The Crayon Epitaph

The house on Maple Hollow Lane was my grandmother’s pride, a two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch and a garden that bled color in the spring. It had been built by my great-uncle, a man who had vanished in the woods behind the property when I was a toddler. The only death I knew of was my grandmother herself, who had passed peacefully in her sleep two years ago, leaving the house to my mother. It was a house of creaking floorboards and drafty hallways, but it had never felt sinister—until the summer I turned nine and my cousin Emma came to stay.

Our parents had gone to a charity gala in the city, leaving us with a teenage babysitter who promptly fell asleep on the couch by six. Emma and I, bored with the ancient board games, discovered a forgotten laptop in the study. The battery was nearly dead, but it had a single game installed: a pixelated adventure where you explored a haunted mansion. We huddled in the study, the only light from the screen, the rest of the house swallowed by dusk. The sound of our laughter was a thin shield against the silence that pressed in from the hallway.

Around eight, a thunderstorm rolled in, rattling the windows and plunging the house into a deeper gloom. We were mid-argument over which path to take in the game when a sound cut through our bickering—a low, wet cough, followed by a voice that seemed to come from the walls themselves. It was strained, as if it hadn’t spoken in years, and it called our names: ‘Sarah… Emma…’ We froze, our eyes locked, the game forgotten. I tried to convince myself it was the wind, but Emma’s face was pale. ‘It’s coming from inside the house,’ she whispered.

We grabbed the only weapon we could find—a wooden yardstick—and crept into the hallway. The voice continued, a guttural murmur, leading us toward the staircase. It seemed to come from the second floor, from my grandmother’s old room. We climbed the stairs, each step groaning under our weight, the voice growing clearer. It was calling us to the room at the end of the hall, the door slightly ajar, a sliver of darkness visible beyond.

We pushed the door open. The room was dimly lit by the storm’s flashes, revealing a canopy bed, a vanity with a cracked mirror, and an old chest at the foot of the bed. The voice was issuing from the chest, now a clear, whispered threat: ‘Come closer…’ Emma gripped my arm. ‘Don’t open it,’ she said. But the voice was irresistible, a magnetic pull that made my hand reach for the latch. I lifted the lid, and inside, among moth-eaten quilts, lay a child’s crayon drawing. It depicted two girls in a sunny field, but their faces were scratched out with red crayon, and beneath the drawing, in shaky handwriting, were the words: ‘The field sees. The field remembers. You will join us.’

I slammed the lid shut. The voice stopped, replaced by a sound like dry leaves skittering across a floor. We backed away, but as we turned to run, the door slammed shut behind us, plunging the room into darkness. A cold hand grasped my ankle, and I screamed. I kicked free, and we both scrambled for the door, finding it suddenly unlocked. We burst into the hallway and didn’t stop running until we were back in the study, slamming the door shut and dragging the desk against it.

We sat there, trembling, until the babysitter woke up at midnight. She found us huddled in the corner, whispering about the chest. She laughed it off, saying it was just an old trunk. But when our parents returned home, we told them everything. My mother grew quiet, and later that night, I overheard her on the phone with my father: ‘She found the drawing… my great-aunt’s twin daughters… they drowned in the field behind the house in 1892. The field was sold, but the house… it still remembers.’

We moved out a month later. But I never forgot that voice. And sometimes, when I’m alone at night, I hear it again, calling my name, from the field where the grass grows too green, where the children’s laughter never stops, and the crayon epitaph waits for another pair of girls to join its chorus.