Maps of the Lost 34
from a fragment of a scrawl on a whiteboard
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 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 lay neat 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.
Notes from the Cartographer
There’s going to be a Maps book. Maybe a nicely printed zine first as a taster, but that will be a first, not an instead of. Not at the point of being able to say when yet, but it’s going to happen. Talks have been had. It’s exciting.
More, as it firms up.
Outside the Maps realm, my short story “Hell Is Empty” is going to be published in the estimable Supernatural Tales, which I’m really happy about. This year’s been a dive into short fiction (not Maps-style flash, 1500-5000 word short stories), and I have about eight out on submission now, with another two destined to be finished in July for consideration for a couple of anthologies. Some of them are at ridiculously over-ambitious markets, but hey, where’s the harm in having a go. It’s worked out well a couple of times before in my writing life.
While they’re different from writing for Maps, most of them share a common DNA of quiet weirdness and/or an elegiac strangeness. It’s my thing.
BASF E180
Everyone of a certain age ends up with a small pile of old video tapes, of weddings and christenings and dance performances and school plays and much-loved films, and no VCR to watch them on. The more organised will find one to borrow, and buy a gizmo that lets you record to digital on a laptop off a VCR, and the more well-off will send a pile of tapes off to a service that will do it for you, and many will do nothing at all until one day they happen on a VCR at a car boot sale that they’re assured is working and is worth taking the chance on anyway, because it’s only twenty quid.
You might find that in amongst the pile of videos is one that’s not labelled, so after watching some of the best ones you put this one in, just to see if you’d recorded something worth keeping.
You see the static of a blank tape, and are about to press stop when a picture flickers on and off, indistinct and jumpy but you can just about make it out that it appears to be a London street, with people running about backwards and forwards, and what at first you thought was interference on the tape is smoke.
You frown, and think what the hell is this. Isn’t any TV programme I can remember recording, and the camera moves as if it is being hand-held, an amateur video shot on a camera that is nowhere near professional standard. You turn the volume up, and can hear what sounds like metal grinding. And screaming. Lots of screaming.
As the shot shudders and jerks around, you can see why. As well as the people running, there are people just lying, arms and legs jumbled at awkward angles. You want to look away, but you can’t, and the camera stumbles forward, swings to one side, up almost towards the sky, then comes back again.
It’s closer to the people lying in the street, broken and pale, close enough to see that one of them is you, and the one lying next to you is the one you had such an intense relationship with years ago, the one that you talked about being forever, but in the end, like a firework, you were both bright for a moment but then done.
You hit the stop button. Sit there for a minute or two, and your hands are trembling.
Seeing the two of you made you remember the street, that day you’d spilled out of a long lunchtime pub session and were hurrying home, both having phoned in sick to your employers. On this one street, you both fell silent. Held hands for comfort, not a promise of what hands might hold later. Something felt strange, and wrong, and when you turned into another street and the world felt right again, you both walked that little bit more quickly until you were home, but for some reason the walk had taken an hour longer than you thought it had.
When you find the courage to play the video tape again, it’s just static, a snowstorm against black. Nothing to be seen. Maybe. There are moments when you think you can see things in the static.
You burn it at the end of your garden.
As you dig the ashes into the soil, the thought comes into your head that nothing might ever grow in that spot.
the new passenger
There is a particular bus on a route in Lancashire which from time to time shudders to a halt at a bus stop that you won’t find on any map. The stop is by an anonymous terrace of houses, with a dark stretch of trees on the side opposite. There’s a streetlight halfway along the terrace, which has a habit of flickering on and off.
If the bus stops at that stop and the doors open, but no one is standing on the pavement, lean out of your seat and take a look at the driver. If he is staring straight ahead with his hands holding the steering wheel so tight that his fingers have turned white, do not make a sound. He knows what he’s doing, though he won’t talk to you about it, won’t talk to anyone about it.
You won’t hear footsteps, and you won’t see a shape, but you will feel the temperature in the bus drop a little, and you might see a seat depress slightly, as if under a light weight. The new passenger just needs to go into town. Don’t look at the seat though, because if you accidentally make eye contact with the empty space where its head should be, it will follow you home when you get off. If you stay quiet and look at your phone or out the window, it will ignore you, disembark at the final stop and vanish into the streets leaving behind only a faint smell of river mud and burned hair.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
I’ve talked about the first season of the Broken Veil podcast on here before, and have just finished the second, which takes the first and runs with it hard down increasingly weird tracks. John Dee, electronic voice phenomena, occult summonings, incarnate transfers, reality slipping, a shifting Essex countryside, and more. Very well written and produced, and Joel and Will carry the load of the story but are well up to doing so in an engaging, sometimes funny, and at other times genuinely panicked-sounding way. Can’t recommend this enough.
Also in the can’t recommend enough box is the 2016 film, A Dark Song. One of the best depictions of occult practice and ritual you’ll see on film, it’s effectively a claustrophobic two-hander carried off beautifully by Catherine Walker’s restrained performance and Steve Oram’s arsey, foul-mouthed occultist in a tracksuit top. It’s sad, it’s strange, it’s intense, and it veers off into a bold and ambitious ending which I loved. Terrific.
lessons
In a secondary school in Stoke-on-Trent, there is a block which is due to be demolished once a new build is open. There’s a decommissioned science lab in the old block, with a whiteboard on the wall. Out of sight of everyone, every Monday there is a new and complex geometric diagram drawn on the board in a faint black dust, as if traced on by a dirty finger. Each diagram builds on the one before, and no one would understand them unless they were a physicist or an occultist of advanced standing. If either of those two groups - neither likely to be wandering through empty school buildings - did see the diagram and stood in front of it, they would be silent for a few minutes while they worked it out. Then they would shake and shiver and cry until someone kind came to lead them away.
into nothing
It’s a crowded street, peak shopping time before Christmas, and the clouds are pressing down hard and grey, there’s a chill drizzle and a spiteful wind, so most of the crowd on the street are pressing on quick from where they’ve been to where they’re going, heads down until they reach the next blast from a warm air curtain in the doorway to another brightly lit shop.
Which is why you might be the only one who notices.
At first you think you’ve just seen it wrong, a twitch of your eyes, a moment of inattention. A man appears a little way ahead of you, in amongst the shoppers, as if he wasn’t there a moment ago. He appears troubled, frantically looking around. And then he’s gone. Just like that. He was there, and then he wasn’t. He filled space, and then he didn’t.
You look to see behind other shoppers, convinced someone had stepped in front of him, and then you see him blink into life on the other side of the street, just for a moment, even more distressed now, pushing at the air as if at a wall.
Then he’s gone, and the pavement where he stood is empty.
You look around, to see if anyone else has noticed, but they haven’t, and then he flashes into being on your side of the road again, his mouth open as if he is shouting, banging on the air around him, tearing at it with his hands as if trying to open it up.
Then he’s gone, and you don’t see him again. It was all very quick, but as you stand there in the rain and the wind and the crowd moving around you, you think that in that last moment he didn’t just blink out, but something dark wrapped around him and pulled him away, into nothing.
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 the crows bring you.
Looking forward to the collection of these tales.
Loved this one.