The Circled Square

"Trust is a choreography you learn with your body, not your head. Your head tells you to stay. Your body already knows what it's going to do."

The light came slowly.

Grey seeping into black, the stars fading one by one, the sky shifting through shades of bruise until the horizon began to glow with the first suggestion of dawn. I watched it happen through windows still fogged with my own breath, my body locked in the same position it had held for hours—knees drawn up, back pressed against the passenger door, eyes fixed on the small white rectangle fluttering beneath the windscreen wiper.

The paper hadn't moved. Hadn't blown away. It sat there, patient and impossible, waiting.

I needed to urinate. The pressure had been building for hours, my bladder insistent, but I'd held it because holding it was easier than opening the door, than stepping into the darkness where he might still be waiting. Now the need was becoming urgent, my body's demands overriding my mind's terror, biology asserting itself with the blind indifference of a system that didn't care about the things that hunted in the night.

The clearing emerged from the darkness in stages. First the building—the stone walls materialising like a photograph developing, grey against grey. Then the shed. Then the fence line, the dead gums, the scrub beyond. I watched each shape resolve itself, my eyes aching from the effort of looking, searching for the silhouette that didn't belong.

Nothing.

The sun crested the horizon. Pale winter light spilled across the landscape, washing out the shadows, filling the spaces where fear had lived. A magpie called from somewhere in the scrub—that familiar liquid warble—and another answered, and for a moment the world felt almost normal.

The paper fluttered.

My hand found the door handle. Rested there. The metal was cold even through the fog of condensation, even after hours of my body heat filling the cabin. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips, each beat a small percussion against the handle I couldn't quite bring myself to pull.

He's gone. The sun is up. He's gone.

But I didn't know that. Couldn't know it. The darkness had hidden him completely—had let him circle the car, press his face to the glass, leave his message and vanish without a trace. The daylight might hide him just as well. He could be behind the building, behind the shed, crouched in the scrub with the patience of something that had learned to wait.

My bladder cramped. A sharp, insistent pain that made my breath catch.

I pulled the handle.

The door swung open and the morning air rushed in, cold and clean, carrying the smell of frost and eucalyptus. I sat frozen on the edge of the seat, one foot extended toward the ground, listening.

The magpie. The wind. The tick of the cooling engine.

Nothing else.

I stepped out.

The frost crunched under my shoe—loud, too loud—and I flinched, my whole body tensing for the sound of answering footsteps. None came. I stood beside the car with my hand on the door frame, my eyes scanning the clearing, the building, the shed, the scrub. Cataloguing every shape. Looking for movement.

The building's doorway gaped empty. The shed stood silent. The scrub was motionless, undisturbed by anything larger than the slight breeze that stirred the upper branches.

I walked to the edge of the clearing. Found a spot behind a clump of saltbush where I could crouch with my back to solid vegetation, where I could see the car and the building and the approaches from every direction. I pulled down my jeans with fingers that fumbled against the cold. The relief was immediate, overwhelming—my body finally releasing what it had held for hours, steam rising from the ground where the liquid hit the frozen earth.

I stayed crouched longer than I needed to. Watching. Waiting. The vulnerability of the position—trousers around my thighs, body exposed—made every nerve sing with alarm. But nothing moved. Nothing came.

I pulled up my jeans. Walked back to the car. Stood in front of the bonnet, looking at the paper trapped beneath the wiper blade.

It was receipt paper. Thin, cheap, the kind that curled at the edges. One corner had torn slightly where the wiper pressed against it, but the rest was intact, the surface pale in the morning light.

I reached for it.

My hand stopped six inches from the blade. Hovered there, trembling.

He touched this. His hands were on this paper. He stood right here, right where I'm standing, and he placed this under the wiper and he was close enough to reach through the window and—

I grabbed the paper. Pulled it free. Stepped back from the car as though distance could protect me from whatever it contained.

The receipt was faded ink on one side—a date from months ago, a petrol station in a town I didn't recognise, an amount that meant nothing. I turned it over.

Not blank.

A drawing.

I stared at it. The lines were crude, uneven—pencil, I thought, or a pen that was running dry. Scratchy marks that resolved, as I looked, into shapes. Into meaning.

A square. Small, positioned near the edge of the paper, with an X beside it.

A line leading away from the square. Winding, turning, the marks getting heavier in places as though the drawer had pressed harder at certain points.

Another square at the end of the line. Larger than the first. With a circle drawn around it—emphatic, deliberate, the pencil going over the same path multiple times until the circle was dark and unmistakable.

A map.

I looked up. Looked at the building in front of me, at the clearing, at my car parked where I'd left it. The small square with the X—that was here. That was this place. The property. The X marking where I'd been when he found me.

The line led away toward... I turned the paper, trying to orient it. The track I'd driven in on came from the south. The building faced east. So the line was leading... northeast? Through scrub I hadn't searched, toward a destination I hadn't found.

Toward the circled square.

Here, the circle said. Go here.

My hands were shaking. The paper trembled in my grip, the crude lines jumping and blurring. I pressed it flat against the bonnet of the car, weighted the corners with my fingers, and made myself look at it properly.

The route wasn't straight. It wound through what might have been vegetation, what might have been terrain features, what might have been obstacles only the drawer knew about. There were marks along the way—small dashes, arrows, indications that might have been turns or might have been nothing at all. The drawing was too rough, too hasty, to be certain of anything.

