A bumper story issue, this time around, ten stories, six of them new - which is what I know you’re all here for, anyway. Enjoy.

(photo courtesy of Google Streetview, which sees all manner of…Things)

there are no birds

Somewhere, on the outskirts of a town in Suffolk, there’s a quiet housing estate, built in the nineteen-twenties. One resident, often found pottering in their garden, has always been unsure whether they cared for the feature over the fence in their neighbour’s garden, a slab of stone on a low mound surrounded by wild flowers. It takes a while before they realise that even during the summer the shadow from the stone does not move with the sun. While every other shadow creeps or pivots, this one remains unmoving, all day long. While they find this somewhat unnerving, they find much more so the way that their neighbour, a retired civil servant, spends every day between 11:30 and 12:30 sitting in a deckchair, staring at the tip of the shadow, and seemingly talking to himself very quietly, very quickly, and now and then fluttering one hand in the air, as if tracing the flight of a bird.

But there are no birds, and you realise that you have never seen one in or above his garden.

take a ride and see what’s mine

You’re not sure if it’s the second time or the third time. Hell, for all you know it may be the fifteenth and you just didn’t notice. But this time, you do.

The car that overtakes you is an unremarkable red Ford, but you recognise it and the driver, a woman in late-middle age. It passed you a little while back, but you don’t remember over-taking it in turn. A young man is sat in the passenger seat, staring ahead, jaw slack, as if he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open.

Gradually, the car disappears out of sight, you take a turn-off onto another dual carriageway, some more songs play and you still have hours to drive.

Then, miles on, she passes you again. Same car, same woman. Different passenger, an older man, slightly confused as if he’s just forgotten something very important. What are the odds of that you think, and then you laugh. She’s driving about ten miles an hour faster than you, and it’s not long before the car is out of sight.

Half an hour later, every light on your dash comes on. The car splutters and chokes and stalls. You manage to guide it to the verge, too shocked to swear until you stop and then you swear a lot. You’d meant to renew your breakdown cover the other week, but there was always something else to do first.

A red car passed you and pulls up just in front. The driver’s door opens and the woman walks to your car, looks in, and tap, tap, taps on your window.

Don’t wind down your window. This is what will happen if you do.

“I can give you a lift,” she will say. “Come on.”

You will look ahead at her car. The passenger seat will be empty. There will be a small voice in your head that says you shouldn’t but it is such a small voice and so, so far away. You will get out of your car, walk to hers, and open the passenger door.

mind the gap

column ka/231/42

In a quiet, brick-paved Kilburn cul-de-sac, there is a streetlamp known to the council as KA/231/42, that all the residents think is faulty, as it comes on and off out of sync with the others. What they don’t realise is that the light only comes on when a 2003 Vauxhall Corsa is parked beneath it.

The car appears roughly three nights a month, always parked perfectly parallel to the kerb, though no one has ever seen it arrive or witnessed anyone stepping out of it. For its age the outside of the car is immaculately clean but if you were to look up whether it was taxed and MOT’d you would see that the tax expired in 2011 and has never been renewed. On the back seat are three neatly bundled copies of local newspapers from the same year.

When the car is there, the lamp remains lit even during the day. When it is not, the lamp goes dark immediately, regardless of whether it is dark. The local council’s lighting department has no record of Column KA/231/42 ever being installed.

unit 141

There’s a self-storage facility in Oldham, where it is quite common for the motion sensors to trigger at 3am. It’s a twenty-four hour facility, and it’s not unknown for there to be coming and going, but the security guard is charged with checking that whoever is in, is meant to be there. He’s used now to looking up at the CCTV at 3am and seeing no-one there. Quite often now he just sees the time, rolls his eyes, and goes back to playing a game on his phone. If he were to go down and look more closely on the morning after, he would see that the dust on the concrete floor was disturbed in a narrow path which twisted its way to Unit 141, which has been locked, paid for since 2008, and never visited or opened.

the flickering gaps

You might be waiting in your car at a level crossing in Lincolnshire watching the train pass and you might notice, in the flickering gaps between carriages, that the field the road runs through on the far side is not the field you have seen many times before when driving that road.

