Maps of the Lost 22
...from the corner seat in the cafe
michael kilgolfen
Next time you’re in a public Zoom meeting with many participants, keep an eye out. It might be a social gathering, a talk or lecture, an educational event or a seminar. Look out in the list of participants for a man named Michael Kilgolfen. He’s easy to spot, with his bright red hair and engaging grin, nodding away as if everything that anyone says is insightful and wise. He won’t ever speak, but there he is. If you’ll see him a second or third time, you’ll wonder if you have mutual friends, how it’s funny you don’t know each other as you have such intersecting interests.
You might message him, but you won’t get a reply.
If you ever find yourself logging in to two Zoom meetings at once, or three, or four, is that you may see Michael Kilgolfen in all of them, smiling and nodding away. No big deal, you think, after all I’m in more than one meeting at a time, so…
Then you realise that the Michael Kilgolfen you see in each of these meetings is nodding and smiling at different times, and one of them scratches his head for a moment, and the others do not, and as you realise this all of the Michael Kilgolfens stop smiling and look very intently into their cameras, as if staring at one person.
Which indeed they are.
Notes From The Cartographer
Couldn’t let Beltane past us by without a newsletter, with new stories and old, to mark the turning of the wheel.
Celebrate! Spring is well and truly sprung and sumer is icumen in. What could possibly go wrong?
Thanks for reading, and be careful opening doors.
white, one sugar
In a small cafe in Lowestoft, you may notice a dishevelled man who sits in the corner and nurses a cup of tea. Watch closely: as each new customer comes in, he will raise his hand and sketch out a shape with his fingers, so quickly almost no one notices it.
He’ll have done the same for you, so it is a good week for you to try bold and amazing things, because you will experience success in all of them if your heart is pure.
He is the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of Merlin.
He lives in a small hostel and enjoys Rich Tea biscuits, and watching Cash In The Attic, and using what little power he still has to make people’s lives a little happier. He is 237 years old.
seen/unseen
If you’re keen on new technology, you might have one of those video doorbells that detects movement. If someone comes and tries your front door, or your car door, they’re captured there on video.
If you’re keen on new technology and animals, you might also have a wildlife camera that detects movement and takes photos using an infra-red flash. It was a bit of an indulgence for your small suburban front garden but you’ve seen ghostly images of grumbling hedgehogs and a twitchy mouse, as well as any number of cats slinking around their inscrutable business. And once, to your amazement, a young fox, who wandered in without a care in the world, sniffed at a few things, and then trotted off to his next appointment.
One day though, you might be reviewing the night’s capture on the wildlife camera and see a shape like a person walk slowly into your garden. Unlike the shots of the animals in the night (three cats, one hedgehog, an insomniac blackbird) you can’t make out any detail illuminated by the infrared flash, just a blurry but unmistakeable shape. It stands there, completely still for about three minutes, then moves it head. After a moment more, it turns and slowly walks away, out of your garden and out of sight.
Indignant at this intrusion, you review the footage from your video doorbell, which they passed to get onto your garden, and when they walked out. There’s nothing there. Nothing at the timestamp on the wildlife cam. Nothing around it. Nothing. But when you look really closely, you think you can see two impressions on the grass.
You’re not sure which unsettles you most. The fact that it could be seen on one camera but not the other, or the fact that just before it left, despite the lack of detail in the picture, when it moved its head you are sure it was sniffing.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
"Reading between the lines of landscape, and drinking in a sense of place from the unpicking of a collective memory, be it literary, anthropological, geographical, or our own sensory experiences, is something that has been toyed with for decades. The emotional and spiritual dimension of being in place, in the work of Alan Garner, powerfully reminds us of our connection to, and relationship with, the land and the memories/stories attached to it."
From Generation to Generation: An Exploration of Myth and Landscape in the Work of Alan Garner, by Nick Swarbrick and Mat Tobin
We are both in the normal world – cocooned in central heating, connected by phones and laptops, washed in the light from the television – and outside it; isolated, separated, remote. And that is the duality of a current trend in British writing which overlays contemporary lives on the older, darker backdrop of our heritage and folklore.
Folk realism: The literature exploring England's legends and landscapes, by David M Barnett
Just beyond the disused platforms at Crouch End Station, are railway arches that host an amazing sculpture. Despite its size this artwork is easy to miss, crawling out of the darkness. You might have seen this giant woodland sprite before, but do you know what it depicts? It's called a Spriggan: these are mischievous creatures from Cornish folklore, known for thieving, but also for their part-time roles as fairy bodyguard (even mythical creatures need to make a living).