Except the destination. The circled square was emphatic. Unmistakable. This is where you need to go.

But why?

The question coiled in my stomach like something alive. A man had stalked me through the darkness. Had hunted me, cornered me, pressed his face against the glass of my car and looked at me with eyes I couldn't read. Had let me cower in terror while he did... what? Drew a map? Planned this?

And then he'd left it for me. Under my windscreen wiper. Like a note from a neighbour, like a flyer for a local business, like something ordinary and explicable instead of a message from a nightmare.

I could be holding directions to my children.

The thought arrived with the force of a physical blow. I gripped the edge of the bonnet, steadying myself, the metal cold through my palms. The circled square. The emphatic marking. What if that was where they were? What if this man—this thing that moved through the night—had found them? Had seen two children sheltering in an abandoned building, lost and frightened, and had come to find their mother?

But that didn't explain the hunting. Didn't explain the terror of those footsteps circling the car, the face at the window, the hours of paralysing fear. If he'd wanted to help, why hadn't he called out? Knocked on the window? Said your children are this way, follow me?

Unless he couldn't. Unless he wasn't... normal. Unless the rules that governed ordinary human interaction didn't apply to whatever he was.

Or unless this was a trap.

The other possibility sat beside the first, equally plausible, equally terrifying. A lure. Bait. A map designed to draw a desperate mother into territory she didn't know, toward a destination she couldn't escape from. He'd seen her searching. He'd watched her for who knew how long. And now he was offering exactly what she wanted most—a direction, a purpose, a place where her children might be.

The perfect trap required the perfect bait.

I looked at the map. At the circled square. At the winding line that led from here to there through landscape I'd never searched.

Rose. Six years old. Hungry and cold and frightened, depending on her brother to keep her safe.

Mack. Nine. Trying to be strong, trying to be brave, carrying a weight no child should have to carry.

If there was even a chance—even the smallest possibility—that this map led to them...

I folded the paper carefully. Slid it into my jacket pocket. Walked around to the driver's door.

The car started on the first turn. The heater began pushing air through the vents—cold at first, then warming, the system slowly coming back to life. I sat with my hands on the wheel, looking at the building, the clearing, the track that led back toward the junction.

The map showed a different route. A turn I hadn't noticed. A path I hadn't taken.

I pulled the paper from my pocket. Studied it again. The first mark after the X—the first indication of a turn—seemed to be close. Very close. Almost immediately after leaving the clearing.

I put the car in gear. Pulled forward slowly, watching the scrub on my right. The track curved toward the junction, familiar now, the route I'd driven three times in two days. But the map showed something else. A gap. A turn. Somewhere along this stretch of road, there was supposed to be—

There.

I braked. The car stopped at the edge of what might have been a path or might have been nothing—a space between bushes slightly wider than the spaces on either side, the ground beneath it showing faint traces of compression that could have been old tyre tracks or could have been animal trails or could have been my imagination.

The map showed a turn here. The first arrow, pointing left.

I looked at the gap. Looked at the map. Looked at the gap again.

The car would fit. Barely. The scrub would scrape the paint, might crack a mirror, might leave scratches down both sides that would require explanation if anyone ever asked. But it would fit.

I turned the wheel.

The branches reached for the car immediately—fingernails on metal, the shriek of vegetation against glass. I flinched but kept going, pushing through the gap at a crawl, the car rocking over uneven ground. Something scraped the undercarriage. Something else snapped against the rear window with a crack that made my heart stutter.

Then I was through.

The track on the other side was barely a track at all. Two ruts in the dirt, overgrown with grass, the space between them thick with weeds that had grown since the last vehicle had passed. But it was a track. It went somewhere. And the map said to follow it.

I followed.

The scrub pressed close on both sides, branches dragging along the doors, leaves slapping the windscreen. The track wound through vegetation that all looked the same—grey-green bushes, red earth, the occasional dead tree standing white and skeletal against the sky. I drove slowly, scanning for the next mark on the map, the next turn, the next indication that I was still on the right path.

A rise appeared ahead. The track climbed it, the ruts deepening where water had eroded the surface. The car struggled—wheels spinning briefly before finding purchase, the engine straining against the incline. I gripped the wheel tighter and pressed the accelerator harder and crested the rise with a lurch that bounced my head against the roof.

The view from the top stopped my breath.

More scrub. More identical landscape. But in the distance—maybe a kilometre, maybe more—a shape. A structure. Corrugated iron catching the morning light, sitting low against the earth as though it had been slowly sinking into it.

The circled square.

I couldn't know that. Couldn't be certain. But the map showed the destination at the end of this route, and there it was—a building, alone in the scrub, exactly where the crude pencil lines had promised it would be.

I started down the far side of the rise. The track descended into a shallow gully, the ground softer here, the ruts deeper. The car slewed sideways for a heart-stopping moment before the tyres caught and I was moving again, crawling forward, the building appearing and disappearing between the trees as the track wound toward it.

Closer now. Close enough to see details. The corrugated iron walls were rusted, sheets missing in places, gaps that might have been windows or might have been damage. The roof sagged in the middle but hadn't collapsed. A cracked concrete slab spread in front of it, weeds pushing through the fracture. A doorway on the near side, dark, revealing nothing of what lay inside.