The train passes, and the crossing barriers lift. The field is the field again:wheat, a hedge at the far side, a line of pylons, one bent-over hawthorn the farmer has left alone

You do not, that evening, tell your partner what you had glimpsed in the gaps, because you cannot describe it

written in the cards

There’s a regional archive in the East Midlands, which holds a card index that was digitised in 2008. The card index should have been destroyed a year later after checking, but a Mr Potts who was hired to do so left the job and did not claim his fee, claiming that, in his words, the index was ‘not amenable’. No one got round to hiring anyone else, probably as a budget cut came in, and then another, and then another, and the index sits there, in wooden drawers pushed behind a partition.

The index was an attempt to draw together and catalogue all births, deaths, and marriages registered in the county between 1837 and 1907. It is correct, fully detailed, and tallies precisely with the digitised records held centrally. However, the card index also contains a second set of cards which are interleaved with the first, in the same hand, but on a different colour card and without any matching entries in the digitised records.

These other cards record births that did not occur, deaths that no one remembers, and marriages between people who, according to every other available record, were never married.

A volunteer attempted, a few years ago, to reconcile some of the entries but was unable to complete his work. He also left the project and he spent the better part of a year not leaving his house. When he notified the records centre that he was leaving his volunteer role, all he wrote was, ‘Potts was not wrong.’

they come and they go

On the Northumberland coast, between two larger and more popular villages, there’s a hamlet made up of eighteen houses, a chapel converted to a holiday let, and a slipway that is no longer in regular use. The harbour silted up in the 1970s. The boats moved up and down the coast. The few remaining residents are mostly the children or grandchildren of the last generation of fishermen, and they have a quiet knowledge of the place that they do not share with the visitors who come for the views.

A low cairn of loose stones stands on the headland to the north, about a metre high. It’s not marked on any map. If you were to ask the eldest of the residents, she’d tell you that it had been there for as long as anyone can remember, back through generation after generation.

The custom of the place was that anyone who lost someone to the sea added a stone to the cairn. This was never taught. Children just learned it by watching the adults, the way that children learn most of what matters. None of them will speak to an outsider about this, but although many stones were added through the generations, the cairn remained the size that their grandparents and great-grandparents and many before that knew.

A folklorist from a northern university, working on a project about grief traditions in small fishing communities, was received with politeness, and left with a complete absence of useful information. She wrote a careful and respectful chapter in her project that did not mention the cairn.

In her field notes though you can find the question that she asked herself, and which she has come to believe is the question that the villagers were all, in their different and polite ways, declining to answer. Her question was, if so many stones were added for each death, why were an equal number later taken away? She thinks often of what she believes to be the answer, but has told no one.

the nothing

There’s nothing different about this morning, it’s your same weekday routine. Alarm at half-five, swimsuit on, clothes on, moka on, coffee drunk, pick up your bag from where you left it beside the front door last night. Short drive to the pool, into one of the cubicles to take off what you’re wearing over your suit, and then locker, water, breathe.

Strokes, breathe. Strokes, breathe. You feel the water and the physical motion wash away thought, and you reach that point where you stop being the swimmer, just become the swim.

The big clock moves round, and you get out, your legs a little jelly, but that’s good. You feel good. Shower, and you lift your face to it, enjoying the moment. Then you go back to a cubicle to get changed, so you have time for another coffee and a croissant before you get to work. The pool’s getting busy now, lots of chatter and voices, the early morning but not as early as you regular crowd.

Then, when you’re just about finished getting ready, you realise you can’t hear anyone anymore. You can’t hear the splash of the water or the rumble of the aircon or the smack of flip-flops on tile. You shake your head, to dislodge water from your ears, remember you’d worn your plugs, lift a hand but they were out, you’d taken them out and put them back in their case.

You start to worry that you’ve missed something, an evacuation of some kind and so you hurriedly push your towel into your bag and open the door to look out.

There’s nothing to see. You blink once, blink twice, feel a little sick. There is nothing to see. No off-white floor tiles, no row of cubicles with orange doors, no metal pipes running up the wall, no wall, no nothing. Although you don’t know how you can tell, you know that you are not even looking at a space where the pool used to be. There is nothing there, not even a space. Just nothing, in all directions.

You feel dizzy, and terrified about what might happen if you fell forward into the nothing, so you step back, shut your cubicle door.

