77 Frederick Street  

This is a true story.

In the winter of 2014, I signed a lease on a house at 77 Frederick Street, Ashfield, in Sydney's inner west. The rent was four hundred dollars a week — thirty percent below market. I was eighteen, just starting a film degree at the University of Sydney, and working part-time at the Apple Store in Broadway. My housemate, Val Torres, was doing her master's in communications at UTS and pulling shifts at a Filipino bakery in Strathfield, the kind of place that sold pandesal at dawn and was empty by noon. We were international students, permanently skint, surviving on rice and whatever Val brought home from the bakery at closing. A price like that didn't just feel like a bargain. It felt like rescue.

Ashfield in those days was an immigrant neighbourhood in transition. Cheap. A bit rough. The main drag along Liverpool Road was all Chinese restaurants with ducks hanging in the windows, Vietnamese grocers, a few old Australian pubs clinging on like barnacles. It was the kind of suburb where no one asked where you were from because the answer was always somewhere else. I liked it. It reminded me of the parts of every city that don't make it onto postcards — the parts where people actually live.

The house was a red-brick Victorian semi, set back from the street behind a low iron fence. The brickwork was blackened in patches with mould that crept up from the foundations like a tide mark. The guttering sagged. A dead lemon tree in the front yard scraped its bare branches against the fence whenever the wind picked up — a dry, scratching sound, like fingernails on a chalkboard. I remember thinking it was the kind of house that looked like it had been holding its breath for a long time.

The real estate agent was a man called Raj. He parked three houses down that first day, which should have struck me as odd but didn't. He was sweating despite the cold, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, muttering under his breath. I caught fragments. They might have been Hindi. They might have been a prayer. He didn't look at the house directly. He looked at it the way you look at something in your peripheral vision that you don't want to see head-on.

Inside, the cold was different. It wasn't winter cold — the kind that comes through gaps in the windows and lives in the floorboards. This was older. Stale. It sat in the air like something that had been sealed in. The wallpaper in the hallway was peeling away in long, damp strips, the floral pattern splitting apart so the roses looked like open wounds. There was a wardrobe built into the wall of the second bedroom, and the door wouldn't close properly. When I looked inside, I saw deep gouges in the wood — dozens of them, scored into the back panel in clusters. Like tally marks. Like someone had been counting off days in the dark.

Val asked Raj why the rent was so low. He blinked several times, very fast, and mumbled something about a "family emergency" — the previous tenants had to leave in a hurry, personal matter, very sad, nothing to worry about. Then he pushed the lease across the kitchen counter and told us the landlord needed signatures today. His phone rang while we were still reading the terms. The ringtone was wrong — not a melody, just a flat burst of static, like a dead channel. Raj's face went grey. He set the phone down without answering, tossed us the keys, and left. Not walked. Left. I watched him through the kitchen window. He didn't look back.

We should have known. But in Sydney, four hundred a week for a two-bedroom house with a yard was a miracle. We signed.

The first night, I was in the lounge unpacking boxes when Val screamed from the bathroom. Not a startled yelp — a real scream, ragged and rising. I found her on the tile floor, backed against the bathtub, pointing at the mirror above the sink.

The mirror was fogged with steam from the shower. And in the fog, something had drawn itself — or been drawn. The silhouette of a woman. Shoulders, torso, arms at her sides. But above the neck, nothing. The outline simply stopped. Where the head should have been, the steam was undisturbed, as though the shape knew it was incomplete.

Pressed into the glass were handprints. Small, deliberate. They weren't on the surface of the fog. They were behind it — or inside it. As though someone had placed their palms against the other side of the mirror and pushed.

I grabbed my phone to film it. The screen froze, then erupted into a wash of coloured static — vertical bars, shearing and jumping. The phone was three weeks old. It had never done that before. By the time I restarted it, the steam had cleared. The mirror was just a mirror.

Val didn't sleep that night. Neither did I.

