Hellsborough Exposed — semagrams

Field work is the job, so at the invitation of the tenants I went down into the catacombs beneath the old crossroads pub, red-brick tunnels oozing river silt and wet sulphur a thousand years deep, murk clogging the lungs with every step. Behind a lifetime's rubble I found a small sarcophagus lodged in a hole that might have been carved to hold it, and inside, an anti-climax: a few blocks of pumice I nearly threw down as worthless rock. It was the shape that stopped me, too uniform, carved rather than formed, the smallest scratches catching under my fingertips. All those inebriated years rubbing shoulders with linguists and anthropologists and folklorists paid out in a single moment of recognition. Those scratches were semagrams, laid to rest by the milting who guard The Hinge, and without them the liminal weight of that junction, and Hellsborough itself, would never have been found.

Crossing The Hinge requires speaking the milting semagrams aloud — a ritual I have performed often enough now that it feels almost like checking one's pockets before leaving the house. Van points out that the portal to the woad kingdom opened for his gruizer without semagrams, which raises the question of whether what I have been doing is strictly necessary or whether I have simply conditioned myself to believe it is — which is, in Hellsborough, arguably worse.

Buried behind a lifetime's worth of accumulated rubble in the catacombs beneath the Freemasons pub at the crossroads was a sarcophagus I almost entirely dismissed as structural debris. What stopped me was the pumice — rough-carved by milting as some form of cosmically patient invitation — each block etched with semagrams smaller than a fingernail. Had I not spent the better part of a career training my hands to read what my eyes could not, Hellsborough and The Dark Peak would still be a set of Sheffield pub legends.