A moment later there are voices, calls of greeting echoing off the walls, an announcement that two of the lanes are about to be closed off for non-club members, the hiss of a shower. You open the cubicle door, and see everything is there again, just as it was.

Now, in the mornings, you get up early, moka on, dress, coffee, trainers on, and out in the open to run and run until you can’t think.

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 not to see behind the veil.

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Does serialisation work at novel length? Be interested to know. The obvious rejoinder is that it did for Dickens, across much longer books, but I am no Dickens and also, to be fair, he didn’t have to contend with the tiktokification of attention.

For those paid subscribers for whom it didn’t work bit by bit, I’ll post the novel in full today, if you’d like to read it in one go.

Can’t let a post go without a story though, so….

departing

Darkness comes in fast at this time of year, and you got caught out, further along the beach than you’d planned to walk. The light faded almost with every step, and you had to be careful as you crossed a strand of rocks, not wanting to lose your footing and hurt yourself on a deserted beach. The sea is just a restless greynow, a cat pawing at the beach.

As you walk up through the dunes and onto the road that leads inland, headlights come your way. You step back from the road in case you’re not seen. A small green hatchback passes you, and there’s just enough light left to see the dark figure of a man inside. He doesn’t look at you as he passes, but pulls up soon after, where the road ends and the dunes begin. You expect him to get out, which makes you a little apprehensive, but he doesn’t.

The driver sits there motionless, staring out to sea. Enough, you think, this is creeping me out, or maybe he is troubled and wants solitude, so you are just about to turn away when it happens.

The interior of the car lights up, a brilliant blue-white that hurts your eyes. You squint at the car to see where it’s coming from, but it seems to have no obvious source. It comes from everywhere, and nowhere all at once, as if the air inside the car has been replaced with light, poured in like water.

Then abruptly as it started, it stops. You’re left with nothing but the afterimage, brilliant white windows drifting across your vision until they’re gone, and everything is dark again. Far out at sea there is a distant flash of brightness, like a flicker of lightning right at the horizon, but in a moment it is gone.

When your night vision returns, you peer at the car, and think you know what you have seen, but do not want to have seen it. You nearly walk away, but your curiosity gets the better of you. You have to know.

You were right. When you walk up to the car, there is no one in it.

The three of them stood by the harbour wall.

“We’ll walk you home,” Sal said.

John looked down into the water. “Davey’s not going to be happy about the state of the boat,” he said. “What are you going to say?”

“Are you mad?” Simon said. “We aren’t going to say anything. Right Sal?”

“I -”

“No, no discussion sis, we can’t t…

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“Can Sal really drive this thing?” John as…

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“Simon,” Sal shouted. “Stop.”

“Sal, it’s Dad. It’s Dad.”

“Simon!” Sal screamed this time, and chas…

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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.

If you enjoyed this newsletter and thought other people might too, or want to share it on social media (please do!), please use this link.

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Thanks for reading, and be careful of what the crows bring you.

“Greg Downing,” Sal said. “It’s me.” She was standing where the path petered out into the short grass of the cliff top. “Fight him Greg. You’re being used. It’s not you Greg, this isn’t you, I know th…

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If you like the very short fiction I publish under Maps, and wanted to read some of my full-length short stories that have been published in various places, my collection ‘Ice Age’ is available on Amazon, which includes stories which were reprinted in year’s best collections or featured in anthologies nominated for Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards.

Anyway, can’t let this just be a plug, so…

SHIFT

You may find yourself walking along the banks of the Wear in Durham at dusk one October, and noticing much to your surprise that the cathedral on the hill is in the wrong place, on the wrong bank of the river. You know where it should be, perhaps you have lived in the city for many years, but yet, there it is.

You stop, look around. No one else is on the river path. You look at the cathedral for some time. Then, as you blink, it is gone. You know before you look that it is back in the right place. You walk on, confused, and scared that perhaps there is something wrong with you. Nothing like it happens again, and you tell yourself that you were just tired. It had been a busy day. Each time you walk that path you look up to check, but when you do you cannot avoid an unsettling feeling that the cathedral is aware of being checked.

