Old Places

It is not easy writing like Neil Gaiman, and I certainly cannot. There is a certain rhythm to his prose that you don’t fully notice until you read it aloud. He has a way of blending the magical and the mundane and the childish and the deeply serious and having it all make sense, although he rarely explains a thing.

Somehow, it makes sense at an emotional level, if not at an intellectual one. Maybe that is why I love his children’s stories the most. They make sense to a child, even if they don’t to an adult.

It is not easy writing like Neil Gaiman, and I certainly cannot. But he is one of my favourite authors, so I gave it a go.

This story is heavily influenced (if not downright stolen) from Ocean at the end of the Lane, although I didn’t set out in that direction. It just went that way once I got started. I suppose I didn’t have the imagination today to take it elsewhere.

Anyway, it is what it is, and maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Old Places

There are old places in the world. Not just old in the way of crumbling stone and weathered wood, but old in the way of deep roots and long shadows, of whispered stories and forgotten names. These are places where time folds in on itself like an old map, where a golden afternoon lingers forever and vanishes in the same breath. You know them, though you may have forgotten. They are the secret spaces where children slip when no one is watching, the half-remembered landscapes your mind strays to when left untethered. But like dreams, of which such places are made, they scatter when the weight of the ordinary presses in—leaving only the faintest echoes at the edges of memory. Just out of reach. Waiting. Biding their time.

One of the old places lay hidden in a small grove between a stream and the village golf course where I grew up. From the outside, it was little more than a scattering of trees, a space so narrow you could see straight through from one side to the other. But for us children who played there, it was a vast and endless forest, where the trees stretched higher than trees had any right to, where deep shadows held a thousand secrets, and where sunlit clearings waited, perfect for whispered councils and imagined campfires. Inside, the world outside faded—the drone of traffic, the murmurs of golfers, the weight of rules and reason. And best of all, if you hid there, no one could find you. Not until you wanted to be found.

And once—just once—when I wanted to be found, I couldn’t be. We had been playing hide-and-seek, darting between trunks, pressing ourselves into hollows, holding our breath as the seeker passed by. I had hidden too well. Too deep. And when I tried to return, the grove had changed.

I called out. I searched for the way back. But the grove, that small handful of trees, had stretched and deepened around me. The paths twisted in ways they never had before, and the light filtering through the leaves was different—older, dimmer, the gold of fading afternoons. The air smelled of moss and damp earth, of something ancient and listening. I ran, then. I called again, but my voice felt swallowed before it could reach the world outside. The roads, the golfers, the village—I knew they had to be close, just beyond the trees, but I couldn’t hear them. The grove had unmade them, as if they had never been. As if I had never been.

Because this was not a handful of trees.

It was one of the old places.

I panicked. A little. Though my eleven-year-old self, the one who lived this, would disagree—loudly, stubbornly, indignantly. He would insist he was fine. That he had it under control. But I am older now, and I am no longer too proud to admit to fear.

I ran. As fast as I could. I called for my friends, my voice slicing through the trees. First in one direction, then another, then another. But everywhere I turned, I found the same endless tangle of ancient trunks. Not the warm, familiar trees I had climbed a hundred times before. These were taller. Older. Their bark rough and cold beneath my fingers, their roots knotted and twisted like something gripping the earth too tightly. Moss clung to them in thick, damp sheets, as if they had not felt the sun in centuries.

I don’t know how long I ran. But at some point, my breath came too fast, too sharp, and my legs ached, and I knew I had to stop. I had no choice.

I wouldn’t escape the dark forest by running blindly. I had to be smarter than that. I had to use the handful of skills I had picked up in the rare moments I had paid attention as a Boy Scout.

Above the treetops—higher than they should be, impossibly high—I saw the sun. Not quite at its zenith, but still bright, still there. A direction. A way forward. Any direction should have taken me out of the grove. If I followed the sun, at least I would walk straight.

So I walked.

And I walked.

And I walked.

Hours passed. Or minutes. Or something in between. The grove was not large. You could walk across it in a handful of steps. But no matter how far I went, no matter how long I followed the light, I never reached the edge. The trees did not thin. The path did not change. There was only forest, stretching out in all directions, unbroken.

Eventually, I stopped. Not because I had found my way, but because I had lost all sense that there even was a way. I sat down, legs trembling, heart still racing. And that’s when I noticed what I had somehow failed to notice before.

The silence.

Forests are never silent. There is always something—leaves whispering in the wind, birds calling to one another, insects rustling through fallen branches. But this forest had stilled. No wind. No birds. No distant, half-heard sounds of the village beyond the trees.

There was only me. My breath. My pulse, hammering against my ribs.

And the unsettling, unshakable feeling that something was listening.

