forms the next night from the road, and the road is shorter again

An encounter

Walking home from a double shift, Nandakumar was followed for what she estimated at nine kilometres. At her door her pedometer read six. Her sister, driving the same road the next day, remarked on how short it now felt.

Priya Nandakumar, agency nurse, The back road between Halloran Cross and Mere End, After the last bus, March

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Lanes where sightings cluster are measurably shorter than their historical surveys.
• rumor: That it follows only walkers who have no one waiting at the end of the walk.
• interpretation: Not an animal but a shape the road has found for itself, so that it can go looking.

Still unresolved

If the road is being eaten, something at the far end is being brought closer. The shortened lanes all lean toward one place. No two surveys agree which.

Where it has been recorded

• Halloran Cross (confirmed) — Recorded by Priya Nandakumar, agency nurse.

Stories about it

• Pavement Counts Backwards (Entity story, 4 min) — A postbus driver whose van floods out on the last March run walks eleven dark kilometres home, accompanied the whole way at her own pace by something warm that means her nothing but good.

Connected entities

• The Cathedral Slug — Both change the distance between places: the lamb shortens a road, the slug lengthens a valley.