#mapsofthelost

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SOUND MIRRORS

Hidden away in Fulwell in Sunderland, behind a Volkswagen garage, is a sound mirror, a 4 metre high concave concrete dish pointed out towards the sea. They were built during the first world war, to give early warning of zeppelin attacks. A microphone would point into the dish, and an observer would sit and listen over headphones for the distant sound of engines, and could then give a precious fifteen minutes early warning.

You have no microphone, but stand in front of the dish anyway, and listen. When there is no traffic, no sounds of shouting kids on bikes, you might hear the faintest of beautiful songs, a song that will bring tears to your eyes, a song that moves you more than anything in your life ever has, a song that makes you realise that you have never known beauty until now.

Turn and walk away though, no matter how beautiful it is. If you listen too long, when the song finally stops you will walk away from the sound mirror, and you will walk down Sea Road past the Metro station, past the shops, down past the park and over the road and across the sand of the beach and out into the water and you will swim into the waves and out of sight to where the singers wait for you with their golden hair and their beautiful smiles and their open arms with which they will embrace you and hold you tight and pull you under and into the darkness.

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Stop

There’s a street in Norwich where you might walk and feel as if you’ve had a touch to your arm, or a caress of your neck. You’ll pause for a second and then smile, put it down to a small gust, an errant catspaw of wind deflecting off the buildings.

If you walk it on the wrong day though, you will be stopped in your tracks by what feels like a pressure at the centre of your chest, stopping you moving any further forward. You break out into a sweat, and feel dizzy and unsettled and are terrified that something medical and terrible is happening to you. You cannot move. You can hardly breathe. You strain to move forward, but cannot. But then the pressure is released, and you almost fall flat on your face. You look around, embarrassment swamping your fear, but nobody seems to have noticed. An exploratory step forward feels normal, then another, you can breathe easily and freely and so you walk on, and promise yourself that if it happens again, you will go straight to your GP.

By the time you get home it feels like a dream, half-remembered the morning after. Until you are in your bedroom, getting changed, and you see the vivid red handprint, right in the middle of your chest.

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Hail To The King

You’re walking home late at night, through a part of West London that’s near where you live, but not enough to be familiar. You’re a little drunk, and the streets are very empty tonight. As you walk down an empty road between blank-faced houses, you see your shadow stretch out in front of you, painted on to the pavements by the street lights.

And then you see the top of another shadow, from someone just behind you to the left, and you prickle with tension, because you missed the footsteps behind, and you wonder whether to turn but don’t want to show weakness. The shadow grows in height as the person gets closer and then it is the same height as yours as if the person is next to you, and then you feel the slightest of breezes on a windless night, and the shadow over-takes yours, and keeps going briskly down the street, and it is only then that you stop and you turn to see that the street is empty behind you, and you spin back round to see that the street is empty in front of you, apart a momentary darkness on the pavement ahead, but then turns the corner and has gone.

You have met the King of Shadows, and although you don’t know it, your life will never be quite the same again, because it won’t be the last time.

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BENEATH

When you spend your life wading through human waste and destroying giant monsters made of baby wipes and chicken shop fat, you would not be surprised by much. But there's a sewerage worker in west London who saw something that changed his world. One night, the worse for drink, he shared his story in a Kilburn pub and I record it for you here as a near verbatim entry to the Maps of the Lost - although the precise directions are uncertain, as I will admit to some large measure of drink being taken.

"I'd been tasked with checking some damage reported in an obscure off-branch of the Kilburn to Wick Lane mid-level that runs into the Northern Outflow Sewer. One of the main passages was getting reports of a leak coming down from above, and we were pretty sure it was a disused minor sewer running about thirty feet off the main - one of those that you had to go back to the old maps to find. I was meant to take a look along the old route with Eddie, but surprise surprise he's on the sick again, knows just how much you can take for the year before they start making noises about getting rid. He's a sharp one, he is.

They don't like us working alone but there was a backlog of jobs and too few people to do them - same old same old story. So off I went. But I think I took a wrong turning heading north in the old network, and found myself in a small branch I didn't recognise - some of the older maps aren't what they should be. It was dark, and there was just a foot or so of water, standing, no flow. I carried on along because if I had worked my bearings out right I'd reach a gate after five hundred yards or so which would let me scramble into one of the feeders in the new network and back where I ought to be.

So I'm splashing along, cursing myself for going the wrong way and wasting time when there's a backlog of jobs and too few - well, I've said that, haven't I - and then I hear voices. Or at least, I think I hear voices. You often do down there, and you write it off as acoustics, you wouldn't believe how it carries sometimes. Or you write it off as your imagination, not that the kind of bloke who works down there is prone to much in the way of imagination because you'd not last an hour if you were, but we're all human.

Anyways, I turn a bend and see light, in one of the tunnel walls. Not like daylight, or the kinda light on my helmet, but a soft yellow square. I get closer and see there's a hole in the wall. Square, like a...window.

So I did what anyone would do. I looked through it.

And there on the other side...

Well, you'll think I'm mad. Or drunk. Well, I am drunk, but I wasn't then, and I'm not mad. I know what I saw.

I saw a room, big, big as one of the main chambers but not one of the main chambers, this was...decorated. Hangings on the walls. A long polished table, dotted with candles that gave off that soft yellow light, candles and dishes and silver bowls and around the table, dressed as if at a society ball...people. Well, *like* people. There was something...but no, must have been people. Must have been. It's just...the clothes didn't look as if they fit their shapes right.

