No Roads Lead There Anymore

Neither of them moved for a moment. The cold ash in the fireplace held the shape of whatever had last burned there, and in the shape of it, if you looked, was the outline of something that might have been a map.
—
They left quickly.
They didn’t speak on the walk back to the cars. The hills on either side were the same. The track was the same. Everything was the same, and that was the problem. It was too much the same, as though the landscape were a recording of itself rather than the real thing.
Maeve drove back to Galway that evening.
Divya flew home the next morning.
Neither of them wrote up what they’d found. Maeve told herself she needed more documentation before she could file a proper heritage report. Divya told herself the data was inconclusive.
They both knew those weren’t the real reasons.
—
A month later, Maeve opened the road atlas to check a reference for a project she was working on.
She turned to the sheet covering the western coast.
The page was the same as it had always been. The roads were there. The townlands were labeled. The coastline was accurate.
But in the area between the two hills, in the place where a track should have been marked by a thin dotted line, there was nothing.
Not a blank space.
Not even the ghost of a grid.
Just smooth, unmarked paper, as though the printing machine had paused for exactly that portion of the map and then resumed, and no one had ever noticed, and no one ever would.
She closed the atlas.
On the passenger seat beside her, through the window of her parked car, the last of the October light was going out over the bay, and somewhere in the grey middle distance, a shape she couldn’t quite resolve was either a headland or a shadow, holding perfectly still.

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About the Author

Rowan Vale — a student of occult symbolism, for whom every abandoned church is hiding something. Never leaves house without Daisy … his little doll.

— Rowan Vale

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August 6, 2026

10min-stories