maps of the lost

Hellfire Cave

A cave in Buckinghamshire was briefly notorious for being a meeting point for the Hellfire Club, and their decadent rituals, which for the most part were about getting drunk and frolicking with whoever was happened to be nearest in the dark.

The Club picked it because it had a bad reputation locally and no gentleman needed to be spotted frolicking by curious rural types. They didn’t know how much they risked by doing so, because the cave had a bad reputation for a reason.

Once a year, on a certain night, something comes walking out of the rock, and out of the cave into the starlight, and it walks the fields of Buckinghamshire and somewhere nearby, someone walking home late from a job or the pub will never be seen again.

Flicker, flicker

If you are walking down a particular street in Edinburgh, you may start to experience the feeling that you can see movement in your peripheral vision. You glance about, but there is nothing there to see. Still though, as you walk, you keep seeing a flicker, as if shadows are flying by. You stop in the street for a moment, shake you head, blink. Still there. You quickly turn your head, as if you might catch something out, but nothing there to see. Glum and anxious, you continue walking, worrying about what it might be and planning on phoning your doctor’s surgery for an appointment as soon as it is open.

Don’t worry. There is nothing wrong with your eyes. The moment you leave this street, the fleeting flicker will stop, and you will not see it again. Unless, that is, you happen to return to this street at a time when the shadows are flying about their business.

The Searcher

In the north Pennines, there is a small hill, just off to one side of the main path. A solitary ash stands on the top of it, and over the years no one has paid much attention to it.

A Viking chieftain lies buried under it, with his armour and his sword and the treasures that he plundered. 

Do not spend time there, especially when the sun has set. You do not have to worry about the Viking, but you do have to worry about the thing which he robbed from which has hunted him over centuries and thousands of miles, and which is close now, very very close.

The Number

If you’re very unlucky, you might begin to notice a three digit number, and then a little while later notice that you have noticed it rather a lot. It could be 712 or 439 or 876, or any other combination. 

But you’ll see it, over and over. On walls. In a card in a window. Carved into a tree. Daubed on to a bus shelter. Spelled out with leaves in a field, or in three small cairns of stones. Over and over, everywhere.

You’re not meant to have seen this number, and the bad news is that your noticing it has itself been noticed. If you are out and get that prickling at the back of your neck that makes you think that you are being watched then you are right, you are. 

There is very little time to spare, so run to a phone box, pick up the handset and key in those three numbers, just once, but very quickly. Help will come sooner than you think.

There aren’t as many phone boxes around as there used to be though, so I hope that this time you are lucky.

Devil’s Drop

In Cotgrave in Notttinghamshire there’s a wood on top of Owthorpe Hill known as Devil’s Drop. No one locally can remember why it’s called that, and despite the name, there are no reports of any strange activity or eerie phenomena that have reached public attention. If you’re walking in the woods one day, you might bump into a man in a Rab jacket and walking boots who is doing the same thing. You’ll nod hello, and he nods a friendly hello back and you both go your separate ways. 

Don’t stop and talk to him though. He dropped something very important in that wood six hundred years ago, and every now and then he goes back to find it.  If he doesn’t find it, which he hasn’t done yet, he might take something else instead. Or someone else.

Dead Spot

Quite close to where you live, there’s a t-junction where you can turn out from a road of quiet bungalows, mostly inhabited by the elderly, onto the much busier main road.

If you are listening to DAB radio, or streaming music or audio in your car, or through a pair of headphones, or if you’re talking on your mobile, you may notice something as you approach the t-junction and turn out onto the main road.

It’s only for a few yards, but you’ll lose the signal, whether it’s radio or streaming over mobile data. Keep going, and back it comes. Go a few steps backwards, and you’ll lose it again. The junction, and a few feet either of side of it, is a dead spot. No signal gets through there. You might speculate whether it’s the configuration of the houses around it, or a dip in the land, but you’d be wrong, because it’s nothing to do with that. 

If you were diligent and checked the time as you pass in and out of this junction, you’d notice that it’s not only mobile signals and the radio that do not work there. That’s why the man who lives in the corner house, the 1930s bungalow by the junction, will never move from there, and it’s why he had the 1930s bungalow built on the site of his previous house, and that house built on the site of the previous, right the way back to when he first discovered the dead spot in 1394.

Can I Help You Dear?

