The Drift

Kevin Marsh left the depot at 4:47am, which was normal, in a vehicle that smelled of the previous driver's instant noodles, which was also normal, carrying fourteen pallets of ambient grocery for three stores between Huddersfield and Wakefield, which was the most normal thing in the world.

He had been doing this run for six years. He knew the road the way you know a road when you've driven it in every weather and every light — knew where the surface rippled before the Hartshead junction, knew the gap in the central reservation where the wind came through wrong, knew the particular quality of darkness on the elevated section before the M621 split that was different from any other darkness on any other motorway in the country and which he had never been able to satisfactorily explain.

He knew when something was on the road before he saw it.

He saw it at 5:09am, approximately four miles east of junction 26.

At first he thought it was fog, which would have been unremarkable — the M62 fogged regularly in February, the elevated section especially, and he had protocols for fog. Reduce speed. Increase following distance. Watch the cats-eyes. Normal.

But fog sat on the road and diffused the headlights and turned the world soft and grey, and what was on the road at 5:09am did not do any of those things.

It was denser than fog. It sat lower. It had — and Kevin would spend a long time trying to find the right word for this, later, in the conversations he would not remember having — it had edges. Fog didn't have edges. Whatever this was had a defined perimeter, visible in the headlights as a boundary that the thing on one side of it did not cross.

He drove into it before he fully processed what he was seeing.

It lasted — he checked his tachograph data later, when he still could — eleven seconds.

Inside it, the temperature in the cab dropped sharply. His radio, which had been playing a talk station out of Leeds, produced three seconds of something that was not static and not speech and not any other thing he had heard before, and then went silent. The headlights dimmed. Not failed — dimmed, as if whatever was outside was absorbing the light rather than reflecting it.

And there was a smell.

He would try to describe this smell to several people over the following days and would find that language had not developed adequate provision for it. It was not unpleasant. That was the strangest part. It was almost familiar, in the way that something can be familiar without being identifiable — a smell that belonged to some context he couldn't place, that suggested a specific memory without producing one, that made him think of somewhere he had been as a child without being able to say where.

Then it was gone. The temperature normalised. The radio returned to a presenter discussing roadworks on the A1. The headlights were fine.

Kevin drove on.

He delivered to the Huddersfield store at 5:41am. He backed onto the loading bay, found the night manager, got his POD signed, made the small talk he always made with night managers at 5:41am on a February Tuesday.

He felt completely normal. He noted this later, because it seemed relevant — there was no headache, no disorientation, no sense of anything having changed. He felt the same as he always felt at 5:41am: tired, a little cold, looking forward to the flask of coffee he'd made before leaving the depot.

He drank the coffee in the cab. Pulled out of the Huddersfield bay. Drove on to Wakefield.

He was thirty-four years old. He had a daughter, nine, who was staying with her mother this week. He had a flat in Morley that he was gradually, methodically, making liveable. He had a Fantasy Football team that was doing better than it had any right to.

He felt completely normal.

The thing about The Drift — which was what they would call it later, the name emerging spontaneously from the people who'd driven through it, as if the name had always existed waiting for the thing to justify it — was that it did not act immediately.

It was patient.

It was waiting until the people who had passed through it were somewhere that would make the most of what it had given them.

Kevin Marsh delivered his third store at 8:23am. He drove back to the depot on the M62, passing the spot where he had driven through The Drift without slowing down, because there was nothing to see there now. He signed off his tachograph. He got in his car.

He drove home to Morley.

He was still completely normal when he parked outside his flat. Still completely normal when he got out of the car.

He had been standing at the window of his flat for forty minutes, looking at the street below, before he noticed that he did not recognise any of it.

Not the street. Not the buildings. Not the cars. Nothing below him or around him corresponded to anything in his memory.

He could not remember how he had got here.

He could not remember where here was.

He could not remember his name.

He went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror for a long time. The face looking back at him was not frightened. That was the thing that would stay with the first person who found him, three hours later — that the man standing in the bathroom, the mirror on the floor where he'd put it face-down, was not frightened at all.

He looked interested.

Like a person encountering something for the first time and finding it more than they had expected.

The second call came from the Wakefield store manager, at 10:15am.

One of her staff — a woman who had opened up at six and had seemed perfectly normal throughout the morning rush — had been found in the stockroom. Sitting on the floor. Methodically removing the labels from every tin in a particular row of shelving, one by one, and setting them in a pile beside her with the focused concentration of someone performing a task they considered extremely important.

She had driven to work on the M62.

She could not explain the labels. She could not explain the M62. She could not explain, when asked, what her name was.

She looked interested.

By midday, West Yorkshire Police had received eleven calls that no one had yet connected to each other, because the calls had gone to different stations and had been logged under different categories and the system that might have flagged the pattern was not yet joined up in the way that systems are always about to be joined up and never quite are.

By midday, twenty-three people who had driven the elevated section of the M62 between 4:50am and 5:20am were doing things that did not correspond to their personalities, their intentions, or their understanding of their own lives.

They all looked interested.

None of them were frightened.

That would come later.

To be continued — Chapter Two coming soon