Maps of the Lost 16
from where the flame still flickers in the fen
the number
If you’re very unlucky, you might begin to notice a three-digit number, and then a little while later notice that you have noticed it rather a lot. It could be 712 or 439 or 876, or any other combination.
But you’ll see it, over and over. On walls. In a card in a window. Carved into a tree. Daubed on to a bus shelter. Spelled out with leaves in a field, or in three small cairns of stones. Over and over, everywhere.
You’re not meant to have seen this number, and the bad news is that your noticing it has itself been noticed. If you are out and get that prickling at the back of your neck that makes you think that you are being watched then you are right, you are.
There is very little time to spare, so run to a phone box, pick up the handset and key in those three numbers, just once, but very quickly. Help will come sooner than you think.
There aren’t as many phone boxes around as there used to be though, so I hope that this time you are lucky.
Notes From The Cartographer
Hello everybody. I hope you’re keeping safe and getting through the days in these troubled times. Sometimes it’s nice to have other worlds as a distraction, even if they are dark and strange in their own way. There can be a comfort in that.
In the last newsletter: I wrote: while calling anything a resolution at this time of year dooms it to failure, let’s just say I have an aspiration to get back to roughly monthly for 2022. Let’s see. The first part was uncannily prescient. The second…less so. In my defence I’ve been wrapped up in several rounds of revision of my novel with my agent, and now I think we’re nearly ready to go out on submission. It’s not in the same territory as Maps but some of themes of identity and who you really are, have…echoes.
One of the good things about doing a project like Maps is that from time to time it leads to interesting things. Early days, but there may be a very interesting collaborative spin-off on the cards. If you have a particular favourite in the Maps stories that you’ve read, one that particularly spooked you, or resonated with you, let me know by replying to this email. It’s fine if it’s a vague ‘the one about the thing where the thing happens and there’s a noise.’
I’ll work it out.
front of house
You’re working in a restaurant in the west of London, waiting tables to support you through hard times as a student. You’d been serving a table for one, a quiet but polite man who stood out from the other customers that you were serving, and not because he was on his own. There were a lot of business travellers in the hotels nearby, and it wasn’t uncommon to have a customer sitting on their own at a table, reading their Kindle while they ate, or scrolling through their phone, or just looking down at the table, trying not to catch anyone else’s eye in case they got a look of sympathy for being alone.
What struck you about this man, who was unremarkable in every other way, was his expression. He stared into space in front of him, as if he could see something there, something which troubled him very much. Each time you came to serve him, he’d tear his gaze away as if it were difficult, and look at you as if he were drinking you in. Not in any kind of sexual way, no hint of desire there, just as if you were the last other human being on earth.
Your noisy table two down left, and as you’d suspected they would be, they were terrible tippers. You picked up the last of their dishes and took them into the kitchen, came back to clean and reset the table, and the man on his own was gone.
Toilet, you thought. I’m good at reading people, and he wasn’t a skipper. They’re always nervy, too talkative, you can tell. He’ll be in the toilet. By the time you’d cleaned the other table though, reset it, and served another time a fourth round of drinks, he was still not back. A man came out of the toilets, heading back to his table, and you intercepted him, sorry sir, but was there anyone else in - no? OK, thank you, no nothing’s wrong.
You went to clear his table, putting it down to experience, another tip short, the boss on your case for the cost of a lost meal, thinking you should have seen the signs, and there it was, lying on his table, his phone. You wonder whether he’s had some kind of incident, got confused, wandered off, not realised he hadn’t paid, not realised that he didn’t have his phone. Or maybe he had no cash, but the phone was worth many times the cost of the meal. You couldn’t leave it there, as some other customer would spot it and pocket it, so you picked it up and took it to the office, steeling yourself to explain you’d had a skipper.
Your boss was on the phone though, having an argument about something, so you just held up the phone and mouthed ‘left behind’, and he gave you a curt nod and pointed to his desk with his free hand. You put the phone down and turned to go, and saw the black and white of the restaurant CCTV on the screen on the wall facing your boss.
