The Lost Village
A weird story set on the South Downs Way
The Lost Village
There are countless lost villages of Sussex. Some were wiped out by disease, others were wrecked by raids or warfare. Some are too old to have had names, their only traces buried and unfound. Many have been washed away by the sea - even recently, like Tide Mills, abandoned just before World War Two. Of all these lost villages, only one sends out messages.
In Sally’s wardrobe is a T-shirt from the Green Man pub in Arunsmouth. She bought it cheap in a vintage store because she liked its image of the green man. She’s never thought to question where Arunsmouth is, imagining it is somewhere in Kent, or maybe up north.
Arunsmouth turns up in no old maps, and it is not recorded in the Domesday Book. It is missing from Google Maps. Yet every so often relics of this town appear in the junk shops of Sussex. Sally was once given a pint glass from another Arunsmouth pub, bought by a friend who recognised the name from her T-shirt. It was broken in a party by Sally’s friend Jeff, neither of them appreciating the item’s true significance.
Sometimes, souvenirs of Arunsmouth make their way into donation bags for charity shops. Often these items will not be recognised as valuable - who would think a half-used pencil from the Arunsmouth Museum would be worth hundreds of pounds to the right collector? Even if items do make it to sale, they are rarely priced with their true value. To a collector they are worth much more. A postcard of the town can be worth four figures, if you know where to sell it.
A number of people trade in Arunsmouth’s relics. They don’t speak of it too loudly, not wanting to push the prices up, or trigger the production of fakes. Each collector has their own theory. One will tell you that Arunsmouth exists in another universe, but is trying to cross over to ours. Some say that a curse that wiped the place out. Others, that it was erased by the fairies, and they have bewitched everyone into forgetting - but who believes in fairies nowadays? Another theory: Arunsmouth is in our future and is sending back the trinkets as some sort of warning. A few collectors believe that if enough of these items are gathered in the same place, Arunsmouth might be brought back from wherever it has disappeared to.
One particularly involved idea is that Arunsmouth is a ghost. That the town was destroyed in some terrible storm. Imagine a tempest worthy of legend, vicious enough to hang whales from trees, miles inland. One that seemed like the end of the world for those sheltering from it. If a town was wrecked by a storm like that, the very streets might feel traumatised. It might not know that it had been destroyed. It might imagine a whole future for itself, doing such a good job that it leaves traces.
Nobody people knows the truth. People like Sally hold clues, but without even knowing that there is a mystery. Arunsmouth is a sort of idea cancer. It is squeezing its way into our world, slowly becoming real. The more clues that appear, the stronger it grows. Eventually, Arunsmouth will break into our reality, and something terrible will happen. It is safer not to talk about Arunsmouth.
Some background
I’ve been writing my South Downs Way sequence of stories since late 2019. Some of these have been collected into zines based around particular themes and characters. The stories are all linked to each other and I love developing the connections.
The Lost Village comes from a series about Sally, a psychiatrist. She appears in one of the earlier volumes, where she walked out of a conference, deciding to hike the South Downs Way instead. She feels that her life has lost the magic she remembers from childhood. I’ve written a number of stories about her walk and what she remembers from being younger.
Some of the connections between individual stories are very slight. Jeff is mentioned in passing here as a friend of Sally’s, and turns up in a couple of other stories. He appears as a bad boyfriend in a story in the first zine, Rich People’s Dogs. He then meets the Devil in a story in the second volume, Like A New York Cabbie on a Rainy Day and, in that piece, he seems to be a decent person.
There have been a few times where I clumsily reused names, and this is a case where I inserted the same name into two stories by accident. There’s a lot to sketch out about how Jeff goes from one story to the other, but I’m enjoying the challenge. I know Sally and Jeff have a number of friends in common, which gives me options about how to draw him into other stories.
Recommendations
It looks like we’re coming to the end of an era in social media, with Twitter and Reddit falling apart and a new Twitter clone launching each week. In most social media platforms’ early days, they are easy ways to find new people and interesting things. Once the sites need to make a profit, they resist promoting links outside the site and it becomes harder to discover anything outside that site.
We’ve become too used to the ease of finding things through social media; but, back in the days before Myspace, before Orkut, we still managed. In the days of blogging, everyone would point to other people, through individual posts and blogrolls. In these emails I’m going to recommend people to follow, either through emails or RSS.
If you’ve not used RSS, it’s one of those things that’s hard to explain but great when you get it (just like Twitter was). The site aboutfeeds provides a good explanation but, put simply, RSS readers build you a feed made up of only things you’re interested in. My personalised RSS reader is the main way I interact with the internet (I use and pay for Feedly).
What Else?
I’ve got a new short story collection coming out soon - but a short story collection with a difference. Fishscale appears on two A5 pages in the Krill zine, and contains 12 stories. Krill is available via kickstarter, and this continues through till July 27th.
If you want to read more of the South Downs Way stories, physical copies of the zines are available through my etsy shop.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Another story will come next Thursday, and will probably be one about money burning.