The Cartographer’s Hobby

Elara rented the small, top-floor apartment in the old Verlaine building, drawn by its immense arched windows that faced the river. The previous tenants had left behind curious remnants: a stack of outdated street maps, a brass compass with a cracked face, and a peculiar collection of pencil stubs, all worn down to the same ragged angle. She thought little of them, shoving the box into a closet. That first evening, as she unpacked, she felt an unsettling prickle on the back of her neck. She turned, but the living room was empty, the only sound the low hum of the refrigerator from the galley kitchen. She chalked it up to the new place, the unfamiliarity.

Night fell, and Elara curled up on her worn sofa, a documentary about deep-sea creatures playing. The prickle returned, stronger, as if a draft were blowing directly on her. She got up, checked the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom. Nothing. She even looked out the window into the rain-slicked street, but saw only the occasional car. Annoyed, she returned to the sofa, pulling a thick blanket over her legs. The feeling intensified, a pressure against her senses, like being watched by something immensely patient. Her eyelids grew heavy, and despite the unease, she drifted into a shallow sleep.

She awoke with a start, a single word still lingering in her mind: ‘rise.’ It had been whispered, childlike, directly into her ear. She checked her phone: she had been asleep for only five minutes. Her heart hammered. She sat up, scanning the room. The television flickered with images of anglerfish in the abyss. Then, a soft, reedy voice came from behind her, close, almost playful: ‘Hey, you.’ Elara froze. She spun around, but there was no one. The voice hadn’t come from the TV; it had been right beside her head.

Again, she searched the apartment, her hands trembling, her breath quick. She checked the closets, under the bed, even the fire escape. Nothing. She was truly alone. She returned to the living room, deciding to stay awake, her back against the wall. She picked up one of the discarded maps from the closet to distract herself. It was a city map, but the streets were drawn in strange, looping patterns, with tiny annotations in faded ink: ‘Here the shadow leaks at 3:00,’ ‘They cross under the bridge at low tide,’ ‘Listen for the hum in the stairwell.’ The pencil stubs were worn to the wood, as if someone had spent hours sharpening them to a needle point, perhaps to inscribe the margins.

Feeling a strange pull, she turned the map over. On the back was a rough drawing of this very apartment, with a small ‘X’ marked in the center of the living room floor. Below it, in the same spidery hand: ‘The still point. The veil thins. They speak from the wood.’ Elara’s blood ran cold. She looked at where the X was relative to the furniture. It was right where she had been sleeping. A faint scratching sound came from inside the wall, like a pencil being dragged across plaster. The child’s voice returned, closer now, a whisper by her ear: ‘You’re sitting on me.’

She leaped up, staring at the floorboards. A faint outline, almost imperceptible, formed on the wooden planks: a small, child-sized shape, as if marked with a faint charcoal residue. The scratching grew louder, and the temperature in the room plummeted. The TV began to flicker between the documentary and static, and in the static, she thought she saw a small face forming, its mouth open in a silent cry. The voice, now neither child nor adult, filled the room: ‘Let me finish the map. We have so much to chart.’ Elara grabbed her coat and her phone, and fled, her footsteps echoing on the marble stairs as she descended into the rainy night, never once looking back at the apartment where something, once trapped, now delighted in its new, unwitting collaborator.