Maps of the Lost 26

...from a gap you might step through

practising

If you find yourself walking the streets of Ely, you might come to a sudden stop and have no idea why. For a moment you wonder whether you had planned to stop for a reason, but then forgotten why in the same way you forget people’s names or why you came into a room, but you realise this is not the case when you start to walk again but…don’t.

You remain still, unmoving. At this point you start to worry that you’ve had some kind of episode, a temporary paralysis, but a second or two later you realise that this isn’t the case when your left arm begins to twitch, and then your right, and your hands grip into fists and relax, grip and relax.

It’s more alarming than the feeling of paralysis, because you have no control over what you’re doing. Your hands raise in front of you, and move up and down, like you are a toy soldier drummer boy. Although you can’t move your body, you can still move your eyes and you look around you, both mortified that someone may have seen you, and desperate for someone to notice and help.

A middle-aged woman passing gives you a look and then looks away, hard, not wanting to draw the attention of the strange person moving their hands. A young man walks by sniggering and lifts his phone, takes a passing photo. Then you see him, off to the side, a young boy of no more than seven or eight, wearing a bright yellow raincoat, and wriggling his fingers, up and down, up and down.

The moment he sees you looking at him, he stops, and your hands fall to your sides. He gives you a look as if he’s been caught stealing a biscuit out of the tin, and then hurries into the crowd. You take a step after him, and realise you’ve taken a step, realise you can move.

You don’t take another one to follow him though, because you decide that you really don’t want to catch him up.

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Notes from the Cartographer

Been under the weather recently, and very busy at work so have needed some undemanding but fun and spooky TV. So I’ve indulged myself by going back in time to boxy suits and coats, lights in the sky, shoulder pads, smoking men, wandering around woods with torches, government cover-ups, and dear god, there’s Eugene Tooms squeezing out of things.

The X-Files has aged (which is depressing, as I’m at the age where I feel the 90s weren’t that long ago), sometimes badly, and some of the supporting acting is remarkably scene-chewing, but there’s a lovely nostalgia about it, and some genuine, um, spooky moments in the torchlit woods.

Although it’s full of entertaining conspiracist paranoia, in an odd way (that I find hard to explain properly) in the strange days of 2025 it feels like a more innocent paranoia from a more innocent time. The truth is still out there.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with others, like passing on a curse only slightly nicer. I’d really appreciate that. Readership’s grown a lot over the last few months, and that’s fun. If you’re reading but not a subscriber and want it to appear in your inbox from time to time like a baleful revenant, here you go.

If you want to share any ideas for places that might be interesting to visit in a Maps story, thoughts on the newsletter, interesting links, or the truth about what happened to the seaside amusement arcade with fourteen people in it which disappeared in 1974, then please drop a comment.

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the gaps

There’s an alley in Glasgow and a small gap between two hedges in Wiltshire and a dip near a hilltop in Armagh and the third cubicle along in a rarely-visited public toilet in Rhyl where if you pay attention, you may see the air itself move, as if it were water. It’s easy to dismiss it as a trick of the light, or tired eyes, but if you pay attention, real attention, you may see the faint tracing of light, a sparkle almost beyond our seeing, a shimmer of static.

It will only be there at certain times and it will only be there for moments, but it will be there, because these are places where the fabric of the world sometimes stretches thin and in those places magic is possible. You might be able to step through, from where you are to somewhere else, or you may be able to reach out and move your hands through the glistening air and make things happen that you could not anywhere else, if you know the right signs to make. Or you might look closely into this space, use your fingers to gently part it like a curtain, and be shown wonders in this world or another. be quick though, it will not last for long.

These places exist in many parts of the country, and indeed, many parts of the world, but so few know how to find them, or if they have found them, to notice the magic in the air. When you are out, be aware. Be open. You may yet find your own.

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layby

There’s a moorland B-road high in County Durham which winds its way between the hills. Not many people drive it, and even fewer drive it often, which is why most don’t notice that there’s one layby that seems to shift position every few months. At one time it’s at the top of a hill, on another it’s in the dip of the road before the climb.

If you pull in there, you’ll feel a deep sense of unease, and if you check your tyres when you get home, you’ll see that there’s moss growing in the treads, where there was none before.

Don’t be parked there when it moves, because when it does you won’t be parked there any more, you won’t be anywhere.

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Maps Traced By Other Hands

Back from the 1990s to 2025 by way of the first half of the 20th century, and the Lovecraft Investigations ‘Crowley’ kickstarter didn’t just reach its target, but smashed through it and hit stretch goals. I’m really pleased for Julian Simpson and all those who are going to be involved in making the thing. Research and production meetings are happening, and at some point as backers we’re going to hear what I know is going to be a great show.

