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    Road Undermined by Badgers, and Other Short Stories
    Road Undermined by Badgers, and Other Short Stories
    Road Undermined by Badgers, and Other Short Stories
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    Road Undermined by Badgers, and Other Short Stories

    By Jonathan Day

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    About this ebook

    Ecology can have unlikely helpers, from the soldier committing the ultimate sabotage, to phantoms from the future foiled in their attempts to save the human race. And corrupt councillors beware the lady with too many cuckoo clocks, the company offering replacement bodies, mirrors reflecting the truth... and always remember that badgers are people, too.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDodo Books
    Release dateJul 12, 2017
    ISBN9781370182589
    Road Undermined by Badgers, and Other Short Stories

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      Book preview

      Road Undermined by Badgers, and Other Short Stories - Jonathan Day

      Road Undermined by Badgers

      and

      other Short Stories

      by

      Jonathan Day

      Dodo Books

      Copyright © Jonathan Day

      & Dodo Books 2017

      First edition Dodo Books 2017

      This is a work of fiction

      and any resemblance to persons

      living or dead is purely coincidental.

      Stories

      Road Undermined by Badgers

      Vanilla Pod

      Mirror, Mirror

      Revenge is Green

      Dimension of Delights

      Be Careful What You Wish For

      Time Tipper

      Trains, Drains and Cuckoo Clocks

      New Bodies for Old

      Enlightenment

      Road Undermined by Badgers

      Seamus bounced over furrows and along the rough track like an overweight baboon on a piece of - very strong - elastic.

      Anywhere else, the 30-year-old on a mountain bike would have been a sorry sight. Out here only the crows, terrified rabbits and the odd sheep paid any attention. Some passengers in the rural bus caught sight of the absurd acrobatics, but from a distance he just looked like an overfed 14-year-old practising wheelies... badly.

      Seamus had tried to grow up - repeatedly over the last 20 years - but never managed it because that glitch in his occasionally analysed mind prevented him from maturing into a meaningful human being. Despite that, he was happy in his zero hours employment, snatching detritus from the tracks of a recycling plant. It was gloriously repetitive, without prospects, and still left time for him to entertain the mindless pleasure centre that ruled his life. All Seamus wanted to do was play computer games in his tiny ground floor flat in rundown suburbia where the foxes delighted in tormenting the neighbourhood dogs. The angry yowling may have woken those who had get up in the morning for early shifts, but this immature adult revelled in the inglorious racket. He loved loud noise as much as junk food.

      When Seamus reached the road on the other side of the field he was so consumed with what McDonalds he would treat himself to that evening he almost collided with a genuine cyclist. This meant that he didn’t notice the crack in the verge he had just bounced over. The cyclist peddled sedately past, casting a glance of contempt over her shoulder, apparently unconcerned that he had just disappeared down a hole.

      Seamus tumbled down several feet and landed on the gnarled roots of a huge tree felled several years ago as a hazard to traffic. Now it was exacting its revenge. Fortunately mountain bikes are robust, which couldn’t be said for Seamus. Shaken and furious, he tried to scramble out, but loose soil cascaded on top of him. Breathless, he sat down and took stock of the situation. How was he going to get his bike out, let alone his large circumference? Without wheels it would be a very long walk home. There was no point in phoning his mother to come and collect him: she had lost patience with her son ages ago. If Seamus had been diagnosed with something she could understand it might have been a different matter, but there was no medical term for the lazy, overweight slob she had wasted half a lifetime bringing up. He was the main reason she divorced the layabout who had sired their son, took up with a lover, and moved as far away as possible from the fast food outlets which the lives of those two men had revolved around.

      Seamus needed something to blame, and it wasn’t going to be his insatiable appetite for junk food. So he pulled out his smartphone and tapped out a rant on Facebook about the hole. There should have been a sign. The thing hadn’t been visible until he fell into it.

      Then he played a few games while deciding what to do. Calling the police was not an option: they were more used to fielding complaints about his loud music and destruction of municipal flower beds with his mountain bike. The council’s online help section didn’t have a phone number, just a box in which to enter a message with the guarantee it would be attended to within the next four working days; no doubt dependent on whether the office cat could remember its password. As for Seamus’s friends - there weren’t many of them, and none with enough sense of direction to find him before it was dark. Jim had an obsession with levers and pulleys which might have hauled him out, but it wasn’t a very healthy one and involved rubber body suits. Resigned to the fact he would have to build up the energy and rescue himself, Seamus went back to slaying nature sprites before making the attempt. He was about to do mortal combat with the elf king when something caught his eye. It lay half-buried in the loose soil, glinting in a shaft of sunlight.

      He stopped his game to pull it free. It was a torque, one like the warriors used to wear when going into battle. His passion for computer games meant he knew all about CGI warfare.

      And it looked like gold.

      Seamus pushed his smartphone into his pocket and scrabbled about in the loose soil for more treasure. He found a large clasp inlaid with enamel, some bracelets and a highly ornamented cup. The hoard looked as if it had been recently buried despite appearing to be Saxon. So it must have belonged to someone. Tough luck if it did. It was his now.

      Seamus quickly stowed the cache of gold in his knapsack.

      Now he had the incentive to scramble up the bank of loose soil, pulling his bike after him. After a quick glance about to make sure he hadn’t been seen, he furiously pedalled off to gloat over his find. This time he used the road, in too much of a hurry to notice the verge-side sign warning, Caution, Road Undermined by Badgers.

      And these were no ordinary badgers.

      Once safely home, Seamus drew the curtains across the French windows of his ground floor flat so nobody could peer in from the other side of the courtyard. He took the discoveries out of the knapsack and rubbed them clean with a duster he had liberated from the recycling track. Once gleaming in their full glory, it was obvious that they were treasure trove. Seamus understood that caches like this should be declared, but believed in finders keepers, losers weepers. The owner of these had probably been dead for over a thousand years anyway and should have hidden them in a more secure place. They now belonged to Seamus and he didn’t see why they should be displayed in the glass cabinet of some museum the likes of him wouldn’t be seen dead in.

      He was overwhelmed by the sense of possession and needed to be the only one able to gloat over the treasure. An online search for similar pieces revealed their true value. There were hundreds of Saxon torques, inlaid clasps and drinking bowls in museums. Few came up for auction. The gold ones that did were valued in the hundreds of thousands. Perhaps it would be worth surrendering them to the authorities to take a finder’s share.

      Seamus would have to think about that.

      And what if they were just some cheap replicas somebody had buried as a practical joke? In the catalogue of irrelevant information he was so adept at boring other people into a torpor with, was that snippet about Piltdown man. It crossed his irrational mind that there was the chance he could go down in history as the gullible finder of a counterfeit Saxon hoard. Even if Seamus had noticed the sign warning that badgers had been the ones to undermine the road, the idea that it might have belonged to them would have made him reason that the animals were bound to be poisoned or shot by farmers as a tuberculosis risk anyway, so what rights could they have?

      On the other side of the country, where badgers were being systematically exterminated, enthusiastic archaeologists were on the verge of entering the central chamber of an untouched burial mound. They had spent years campaigning for permission to excavate the round barrow, expecting to find a valuable hoard interred with a Saxon chieftain.

      After

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