Maps of the Lost 25
…from the high moors in the whispering rain
and now the weather
You may find yourself driving over the spine of England, the North Pennines where Durham and Cumbria meet. Perhaps you’re a taxi driver, or you drive a delivery van, or maybe you just can’t sleep because there are things in your life that won’t let you, so instead you drive the dark country lanes. You like to listen to the radio when you drive, not music, voice radio. It’s like company in the thick folds of the night.
The reception is not always good in this part of the world, but this night it’s particularly poor. Stations tune in and out, waves of static wash over the signal, and sometimes there is just silence.
At midnight though, the silence and the static recede, and a voice emerges from them. He sounds as if he is some distance away, but is reading a weather forecast that appears to be very local. In a warm, calm voice he talks about Alston, and he talks about Bearbridge, and he forecasts rain in St John’s Chapel, and you relax into it, a comfortable lullaby like the shipping forecast.
Then you think oh, I don’t know that place, and I know this area well, and then another name catches your attention and you think, I don’t know there either. You listen a little more closely and you think, wait, what? I’ve never heard that on a weather forecast. In the same soft voice the forecaster tells you that the mist is as thick as moths’ wings in Widdershaugh and that Tarnfell Cross will experience whispering drizzle.
The forecast ends with a single chime, and the static surges like a wave, and after a moment, the radio station you were first listening to comes back in, and stays there for the rest of your journey.
Sometimes in your dreams after that night though you find walking down streets you don’t know. There’s a strange mist that feels like dust on your skin, or a soft rain that sounds like quiet voices whispering words you cannot quite make out. Sometimes when you drive through the North Pennines, even though it’s just moorland stretching bleak and lonely around you, you feel as if you should pull over, get out, walk into the mist and drizzle.
Notes from the Cartographer
Lovely to see so many new subscribers since the last email went out. Welcome, and I hope you enjoy what for many of you will be your first Maps of the Lost newsletter. Of course, this could also be the point where I lose dozens of subscribers…
If you like it, please share it with people who you think might like it too.
I've been posting quite a few older Maps stories in Substack Notes . So if you’re an old-time Maps email subscriber but weren’t aware of those you might want to check them out. They certainly seem to have brought quite a lot of new people here. I’ve got lot of plans for the newsletter for the months ahead, including the serialization of a novel…
Speaking of novels, I've started work on a new one. A lot of my publication history is crime fiction, but I'm going back to my roots with this one, which is very much in Maps territory. A literary weird fiction novel that forgoes the tropes of folk horror for a horror of the edgelands, the shabby and marginalised, and which is in part the story of a play that has been performed for over five hundred years - without any of the cast knowing that they are in it.
Here's a quote from the poem that provides the title.
Across the highways strewn with ashen filth
The ragged pilgrims come to the new Metropolis,
That cruel City, built of stone and steel,
where unveiled passions, unashamed crimes,
the windy avenues traverse, where lust
wars bitterly with lust, where naked lights
illumine nightly what the day concealed.(David Gascoyne, ‘The New Isaiah’)
closed, danger
If you’re walking in that part of town where the urban blurs into edgeland which blurs into country, in between the factory units and the compound full of ruined tyres, you might pass a small road which disappears off into some scrubby woodland, between hedges filled with with plastic bottles and crisp packets and cans. It wouldn’t be at all noticeable if it wasn’t for the fact that the road has been closed off, with a chain slung across it, hung from a street light that doesn’t work on one side and a metal fence on the other. There’s a sign hanging from the chain, a piece of dirty white plastic that someone’s written on with a Sharpie, the black letters slowly blurring down to the bottom from exposure to the rain, as if they are bleeding: CLOSED. DANGER. I wonder what, you think, and whether it is interesting enough to sneak through and take a photo.
