By the time I stopped thinking of it as a nuisance and started thinking of it as a pattern, three people had gone missing and four parcels had turned up where they had no business being.
I run a stall at Market Day in Whittlesea, a river town in the north of Victoria where Saturday mornings bring out the same faces every week: the garlic farmer with his handwritten signs, the woman selling jars of quince paste, the twins with trays of sausage rolls too hot to hold. My own pitch sits near the old goods shed at the edge of the market grounds, under a blue tarp patched twice with duct tape. I sell second-hand books and records, nothing rare enough to excite anyone but enough to pay the stall fee and keep the lights on at home.
My wife, Maddy, thought I should have given it up when our son Eli was born. She was still on maternity leave from the clinic in town, and I was still trying to make the stall earn more than it cost in petrol and Saturdays. But I liked the rhythm of it. People arrived with their dogs and coffee cups, their kids begging for hot jam doughnuts, and for a few hours everyone seemed to have a purpose. There were no surprises, which was exactly why the first parcel unsettled me.
It appeared on the Saturday after Anya Bell disappeared.
Anya was seventeen, slight as a reed, with a mop of black hair and a habit of reading while she worked. She helped her uncle Neville at the plant nursery across the road from the market. On the Friday before she vanished, Neville had let her leave early to catch a friend’s birthday barbecue. She never got there. Her mother came into the market on Saturday morning asking if anyone had seen her, and by lunchtime half the stalls had stopped trading for ten minutes so people could search the lanes, the public toilets, the creek path behind the tennis courts. Nothing came of it, not then.
Near closing time, after most of the crowd had thinned and the sound of the market was only a few conversations and the clatter of trestles being folded, I found a parcel sitting on the edge of my table between a crate of paperbacks and a stack of vinyl sleeves. It had arrived without me noticing anyone placing it there. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with garden twine. No stamp, no label, only my name written on the top in black ink.
I knew immediately that I had not written it.
The parcel was not large, about the size of a shoebox, but it was oddly heavy. When I lifted it, something inside shifted with a wet, sliding motion that made my stomach tighten. Maddy had been helping me pack up at the time, and she said later that I went pale. I told myself it was perhaps a broken ceramic bowl someone had left as a joke, or a bag of coins, or one of those terrible second-hand paperweights people insist on selling. I cut the twine with my pocket knife.
Inside was a kitchen towel, folded around an old brass door key and a pale thing that at first I took for a peeled onion. It was not an onion. It was a pear, but shrivelled and waxy, as if it had sat too long in a warm drawer. One side of it was indented by a clear thumbprint. Tucked beneath it was a note written on lined paper torn from a school exercise book.
You have one parcel left to take to the right place.
I laughed then, because the alternative was to think about it seriously. Someone had made a ghastly little prank. Maybe a collector had mixed up the stall numbers. Maybe one of the regulars thought it funny to send me rubbish with a threat. I showed Maddy the note and she frowned, saying it wasn’t funny, but even she could not make much of it. We threw the pear in the bin behind the shed and I kept the key in my pocket because there seemed no point in putting it back on the table.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, two weeks later, the next parcel arrived, and then another.
The second turned up on the morning a butcher named Ray Manton vanished from the loading bay behind his shop on Main Street. Ray was not the sort of man people described as friendly, but he was dependable. He kept his apron cleaner than his counters and gave leftover sausages to the school fundraiser every Easter. His wife said he had stepped out to take a delivery and simply failed to return. When the police searched the laneway, they found his ute still idling and the driver’s side door open. On the passenger seat sat a parcel wrapped in butcher’s paper.
He brought it to the market the following Saturday, because it had my name on it.
“I don’t know why you’re in this,” he muttered, setting it down on my trestle. “But I’m not keeping it.”
The paper was greasy in one corner, and the twine was tied in the same clumsy knot as the first parcel. Inside was a pair of children’s gloves, red wool with moth holes at the fingertips, and a folded receipt from the old Cobden Street post office, which had closed years ago. There was also a brass key, identical to the one I already had. When I held them together, they fitted each other as neatly as matching teeth.
Maddy said we should go to the police. I wanted to, but there was not much to tell. Anya and Ray had gone missing in a town where people sometimes wandered off into the bush, took the wrong turn at the river, or decided to leave without a word. The parcels, on the other hand, sounded ridiculous even in my own ears. I was embarrassed by the idea of bringing two keys and a shrivelled pear to Sergeant Kline, who already looked at the market as if it were a nuisance the council had invented. So I kept quiet.