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“Sorry?” the old man’s voice was still a whisper, but it carried more of it…

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The thing carried on its slow move towards him, not showing any signs that it could hear or understand. He tested it, taking a pace out towards the centre of the cave. Immediately it changed direction slightly, so that it was still moving towards him, finger …

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John stopped where he was. The stone moved again, and John could see that Elias was standing on the far side, leaning against the rock. In the darkness, John could not tell where the stone ended and Elias began.

“You run, you run like a little child, and now you come to me.”

“Yes,” John said, because he could not thi…

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marbles

If you are shopping in a multi-storey department store in Leeds, you might take a wrong turn through a set of heavy fire doors, mistakenly thinking that it was the way to the toilets or the cafe. Instead, you find yourself in a long corridor with a slightly sickly yellow carpet. At the end of the corridor is a single, glass-topped counter with no signage.

A woman stands behind it, wearing a smart uniform which in some way reminds you of films about the war years, while not resembling anything in particular. She is wearing a pair of brilliant white gloves, and is busy with something on the counter. As you get closer you will see she is counting what appears to be marbles into indigo velvet bags. When you reach the counter, she will look up, smile too widely, and say, “You are early, but since you’re here…”

She will reach under the counter and pull out a small box wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, and she will lift it onto the counter as if it is very, very heavy. Don’t take it. Apologise, say that you have taken a wrong turning, and go back the way you came. The woman will nod, and go back to her counting and sorting, and if you try to go back through to the corridor again, you will find nothing more than a cleaning cupboard.

The box was meant for someone who died forty-six years ago, and who may still come to collect it.

Notes from the Cartographer

The Chapter Too Dark for ‘Wind in the Willows’ This haunted me as a very young child, in a mix of fear and wonder. It’s a departure in tone and theme from the woodland adventures in the rest of Wind in the Willows. Suddenly the everyday conflicts of weasels with aspirations of power and the strain of trying to keep your wayward toad friend from getting into trouble fall away, the tone of the story hushes, and our protagonists are silenced by awe as they come face to face with the numinous.

As far as I can remember, I didn’t think: what the hell is this? I think I read on avidly, falling into awe myself, aware of the presence in this story of something I could see but not understand.

It must have been formative, as Pan’s been something of a recurring obsession in my writing and reading. Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, M John Harrison’s short story of the same name, Saki’s The Music On The Hill, E.M Forster’s The Story of a Panic, The Man Who Went Too Far by E.F. Benson…any more suggestions are always welcome.

And as for the original meaning of Panic, I have experienced it twice, both times in the Lake District. Once in a quiet valley near Helm Crag, but most of all one night on an innocuous path up into a wooded hill near Ullswater, where I have no shame in admitting that I turned the family around and headed away as fast as we could. We weren’t wanted there.

Not overtly featuring Pan, but his shadow hangs dark and wild over it: one of my favourite stories is the fever-dream that is Machen’s The White People. Really enjoyed reading this reflection on the story by the talented Lynda E Rucker, whose stories are well worth a read, as well as her Substack, Letters From Somewhere.

mr clackers

You are walking through Huddersfield, and you have got yourself a little lost, just as the light is starting to fade from the sky. You walk down the fifth street of identical looking terraces, and just as you pass a back lane, you hear a long piercing cry, and you stop, startled. You hear it again, and this time you think cat, and the note of the cry changes and you think it’s in pain. You look around as if there is someone else who might help you, but there is not. You like to think that you are the kind of person who helps hurt animals, but you are also the kind of person who likes there to be someone else who might help.

You summon up your best spirit of doing things you are fearful of, turn down the back lane, and find a scruffy young girl, no more than six years old, sat on a crushed pizza box, outside the backyard gate of a dilapidated terraced house. The gate hangs slightly open, dark red paint now peeling and showing wood underneath, white like bone.

“Hello,” she says.

You say hello back, but in a neutral way, because she is a little girl and you are on your own in a back alley and you worry about such things, same as you worry about the man with a backpack on the train and the pollution you can’t see and the headlines that you can. Her face is dirty, as if you could run a finger over her cheek and make a white line. But of course you do not.

“Are you looking for a cat?” the little girl asks you.

“I am - well, not my cat. I just thought I heard one as I was passing and it sounded like it was in distress. I thought it might be trapped, or hurt.”

“He’s playing with Mr Clackers,” she says. “In there.”

“Ah,” you say, trying to remember how you talked to your nieces and nephews when they were just six and still interested in talking to you. “Is Mr Clackers your imaginary friend?”