There were four pictures in one: front of house, kitchen, outside the front door, outside the back door. In the CCTV for the front of house, you could see the table set for one, and a fuzzy indistinct shadow sitting in the chair where the man had been. You looked closer, but couldn’t make anything out, hurried out and stared at the table, at the chair in front of a plate of half-eaten food. There was no one there. You almost ran back into your boss’ office, ignored his annoyed look, saw a fainter shadow in the chair, fading like mist in the sun, and then it was gone.
urbex legend
In your town, you may hear talk of a hidden tunnel. In nearly all cases it will be myth, or an old smuggler’s tunnel or a relic of the civil defence preparations of the 1950s which would have allowed local councillors to huddle in fear and drink tea while the world burned. In one town though, that tunnel leads you to hell. Unfortunately, we do not know which town that is. Be careful, explorers.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
A grab bag of links that I found interesting this month. Maybe you’ll find some of them interesting too.
“Another ancient belief, attributed to Aristotle, was that no creature can die except at ebb tide” - Tides in folklore and literature.
‘between the civilisation of the village and the unknown darkness of the wild wood’ -Two Worlds In-between: Exploring The Liminal Space
Cutty soams down in the pits, the Portobello braag, the Man o’the Moors and more from my little corner of the world, in the rainy north-east: The Unexplained North: Braags, Yotuns and the Lambton Worm
And to close the final speech by King Penda, king of Mercia and the last pagan king of England, from the wonderful, haunting, strange film Penda’s Fen.
Stephen,
our land must live.
This land we love must live.
Her deep, dark flame must never die.
Night is falling.
Your land and mine goes down
into a darkness now.
And all the other
guardians of her flame
are driven from our home,
up out into the wolf's jaw.
But the flame still flickers in the fen.
You are marked down to cherish that.
Cherish the flame
till we can safely wake again.
The flame is in your hands,
we trust it you.
Our sacred demon of ungovernableness.
Cherish the flame,
we shall rest easy.
Stephen, be secret.
Child, be strange.
Dark, true, impure and dissonant.
Cherish our flame.
Our dawn
shall come.
The Ooser Speaks
(taken from the wonderful Readers Digest 'Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain')
Near Aylmerton in Norfolk lie the Shrieking Pits. Circular depressions in the ground, they may be where prehistoric houses or flint mines once existed. Sometimes a tall woman in white is seen, peering into the pits, wringing her hands and shrieking, shrieking, shrieking.
Some say she is the ghost of a Stone Age woman. Others say that she is the ghost of a woman murdered nearby. Either way, she shrieks and she shrieks and she shrieks.
his little friends
In the flat land between Cambois and Newbiggin in Northumberland, you may pass a small workshop. If you look in, you will see some small and intricate assemblages of cogs and levers. The owner of the workshop puts them into dolls and sends them out to do his bidding. Don’t let him see you looking in his workshop, because a night or two later you will hear the tap of tiny feet.
the three
When the rains means that a certain river in North Yorkshire runs very high, and the moon is at its fullest, be very careful walking its loneliest banks unless you know for sure that three have drowned there in the last year. The god of the river will take three, and three only in any year. But it will have its three.
Thanks for reading this edition of the Maps newsletter, and remember: be strange, child. Our time will come.
Beyond This Point There May Be Dragons
You’ve been reading Maps of the Lost. Or have you? It’s hard to tell. Maybe this is all just a dream. Or a prophecy, or a forewarning. I hope you enjoyed it. Feedback is always welcome, as I’d really like to shape this newsletter to be what you’d like to read and hear. So, ideas, suggestions and comments welcome. You can just reply to this email if you like.
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Phone box image courtesy Adrian Cable / Farnham PO Postbox & Telephone Box / CC BY-SA 2.0
Your writing, as ever, is haunting, chilling, and compelling. I'd love to read the novel you mentioned. Thank you for continuing to write.
Thank you for your work. It is unique and wonderful.