The third disappearance made silence impossible.
My neighbour, Gina Vale, ran the flower stall beside mine. She was sixty if she was a day, with a permanent crease between her brows from years of squinting at daylight. Her husband had died three years earlier, and she spoke to the marigolds and potted herbs as if they understood her. On the morning she vanished, she was due to collect stock from a wholesaler in Shepparton, but she never made the drive. Her van was later found parked at the edge of the market grounds, engine off, keys in the ignition, driver’s door wide open. On the passenger seat lay a parcel.
This time, it was tied with ribbon instead of twine.
The market itself began to feel wrong after that. People still came, still bought berries and hand-knitted beanies, but they did so with their shoulders raised and their conversations cut short. It was not fear exactly. It was a feeling that one had walked into a room where a private business was underway and was expected to pretend not to notice. Several stallholders said they had seen parcels left here and there: on trestles, under tables, once inside the open boot of a hatchback. Always plain brown paper. Always my name. Always when someone was distracted for the briefest moment.
Maddy told me to stop going to the market until we understood what was happening.
“And if I don’t?” I asked.
She looked at me for a long second. “Then stop taking whatever’s being left there like it’s meant for us.”
It was the first sensible thing anyone had said to me about it. So, for one Saturday, I stayed home. I watched Eli crawl across the rug with a toy fire engine and tried not to think about my stall sitting empty among the others. In the afternoon, around four, Ray’s sister Deborah came by with a tray of scones for Maddy and a face red from crying. She said someone had seen Ray walking towards the old post office at the far end of town just before he disappeared. Not entering it. Just walking towards it, carrying a parcel under his arm.
That was the first time I thought of the brass key in my pocket.
The old post office on Cobden Street had been shut for over twenty years. It stood behind the hardware store, a squat brick building with cracked awnings and a faded sign still bolted above the door. Everyone in town had seen it, but few had gone inside after it closed. It had passed through a succession of owners and failed renovations. Once, an attempt had been made to turn it into a café. The chairs remained stacked in the windows for months before someone took them away. For as long as I could remember, the front door had been padlocked.
I drove there after dusk with the brass keys in my pocket and the latest parcel on the passenger seat. Maddy argued, but not hard enough to stop me. She knew my mind when it was set. Perhaps she also knew that if I waited any longer, I would do something foolish out of curiosity alone.
Cobden Street was empty except for a delivery van outside the chemist and the distant murmur from the pub. The post office door was fitted with a rusted lock that looked newer than the rest of the building, which suggested that someone had been opening and closing it recently. I tried the keys one after another until one clicked and the padlock sprang open so cleanly it made me take a step back.
Inside, the building smelled of dust, old cardboard and something faintly sweet, like bruised pears left in a warm room. The front hall had been stripped bare except for a counter and a wall of pigeonholes with their labels still above them. Most of the glass panes had been boarded from the inside. I could hear a soft ticking sound somewhere deeper in the building, not loud enough to place, steady enough to be deliberate.
On the counter lay a stack of parcels wrapped in brown paper. Seven, maybe eight. Some bore names I did not recognise. One had Anya Bell written on it. Another, Ray Manton. Another, Gina Vale.
I stood there too long, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, until I noticed that each parcel had a keyhole sewn into the twine knot, small and neat as if made for the purpose. I reached for the one addressed to Gina and heard a scrape behind me.
A woman’s voice said, “Don’t open the wrong one.”
I turned so fast I nearly slipped on the tiled floor. In the doorway to the rear room stood Mrs Harker, the retired postal supervisor everyone in town thought had moved to Wangaratta years ago. She was smaller than I remembered, with a grey cardigan buttoned to her throat and a walker folded against the wall beside her. Yet she looked perfectly at home in the dark office, as if she had never left it.
“You’ve been bringing them here,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“I’ve been trying to keep them moving,” she replied. “There’s a difference.”
Her voice was thin but steady. I could not decide whether she was frightened or merely irritated by my presence. She glanced at the parcel in my hands.
“You shouldn’t have taken that one home,” she said. “It marks the route.”
“The route to what?”
“To where they go when they’re not where they’re meant to be.”