It was not merely silence. It was a living thing, stretched thin over the world, shimmering with a malevolence all its own. A silence that waited. A silence that hungered.

And it did not hunger merely for flesh—though it would take that if need be. No, its craving ran deeper. It yearned for my essence, the fragile light of my soul, the tender dreams I had yet to dream, the half-formed hopes still flickering in the quiet corners of my heart. It would take me apart piece by piece, not out of malice, not out of vengeance, but because it could not do otherwise.

And when it had taken its fill—when I was nothing more than a whisper swallowed by the dark—it would still hunger.

For a hunger like that knows no end. It is the gnawing void that stretches across ages, the endless need that no feast can ever satisfy. It devours not to be full but because that is all it knows how to be.

I sprang to my feet and ran.

Direction be damned. I wasn’t running toward anything, only away.

Behind me, the forest swallowed itself. Trees that had stood for centuries flickered and vanished into a nothingness deeper than shadow. Leaves curled into absence. Roots unspooled into the abyss. The world behind me turned darker—then black—then something less than black.

The Hunger was not chasing me.

It was consuming.

In the darkening twilight, as The Hunger devoured the last slivers of light, I ran. I ran through a world unravelling at the edges, a shrouded maze where shadows twisted and leapt like things alive. Gnarled roots coiled and grasped beneath my feet, slick and treacherous while low-hanging branches—long and thin and clawing—snatched at my arms, at my face, urging me onward.

Even my eleven-year-old self would admit, at this point, to a bone-crushing fear. A hopelessness no child should ever feel. But I felt it then. Oh, how I felt it.

I was blind now, the darkness absolute. I ran with my hands outstretched, battering against unseen branches, praying I wouldn’t trip on unseen roots, knowing—knowing—that if I fell, I would never rise again.

And then—just at the edges of my vision, imperceptible at first—I saw it. A light! Faint. Flickering. Impossible.

I surged toward it. I ran faster than I had ever run before, feet barely touching the forest floor, lungs burning, heart hammering against my ribs like it wanted out. The light grew brighter, growing from a distant, ephemeral glow to something solid, something golden, something real. It flared like the dying sun against the horizon, radiant and rich, impossibly warm against the creeping void.

And then I saw her.

Mrs Yarrow.

She stood at the heart of a clearing bathed in golden summer light—though there was no sun, no sky, only her. The light came from her, rippling outward in crashing waves, breaking against the darkness as the ocean breaks against jagged cliffs.

Mrs Yarrow had lived at the edge of the village for as long as anyone could remember. The grown-ups called her a retired schoolmistress or something equally dull, but the village children just thought her strange—not the kind of strange you whispered about with wide eyes, but the kind you ignored because she was part of the world of grown-ups and grown-ups, by definition, were uninteresting.

She was small, but her presence was vast. Her hair was a silver tide, bound loosely in a way that suggested it had never truly been tamed. Her skin was soft with age, lined like old parchment, like something that had been read and read and reread again. Her clothes were simple, the sort that never quite wore out, though you couldn’t say why. And her eyes—oh, her eyes were ancient things, as deep as roots, as endless as the spaces between stars.

She reached out a hand.

I took it before I had the chance to question.

And she pulled me in—into the centre of the island of light, the only place left untouched by the hungering dark.

The Hunger came.

It did not rush or howl or rage. It did not need to. It was not a beast, nor a storm, nor even a shadow. It was the absence of things, and it was swallowing the world one breath at a time.

The edges of the clearing curled inward, trees unspooling into nothingness. The golden light around us flickered as The Hunger pressed in, greedy and endless. And for the first time since I had found her, Mrs Yarrow spoke.

“Oh, I see you.”

Her voice was not loud, but it did not need to be. It was the kind of voice that made itself heard, the kind that had once commanded rowdy children and silenced rooms without ever having to raise in volume. It was a voice that had weight.

The Hunger recoiled, just slightly. The trees at the edges of the clearing shuddered, as if the space itself was holding its breath.

“You’ve always been such a greedy thing,” Mrs Yarrow continued. She wasn’t looking at The Hunger—not exactly. Her eyes were fixed on the shifting blackness at the edges of the world, on the spaces where the light trembled.

“I remember you.”

The words were not kind. They were not frightened. They were not impressed.

The Hunger shifted, not quite moving, but not quite still.

I felt it then, not just as a thing, but as a want—a deep, endless longing. A hole that could never be filled. It was not alive, not really, but it knew that I was, and it would take that from me, piece by piece, not because it needed to, but because that was all it had ever known how to do.

Mrs Yarrow took a step forward.

She was small, just an old woman in a faded dress, but when she stepped toward The Hunger, it stepped back.

“No.”

