Maps of the Lost volume 11
from the Underground station that doesn't exist
feathered
You might be walking through the trees on Haughmond Hill in Shropshire on a beautiful spring day, when the air tastes clean and fresh and although it’s chill the sun shines down with the promise of warmth to come. As you enjoy the unfolding of the leaves and plants around you as they reach towards summer, you slowly catch up with another walker.
As you draw near to him, you see that he has a feather that’s become attached to the back of his fleece jacket. It’s beautiful, a rich black and the brightest of whites, and when the sun catches it as the man walks between the trees the black reveals an iridescent green that almost stops your breath, it’s so beautiful.
You might be minded as you walk past to pull it off, or to say to the man that he has a feather stuck to his back and remove it for him.
Don’t.
He has been marked for a reason, and if you take it from him then you will carry the mark without knowing it, and you do not want to see what will come that night looking for he or she who is marked, you really don’t.
Notes From the Cartographer
Last month I was reflecting on writing Maps of the Lost, and some of the themes that have emerged. I do love that it seems to strike a chord with people, these odd little stories, and that you the readers enjoy the frisson of the strange, the weird, the scary.
What’s more, I enjoy it too. Very much. I’ve written short fiction, novels, plays and audio-drama across a range of genres, to vary degrees of success, but there is nothing across all of that which is simply as fun as writing Maps. It’s like play, not effort, and that’s in part because I love immersing myself in a world off-kilter, eerie and strange.
Interesting what it is that appeals to us all at the heart of weird fiction. I read an article this month about a scientist who was proposing that dreams are a way of stopping us falling into familiar ways of thinking, and of encouraging innovation and creativity in the brain so we can then apply it in real life. His argument was that we do similar when training neural networks for machine learning and building AI - programmers throw in noise and randomness in the data to stop the network being able to do one thing really well but not capable of learning an adapting.
Erik Hoel’s theory is that maybe the same is true for the brain. By providing it with the surreal, the nonsensical, the dreams that don’t follow geometry or physics or logic, we’re encouraging the brain to keep being open to new ideas and not being bound by what we already know.
Hoel relates this explicitly to the reading of fiction, and maybe (amateur theorising klaxon goes off at full volume here) weird fiction, where the world doesn’t work in the way we expect, does this for us in particular, with its dreamy, not of this world feel.
Brian Evenson’s a terrific writer of horrific and strange fiction, and a quote from an interview with him has stayed with me:
“I think I’m always asking: how do you live in a world that is not the world you thought it was?”
I think a lot of the fun I have with Maps is asking that question on a very small scale, over and over.
witch cult
You might be browsing in the folklore section of a bookshop when a tall man with eyebrows like caterpillars may ask you what you know about a witch cult which exists in a village in Lancashire. If you know anything of it, do not tell him.
There is a witch cult in this village, and there has been since before there even was a village. The witches quietly go about their business, making sure the crops grow and the cattle and sheep do not sicken, and that child’s persistent cough goes away, and that planning application for a sprawling Amazon warehouse across greenbelt land gets withdrawn.
The man is a witch hunter and he has murdered many.
Take some time away from work immediately and travel to the village. When you are there, take the path that winds up a hill to where the gibbet used to stand, and sit on one of the low stones there and wait. The witches will know you are there, and sooner or later they will come to see you. Warn them about the man. You are not at risk from them, and they will be grateful to you and see you safe away.
But please, please: when you go, make sure you are not followed to the village.
mind the doors
Have you seen the new tube station on the Northern Line between Aldgate and Liverpool Street? Most people who see it assume that it’s not open yet, because the signs on the platform aren’t yet up, and the tube almost never stops there. If you are one of those people who can see it, and the tube does stop there, it’s probably best you don’t get off. No one else on your train can see it other than you, no one else will remember the train even stopping there, no one else on your train will notice you step off, and when the police are painstakingly trying to piece together your last movements, no one on the train or working for TfL will be able to explain why the carriage CCTV goes dark for a few seconds and then when it comes back on there’s just an empty seat where you were.
Your name may get mentioned from time to time in books of mysterious disappearances. And sometimes, in the early hours of the morning when no trains are running and the fluffers and the maintenance crews are working their way down the lines, they may think they hear your voice coming from the tunnel walls, but they will pretend it was just their imagination, just an echo, just like they do with all the other voices.
Maps Traced By Other Hands
I’ve mentioned it in the newsletter before, but Hellebore is always a delight, and the new issue landed a couple of weeks ago, and is as beautifully produced and interesting as ever. The magazine is described as:
a collection of writings and essays devoted to folk horror and the themes that inspire it: folklore, myth, history, archaeology, psychogeography, and the occult.