It was the sort of sentence that would have sounded foolish in any other place, but in that stripped office, with the parcels stacked on the counter like patient pests, it made a twisted sort of sense. I said, “You know what this is.”
Mrs Harker let out a breath through her nose. “I know what happens if the parcels are delayed.”
She told me then, not in a speech but in fragments, while keeping one hand on the walker as though she might need it quickly. Years ago, before the post office closed, there had been a wrong door in the back room. Not a ghost story, not a curse passed down by grandmothers, just a place that behaved improperly. Parcels left there by mistake did not arrive. People who kept a parcel too long, or opened one not addressed to them, sometimes disappeared from the places where they had been standing, and something else took their place for a while. The town had learned, in the way towns do, to pretend not to know. There had been rules. Never break the seal. Never open the parcel unless it was your name on the paper. Always deliver the last one to the post office before market closed on Saturday, when the route was “open”.
I stared at her.
“That is an appalling explanation,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied. “But it’s the one you’ve got.”
Behind us came the sound of paper sliding across wood. One of the parcels had shifted by itself on the counter, turning slightly as if it had been nudged by an unseen hand. I looked at the labels again and saw something I had not noticed before: all the names were people who had vanished on market days. Not at random, not from lonely roads or riverbanks, but on or around Saturday mornings, when the town was busiest and least attentive.
“Where are they?” I asked.
Mrs Harker looked at the door to the rear room. “Not here.”
I did not like her answer, which was no answer at all. But I did like the fact that she was willing to meet my eyes while saying it. It was the first honest thing anyone had given me since Anya disappeared.
Then the back room door opened by itself.
It was not a dramatic opening. It did not slam or bang. It merely unlatched with a careful metallic click and swung wide enough to reveal a narrow passage lit by a dim yellow bulb. The smell of the room beyond was the smell of damp paper and rotting fruit. The ticking I had heard earlier grew louder. Somewhere deeper in the building, parcels were being sorted, one by one, with patient little thuds.
Mrs Harker whispered, “If you’ve still got the key, use it. But only on the last parcel.”
“How do I know which one’s last?”
She gave me a look that was almost pity. “You’ll know when the others stop moving.”
I wish I could say I thought first of Anya, or Ray, or Gina. In truth I thought of Eli, asleep at home with one hand curled round a toy wheel, and of Maddy waiting for me to stop being reckless and come back with something she could believe. I gathered the parcels into my arms. They were heavier than they looked, as though each contained more than paper and ribbon, and I carried them through the doorway one after another while Mrs Harker held the front room and listened to the town outside.
The rear passage led to what had once been the sorting room. It was narrower than I expected, lined with shelves and pigeonholes. At the far end stood a door painted the dull green of old hospital walls. There was no handle on my side, only a brass plate with a keyhole in the centre.
I laid the parcels on the floor. Six of them, then seven, then eight. They shifted again, not much, just enough to suggest a direction. The final parcel I had brought from home, the one with my name on it, sat by itself near the threshold. When I picked it up, I felt the same wet slide inside that I had felt with the first.
I used the key.
The lock turned with an almost cheerful click. When I opened the parcel, I found no note, no fruit, no gloves. Inside lay my own stall receipt from the market, folded twice, and a small metal token stamped with the words COBDEN STREET POST OFFICE. It was the sort of thing that might once have hung from a keyring at the counter. On the back someone had scratched a word with a pin or nail.
Last.
At that moment all the other parcels gave a shudder as if a train had passed somewhere beneath the floorboards. The twine on each one loosened. The paper peeled back. Not all at once, but in sequence, as though the room itself were unwrapping them. I saw the red wool gloves lying empty on the floor before me. I saw the butcher’s paper opening to reveal a strip of Ray’s grey sleeve and the cuff of his watch. I saw a florist’s ribbon unwinding beside a handful of Gina’s snapped plant ties. There was no gore, no sudden heap of the dead, only the terrible evidence that these parcels had not been carrying goods. They had been carrying people by pieces of attention, by names, by places where they belonged, and those people had been taken somewhere that refused to return them whole.
The rear room filled with a smell like wet soil.
I heard footsteps behind the wall, many of them, moving in a corridor too close to be possible. Then I heard Anya’s voice, very faint and not quite right, call my name.
