Sometimes he'd hear someone running away under the roadbridge, but he never saw them.
He collected them and scanned and OCR'd them, and added his own pictures to liven them up.
Every day he would go cycling thru the deserted streets, starting at Camden lock, down to the towpath,
along to Little Venice, and find a new story pinned to the wall under the lights. He never saw who left
them there. Each one was written by a different hand as far as he could tell.
He took to setting out earlier and earlier to try to catch whoever was putting the tales there.
Sometimes he'd hear someone running away under the roadbridge, but he never saw them.
He collected them and scanned and OCR'd them, and added his own pictures to liven them up.
Later on, he came to realize that the pictures had always been there. They were trig points left by the authors, like pins in a ghost map, to show where they were written. And like the ghost map, maybe he could find the fount at the center of all those points. He started to travel around the city trying to match pictures to locations, always remembering that the location might be in the past, or even not there yet.
Everything is before you die.
Photo credits (mine): hydra (kamini), 1973 outside johnny foxes, Glencullen, Dublin, 2001 paleochora, crete, 2020 bins outside computer lab, Cambridge, 2020 sunri lodge, masai mara, kenya, 2019 the mara north, 2019 heraklion, crete & brook street, london, 2020 private library, kentish town, 2020 buck street, camden, 2020 llanggollan, viaduct, 2017 or 1983 lipari, italy, 2015 venetian fort, paleochora, crete 2018 padington basin, regents canal, london, last week sandy beach, paleochora 2020 beneath the stairs, the library again, unknown date quinns, hawley road, unknown date hydra port, 1969 islington cemetary, 2017 burma, 1943