Or you might be walking in to town from the countryside, and notice how the rural landscape changes to rural industrial, cattle sheds and tractor parts and coils of baling wire, an electricity substation that hums to itself as if meditating, discarded plastic tubs and barrels, blue plastic sheeting caught on the fence and flapping in the wind like a ghost. Trying to find the route into town you follow a road up towards a small scrubby wood, because in the distance you can see low buildings beyond it, all grey, coloured signs under the eaves and you are sure it must be the industrial estate where you once bought a UPVC door.
As you reach the wood though, your progress is stymied, because the road is closed, a metal chain swinging slowly back and forth between a tree trunk on one side and a fence post on the other. Someone’s made a sign by writing on a piece of paper, putting it in a plastic wallet, and taping it to the chain. The plastic is smeared by dirt and watermarks, but you can read it: CLOSED. DANGER. I wonder why, you think, and you consider how far it would be to backtrack and find another route that would take you to the town, how tired you are, and whether it’s worth being cautious on the road but sneaking through and taking the shortest way back.
A word of warning though. Although it’s only a short road, if you step over the chain and walk through from the industrial estate you will not come out by the chain on the other side of the woods, and if you step over the chain and walk through from the woods you will not come out by the chain at the industrial estate.
Either way, you will come out somewhere else where you do not understand any of the colours and everything bends the wrong way, and when you find yourself in that place you will understand DANGER. Briefly.
night market
There's a small market town in the middle of England which has held markets in the square for hundreds of years. They're not what they were now, and only happen one Saturday a month. It's a slightly sad affair where stall-holders sit bored and cold behind their tables of cheese, or painted stones, or seaglass jewellery, or old CDs and DVDs.
A couple of times a year though, anyone waking early and walking through the square would be forgiven for thinking that a market had been held overnight, when no one was there to see it. There are burned-out votive candles which seem to mark the lanes between the stalls, torn paper stained with something undefinable, the insides of a clock scattered on cobbles, a battered brass compass which just swings lazily round and round as if north is being blown by the wind, some torn and faded photographic prints of a landscape that you don't recognise.
On those nights, a resident or two of the town will have strange dreams, of walking between the stalls of a market in the dark, of silent stall-holders with faces that remind them of someone they might once have known. When they wake in the morning they will feel tired all the next day, as if they have not slept at all. And somewhere in their house will be something that they bought at the night market, although they may not see it, for it is not to be seen.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
Just read: The Dark Between The Trees by Fiona Barnett.
Two intertwined stories in timelines hundreds of years apart, and one forest. Or maybe not. One strand tells of a research party led by an academic, the other of a battered and exhausted Roundhead company at the time of the Civil War. I much preferred the latter story - I found the motivations of the modern day characters unconvincing and, well, they were all so annoying. The historical story, and the characters within it, were much richer. But that aside, the overarching plot and mystery that brings the two together was very good, disorientating and disturbing.
Just listened: Broken Veil. Oh now. I really enjoyed this. A podcast from Joel Morris (Gralefrit here on Substack) and Will MacLean (author of Apparition Phase, which if you’re a reader here I’d be pretty sure you’d like).
They call it ‘a blend of “found narrative”, DIY podcasting, and psychogeography, mixing sound, memory, storytelling, landscape and documentary. Or maybe it’s just something you have to hear.’
I don’t want to talk about it very much, because it’s hard to without spoiling it. But two people investigate a strange story that happened to a friend, taking them in search of an odd place in rural Essex and then, and then…
Recommend this very much if you Like This Sort Of Thing, and if you don’t, you probably wouldn’t be reading this newsletter.
The Ooser Speaks
(taken from the wonderful Readers Digest 'Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain')
Basingwerk Abbey lies in Dyffryn Maes Glas, Wales. In the 12th century a monk from the Abbey heard a nightingale singing in a nearby wood, and was so entranced that he listened spellbound, for what felt like hours.
