Maps of the Lost 30
...from the path to the deep dark woods
the footpath up the hill
There’s nothing exceptional that night, just a late September walk up from the caravan near Ullswater where you’re staying with your partner. You’d meandered round narrow roads and across a farm track, talking about everything and nothing. It had been an impromptu decision to get away at the last minute for a bargain price, spend a lot of time outside and the time not outside in the pub or in bed, and it had been a wonderful few days.
The track leads to a gap in a hedge, and beyond it is a narrow footpath that leads up a steep hill and disappears into the darkness of a small wood.
“I wonder if this goes anywhere,” you say and walk a little way up the path to see. You only get a few yards up the path before you stop. You feel cold and you feel sick, and most of all you feel full of dread. You know that whatever you do, you must not walk up and into those dark woods, you must not take your partner into those dark woods, you must not.
“I don’t think we’ll bother,” you say, trying not to let your voice sound weird and failing. “Looks muddy.”
“It’ll be fine,” your partner says. “Come on.”
“No. I know it sounds weird, but I just feel we shouldn’t go up there. It feels like…something’s waiting. I’m sorry, I sound crazy.”
“It’s OK,” they say quietly and slip their hand in yours to give you a little squeeze of reassurance. “Sometimes we just feel a little weird. That’s not a problem. But it’s important to power through it, because if you don’t, then it does become A Thing. And that is a problem.”
You take a breath. “I know. I don’t know what’s come over me. Let’s do this.”
Their hand gives you a little pull. Time to go. You can do this. You straighten your back and take one step forward.
Then somewhere back behind you, yards back behind you, your partner says, “Look I don’t mind either way love, but if we’re not going up there, let’s go back, I’m bloody freezing.”
You turn and see them there behind you, standing in the gap in the hedge. There is nothing there with you on the footpath up the hill other than the shiver of the trees in the dark wood and a warmth in your hand that turns cold, very quickly.
Notes From The Cartographer
For the first time, I’m off to Derby for the UK Ghost Story Festival at the end of February, and I’m really looking forward to it. The Festival’s been running for six years, and is led by Alex Davis. As if putting on a physical festival isn’t enough work, Alex is also running an online version of the festival with its own set of speakers and topics.
There’s a three-day programme of interviews with authors, panels, workshops, performances and I found it really hard to choose from the competing sessions in each time slot.
It all looks great, but to draw out some highlights: excellent author James Everington’s workshop on ghosts and ambiguity, David Alnwick’s solo performance of The Signalman, the launch of the anthology Unquiet Guests with Dan Coxon, Will Maclean, Alison Moore and Aly Wilkes, and an author panel on ghost stories in modern publishing.
Can’t wait.
Hope that those of you paid subscribers who are reading Sea Change are enjoying it, one new instalment dropping every week. Feels a little Dickensian, serialising a novel, but at least it’s a novel that’s finished and I’m not racing ahead to write each new chapter just before a deadline like Chaz did.
lob
If you walk the country lanes of Wiltshire, you may find yourself in the company of a bent old man with bright eyes and a weathered face. He will offer to show you the hidden byways of the county that few can see, and to tell you the true names of the trees and the flowers and the birds which will enable you to control them. If you ask him his name, he will tell you that it is Lob, or Lob-lie-by-the-fire or Jack Cade, Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade, Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d’ye-call, Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall, Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, or lazy Bob.
And he will laugh, and his merry eyes will twinkle.
Decline his offer. He has many names, many, many names.. You may know some of them, and others belong to civilisations long lost to history, and buried in the sands. He buried some of them.
Do not tell him your own name.
lost
If you’re out and about in South London you might be stopped by a middle-aged man. He’s not at all threatening, he just looks troubled and confused.
“Excuse me,” he says, in an accent that you can’t quite place. “I seem to have taken a wrong turn and can’t place myself. Can you direct me to Dunrick? Or Kenford Rise?”
You smile and shrug and tell him you’re sorry but you don’t recognise those places, perhaps he could ask a cabbie or look in a newsagent’s for an A-Z. He looks sad and bewildered, but thanks you politely and moves on.
In the place where he came from, until one moment there was a bright blue flash and he was not, there is a woman who looks troubled and confused, and is asking for directions to Brixton or Clapham from passers-by who have never heard of either.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
I loved reading this post by Lynda E Rucker on her substack Letter From Somewhere (strong recommend) on the mighty M. John Harrison, and his short story The Great God Pan which (in a very MJH way) he later reworked and grew into the novel The Course Of The Heart.
I love that novel very much. As I commented on Lynda’s post, there are many novels I've enjoyed, loved, gone back to, but there are very few that left me feeling *changed* in the way TCOTH did. Not entirely in a 'good' way either, it felt when I finished it as if the world outside the book just slipped sideways, a little, and cracks appeared. I love it so much for that. It's a book, not a ghost, but it haunts me yet.
Very excited that MJH has a new novel, out in June: The End Of Everything. And it’s a seaside novel, so that’s just about all my obsessions in life wrapped up in one book.
(Lynda’s a terrific writer of strange fiction herself - if you like Aickman, you’ll love her work. I first came across her via her unsettling story ‘The Dying Season’ in the anthology ‘Aickman’s Heirs’, and knew I wanted to read more. You can read ‘The Dying Season’ online - treat yourself.)
I’ve mentioned the brilliant Broken Veil podcast a number of times, and its creators Will MacLean (mentioned earlier in this newsletter) and Joel Morris released a one-off (non-Broken Veil) drama onto their Patreon at Christmas, “Tond.”
Tond was, frankly, terrifying at times but I’m also singling it out for mention because it took one tiny aspect of modern technology, to do with photos on your phone (trying to avoid a spoiler here), and used it to generate much of the creeping dread that runs throughout. I really like stories which engage deeply with the now, and which use it to spin off new ways of making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Simple, small things that we take for granted suddenly made a source of dislocation and horror. Tond does this very well.
The Ooser Speaks
Alas, like a vampire the Ooser rests long and still in a box while the house is rebuilt. So here’s a trip into the ancient mysteries of the past, also known as the first edition of the newsletter.
Near Boston in Lincolnshire, the breezes that blow around the exposed tower known as Boston Stump are said to be the result of a struggle between St Botolph and the Devil. The saint so belaboured Satan that he huffed and puffed, raising a wind that has not yet died down.
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 guilty, 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 nestled neatly 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.
ash francis
On a certain night of the year, residents of the Elham Valley in Kent build a bonfire. As soon as the flames have taken hold, they go into their houses, and they lock their doors, and shutter their windows, and they do not come out again until dawn.
If you walk the valley that night, as the flames start to die down, you will see something that the residents of the valley never see. You will meet Ash Francis. But you will wish you hadn’t.
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 which woods you walk in.
I listened to Tond. Really creepy. I really liked how the story was gradually revealed through the dialogue with the sceptical therapist.