Chapter 1: Unexpected Burgers

'Weird,' thought Bill, looking at the empty burger van. What made it weirder were the two burgers sizzling on the hotplate inside.

There was no one around, and there was nowhere else for anyone to be, except inside the van. He had walked all the way around it now, twice, if he was honest, though he wasn't about to admit that to anyone, least of all himself, parked as it was at the end of this short farm road. Nothing but fences and fields and the flat grey smear of a Scottish sky doing absolutely nothing interesting with itself. And, of course, the two burgers. Just sizzling away. Two fresh burgers, and Bill could see from the serving window exactly how red the meat still was, could tell they'd only been cooking a minute or two, at most. Someone had put those on. Recently. Like, just now recently.

He took a step back and looked at the van properly, the way you might look at a dog that hadn't barked yet but was clearly thinking about it.

'BurgerVan,' the sign proclaimed, in red lettering on a yellow background, cheerful as a wasp. One word. CamelCase. The kind of naming convention Bill spent his working life enforcing on variable names so that some future version of himself, or worse, some future colleague, wouldn't want to throw a keyboard through a window. Not so much a convention you expected to find on the side of a catering van. Bill knew that because Bill was That Guy, the IT guy, the one who cared about things like this, and it did not help him even slightly in the here and now. Burger vans were supposed to be called things like Tasty Burger, or Big Jimmy's Burger Feast, or, if the owner fancied himself a bit of a wit, something painfully punny like Meat Your Lunch. Something with a bit of personality behind it, however cheap. Just calling your burger van 'BurgerVan' felt lazy in a way that itched at him. It felt, if he let the thought go where it wanted to go, like whoever named it hadn't expected anyone to actually read it. Like it was a label slapped on for a shelf, not a shopfront.

He didn't like where that thought was heading, so he stopped following it and glanced at the menu instead. That didn't help either. Burger. Cheeseburger. Burger with Cheese. He stood there a moment longer than the sentence deserved. 'Surely burger with cheese is just... a cheeseburger,' he thought, and the sheer domestic pointlessness of the question was almost enough to drown out the other thing, the growing, prickling unease that someone, somewhere, had put those burgers on the hotplate, and he had not passed a single other soul on his short drive down here. Not a car. Not a dog walker. Not a tractor. Nothing.

He dragged his attention back to the van itself, and the burgers had started to char now, curling a little at the edges, and he could faintly smell the burning starting to cut through the grease.

'Hello?' he shouted, looking left and right, into a field that offered no opinion either way. 'Your burgers are burning!'

Nothing. Just the smell, thickening.

Bill opened the side door and stepped inside, because apparently that was a decision he was making now, apparently that was who he was today. He had eaten at several thousand of these things up and down the UK over the years, burger vans, breakfast vans, chip vans, one genuinely life-changing pork pie van on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales that he still thought about sometimes, embarrassingly, fondly, but this was the first time he'd actually stepped inside one of these converted caravans. It was smaller than it looked from the outside, which felt like a violation of basic physics, cramped and low-ceilinged and thick with the smell of old grease baked into every surface, and now, on top of it all, rapidly cremating burger meat.

He found the hotplate controls at the side and turned it off, half expecting a voice to erupt from somewhere behind him, 'What the hell are you doing in my van?', the kind of voice that would at least explain things, give him someone to apologise to, someone to blame the smell on.

No voice came.

So Bill thought it himself, instead. What the hell am I doing in this van.

He'd passed the turn-off hundreds of times over the years. There was nothing unusual about the sign, Burger Van, arrow pointing down a scrubby little farm track, and he'd even glanced over at it occasionally as he drove past, out of nothing more than habit, the same way you clock a familiar tree or a pothole you know to swerve around. The van itself sat about thirty feet back from the junction, and because the road dipped slightly there, all you ever really saw from the main road was the roof of the thing, pale and curved like the back of something surfacing. It had never raised more than a flicker of interest in him, because Bill usually passed this stretch of road on his way home from work, and getting home had always mattered more to him than getting a burger. On the rare occasions he was hungrier than usual, the knowledge that these places generally shut up shop by three in the afternoon was enough to talk him out of it.

Today had been different, because Mrs Harkness, the floor manager, and a woman who ran on a fuel mixture of instant coffee and barely suppressed contempt for the entire male workforce, had come round just before lunch and told everyone to go home early, because the toilets had backed up and flooded. Bill had walked out of his office and immediately clocked the apprentices sniggering in the corner of the workshop, and he'd known, instantly and completely, that they'd been stuffing blue roll down the pan again. They probably thought they'd invented something. Plugging the toilets to get an early finish on a Friday was one of the oldest tricks in the book, especially at a place like Harkness and Co, which had been sitting on this exact plot of land for what felt like a geological age. Bill had sighed the sigh of a man who used to be young and stupid and now merely felt tired about it, put his jacket on, and walked out to the car park. Behind him he could hear Mr Harkness bellowing at the lads, and Bill found himself wondering, not for the first time, whether Mr Harkness himself had done the exact same thing as an apprentice, except it was his own father's firm at the time, so probably not. Probably he'd been too busy being groomed for ownership to bother sabotaging the plumbing. When Bill had been an apprentice, long before his IT-guy days, he'd absolutely done the blue-roll thing himself, convinced he'd discovered it fresh, like some kind of pioneer. He very nearly lost his job over it. Hilarious, in hindsight. Slightly less hilarious at the time, when his supervisor had looked at him the way you might look at something you'd stepped in.