When he finally wandered back to the Abbey it was in ruins and everyone there was a stranger to him. When he asked them what had happened, no one understood him, but one local said to another how the stranger’s appearance reminded him of the story of a monk who’d disappeared from the Abbey centuries before. With a kind gesture, they offered this stranger food, but the moment he touched it, the monk out of time crumbled into dust.
most is not all
You might spend some of your time tromping round the muddy country paths of early spring, when you never know whether the next hour will bring rain, or sunshine, or some unexpected sleet and a vicious squall throwing it into your face. The buds are starting to form, the birds are starting to sing, but the paths are still soft and every now and then you have to leap across a puddle.
When you do, you're probably looking to the other side, to make sure that you have a firm landing and you don't slip and end up face down in mud, having to slink back to home or car looking like you have been pretending you're a sniper and camouflaging your face.
Now and then though, look down. There's one puddle in your route that's worth a look. You should wait for any breeze that shivers the hedgerow next to you to subside, and for the rippling water of the puddle to slow, slow, and still. When it does, you'll notice that you don't see your own reflection. Keep looking, and you'll realise that what you see reflected isn't the ash tree that sways behind you, or the clouds in the sky above you. What you see reflected isn't where you are at all. It's somewhere else. If you keep watching, you might see things fly through the sky in the reflection that don't look like anything you've seen fly at all.
If you keep watching too long though, something might come to the other side of the puddle and stare in at what they can see, and what they can see is you. Don't worry over much. Most of them can't come through. But do worry a little, because most is not all.
pale blue eyes
You may find yourself out with friends, and the discussion turns to the past and all the gigs that you have been at together, which always seem even better in hindsight than they were at the time, the music louder, the energy greater, the friendship warmer. There’s a collective forgetting of the queues at the bar, that idiot drunk with sharp elbows, the weird stink of the toilets that you couldn’t get out of your nostrils even after you’d left, and where you do all remember something that went wrong - the car that broke down, the trip on the stairs and the sprained ankle, the lost phone, the last train missed - it becomes a funny story, transmuted by distance.
You’re enjoying the discussion and the bickering about which was the best, and which was the worst, and what year was that one anyway, when one of your friends names a band and looks at you with a grin and says that clearly that was your best gig.
You frown a little but smile back and say hardly, as I wasn’t there.
Everyone else gives an ooh as if someone had just dropped a tray of glasses, and then one of them says that you’ve blanked it from your memory, another says that’ll be the embarrassment, a third says that’ll be the gin. You shake your head. I was ill, you say. I went to bed, I didn’t go, you must be thinking of another night - again the crowd burst into hoots of disbelief. You were crazy that night, one says, I’ve never known you the life and soul as much as then, another says.
You can’t believe they could all get it so wrong. You remember it well, because it was one of the only times that you’d lied to your friends. You’d felt strange all day, a feeling of doom and despair that had come out of nowhere. You’d not woken up with it, but on the way to work you’d collided with someone on the way to the train, or they collided with you, and it was all so quick that you only noticed their eyes, a pale blue, like old ice. Something about that had left you unsettled, and you felt worse and worse as the day went on. Not wanting to admit to this, you phoned your friends and said you had the flu, then lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what was wrong with you.
In time, you fell asleep, but woke in the night with a strange shiver, as if your whole body was shaking. It lasted a moment, and then it was gone, and you fell back asleep and when you woke you were well again.
I can’t believe you’re all so mixed up, you say, how much did you all have to drink that night, but then one of your friends gives a shout of triumph, and holds up their phone.
There you are, with the rest of them, near the front, band on stage behind you, all of you looking wild and as if you’re having the time of your life. You take the phone, while your friends mock you, and you look very close at yourself in the picture. You know that your eyes are not pale blue, like old ice, but you do not say anything to your friends, and when you go home at the end of the night you do not look in the mirror, just in case.
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. You can just reply to this email if you like.
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Thanks for reading, and be careful of what you see on the other side of a puddle.
Excellent. Good luck with the novel!
Always a delight when your newsletter slides into my mail!