She smiles a smile that is a lot, lot older than six.

“Of course he is,” she says. “Go on in.”

The gate is open. The cat cries. The sky darkens. The girl smiles. Mr Clackers waits.

floor 44

The lift in a commercial office building near Holborn on occasion will briefly pause and judder a little between floors, seemingly at random. It resumes its journey smoothly, and there is never a problem with it stopping at the right floors, or in any other aspect of its use. Staff have noticed that when the lift pauses where it shouldn’t, the display flickers to floor 44, before returning to the correct floor. The building only has 12 storeys. The lift engineers have been out a few times, have not been able to diagnose a fault, and have certified the lift as safe to use.

It is vanishingly rare for this to happen, but if the doors ever open during that pause, you will see a corridor beyond the doors. If someone gets in the lift from there, do not look them in the eye. And whatever you do, do not walk out of the lift. Once you walk out of the lift you will stay there, and floor 44 is not for you, or for me, or for anyone like us.

Maps Traced By Other Hands

Lots of good things happening this month. The new series of the podcast Broken Veil has started on their Patreon, and it’s picked up where the last one left off with the first two episodes, We Be Death and All The Devils Are Here. I’m really looking forward to seeing where it goes.

One of the BV duo, Will MacLean is also the author of the terrific Apparition Phase, which I think is the best ghost story at novel-length I’ve read in a long, long time. His new novel, Solace House is out on 7th May in the UK, and has the utter catnip to me blurb of ‘The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House’. Can’t wait.

And in more spooky shit returns news, those of you who enjoyed The Lovecraft Investigations will want to be all over the crowdfunder for the next series, Call of Cthulhu. Here’s the trailer.

Crowdfunded, because I think Julian was increasingly frustrated with the constraints the BBC was placing by the time it got to the fourth series. Details of the crowdfunder here, and if you haven’t listened to any of the previous seasons, you can find them all on the BBC: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Whisperer In Darkness (my favourite season), The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Haunter of the Dark. So much fun, and although modern and set within the framing conceit of a podcast pursuing the stories, they all still nail that eldritch vibe.

access

At a large office park outside Reading, the access control system logs every card swipe through every door. Analysis of a full year’s data has revealed a pattern: every so often a card is swiped into the building at 2:15am that is not registered to anyone employed there, and has not been issued by the facility. The card is then used on one particular room. CCTV shows nothing. A cross reference with the maintenance logs would show that every day after that pattern, there are requests from the users of that room to check if there is a leaking pipe, or a window letting rain in, because there’s always patches of water on the floor. Like footprints.

the cairn

Beware on travelling on a coach over the Pennines to Manchester when it’s the fifth day after the winter equinox and the moon is waning.

Nine people who did will never forget their journey. They were scattered about the coach, everyone leaving a seat free next to them, as the coach was nowhere near full. Most had headphones in, some were listening to music, some were watching video. One woman was reading a hardback book.

The coach lumbered up a steep hill over a valley-bottom mill town, leaving the brick chimneys and a forlorn looking playground on the outskirts behind. As it reached the top, it approach a small, simple stone cairn to the side of the road, and at that point, nine phones all rang, and rang out loud. It didn’t matter if headphones were plugged in or connected by bluetooth, it didn’t matter than many of the phones were switched to silent, they all rang at once, and rang out loud, very loud.

The display showed a call, but no incoming number, just fragments of characters that looked as if the screen was damaged. The passengers looked at each other, and answered the call.

Most only listened to the howling, terrible screaming for a second or two in shock, before they started to jab at the end call sign on their screen, or thumb at the button on the side, and after a second or two more four of them had thrown their phones down on the floor, and were recoiling back in their seats. Nothing stopped the screaming.

Then the coach crested the hill, passed the cairn, and started down the hill. The phones all went silent. The passengers looked at one another. Those who had thrown their phones down picked them up. They looked at the phones, as if there could be a physical fault. They looked at each other. Someone laughed, a nervous, inappropriate laugh.

The driver drove on. He’d driven this route for years, and when it’s the fifth day after the winter equinox and the moon is waning he always puts his phone in a metal box, stuffed with foam, and slides it to the very back of the luggage compartment for the duration of the journey.

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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