After that, it escalated. Not all at once — incrementally, the way a fever builds. Each day slightly worse than the last, so that by the time you realise how bad it's gotten, you've already been living inside it for too long.

The kitchen knives. Every morning, no matter where we'd put them the night before — in the drawer, in the block, once even locked in a suitcase — they'd be on the counter at dawn, laid out in a neat row, blades facing the hallway. Perfectly spaced. Perfectly parallel. As though someone had taken great care.

The hair. Long, black, straight. Not Val's — hers was dark brown and wavy. This was jet black, coarse, and it turned up everywhere. Wound around our toothbrushes. Threaded through the cereal in the box, so you'd pour a bowl and find a strand curled in the flakes. Frozen inside the ice cube tray, suspended in the centre of each cube like a specimen in resin. It smelled of cheap jasmine shampoo — sweet, cloying, the kind you'd buy at a two-dollar shop. One morning I sealed a clump of it in a ziplock bag and took it to work, thinking I'd show someone, thinking maybe I needed proof that I wasn't losing my mind. When I opened the bag at lunch, there was nothing inside but a tablespoon of water.

I started sleeping with the lights on. Val started sleeping at friends' houses, coming back only to shower and pick up clothes. We didn't talk about it directly. We talked around it, the way you talk around a death in the family — acknowledging it with silence, with the things you don't say.

On the fifth night, I woke at ten past three. Val was standing at the foot of my bed.

She was holding my phone, the screen casting a pale rectangle of light across her face. Her eyes had rolled back. Not fluttering, not half-closed — fully rolled, so that only the whites showed, glossy and blind. She was filming me. I don't know for how long.

When she spoke, the voice wasn't hers. It was lower, flatter, with a cadence that didn't match her mouth. As though someone else was using her throat.

"In the walls," she said. "She needs a new head. Mine will do."

Then her whole body seized. She went rigid, the phone clattered to the floor, and she dropped. I caught her shoulders before her head hit the bedframe. She was convulsing — jaw clenched, back arched, a thin line of spit running down her chin. I called triple zero with my free hand and held her on her side until the ambos arrived. Seven minutes. It felt like an hour.

While I waited, I picked up her phone. The gallery was full of videos I'd never seen. All of me, asleep. Dozens of them, filmed on different nights — some on her phone, some on mine. The framing was always the same: my bed, from the doorway, shot at a slight downward angle as though the person holding the camera was taller than Val. And in every single clip, in the far corner of the room, there was a shadow. Not a shadow cast by anything. A shadow standing. Still. Watching.

I rode in the ambulance with Val to Royal Prince Alfred. The doctors said it was a seizure — possibly stress-related, possibly a one-off. They kept her overnight for observation. She lay in the ward with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling tiles, and wouldn't speak to me.

I sat in the hospital corridor with my laptop and finally did what I should have done before we ever signed that lease. I searched for the address.

Old forums — the kind that existed before Reddit swallowed everything, hosted on freeware platforms with grey backgrounds and broken image links — had warnings in plain language. Do not rent on Frederick Street. Do not rent number 77. People reported crying through the walls at night, always from the bathroom. Problems with the mirror. Appliances turning on by themselves. One poster described waking to find every door in the house standing open, including the front door, in the middle of the night.

The listing history on the real estate agency's website told its own story. In four years, the house had had nine different tenancies. None lasted longer than fourteen weeks. The rent had dropped steadily — five-fifty, five hundred, four-fifty, four hundred — like a price being lowered at auction when no one bids. And then I found a comment, buried in a forum thread from 2013, that stopped me cold:

"The tenant before us disappeared. Just gone one day. But their stuff was still in the house. Clothes in the wardrobe. Milk in the fridge. Like they'd stepped out and never come back."

I sat in that corridor for a long time.