In a small public library in East Anglia, one that has so far escaped the onslaught of the barbarians, there is a librarian who looks as if she should have retired many, many years ago. You might hesitate before asking her a question about a book, as she looks like she might be vague and she has food on her un-ironed blouse and what appear to be thistles in the pocket of her cardigan, but do go ahead, she’ll answer your question. Most people don’t ask her, and if they do, they’ll ask her about a book, which is a shame, as she can and must answer any question put to her, even if it is an answer that nobody else in the world knows. She’s known everything even before there were books, or indeed even before there were languages that they could be written in.

Crunchy Bits

New Brighton is a classic British seaside town but prides itself on having the longest promenade in the country.

Down on the prom and by the beaches the usual folk, as in any seaside town in season, will sell ice creams and shellfish and candy floss. Fill your face, it’s all part of the seaside experience. But on occasion a very tall man in a wide-brimmed hat walks the streets with his basket, selling ‘crunchy bits’. You won’t be sure if it’s sweet or savoury in the little white paper bags, and as sure as anything he won’t tell you, only smile.

If you buy a bag and eat the little crunchy bits, you still won’t be sure. They’re not unpleasant, but you can’t place the taste.

That night, you’ll feel that you’ve overdone it on the longest promenade in the country, as your limbs will ache, and even a hot bath won’t shift the stiffness. You’ll go to bed early, feeling increasingly stiff like you can’t move, and a couple of hours into the night you won’t move ever again, and your body will harden and crackle and split and crumble and in the hour before dawn the very tall man in a wide-brimmed hat will steal up the wall to your bedroom window and whether its shut or not he’ll come in, and he’ll gather you up in his little white paper bags.

The Night Bird

You might find yourself out for a walk at night. Maybe you can’t sleep, or perhaps you are on your way to or from a late shift, or perhaps you just like to walk at night because the world feels different in the moon and starlight, with few about but you, and that silvery feeling that maybe something is about to happen, something unlike the quotidian drabness of the daylight where despite your hopes nothing much ever does.

One night, something does happen. You feel it, rather than see it at first. There’s a raising of the hairs on your arms and neck, not from fear, but like a storm is coming. The shadowy landscape around has changed, but you can’t say how. Perhaps you dismiss it as an over-active imagination or a lack of sleep or just being a bit weird, as you are sometimes. After a moment or two though, all those explanations fall away.

Everywhere around you, the landscape starts to glow. It’s soft, a gentle blue-white, but it’s everywhere: every tree, every hedge, the telephone poles and the street signs, the bricks in the walls and the tarmac of the road, all shiver with the glow. You look around, startled, and then look down and see that you are aglow too: your feet, your hands, your arms, your legs. You take a surprised breath, and when you exhale you can see that too, glowing like a faint mist as it leaves your lips and fades into the glowing world.

You hear a noise, a soft rustle and flap that seems to come from all corners of the sky at once, and you look up and see the stars, bright in the dark sky, but then the noise gets louder and the sky grows dark as the night bird flies slowly above you, its presence only visible by the stars’ disappearance. They reappear as it passes, but it takes three minutes for the night bird is very, very, very large.

The glow around you fades, and you can see it away from you now, a long glitter path into the distance that gradually turns dark as the night bird flies on.

Then everything is back to normal. All except you, that is. You’ll never quite be the same again, for you’ll know that there are things that cannot be explained away, and you’ll wonder what else there is out there. The answer is, there is quite a lot. Really quite a lot.

Play Time

If you live in the wrong house in Dewsbury, in Yorkshire, you might get some callers on the evening of the longest day of the year.Your doorbell will ring at 8:08pm and when you open the door there are three scruffy young children standing there. You think they’re between eight and ten, but you find it hard to tell because they’re so dishevelled, as if they’ve just been spending the evening playing at the bottom of a ditch where the water still runs and the mud still sticks.


Hello, you’ll say, because you are always polite, even with the unexpected.



Speaking in chorus, in a sing-song voice they ask you if a child that they name is coming out to play.

You must be mistaken, you say. Sorry, but there’s no child of that name here.


They ask you again, in the same sing-song chorus, as if they hadn’t heard you.

I’m sorry, you say, I think there’s been a mix-up. That’s my name, but I’m a bit old to come out and play.

They ask you again, in the same sing-song chorus, as if they hadn’t listened to you, if you are going to come out to play.

Shut your door. Do not answer it again that night. If you do that, you’ll never see them again. If you take one step out of it - well, you’ll find out, won’t you but it won’t be pleasant and it will take a very long time.