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The Ooser Speaks

(taken from the wonderful Readers Digest 'Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain')

There’s a parish in Northamptonshire which is called ‘Stowe Nine Churches’. Back in Saxon times, the locals decided to build a new church and dedicate it to St Michael. It proved not to be as straightforward as planned, as each time the builders started work on the church, a supernatural creature described as ‘a crettur no bigger nor a hog’ undid their work over night, destroying what they had built and moving their stones and tools. On the nineth occasion the creature was happy with the location of the church, and let them be.

(the ninth and final Saxon tower, undisturbed by any crettur. Photo by RATAEDL)

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on the edge of the dial

There’s a charming Victorian cottage for rent just inland from Bamburgh in Northumberland. It’s the opposite of chic minimalism, cluttered with odds and ends chosen with exquisite taste. They should make no sense together, but somehow, they do. Many of the entries in the guest book say things like, ‘cosy,’ and ‘never stopped smiling from when I walked through the door.’

Tucked away in the corner of the snug living room, on a beautiful teak 50s table, sits a vintage radio. Its tuning window is littered with the names of stations that haven’t existed for decades, but it still works - turn it on, wait a few seconds for it to warm up, and then find a station and enjoy the warm, rich sound.

If you have it on at midnight, and tune it to the far left of the tuning window, you will find a station that is not there at any other time. The reader has a soft, neutral accent, and he knows your name and will say it, and then he will tell you five things, some of which you may very much want to know, and some of which you may very well not.

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through the grove

Be wary when driving along a certain road heading north through Staffordshire at a particular time of year. You might have driven some way, and be in that meditative mood that driving brings, when you’re still alert but into the rhythm of the tyres on the road.

The road’s not busy, and you’re driving through that half-world between urban and rural, as if the landscape can’t make up its mind which it is. There’s a low garage that looks as if it should have shut in 1954, but there’s a door open and a car inside being worked on. Then a scrubby field, growing some kind of low crop that you can’t name. A scattering of houses, one with three cars in the front garden, one with washing flying in the breeze, all bright colours like flags at a regatta. Then an entrance to a farm, with a big board propped by the road which just says EGGS in orange chalk, a field with some desultory cows, more houses, a Nisa store, a tile warehouse, fields, and you listen to the music or maybe the radio, and you drive on, tapping your fingers on the wheel, through a little grove of trees that hang together over the road like a canopy, the light filtering green through their leaves and making it seem as if you are under water.

Then you are out the other side of the trees, and you frown a little as you don’t recognise the landscape, even though you’ve driven this road many times before. They must be doing something industrial, you think, without even knowing who the they are. An opencast mine, a quarry. Everything is dark mud, no trees, no hedges, no fields, just torn up soil and wet slabs of clay that glisten like viscera. No green, just brown.

You tut and think what a terrible job they’ve made of it and how could the council let them, and then you see the family rise up out of a dip in the earth, two adults, two children whose sex you can’t determine because they’re all dressed in ragged remnant and as filthy as if they’d rolled in the earth. None of them walk right, and as you slow, wondering if they’d been in an accident, you see that one of the adults is a man wearing a mask that is slipping off one side of his face. You slow more, but don’t stop. They stumble and limp closer, and you realise that it isn’t a mask slipping off one side of his face, it is his face slipping off, the skin sloughing like a snake’s.You jump and stall the car, and it’s then that you notice that in the soil at the edge of the road, there are white knobbles and bumps visible, and in one rut three bony fingers of one hand reaching up from the mud.

Without thinking you start the car again, and drive on a hundred yards. Stop. There’d clearly been an accident, something terrible, wastes, pollutants, how could you leave people in that state. You pick up your phone out of the cup holder to make a call but there’s no signal, and when you look up from it you see more people coming across the fields, scarred and burned and silent. It is as if the world has ended.

I need to get help, you think, and hit the accelerator and drive quick, knowing that you do want to get help but also if you are honest that you do not want to stay on that road amidst the shattered mud any more. In seconds you reach a little grove of trees that hang together over the road like a canopy, the light filtering green through their leaves and making it seem as if you are under water. When you are through it, there’s a field with some sheep lazily eating. One stops, stares at you for a moment, and then returns to its more interesting business. In the distance, there’s a country church.

When you pull over and climb up on the verge and look back the way you came, you can see back past the little grove. There’s just fields and low hills and a line of pylons and a house set a little way back with smoke coming from its chimney. You think about driving back through the grove but you don’t, not then, not ever, because you always drive a different way if you drive at all, because you spend much of your time at home, in the town, where the streets are what they are.

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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. You can just reply to this email if you like.

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Thanks for reading, and don’t park in the layby too long.