“Don’t answer,” Mrs Harker shouted from the front room.
I did not. I would like to claim courage, but it was fear and memory and the knowledge that if I responded, the thing behind the wall would know it had chosen correctly. Instead I grabbed the parcel token and shoved it into the brass keyhole in the green door. It fitted like a coin in a slot.
The door opened inward, and the smell hit me full in the face, sweet and rotten and humid as a compost bin in summer. Beyond it was not another room but a long dark space that seemed larger than the building should have allowed. Shelves ran away into it in both directions, stacked with parcels and sacks and bundles tied with string. Some were labelled with names I knew from the town. Some were blank. At the far end, under a dim light I could not place, stood a row of people with their backs to me, motionless as items in storage.
I saw Anya by the shape of her hair. I saw Ray by the broad set of his shoulders. Gina was there too, one hand lifted slightly as if she had been about to wave.
They did not turn.
The room was not a place for rescue, I understood then. It was a place for delivery, and the parcels were only one direction of it. Whatever had taken them had kept them in the logic of the post office, filed and delayed until their names were called properly. If I stepped inside, I knew with a certainty beyond reason that I would join them, not as a body ripped apart, but as a thing shelved and waiting.
So I did the only useful act available to me. I slammed the green door shut and forced the key back in the lock, turning it hard until the metal gave a squeal. From the front room came a crash as if shelving had collapsed. Then Mrs Harker was shouting for me to run.
I ran. The passage seemed longer on the way out. The building shook with a burst of thuds and scraping movements. When I reached the front room, Mrs Harker had gone white as paper and was using her walker to batter the counter, knocking parcels to the floor one by one.
“Take the token,” she cried. “And don’t let it be returned.”
I fumbled it into my pocket and pushed through the front door into the night. Behind me something in the post office hit the inside of the windows with a flat, patient sound, not a smash but a testing, as if it were learning the shape of the glass. I did not look back until I was in the ute and had pulled away from the kerb.
In the rear-view mirror, the post office lights were on. Not all of them, just the front hall and one narrow strip of yellow above the old counter. A figure stood in the doorway where I had left Mrs Harker. She raised one hand, not waving exactly, but indicating that I should go.
I never saw her after that.
By the following Monday, the post office was empty. The police opened it with a locksmith, found the rear room sealed off by a wall that had not been there before, and declared the building unsafe. They found no parcels, no ledger, no sign of trespass. Sergeant Kline asked me several questions I could not answer without sounding deranged, and in the end he wrote my statement down as a report of suspicious circumstances. Maddy said he looked disappointed I had nothing more exciting to offer.
Three days later, the market reopened as if nothing had happened. There was no memorial, no official announcement, only the quiet return of stallholders and customers to their old routes. Yet things were altered. Ray’s butcher shop closed. Gina’s flower stall was taken over by her daughter, who sold out by eleven and cried in the van afterwards. Anya’s uncle kept the nursery open but would not speak about the back row of potted herbs where she used to stand.
And every Saturday, at some point near closing, I found a parcel on my stall.
I never opened another one.
Instead, I did what Mrs Harker had done. I took each parcel, marked with my name in that same black ink, and carried it to the old post office site. The building was eventually demolished, but the concrete slab remained for months, surrounded by wire and weeds. I left the parcels there beside the paling fence until morning, then watched them disappear from where I had set them, one by one, without any sign of who took them away.
The last parcel arrived on the first market day after Eli’s second birthday. It was smaller than the others and tied with red ribbon. My name was written neatly on the paper. I had not seen the handwriting before.
Inside was a photograph, though not of a real moment. It showed the market grounds on a bright Saturday morning, crowded with stalls, customers and dogs on leads. Near the old goods shed stood my blue tarp and beneath it, leaning over my table, was a man I did not recognise. He had my face, or something close enough to it that my stomach turned. He was reaching for a parcel resting on the edge of the trestle.
On the back of the photograph, in the same black ink, were the words: Delivered late. Please return to sender.
I did not go home by the usual road that day. I drove south for three hours until I reached another town and another market, where nobody knew my name and the stalls were arranged differently and the air smelled only of chips and sunscreen. I bought a coffee, sat in the car park with Eli asleep in his seat, and watched the people moving in and out among the canvas shelters.
Somewhere, I knew, there would always be a parcel waiting for the right address.
Urban Legends
