Maps of the Lost 17

from a reflection in a window, half-seen at night

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gifts

If you feed the crows and the magpies on a regular basis, you might find that they do what corvids do and bring you back small gifts in return.

A feather, a small shiny stone, a keyring, a piece of broken glass, and once, a silver necklace with a small pearl set in it.

If you keep feeding them, they may bring you more, and you will wonder where they got the shiny objects from and occasionally you feel vaguely guilt, but you still keep feeding them and you are always excited for what they might gift you in return.

One woman made such friends with the crows and the magpies and the rooks and the jays that one day they brought her a tiny shiny telescope, so small it lay neat in the palm of her hand. She marvelled at the thing itself and how they might have come across it, and how they had held it in beak or claw to bring it to her.

Then she screwed her eye up to look through the tiny eyepiece and that’s when she realised that the birds had brought her something that let her see the world as it really is, not as we see it, and her life has never been the same again.

Not least because the original owner of the telescope is on the hunt for his stolen property, and he may be very very small but he walks very very fast.

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Notes From the Cartographer

It’s been a while since the last newsletter. I’ve had Covid (which had felt increasingly inevitable…TripAdvisor review: “would not recommend, one star” but am fine now), been abroad (which was wonderful) and have been working hard on several rounds of revisions for my agent. All of which are done now, and my novel has landed on the desk of a number of publishers as of last Friday. Apparently the industry is moving very slowly at the moment, so I’ve been told not to be sitting on the edge of my seat. But even so, even so…

In other exciting news, there are plans afoot with a wonderful collaborator which we hope will lead to a short film of a Maps story. It’s been fun choosing which would work best.

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dead spot

Quite close to where you live, there’s a T-junction where you can turn out from a road of quiet bungalows, mostly inhabited by the elderly, onto the much busier main road.

If you are listening to DAB radio, or streaming music or audio in your car, or through a pair of headphones, or if you’re talking on your mobile, you may notice something as you approach the junction and turn out onto the main road.

It’s only for a few yards, but you’ll lose the signal, whether it’s radio or streaming over mobile data. Keep going, and back it comes. Go a few steps backwards, and you’ll lose it again.

The junction, and a few feet either of side of it, is a dead spot. No signal gets through there. You might speculate whether it’s the configuration of the houses around it, or a dip in the land, but you’d be wrong, because it’s nothing to do with that.

If you were diligent and checked the time as you pass in and out of this junction, you’d notice that it’s not only mobile signals and the radio that do not work there. That’s why the man who lives in the corner house, the 1930s bungalow by the junction, will never move from there, and it’s why he had the 1930s bungalow built on the site of his previous house, and that house built on the site of the previous, right the way back to when he discovered the dead spot in 1394.

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listen. listen

You may enjoy field recording, capturing the sounds of nature and place. Perhaps this is simply for your own enjoyment, or because you enjoy identifying bird song, or perhaps you are sampling natural sounds to use in your ambient music productions, or in an audio drama you are producing with friends, or perhaps even in a podcast that you are recording about the wild and thin places of the country in which you life.

Sometimes a perfect recording is spoiled, maybe by a jet grumbling its distant way to a holiday destination, or a motorbike with a defective silencer tracing its way on the country road over a mile away like a shiny black beetle. You might find yourself in Somerset, recording in the hush of a stone circle when the dew still lies silver on the grass, or resting your recorder on the ramparts of a fortification built over a thousand years before the Romans even came to Britain, and then back home curse the annoying hum that has blighted your recording.

But wait. Don’t press delete. Don’t apply noise reduction. Increase the gain as high as you can, ignore the noise that is just from your pre-amps, and listen to the hum. Listen.

If your ears are good, and you listen close enough, you may realise that it is not a hum. It is chanting.

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Maps Traced By Other Hands

Zoe Gilbert, author of the amazing, weird, mythic 'Folk' has a new novel out, 'Mischief Acts'. I think Maps readers would love them both.

Mischief Acts:

"Herne the hunter, mischief-maker, spirit of the forest, leader of the wild hunt, hurtles through the centuries pursued by his creator. A shapeshifter, Herne dons many guises as he slips and ripples through time – at candlelit Twelfth Night revels, at the spectacular burning of the Crystal Palace, at an acid-laced Sixties party. Wherever he goes, transgression, debauch and enchantment always follow in his wake.

But as the forest is increasingly encroached upon by urban sprawl and gentrification, and the world slides into crisis, Herne must find a way to survive – or exact his revenge."

As Zoe herself says: “It's a novel about many things: the myths we need, enchantment and disenchantment, the woods (and in particular Sydenham & Dulwich Woods in South London), mischief, freedom, and our complicated relationship with the natural world. For me, it's a celebration of wildness, inside and out, but also a warning about what we do with that wildness.”

