maps of the lost

But they don’t

Looking forward to the evening has carried you through the whole grinding day at work. You’re meeting a small group of friends whom you haven’t seen for a while as it’s not often that you can get together.

Although the clock’s ticked slow, the physics of time at work different to that outside it, you finally spill out of the door and into your car and then you’re home, getting ready, in that beautiful moment between finishing for one day and the start of the next a whole evening of food and drink and laughter away.

You’re first to the pub, but then you always were the one who gets there early, so you order a drink and grab a big table, it doesn’t matter because the place is not busier.

But the place gets busier, and the time comes, and you begin to look at your phone to see if there are any notifications from them, and the place gets busier still and the time is ten minutes ago and it’s funny how none of them are there, so you worry you’ve come to the wrong place so you open up your phone to find the message on the group chat where you agreed the time and place.

But you don’t.

The group chat is not there. Oh God I’ve deleted them, you think, I’ll message one of them to work out what’s going on, and you go into the contacts to find Chris or Anita or Jas or Paul.

But you don’t.

You frantically scroll through email, because you know that Jasminder emailed you a few months ago to share some photos, and Paul sent you a pdf of something, you can’t remember what but you keep all your emails, and you know you can find them.

But you don’t.

You search your call history, because didn’t Chris ring that once, and you search that social media app that you don’t use any more, and then you look through your photos to find them, to prove to yourself that at least you’re not going mad.

But you don’t.

You’ll phone other friends, who don’t know the group well but will have heard you talk about them, who will remember a name, or will have seen you out with them.

But they don’t.

When you’re home, in a final desperate rush of inspiration, you drag boxes from the bottom of your wardrobe, and find the battered album where you should find the photos from your weekend away, where Anita brought a disposable camera, and you all took turns taking pictures of each other, they should be there, and if you don’t find them then surely you’ll find something, some proof that these people you know so well were in your life, are in your life.


But you don’t.

And you won’t.

You are not mad. Your friends were there, and they would come back to you if they knew a way.

But they don’t.

Washing Day

There’s a pleasant village in rural Lancashire that you might find yourself in. It’s hard to say why, but there is a feeling of light and calm in this village, and you find yourself wanting to spend time there. This feeling only grows as you encounter some of the people who live there: they are friendly and kind, and you walk away from each of them thinking what a decent person that was. They each shine with goodness and a kind of purity that leaves you feeling humbled.

Walk down a back lane and through a kissing gate and then down the muddy path to the riverside, and you will see a very old woman from the village on the bank, plunging her hands into the water over and over.

You have happened to arrive on washing day, and the woman is washing out the sins of the village. You have met the villagers when they are as clean as the day they were born.

Do not drink the water. It is black and thick and bitter and tastes of murder and lust and betrayal and spite and revenge.

The Silent Pool

There’s a pool, in the middle of a small copse of trees in Worcestershire, that is locals call the Silent Pool. The water is always very still, and very dark. No insects skate across its surface, and no birds sing in the trees around it.

Local legend has it that the pool is haunted by the ghosts of two children that drowned in it, back in mediaeval times.

With it being so still, you’d think you could look into it and see your reflection, but if you find yourself there, you won’t see yourself. Just dark, unmoving blackness that makes you feel dizzy, as if you might fall in. If you look in it for more than a few seconds, you will, and then you’ll fall and fall and fall and fall until a long time later and many millions of miles away you reach the bottom, and meet what haunts the pool, which is not two children, but something which has been down there for longer than there have been children.

Them

There’s a strangeness about them. If you looked at them for a while, you wouldn’t be able to say what, but then again you probably would not look at them for a while, and would look away and at something else but would not be able to say why, and would tell yourself it was because something else had caught your eye.

They pass as human and they walk amongst us, and you will have passed them, or hoped they did not sit next to you on the bus or the train, and if you walk by one on the street when it’s dark the hairs on the back of your neck will stand up and you will have to fight the urge to run. Anyone watching would wonder why you seem to shiver and walk faster, because all they’d see is you and a small man who offers no threat reading a bus timetable, or a woman sat on a bench, looking as if she is waiting for a friend.

How Beautiful The World Is

If you’re taking a stroll across a certain set of fields in Somerset as the sun dips below the horizon and everything is golden, you may see a hare, running across the field you’re in.

You’ll smile and think how beautiful the world is, and listen to the sound of the birds bickering as the light fades, the white of rabbits’ tails on grassy bank, the shush of the wind in the grass. Keep an eye out for a second hare though, racing through the grass around you.

If you see it, don’t stop to wonder if they are chasing one another, don’t stop to listen to the birds or to watch the gold of the dying sun slide down the hillside, run, run out of this field.

When a third hare joins the first two, they will race through the field, one after the other, and you will realise that they are running a circle around you, and they will run faster and faster, closer and closer, and you will feel dizzy, tired, and you will drop to your knees, and then lie down because the air is warm and the birds sing so sweet, and all you want to do is close your eyes.

You’ll never wake up, and never be found, but next year the grass will grow tall and strong and the trees will bear many berries and the birds will sing, so so loud.

Opening The Maze

If you’re walking through a back street in Shoreditch and see a hooded figure spraying graffiti on a back wall of an empty shop, pause for a moment. If they’re tagging their name, or creating a vivid picture, or a cutting piece of satire then I’d just walk on.

If they’re creating a strange spiral shape, like a maze, do everything you can to stop them as quickly as you can. Do not let them spray that last line.

If you do stop them for just thirty seconds, the lines will fade away as if they were never there, and the hooded figure will curse you and run.

If you don’t stop them, then the portal will open and we’re in a lot of trouble. Not that you’ll know anything about it, as you’ll be the first to be eaten.

Close To You

There’s a market stall in East London which sits at the far end of the market, a little way from the other stalls, caught by the wind that passes down a side street and flaps the tarpaulin that just about shelters the stall from the rain.

There’s not much there, just a few handbags laid out on a plastic sheet. The old man behind the stall sits and stares down at the plastic and will not meet your eye. But the bags look quite like some very expensive ones, and the price handwritten in pencil on little white cards is very cheap, so every now and then someone will buy one. It might even be you, and you’ll be pleased about the bargain that you have found, and wonder how the old man makes a living.

What you don’t realise is that if you cut the bag to pieces and peeled off the lining from the outside you’d see that the side of the lining that you don’t see is covered with words and symbols of power, and every day you carry the bag close to you those words and symbols feed on you. You will grow paler and weaker and fade, and that is how the old man makes a living, because he sells what the bag steals from you to those who want to live on and on and on.

The Party

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

Exclusive Viewing

You might just scroll past it the first few times, but eventually it will catch your eye, on Instagram or on Facebook or on Twitter. An advert which piques your curiosity for the weird and the eerie, an advert which tells you that a haunted house in your area is open for exclusive private viewing to those brave and bold enough to explore it.

There will only be a dozen people who see that advert. Of those, eight will click on it and read the details. Of those, four will go and visit the house. Of those, none will come back.

Don’t think it’s only influencers and political campaigners who have worked out the power of social media. Spiders spin their webs and they catch their flies, and after an awkward and dispiriting time spent hanging upside down wrapped up in silk, the flies get eaten.

Scroll on. Clickety-click.

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.