Just the one word. No grand speech. No magic incantation. No plea.

Just no.

The Hunger shuddered. The golden light rippled outward, crashing against the black void like the tide against a cliff.

“I was here before you,” Mrs Yarrow said, almost to herself. “I will be here long after.”

The Hunger lurched forward, seething, writhing, unravelling. It howled, though there was no sound. It gnashed, though it had no teeth.

Mrs Yarrow exhaled.

And the light surged.

Not like fire—not sudden and bright and devouring—but like something older, heavier, inevitable. The way the sun slowly overtakes the night until you realise the stars are gone.

The Hunger shrieked, and then it was nothing at all.

Not banished. Not destroyed. It simply wasn’t.

And then there was only the clearing, and the summer light, and Mrs Yarrow, standing there as if nothing at all had happened.

She turned back to me, brushing dust from her hands.

“Well,” she said, “you took your time getting here.”

“Here?”

I turned, half-expecting to find the world still unraveling, still gnawed at the edges by the creeping dark. But the forest was peaceful now—not just safe, but as it had always been. The trees had returned to their rightful shapes, solid and climbable, their bark warm beneath the summer sun. Birds flitted between branches, squirrels darted along the undergrowth, and the air hummed again with the quiet, living sounds of a world set back on its course.

Somewhere beyond the trees, I heard golfers passing by, their voices mundane and distant, as if I had never left at all.

Mrs. Yarrow watched me, the barest hint of a smile at the corners of her lips. “Back where you belong, little one.”

Her voice was warm, steady. “Where all children belong—between one world and another.”

I swallowed. My voice felt small. “What was that? And… what are you?”

She tilted her head, considering.

“One who consumes, and one who endures,” she said at last. “And neither are for little ones to worry about.”

Her gaze flickered toward the trees—not the grove I knew, but somewhere else, somewhere farther than a handful of trees should allow. Her eyes lingered, searching the spaces between, as if scanning for a shadow that might yet return.

“Well,” she added, almost to herself, “usually not worry about.”

Then she took my hand, her fingers cool and strong, and together we stepped through the trees, past the quiet places where the dark had lingered. We walked to the edge of the stream—the thin, winding border between the forest and the waking world. She sat, and I sat beside her.

“Rest a little.” She gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “Your friends are still playing.”

And the moment she said it, I heard them—laughter, shouts, the unmistakable squeals of children at play. Close. As if they had always been close. As if I had only stepped away for a moment.

She squeezed my hand once more and rose to her feet. “When you’re ready, go join them.”

I turned my head toward the grove, toward the voices of my friends. And when I looked back—

Mrs Yarrow was gone.

The world had settled back into itself, with no sign that it had ever been otherwise.

I dared not return to the grove, so I sat by the stream instead, swinging my legs over the water, watching dragonflies stitch invisible patterns in the air. I waited for my friends to emerge, and when they did, they didn’t seem to notice anything had changed. If they had, they said nothing.

As I sat there, I made a promise to myself. I would never return to the grove. Never, ever.

But we forget the old places.

By the time I sat at the dinner table that evening, recounting my day to my parents, I remembered only that I had gotten lost in the grove. That it had been a little scary.

The next day, my friends and I went back to play, as we always did.

In the decades since I don’t think I’ve recalled the time I got lost in the grove. If I ever did, I’d forgotten again. The old places do not live in memory. They want to be experienced, not remembered.

But today, I drove past the village where I grew up. The grove where we once played is gone—paved over, replaced by a road. I suppose it makes it easier for golfers to reach the clubhouse, though it does nothing for the children who might have played there.

I stopped, just for a moment. To reminisce. To think of childhood summers and friends whose voices have faded to echoes.

And as I stood there, an old woman came walking up the road toward me.

Mrs Yarrow.

She looked exactly as I remembered her forty years ago, untouched by time, as if she had simply stepped out of memory and into the present. She smiled, patted my shoulder once—lightly, familiarly—and walked on.

And in that moment, everything came rushing back.

As I write this, the memory is already fading. Soon, it will be gone entirely. Whether these words will remain in my notebook after I have forgotten them, I cannot say. And even if they do—if I read them tomorrow—will I believe them?

There are old places in the world. Places of terror, yes, but also of magic and mystery. There is a hunger that devours both, swallowing wonder before it can take root. But there are also those who endure—who guard what is fragile, who stand in the spaces between, ensuring that magic is not lost for the ones who come after.

If you remember an old place, treasure it. Hold it close.

Because it is in those places that magic still lingers, where adventure still waits, where the world has not yet been tamed.

And perhaps, without knowing it, we all hope that one day—when the moment is right, when the light falls just so, when the old places remember us in return—we will find our way back.