Folk:

“A captivating, magical and haunting debut novel of breathtaking imagination, from the winner of the 2014 Costa Short Story Award

Every year they gather, while the girls shoot their arrows and the boys hunt them out. The air is riddled with spiteful shadows – the wounds and fears and furies of a village year.

The remote island village of Neverness is a world far from our time and place. The air hangs rich with the coconut-scent of gorse and the salty bite of the sea. Harsh winds scour the rocky coastline. The villagers' lives are inseparable from nature and its enchantments.

Verlyn Webbe, born with a wing for an arm, unfurls his feathers in defiance of past shame; Plum is snatched by a water bull and dragged to his lair; little Crab Skerry takes his first run through the gorse-maze; Madden sleepwalks through violent storms, haunted by horses and her father's wishes.

As the tales of this island community interweave over the course of a generation, their earthy desires, resentments, idle gossip and painful losses create a staggeringly original world. Crackling with echoes of ancient folklore, but entirely, wonderfully, her own, Zoe Gilbert's Folk is a dark, beautiful and intoxicating debut.” (C&W Literary Agency)

And just look at this gorgeous cover art for both books. Does book design get any better than this?

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The Ooser Speaks

Many hundreds of years ago, a fire damaged the church tower of Tunstall, in Norfolk. The church bells were rescued, but an argument broke out over who should have possession of them until the tower could be repaired. The competing parties, the churchwarden and the parson, could not agree but the Devil himself settled the matter by appearing from nowhere and seizing the bells.

The parson ran after him in pursuit, reciting prayers in Latin but the Devil got away by leaping into a boggy pool, which is said locally to lead directly to hell.

The bells? They were never recovered, but sometimes there are reports of people hearing a muffled ringing, far below the village.

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flutter, flutter

Walking up through a small woods in Suffolk, if you turn off the narrow path and walk a little further into the woods, you might catch a glimpse of colour and movement out of the corner of your eye. If you head towards it, you’ll see that it’s a gnarled and massive ancient oak, and that its branches are festooned with small strips of rags of many different colours, which flap and stream in the gentle breeze which shivers the trees.

There must be dozens of the rags, and as you get closer you’ll see that they appear to be torn pieces of clothing, but no two the same. A strip of striped shirt here, a fluttering ribbon of denim there, a swaying strip of tweed, a bright fragment of Gore-Tex. The wind rises and they whip and they move, and if you stare in puzzlement for too long you may not notice the hollow in the thick and ancient trunk of the tree, and you may not notice what is coming out of it, and you may not even have time to wonder what it will choose from what you’re wearing to add to its souvenirs afterwards.

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reflections

It’s been a long day, and it’s not over yet. Up before dawn to get the early train, three hundred miles, then a conference all day, listening, writing, making small talk, eating bad sandwiches, then back on the tube then back on the train, delays due to a horse on the line and you still have an hour to go.

You are too tired to read your Kindle or do anything in particular, so you stare out of the window and watch the blue of the sky fade to indigo, the lights of the houses flashing by come on, the last circle of rooks over a copse before they settle down. As it gets dark, you see the reflection of the other passengers in your part of the train, all looking tired and lulled into submission by the passing of the day and the rock of the train and the darkness outside.

As you see their faces floating in the dark world beyond the glass, you notice one woman who seems to be looking right at you. You look back at her, and wonder if she can tell you’re looking at her as she looks at you, and you quite like this strange frisson that two reflections might be flirting with each other. Then she opens her mouth as if she is crying for help, a long silent cry.

You can’t help but look away from the window, back into the lights of the carriage, because something is wrong and you want to help and you want other people to have noticed so you’re not the only one helping, and there is no woman, just an empty seat with a discarded copy of the Metro lying on it. You look back at the window, and she’s gone from there too.

You sit uncomfortable and troubled for the rest of the way home, and worry that there’s something wrong with you, that you are seeing such things. Then you tell yourself you must have fallen into a micro-sleep, rocked away by the chatter and clatter of the train on the tracks, and you had a waking dream.

You settle for this explanation, and you begin to forget about the woman who looked as if she was crying a desperate plea for help direct to you.

Until you see her in a shop window. In a mirror as you walk past. Shivering in the neon reflection in a puddle, standing on the other side of the perspex of a bus shelter, in a colleagues laptop screen as it goes to sleep and turns dark, in the black water of a canal, in the window of a car that passes while you wait to cross.

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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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Magpie image by Federico Maderno from Pixabay.

Thanks for reading, and be careful what you see in the reflections.