Maps of the Lost 18
from the places that do not want you
all I ever wanted was everything
In Reading there’s a public phone box, one of the few still left around. If you try and make a call from it, you won’t get the dial tone. If you pick exactly the right day of the year though, and touch it with your left hand then walk four times around it anti-clockwise and one time around it clockwise, the phone will ring.
If go in and answer it, a calm voice will tell you the answer to all the things that you have ever wondered.
It’s worth noting that almost everyone who has answered that call has lost their wits under the burden of it all. Be careful before you try it. Think of all the things you have ever wondered and consider whether you really want to know the answers.
Notes From the Cartographer
It always feels a little different writing Maps stories and this newsletter in the summer. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting outside a cafe overlooking the sea, with bright early morning sunshine creating a beautiful, dazzling glitter path all the way out to the horizon.
It feels like the natural territory for writing the kind of things I do for Maps would be late at night, hearing the wind buffeting the house, and wondering whether that tapping at the window is a branch. Or not. Or walking this same seashore as the sea fret (fog, haar) rolls in and you can’t see more than a few yards ahead, and other people are just shapes in the mist. At least, you think they’re people.
But there’s a certain kind of horror to be found in the bright light of day and the bustle of a summer beach. You almost expect the eerie when it’s dark and the clouds slide over the moon. So isn’t it a little more jarring if it comes in the daylight, in plain sight, not a figure in the night, a cold feeling, but the person just walking past, or that person who is sitting at the next table to you. I mean, how do you know that for everyone else sat outside this little seafront cafe, there is no one sat at the table next to you?
Perhaps you’re the only one who sees them. And see the way they glance up and look at you now, with a slight smile. You know now, and they know you know, but around you people just walk dogs and drink tea as the sun climbs higher in the sky. Isn’t there a particular kind of terror in that?
the Horton in Ribblesdale plague
Horton in Ribblesdale has been Horton since before the first Domesday Book, and in Ribblesdale since a couple of centuries after, because of that other Horton of which the Horton in Ribblesdale folk do not speak.
The register of parish burials shows that in one year in the sixteenth century, one in eight of the parishioners died in a ‘plague’.
The register does not go on to explain where this particular plague came from, who opened the gateway that let it in, how the valiant parishioners braved their lives to defeat it, or what charms of warding keep it from coming back.
A few of the folk of Horton in Ribblesdale, which is not the other Horton of which the Horton in Ribblesdale folk do not speak know though, because every year they still walk the bounds that create the warding that stop the plague from tearing a hole in space and sliding and slipperying and slithering and slooshing its way back in.
meridian
If you visit a particular side street in Greenwich on a solstice day, you might spot a line running down the middle of the street that is not visible on any other day. It is faint, like a plume of smoke or a finger of mist just lying on the tarmac.
If you cross over it…everything will be the same. You will walk back through the streets, and nothing will have changed. Your family will still be there waiting for you when you get home. Everything will be the same.
Except it isn’t.
In the world you left behind, after a time there will be phone calls and police and neighbours making cups of tea, you will be on regional news and your family will end up putting posters up on lamp posts, but after some years your children will struggle to recall what you even looked like.
Everything will be the same, that is, apart from one thing. If you walk back to the quiet street on the solstice, you’ll not see a line again. You made your choice.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
This edition, a grab bag of links to the strange and the odd.
How can you resist an article with a name like ‘The Magus Was A Spy: Aleister Crowley and the Curious Connections Between Intelligence and the Occult’?
It explores how the Beast went undercover in the US in World War I, and was summoned by Ian Fleming’s boss in Naval Intelligence in World War II, maybe so he could interview Rudolf Hess.
Tides In Folklore And Literature is exactly what it says it is. An interesting read, from Thor to Sylvia Plath.
The fabulous Alan Garner’s newest novel, Treacle Walker, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize.
More on that when I read it (but I must not read it in public wearing my t-shirt which also has the White Horse [1] on it as that’s just too on-brand), but for now here’s Garner himself talking about where the novel came from, on the lascivious subtexts of Catullus, mistaking Lord of the Flies for a satanic text and CS Lewis’s ‘totalitarian’ fantasy epics, and a reflection from last year on when his key novel The Owl Service, reached 50.
The owls are not what they seem.
Sorry, we’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks from the beginning, and it’s got into my head.
[1] From the marvellous Hare and Tabor, who also have t-shirts with the Spirit of Misrule, a John Dee sigil, Robin Goodfellow, the three hares, and many more. I disclaim all responsibility if you get arrested wearing the Cerne Abbas one.
The Ooser Speaks
In Minster, on the peculiar Isle of Sheppey off the Kent coast, an impetuous and tempestuous knight and Lord of Sheppey, Sir Robin de Shurland killed a monk who defied him.
Hunted by the law, he won a pardon from King Edward I by having his horse swim out to the King’s ship as it passed by up the Thames Estuary. With a swagger, Sir Robin waded ashore only to be met by a mysterious old hag. As mysterious old hags tend to do, she gave him a prophecy: his horse had saved his life, so it would bring about his death.
Being an ungrateful and violent type, Sir Robin drew his sword there and then, and beheaded his loyal steed, to save himself from the prophecy.
Years later though, he was walking on the beach and came across the skull of his horse, which reminded him of his perfidy and of the prophecy, and in a rage he kicked out at it.
One of the teeth jabbed through Sir Robin’s boot, and into his foot, and he died from blood poisoning a few days later. It is not confirmed that he was visited by a vision of Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons shouting ‘Ha, ha’.
he comes and he goes
If you are visiting a certain megalithic site in Dorset, watch out for a man walking by the side of the road, about two miles before you get there. He will be walking slowly, wearing a blue waterproof jacket, his head bowed down, his hood up.
When you get out of your car at the site a few minutes later, you will be very surprised to see what appears to be the same man walking towards you in the other direction, even though he could not have possibly got there in time. You’ll shake your head and think what a coincidence, someone dressed identically, blue waterproof jacket, walking slowly, head down, hood up.
It isn’t anyone else. It is him. Just let him pass. Do not try to talk to him. If you try, he may pull back his hood, and raise his head and then you’ll wish you hadn’t. Secrets The Wind Whispers
know your place
It might be a clearing in a forest in Northumberland, it might be a wasteland behind factory units in Salford where only weeds grow from the cracked concrete. It might be a 1930s semi-detached house in Sunderland, or it might be a small low hill in Gloucestershire. It might be the stairs up to a Crewe dentist, or a small play park on the Isle of Thanet. It might be a supermarket in Fife, or a short stretch of canal path in Leeds, or a set of stairs, next to a chair, leading down, down, down.
It might be anywhere. But one day, somewhere, you will find it, and you will know it. You will walk into that place, and you will feel an immediate unease, a sickness in your stomach, the desire to run.
Listen to that unease. This is not the place for you. It has turned against you, and you cannot placate it. Leave, and do not return.
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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Thanks for reading, and be careful not to step across the line.
know your place struck a chord. I was a chartered surveyor and was inspecting a house in south London, never made it past the ground floor, just knew. I love your work.
I do not know how you can come up with such scary tales, and all beautifully written. I am just grateful that you do! Thank you for your extraordinary work.