It was somewhere at the back of beyond.

Maybe he would have found it difficult to be more precise.

He was one who, when motoring outside his own territory, preferred to follow a route

given by one of the automobile organisations, and on this very occasion, as on other previous

ones, he had found reasons to deplore all deviation.

This time, it had been the work's managers fault.

The man had not only poured ridicule on the official route, but had stood at the yard gate in

order to make quite certain that Maybury set off by the shortcut, which according to him,

all the fellows in the firm used, and which departed in the exactly opposite direction.

The most that could be said was that Maybury was presumably at the outer edge of the immense

West Midlands conurbation.

The outer edge, it by now surely must be, as he seemed to have been driving for hours

since he left the works, going round and round in large or small circles, asking the way

and being unable to understand the answers, when answers were about safe.

All the time, seemingly more off course than ever.

Those were the opening few paragraphs of Robert Ackman's The Hospice, and we're going

to give this strange story a strange study, because that's what we do here on hppodgraph.com,

strange studies of strange stories on Chad Fiverr.

But I'm Chris Lackey, and we're also on Patreon.

This is a free show, but please consider subscribing for six shows a month and access to over 500

episodes in our archive.

Yeah, this is in fact episode 566 of the show right now, 566, the number of the guy

...