The Constant Weight of Emptiness

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with the feeling of being watched by nothing. My family settled in the dusty outskirts of a town called Murrumbo, New South Wales, in 1974. The house we bought was a rambling Edwardian relic, all peeling paint and deep verandas, set on a block choked with ghost gums. From the moment we unpacked, there was a general, unspoken dread that clung to the rooms like cobwebs. My parents joked about it being ‘drafty’, but I knew better, even as a child.

I was three when I first noticed the hollow space at the end of the hallway. It wasn’t a room, exactly, but a wide alcove where my mother had placed a heavy, dust-sheeted piano. She never played it, and I was forbidden to touch the sheet. The air there was always colder, and no matter the time of day, the light seemed to curdle into a grey gloom. My older brother, Ben, swore he saw the keys depress on their own one afternoon, a faint, tuneless melody that faded as soon as he approached. I believed him because I felt it: a dense, oppressive presence that made my chest tight.

One night, I woke to the familiar terror. The hallway stretched before me like a throat leading to a stomach of darkness. I wanted to call for my parents, but my voice was a dry rasp. I shuffled out of my room, my bare feet cold on the worn linoleum. The hallway was a black tunnel, but the alcove at the end was lighter, a sickly grey glow. I felt drawn there, against every instinct. As I got closer, the air thickened, and I heard a sound—not a scream, but a low, ceaseless hum, like the vibration of a far-off engine. It came from the piano.

I reached the edge of the alcove. The dust sheet was gone. The piano lid was open, and inside the dark cavity, I saw something that made my stomach flip. It was a face, but not a human face. It was a mask of skin stretched over a skull, with hollow sockets that leaked a black oil. It was smiling—a wide, impossible grin that split the face in two. The hum intensified, and the face began to move, pushing out of the piano like a swimmer breaking surface. I couldn’t move. I just stood there, watching this thing emerge, its body a tangle of pale limbs that unfolded and stretched toward me.

It spoke, but its voice was inside my head, like a bone pressed against my eardrum: ‘I remember you. You were here before. We waited so long.’ And then it touched my cheek with a hand that was cold and wet, and the touch sent a jolt of ancient recognition through me. I knew, in that moment, that I had been in this house before, in a life I couldn’t recall, and that this thing had been waiting for me to return. It started to sing a lullaby—a song I’d never heard, yet knew by heart. It sang of a child who wandered into a piano and never came out, and the song wrapped around me like a shroud.

I woke up in my own bed, sweating, the morning sun cutting through the blinds. My mother was stroking my hair, asking if I’d had a nightmare. I couldn’t speak. I saw the dust sheet was back on the piano, but now it was stained with a dark, spreading blot, like old blood. I told no one. But I started to notice things: the piano’s keys would be slightly out of tune, even though it was never played; the dust sheet would be shifted, revealing a corner of the wood; and sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d hear the faint hum again.

As I grew older, I rationalized it as a child’s imagination, a house with bad energy, an old piano with weird acoustics. I left Murrumbo at eighteen and never looked back. But the hum never left me. It became a constant undercurrent in my life, a bass note beneath every silence. And now, at forty-five, I’ve returned to the house to settle my mother’s estate. The piano is still there, dust sheet intact. I’ve decided to face it. Tonight, I’ll lift the sheet, open the lid, and look inside. Because I need to know if the face is still there, waiting, and if the lullaby is just a memory or a promise.