Then there was movement, swift and sudden, eyes glaring at me through the hole and then a stone slammed into it to close it. I don't mind telling you, not much bothers me but those eyes did, those eyes and the thought that there would be other entrances to the room and some of those in it might be leaving those to find me. So I ran and I ran and I fell and I ran and I hit my head - see, can still see the bruise - and I scraped my shins - and I don't know how but I found my way to a main, and out. I told them I saw no leak. Then I took a leaf out of Eddie's book and have been on the sick. My back, I said. Which is kind of right. Because I can't see myself going back. Not down there. Not ever. Nowhere those eyes might be. Now, you owe me another pint for that."

I went back the next week with a book of old sewer maps I'd bought from a particular bookshop in Bow so I could chart this entry properly, but the man was not in the pub and no one had seen him for a couple of days. An old man propping up the bar was the last to see him; he told me he'd been standing in the pub doorway when the man left for the last time. The old man had bent his head to light a cigarette against the wind, and when he looked up the man was gone.

The old man knew the sewer worker must have taken the road towards the railway bridge because while he lit his cigarette he heard what must have been the clank of him stepping on a loose manhole cover. Must have been a hell of a fast walker, the old man said. It's a long old street.

(Photo courtesy of: https://www.flickr.com/photos/londonmatt/ Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))

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LISTEN, LISTEN

You may enjoy field recording, capturing the sounds of nature and place. Perhaps this is simply for your own enjoyment, or because you enjoy identifying bird song, or perhaps you are sampling natural sounds to use in your ambient music productions, or in an audio drama you are producing with friends, or perhaps even in a podcast that you are recording about the wild and thin places of the country in which you live.

Sometimes a perfect recording is spoiled, maybe by a jet grumbling its distant way to a holiday destination, or a motorbike with a defective silencer tracing its way on the country road over a mile away like a shiny black beetle.

But there are other times, when you might find yourself in Somerset, recording in the hush of a stone circle when the dew still lies silver on the grass, or resting your recorder on the ramparts of a fortification built over a thousand years before the Romans even came to Britain, and then back home curse the annoying background hum that creeps around the edges of your recording.

But wait. Don’t press delete. Don’t apply noise reduction. Increase the gain as high as you can, ignore the noise that is just from your pre-amps, and listen to that hum. Listen.

If your ears are good, and you listen close enough, you may realise that what you hear in the background of a recording you made just after dawn, with nobody else around for a mile is not a hum.

It is singing.

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The Cerne Abbas giant stands proud and rather smug on a hillside. The man who originally carved the giant was also a proud and rather smug man, who proclaimed it something of a self-portrait until several of his very close acquaintances pointed out certain significant issues on the question of proportion. Distressed and embarrassed, he threw his tools away, left Dorset, and became an itinerant pedlar who ended up being voluntarily eaten alive by ravens on a hill in Staffordshire while a circle of children sang a very old song, but that is another story.

There are other giants carved into our hillsides, but you will not see them. The carvings are deep in the rock, or they are carved in ways which only the gifted are able to see, glittering like veins of ice in the dark.

There are six people in this land who know how to wake these giants and bring them out of the rock and earth if they are needed, and one of those people is very ill indeed. So if a gaunt elderly man approaches you in a pub and asks you to put out your hand, be very careful about doing what he asks. If you do, he will drop a piece of white chalk into it, and then close your hand around it. In that moment you will become one of the Six, and you will have all the knowledge of the rock and the earth and the ways of seeing.

But you will also know what the giants are there to protect us from, and that is a terrible burden to carry.

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Who Knows Where The Time Goes

In rural Norfolk there is a certain village which is known for its history of witch burning, that you may decide to visit to learn more about this historical atrocity. If you approach it from the south on the day the may blossom has just flowered, you will feel a sudden shiver as you pass the village sign, as if something significant has just changed. You’ll look around you, but just see the hawthorn and the ash and the clear blue sky, which for once is unmarked by vapour trails.

As you walk into the village, along roads pleasantly free of traffic, looking for the small museum above a shop that your guidebook promised, you might be forgiven for thinking that there is a historical reenactment taking place. At first you smile at all the people dressed in odd costumes, but become less comfortable the more they look at you with curious and fearful expressions.

By the time you reach the village square, you’ll find yourself surrounded, and shouted at in strange accents, and questioned, and then searched. When they find your mobile phone and see that you have the faces of children captured inside your small glass thing, they will do a number of unpleasant things to you, and then they will burn you as a witch.

On the bright side anyone visiting on any other day will see you mentioned in a display on the wall of the small museum above the shop.

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CARYATIDS

If they see you standing outside St Pancras Church looking up at these, a particularly knowledgeable yet intrusive passer-by will stop to tell you that these are caryatids, named after the ancient Peloponnese town Karyai. Without you asking for more information, they will keep on (with breath that smells of pickled onions) and tell you that they are the female versions of Atlas, a sculpture that holds weight, like a column would. Excited, and despite your non-committal nod and lack of eye contact, they will go on to tell you that these are fake caryatids, as they bear no weight. Instead they are just terracotta, wrapped around a column of iron that does all the heavy lifting.

He would go on to tell you more, whether you like it or not, but he notices a particular number bus coming down the Euston Road, and with regret he tells you he must dash, gently showering you with spittle.

As he leaves and you brush disgusted at your lapels, a stumpy, grubby man who looks very much like he sleeps on the street, lurches along the railings towards you. You say a mental oh no, but all he does is lean in close, and say: “I saw them one night. I saw them come down, when everyone else was asleep.” Then he looks around and lurches away, and you hurry off for your train at KIngs Cross before anyone else can approach you.

Only one of these two men really knows about the caryatids.

And he didn’t catch a bus.