Why Val and not me? I turned it over. Maybe she was more vulnerable — more tired, more ground down by work and study and the low hum of homesickness that never fully goes away when you're young and far from everything you know. Maybe the thing in the house looked for the path of least resistance. A crack already open. A door already ajar. I don't know. I still don't.

A week later, I went back to the house during the day. I brought two mates from my film course — Jake, who was built like a rugby prop and afraid of nothing, and Mei, who'd grown up in a family that burned joss paper every Qingming and didn't flinch at ghost stories. We told ourselves we were scouting it as a location for a short film. It was easier than saying what we were actually doing.

The house was exactly as I'd left it. Unwashed mugs in the sink. Val's jacket on the hook by the door. The smell — that stale, sealed-in cold — was worse now, thicker, as if the house had been breathing in and not breathing out.

In the wardrobe of the second bedroom, behind a loose panel, Mei found a notebook. The cover was swollen with damp, the pages fused together in places. Most of it was illegible — water damage, or time, or both. But the last page was still readable. The handwriting was frantic, the letters pressed so hard they'd torn through the paper. And they were written in something dark and rust-coloured that wasn't ink.

BEHIND THE WALL SHE IS STILL SEARCHING HELP ME

Jake said nothing. Mei closed the notebook very carefully, the way you'd close something you didn't want to let out.

I went into the bathroom. The wall behind the mirror — the one Val had been staring at that first night — had fresh scratch marks. Not on the surface. In the plaster. Deep, ragged grooves, as though something with fingers had been clawing from the inside. Wood shavings and plaster dust were scattered across the floor in a small drift. The gouges were recent. They hadn't been there when I'd left.

We didn't stay long after that.

When Val was discharged, she didn't come back to the house. She went straight to the airport and flew home to the Philippines. She dropped her master's. She never returned to Sydney. I broke the lease the same week. Raj didn't argue. He didn't even ask why.

But Val still messages me.

Always at 3:17 a.m. Sydney time. Voice notes. I'll wake to the notification, and when I press play there's a long, uneven breath — the kind you take when you're trying to steady yourself, or trying not to cry — and then her voice, very quiet:

"It's still inside me."

I've asked her what she means. She doesn't answer those messages. She just sends the next one, a few weeks later. Same time. Same words.

Recently, she sent me a photo. Just a selfie, taken in her bedroom in Manila. She looked thinner. Older than twenty-six. Behind her was a mirror on the wall, and in the mirror's reflection — I had to zoom in, I had to look twice — the room behind her wasn't her bedroom. It was the bathroom at 77 Frederick Street. The cracked tiles. The mouldy grout. The fogged glass. And standing in the far corner of the reflection, barely distinguishable from the wall, the shadow.

I haven't replied.

The house is still on the rental market. I checked last month. They're asking three hundred and fifty dollars a week now.

Tenants still last a few months at most.

I drove past not long ago, on my way to a shoot in Burwood. The dead lemon tree is gone — someone cut it down but left the stump. The fence has been painted. New curtains in the front window. Small improvements, the kind agents make when a property won't shift. Lipstick on something that doesn't have a mouth.

There were two girls standing out the front, taking selfies by the door. Chinese students, early twenties, wearing USYD puffer jackets. One of them was laughing, holding a set of keys.

I pulled over. I sat in the car with the engine running and my window down. I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell them about the knives, the hair, the mirror. About Val standing at the foot of my bed with white eyes and someone else's voice. About the notebook behind the wall.

But what do you say? How do you warn someone about something that sounds insane? They'd think I was a nutter. They'd think I was trying to scare them out of a good deal. And maybe they'd be right. Maybe I am a nutter. Maybe the whole thing has an explanation I'm too close to see.

But I don't think so.

I drove away.

In the Sydney rental market — in any city where young people are broke and desperate and willing to overlook the rot because the price is right — there will always be someone who signs the lease. Someone who tells themselves the cold is just the cold, the sounds are just the pipes, the mirror is just a mirror.

There will always be someone desperate enough to ignore the warnings.

Always.