I left my flat in Leeds at 7 PM to drive to my parents' in Harrogate. It's a 45-minute drive I've done hundreds of times. I remember joining the A61 and then nothing — absolute blank — until I became aware of myself sitting in my parked car in a layby outside Ripon. My phone said 11:23 PM. The car was facing south, which is back towards Leeds. I had driven roughly 60 miles but had no memory of any of it. The fuel gauge had barely moved. My hands were shaking. There was a smell in the car I can only describe as burnt copper. Three weeks later I started having the same dream on repeat — a white room, a sound like cicadas, figures that are tall but wrong somehow. I've since been to a hypnotherapist. I don't want to share what came up until I've processed it more.
The following is a transcript of the final recorded transmission from research station Ouroboros-7, recovered from a waterproof hard drive found floating 340 nautical miles off the coast of Norway. The crew of three had been conducting deep-sea acoustic monitoring. The recording begins mid-sentence. [00:00] — ...the sound has changed again. Maren thinks it's geological but I've been running the spectral analysis for six hours and there is structure in it. Deliberate structure. Maren won't look at the printouts. [00:47] — We've lost contact with the surface relay. Maren says it's the weather. Jonas hasn't spoken since yesterday morning. He just sits at the hydrophone array with his headphones on. Whenever I try to take them off him he holds them against his ears and makes a sound I don't have a word for. [02:13] — I put my own headphones on tonight. Just for a second, just to understand what Jonas was hearing. I understand now. I wish I didn't. The sound is not geological. The sound is a question. It has been asking the same question for a very long time. I think tonight it finally received an answer. [03:58] — [sound of water] [no further transmission]
The maps started appearing in my letterbox every Tuesday. No postage. No return address. Just a folded sheet of paper, hand-drawn in ink so fine it might have been made with a single hair. Each one depicted a place that did not exist — coastlines bent the wrong way, rivers that flowed uphill in the legend, cities named things like Veth and Carrow-on-the-Seam. I began to notice details that repeated across different maps. The same lighthouse appearing in different geographies. The same small boat, always anchored offshore, always empty. On the eighth map, I found a street I recognised. My street. My house, faithfully rendered, with one difference: a door on the side of the building that has never existed. That night I went outside with a torch and put my hand against the brickwork where the door should be. The mortar was warm. And something on the other side knocked back.