Grotesque encounter · 3 min read · Set in The Marlow District ·
The Cartographer's Apprentice at Marlow
A surveyor's apprentice in Marlow draws the map of the new road that the council has promised, and the road appears on the ground three years later, but the apprentice himself is not on the survey sheet, and the figure walking the road at dusk has his face.
The Marlow survey office was a long, low room above the saddler's on the high street, with tall windows facing the hills and a row of drawing boards along the north wall. Thomas Ryle was the junior draughtsman there, a quiet, careful young man with ink on his fingers and a habit of humming while he worked. He had been taken on to draw the new road that the council intended to build across the moor to the reservoir: a long straight line through the bracken and the bog, lit at night and marked with milestones every half mile.
He drew it in the spring. It was a beautiful drawing, clean and precise, every contour line in place, every culvert and drainage ditch set exactly where the engineers wanted it. He drew the moor in pale green, the bog in blue hatching, the road in red ink. At the bottom of the sheet, in his neat capitals, he wrote the title: *Proposed Reservoir Road, Survey Sheet 7.*
The council approved it. The contractors came in the summer. The road was marked out with pegs and string, and the first sod was turned in August.
Thomas went up onto the moor to see the work. He stood on the rise above the bog with his notebook in his hand and looked down at the survey line, and saw that the road was not where he had drawn it. It ran a little further north, through a stand of old birch that did not appear on the sheet. The milestones were already in place along it, painted white, with the numbers stencilled in black, and each one bore a different date, all of them years in the future.
He asked the foreman about it. The foreman looked at the survey sheet and said it was the one they had been working from. He said the road was perfectly straight, as drawn, and that the birches must have been a surveyor's mistake, and he sent Thomas back to the office.
In the autumn the road was tarmacked, lit with new lamps, and opened to traffic. The council held a ceremony. The mayor cut a ribbon. Thomas was not invited, but he stood at the edge of the crowd and watched the first car drive past the milestones, and in the dusk, as the lamps came on, he saw a figure walking along the verge ahead of the car. A young man in a dark coat, with a notebook under his arm and a pencil behind his ear. He was humming a tune Thomas knew.
The figure turned and looked back at the crowd. It had Thomas's face.
He stepped back into the trees. When he looked again, the figure was gone, and the road was empty, and the survey sheet in his hand, which he had brought without thinking, had changed. The title at the bottom had been crossed out. In its place, in fresh ink, in his own capitals, someone had written: *Surveyed by the apprentice. Not returned.*
He went back to the office that night and sat at his drawing board with the lamp lit, and he tried to draw the road as it was now, with the birches and the milestones and the lamps. He could not. The pencil would not stay on the paper. Each line he drew curved away from the true alignment, toward the birch wood, and each time he looked up, the window had grown dark, and there was another figure in the room, bent over a drawing board of its own, humming the same tune.
The survey office has been closed since. The sheet is pinned to the wall of the empty room. The road still runs north through the birches, and the milestones still carry their future dates. On evenings when the lamps are lit along the reservoir road, a young man in a dark coat walks the verge, slowly, with his notebook open, measuring the distance from each stone to the next, and writing the figures down in a neat, careful hand, and the figures always come out a little longer than they should.