The Chalk Map

The house on Wattle Bend Lane was a sprawling Federation-era relic, all dark timber and leadlight glass, backing onto the sluggish green expanse of the Murrumbidgee River. Our group of six adults and two infants had come for a week of sun and river swims, but the house itself felt like a held breath. It was too big, with its redundant second kitchen and a hallway that seemed to stretch longer each time you walked it. My partner, Ellie, and I took the upstairs room with a balcony overlooking the water, while the others spread out below, the two babies, Lila and Sam, in bassinets beside their parents.

For two days, we did what you do on holidays: swam, played cards, drank wine on the wide verandah that wrapped the house. The babies cried at normal hours, and we laughed at their parents’ exhaustion. Then, on the second night, as we sat below the verandah in the cooling dusk, we heard it—the thud of running feet upstairs, a frantic, circular rhythm, as if someone were chasing their own tail in the room above where we sat. Caleb, the one who’d booked the place, looked up, brow furrowed. ‘What the hell?’ He pushed his chair back, and the moment his hand touched the screen door, the sound ceased. He stepped inside, listened, then shrugged, saying, ‘Must be next door.’ We laughed, relieved, and said nothing more.

Morning of the third day was humid, the kind that makes your shirt stick to your back. Ellie and I were in the second kitchen, making coffee, when we heard a faint, high-pitched singing from the disused pantry. It wasn’t a baby’s cry; it was a child’s voice, off-key but sweet, humming a tune I almost recognized. I opened the pantry door, and the singing stopped. Inside was just jars of old preserves and a layer of dust. I closed the door, and behind me, Ellie was pale. ‘I heard that,’ she said. ‘It was coming from inside the wall, wasn’t it?’ I shook my head, trying to convince myself it was the wind.

But that afternoon, we found the chalk map. It was in the upstairs hallway, on a stretch of wall behind a heavy armoire that we’d shifted to find a lost pacifier. Scrawled in white chalk was a rough, childish diagram of the house—the upstairs, the hallway, the rooms—with a large X in the center of the main bedroom, and a spiral winding from the corner of the hallway to the X. The handwriting was shaky, as if drawn by a trembling hand. ‘One of the kids?’ asked Dan, but the babies were too young to hold chalk. We took a photo, scrubbed it off, and said nothing more. But I noticed Caleb kept glancing at the ceiling.

That night, we were all in the living room, watching a horror movie (a joke, we thought), when Lila, the three-week-old, began to cry. Her mother, Jess, soothed her, but the crying stopped abruptly, replaced by a low, guttural sigh from the baby’s crib. Then, from the ceiling, came the sound of tiny feet, walking slowly, deliberately, from one corner of the room to the other, then back. The feet stopped directly above us. The house was silent. Then, a small, clear voice said, ‘You’re sitting on my bed.’ We all froze. ‘Who said that?’ I managed, my voice dry. ‘In the room above,’ said Ellie, pointing. The voice had come from above, but it was clear as if it were in the room.

We gathered our things and left, piling into two cars, but the babies were wailing, the car engines wouldn’t start at first, and the air was thick with the smell of river mud. We drove to a motel, and no one slept. The next morning, we returned to the house to pick up the rest of our belongings, but the chalk map was back, now more detailed, with a new addition: small stick figures outside the house, and arrows pointing toward the river. The landlord, a weathered man, asked us, ‘Did you touch anything? Move the wardrobe?’ When we told him, his face went gray. ‘That house was built over the old river crossing. A girl drowned there in the 1930s. Some say she still plays upstairs.’ He said the house had been empty for years, and he’d lost the key. But we had a key, and we used it.

As we drove away, the sun was setting, and on the road behind us, we saw a small chalk drawing on the asphalt, a spiral, exactly like the one on the wall. It disappeared as we turned the corner, but I knew it was just the beginning. The map was growing, and we were on it.