He'd driven down out of the Eurocentral estate and briefly, very briefly, considered the M8, before deciding against it and taking the smaller side road instead. Bill didn't really do motorways any more. Something about the pandemic years had quietly rewired something in him, he couldn't have told you exactly what, or when, or why, only that somewhere along the way the big wide roads had started to feel too open, too fast, too full of other people's decisions being made at seventy miles an hour six feet from his door. The smaller A-roads felt more honest, somehow. More his speed. Literally.

And that was where he'd spotted the sign for the burger van, about a hundred yards down from the roundabout on the Edinburgh Road. Burger Van, said the sign, with its arrow. Since he hadn't eaten yet, courtesy of the Blue Roll Brigade, he'd turned right on something that wasn't quite a whim and wasn't quite a decision, and crawled the thirty-odd feet down to the van itself. There was a scrap of hard-packed ground out front, enough space for three or four cars if everyone was feeling generous with their door-opening, and that was the entire extent of the facilities.

No cars, though. Just the van, an old, off-white, ex-caravan sort of thing that had clearly lived several previous lives before this one, and the smell of frying meat drifting out into the cooling afternoon.

And no one to serve it.

Weird.

Back inside, with the hotplate ticking as it cooled and the smell of char slowly losing its grip on the air, the only useful thing Bill could think to do was shut off the gas at the bottle and pull down the serving shutter. This turned out to be more of an ordeal than he'd anticipated, the shutter didn't want to move, seemed actively opposed to the idea, in fact, the way old machinery sometimes develops a personality out of pure spite, but after a bit of determined heaving it gave way all at once, in a shower of rust flakes, and clattered down to counter height. Not quite all the way. There was a gap of an inch or two where the bottom edge of the shutter and the top of the counter simply refused to agree with each other, a small dark mouth of a space that Bill chose, very deliberately, not to think about. It would have to do. He was not, he reasoned, contractually obliged to fix another man's rubbish shutter, and he was increasingly, uneasily aware that he was alone in a locked-off caravan that smelled of burnt meat, on a farm track, with the light starting to go soft and grey outside. So he stepped back out, and since the door wouldn't lock from the outside anyway, he simply pulled it shut behind him and left it at that. Somebody else's problem now. That was the going rate today, apparently: everybody's problem became somebody else's, on a rolling basis, all the way down.

He walked back over to his car, and paused, and looked back at the van. Just a burger van. A view not unlike a million other burger vans scattered across every lay-by and farm track in the UK, entirely unremarkable in every dimension except the two that mattered right now. But there was something wrong here, something under the surface of the ordinary that he couldn't quite name and didn't especially want to go looking for, a wrongness he could feel more than see, the way you feel a draught before you find the open window. Maybe it was just the hour. Evening was properly setting in now, the temperature dropping with it, and Bill felt suddenly, keenly alone out here, a soft, exposed kind of alone, the kind that made him aware of his own spine.

He got in the car, did a slightly-too-fast three-point turn that scattered gravel in a way he would have judged someone else for, and pulled away back toward the main road but something caused him to brake. In the rear-view mirror, for just a second, he thought he saw something detach itself from the shadow behind the van, low, and quick, and wrong in its proportions somehow, before it slipped back out of sight as though it had never been there at all.

His first instinct was to turn around, go back, be a responsible member of society and Investigate The Strange Thing like a normal, sensible person in a story where that always works out fine for everyone. He continued to stare into the mirror at what he could see in the frame: the van, and above it, the sign, 'BurgerVan', plain as the quickly darkening day.

His second, third and fourth instincts arrived almost immediately afterwards and overruled the first with a firm, unanimous not my problem, and, with that, Bill drove on up the little farm track, turned right onto the Edinburgh Road, and went home, like a man who had learned absolutely nothing from a lifetime of horror films and fully intended to keep it that way. He had his headlights on by the time he pulled onto his own street.

Definitely not burgers for tea tonight, he decided. Chips and egg instead. Something with no meat in it that might, hypothetically, have appeared out of nowhere.

It wasn't until much later, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling doing the kind of arithmetic that never leads anywhere good, that Bill realised he'd left work at around quarter to twelve, and hadn't got home until half past four in the afternoon. It was a sixty-minute drive on a bad day. Today the roads had been about as clear as they ever got.

He had no memory at all of where the rest of that time had gone.

'Over three hours, just...gone. Lost.' Bill said out loud, to no one, in the dark. 'How the hell—'

And then, before he could finish the thought, he was asleep.