The latest issue is themed around uncovering…the subterranean world, the buried, and what might return from it.
In The Unearthing Issue we look at these stories to examine what once was buried and analyse the consequences of its disinterment. The re-emergence of cursed objects, human remains, and Martian spaceships threatens us with the repetition of past traumas and forgotten histories. But if the earth often acts as a repository of our darkest truths, the act of unearthing forces us to confront them. In spite of fears and tribulations, only by learning about our past will we stand the chance of breaking the cycle.
Not mentioned before, but well worth touching on is the fantastic Nightjar Press. Produced by Nicholas Royle, himself a fine writer, Nightjar produces regular limited edition single short-story chapbooks by individual authors. They’re beautifully designed (by Jon Oakey), and Mr Royle has excellent editorial taste - there are some terrific stories in these.
One of the latest features a story by David Rudkin, who has a stellar history of writing for stage and TV, and whom lovers of the weird will recognise as the writer of the classic, strange (and in my case, childhood dream-haunting) Penda’s Fen.
And the name? As it says on the website:
The nightjar – aka corpse fowl or goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies silently at dusk or dawn as it hunts for food. The nightjar is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. In her poem ‘Goatsucker’, Sylvia Plath wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’.
The Ooser Speaks
(taken from the wonderful Readers Digest 'Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain'
A letter was published in 1935 (in the long-deceased Surrey County Magazine) which described the activities of a witch who lived in Ditchling, near Brighton. She had the arcane power of immobilising farm carts, although the article is not very clear on how this was a useful thing to be able to do, but hey ho, you get the dark powers you’re given.
One clever carter found a way to flush the witch out: he cut notches in the spokes of an immobilised wheel and there were immediate yells from a nearby cottage, and an old woman came running out, blood streaming from her fingers…which had exactly the same number of cuts as there were notches on the carter’s spokes.
tasting menu
If you keep your eyes open in north-west London, you may notice some well-dressed men and women disappearing into what looks appears to be the most unlikely of places: sometimes a closed-down shop, other times an empty office block.
These golden people are visiting the most selective of pop-up restaurants, only known to a few of the most privileged. You might even recognise a face or two from the highest echelons of society, but I’d take care to avoid your face being seen.
You won’t be allowed in, and you won’t get to try the tasting menu which delivers the most exquisite cooking, up there with the most famous of restaurants.
The one quirk of this nameless restaurant though, is that throughout the menu they only use one kind of meat, and the menu is silent as to what it is. The diners know though. They know.
Secrets The Wind Whispers
Years late to the party as usual, I’ve been listening to The Black Tapes. It’s a ‘Serial’ style docudrama which opens with what’s meant to be a one-episode look at people who investigate the paranormal, but then draws the journalist into a much bigger and more dangerous investigation. The structure’s a little X-Files style, with each week bringing a new case, but with an overarching plot starting to develop and link them as the first season goes on.
Some of the dialogue is a little didactic at times, and the acting is occasionally variable (no, Percival Black, that is not an English accent or anything even near an English accent or even anything near anything near an English accent), but on the upside it pulls together some interesting strands about sacred geometry, maths and music and creates some genuinely chilling moments. I enjoyed season one on the whole, and am just starting season two but from what I’ve read I should prepare to be disappointed.
It’s such a common criticism of what a lot of drama gets wrong (the ‘Lost’ syndrome) - that point when it becomes apparent that the writers have taken an exciting idea and run with it, but have absolutely no clue where it’s going or how to end it, and that becomes more apparent as you go, and it just…fizzles out.
I guess that’s one of the advantages of writing Maps - there’s no over-arching story arc to worry about, each piece is self-contained. But I have noticed themes and strands reoccuring, and echoes from one story to another, and wonder whether I might occasionally play with that more.
the first floor
Walk down a Manchester street in the late evening, and you might pass a closed down shop between another selling phone cards on the one side, and a scruffy travel agent on the other. There’s a flat above it, lit up, the sounds of a party coming from open windows, and the door to the street is ajar. It sounds as if everyone is having a grand time, and you may be tempted to go in, and to climb the stairs to the party.
Don’t.
A few days later you may be glad of this advice, when your work happens to take you down that same street, and there it is, between a shop selling phone card on one side, and a scruffy travel agent on the other, just a gap like a mouth with a tooth missing where a building once was, old foundations overgrown with weeds
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, as I’d really like to shape this newsletter to be what you’d like to read and hear. So, ideas, suggestions and comments welcome. You can just reply to this email if you like.
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