The Cartographer of Lost Souls

He maps the dead. Now he must save the living.Donald Mayfield is a master cartographer with an impossible ability: when he renders a location in exquisite detail, he can see the “echoes”—spectral impressions of death and suffering that haunt places like emotional stains. A traffic accident victim’s despair pooling at an intersection. Children’s terror crystallized in an old building’s foundation. Violence resonating through decades-old crime scenes.For twenty years, Donald has treated these echoes as pure data, documenting human tragedy with clinical detachment while living in self-imposed isolation. His maps are masterworks of precision, but they carry a secret archive of pain that only he can perceive.When Angela Nguyen moves in across the hall, she disrupts his carefully controlled solitude—and notices something Donald has been avoiding: a pattern. Accidents are clustering around an old community center with mathematical precision, escalating toward something catastrophic. Donald’s maps reveal the terrifying truth: a serial killer named Thomas Bellweather murdered thirteen children in 1951, then bound their echoes to feed his own spiritual immortality. And he’s not finished.With a neighborhood festival approaching and hundreds of lives at stake, Donald faces an impossible choice. His entire system of survival depends on observation without participation, on documenting suffering without experiencing it. But to stop Bellweather’s planned massacre, he must engage directly with the very echoes he’s spent decades avoiding.The Cartographer of Lost Souls is a horror novel about isolation and connection, trauma and healing, and the maps we draw to make sense of chaos. It explores what happens when witnessing suffering creates an obligation to end it—and what transformation becomes possible when we stop merely observing and start truly participating in the world around us.