The Fairy Bodyguard Of North London, by Harry Rosehill. (photo: Peter O’Connor https://www.flickr.com/photos/anemoneprojectors/28843975672/)
And more on the Crouch End Spriggan, by writer Gary Budden
In the railway arches near Crouch End, that’s where you can see it, the spriggan. It slides out of the brickwork as if caught between dimensions, perhaps seven feet tall if it could stand. It’s a marvel, amongst the overgrowth and the lurid graffiti. I often stop and stare at it. It reminds me of those old Machen stories, relics of older mythologies making themselves felt in the city. It just seems right.
The Ooser Speaks
(taken from the wonderful Readers Digest 'Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain')
Many say that the Eagle’s Crag near Burnley is the site of a witch’s grave. Lady Sybil Towneley was a practitioner of the dark arts, and used to enjoy running around in the shape of a white doe, or a cat. Her husband, Lord William Towneley, had pursued her to no avail, but another witch told him to hunt the white doe at the crag on All Hallows.
He was helped in this by a magical dog (as happens), and tied the roe up with an enchanted silken thread. It promptly transformed back into Sybil, and Lord William forced her to give up her sorcery and marry him. She did not mend her ways (and who can blame her), and wasted away from lack of a hand, when she had been in her cat form and lost a paw at Cliviger Mill while ‘causing mischief’. Since then, doe, hound and huntsman haunt the crag as darkness falls on All Hallows Eve.
brick by brick by brick
You may enjoy wandering around Covent Garden, early in the morning, when the pavements are still shiny wet from washing, the shops are shut, and not so many people are around. The sun is up, the air is cold, but there’s a cleanness to it that makes you breathe it in deep. As you wander, you often look up, because there’s more to be seen up there sometimes than down at street level.
You watch a TV crew setting up, the satellite dish nearly as big as the van it sits on. A couple of young tourists, out early, chase a pigeon and then leave it when they see your frown.
There must be a lot of construction going on, because you pass a couple of side streets, and in each one you notice a construction worker, rigger boots and hi-viz jacket, just standing, waiting for their colleagues. You smile to yourself and wonder whether one of them has the wrong street, and they’re both standing there waiting for the other, not knowing how close they are.
But then you pass another, and another, and then another.
Just standing. Waiting. Staring out as you as you pass.
You turn on to the main road, spooked by this, seeking comfort in more of a crowd, but although there are more people there, there are more of them. Standing on a corner, as if waiting for a lorry. Standing in a shop doorway. Standing down a narrow lane. None of them are doing anything. Just standing. Staring.
Look away. They are starting to think you know, and that is not a terribly good thing for you.
They are building something, something tall and terrible, but our eyes cannot see it, and they do not have to move to build it. Just stand, and stare into nothing, and think very hard, and invisible floor by invisible floor the place that overlays this little part of our world is built. When it is finished, the men will all turn and walk away and people will walk past them or stand next to them on the Tube, and will not even know what they are, but their dreams will be fractured and uneasy, and so will yours, for quite some time.
deceptively spacious
These are troubled times, and we are all to keep to our homes. Anyone could be forgiven for wondering whether the walls are just that little bit closer than they were the day before. I hope you are all well, and safe, and remain so in these days when fictional gazetteers of the weird seem so prosaic compared to the real world. There is one house, in Oxfordshire, where one might choose to pass this period of isolation.
It is unremarkable, and you would not think to stop there and look in. The house looks as if it was built in the nineteen-seventies, and it has never been extended. If you were to guess, from the outside, or if you had an estate agent’s eye (in a figurative sense, there is another story about the literal one but it is somewhat darker), you’d say it had three bedrooms, maybe four if one was a boxroom. A living room, a smaller dining room, a kitchen with the utility off to the side.
You could rent this house, if you knew the right person to ask, and the right person is a small dusty man who works out of an office above a betting shop in Kilburn and who has been looking after this house since his father died sometime around the Napoleonic Wars.
If you did, you would enter the house through the front door, and into a hallway, decorated in that bland rental house way. Perhaps the walls are Timeless Ecru, perhaps they are Faded Barleycorn, perhaps they are Toasted Cream. You can work out the layout of the house just from the hallway. To the right, the living room. To the left, the dining room. At the end, past the stairs, the kitchen.
Try the living room. A modest sized room, with IKEA furniture that you haven’t been able to buy for some time. The walls in here are like the hallway - maybe Tainted Pewter, or Antique Linen, or Busman’s Beige. But there’s a door in the far wall, and you can’t work out how that can be or where it would go. Isn’t that an outside wall?
Open the door and step through, and you will find another room, and then another, and then another, and many of them are far more interesting than the bland rooms you first stepped into. You can always find your way back as there is only one door in and one door out, but if you’re bold and you press on through the new rooms, take snacks. You could walk for nineteen days and nights before you came to a final door, which will not open to you because it is locked.
Do not try and force this door open. If you want to know what would happen if you did: picture a sink full of water. And then someone pulls the plug out.
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.
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