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Mum wiped the stringy blood from around Granddad’s mouth.

“Emma, grab the tissues from the desk,” she ordered.

Granddad lay on his battered mattress in the corner and stared at the damp ceiling. He looked like he was sick of fighting whatever tortured his insides, and skin hung like it wanted to leave him. I grabbed the tissue box and wheeled over to him.

When we discovered his lung cancer was terminal mum moved him from the cabin by the pond to the farmhouse so he could spend his dying days closer to us. The stench of cigarettes clung to him, even though he hadn’t smoked for the last month.

He coughed more blood.

Fear twinkled behind the dry sickness in his eyes. They locked on mine and he moved his finger over the duvet in a circular motion while mum wiped the blood. I had no idea what he wanted, and I wished we could’ve bonded more, but in truth, he scared me. He always stared and looked anguished. Eighteen years we’d lived on the same land and I knew little about him. On top of that he was mute. Mum said when grandma had a heart attack he stopped talking and that he couldn't be bothered to communicate with anyone. The day Grandma died it seemed he did too.

“I’ll go get him some water.” Mum blew her greasy brown hair out of her face. Sweat dotted the clothes that had hung off her for three days. Apparently, as well as mum’s pale skin, hair, and monster metabolism, I’d inherited her smile, which I hadn’t seen for a while.

Granddad must have felt so lonely. Grandma died in 1978, when mum was eleven, and Granddad refused to look for a new wife. Their plans to open a bed-and-breakfast in Ipswich died with her, and Granddad decided to stay here in Lewes on our 150-acre land. Apparently, he liked being near the apple tree as the smell reminded him of my grandma.

Blood flopped from his mouth onto the duvet. He wiped the blood in a circle repeatedly.

“O?” I shrugged.

He closed his eyes, pained.

“I’m sorry, Granddad, I wish I understood you.” I felt bad for finding him annoying.

Stubborn determination gripped his face. He pushed himself up to lean his back on the wall. His neck muscles tensed to the point I thought they’d rip. “The cabin…” he forced with all his breath, unable to utter the next word. He fell back, his face gray from the effort.

My heart pounded. Did I imagine his words? “Mum! Quick!”

Granddad squeezed my hand, his eyes begging me to be quiet.

Mum entered holding a glass of water. “What?”

Granddad closed his eyes. “Nothing,” I said. “I thought Granddad was about to vomit but he wasn’t.”

Granddad looked relieved.

The cabin was the first and last two words granddad ever said to me.

*  *  *

I didn’t notice the wheels of my chair sink in the dirt while mum buried him. The rain battered against my umbrella, accompanying the repetitive splat of soil against the coffin.

The cabin, repeated in my head.

Mum shivered but remained stony-faced, probably hiding her pain. She hated showing weakness and didn’t seem to care that the rain hammered her. It was just us now and she was covering all roles in the family. It didn’t help I was moving to Newcastle tomorrow for university. I felt bad it was at the other end of the country and that I’d added to her stress, but I couldn’t live here forever.

Our family history, centuries of it, was in this field only a ten-minute wheel from our back door. Mum drove us around the long way on account of the weather and my travel issues. Generations of our family had inherited this land. The eldest, James, was desperate to own it in the seventeen hundreds. Mum said he met the love of his life in these fields, and he wanted to build a home on the land where their love blossomed. Another family bought the land before he could, but Mum said James paid a visit and charmed them with his story of true love. It had been the family land ever since.

In the short drive back Mum tried to fill the silence with the radio, but every song had some lyric that hammered home the sadness we both felt. Water dripped from her chin and she didn’t bother wiping it.

“Mum?”

“What?”

Death makes you curious about things you normally push away. “Do you know how I can contact Dad?”

“What makes you think he wants to hear from you?”

Her tone shook me. Not the sensitivity I’d hoped for. “It’s just…”

She glared at me, neglecting the road. “First you’re leaving me for university, and now you want to leave me for him!”

“Mum, the road!”

She didn’t care. “He ran off after the accident because he didn’t want a disabled daughter. I’m your family. Not him. ME. He’s a fucking coward, okay?”

She ignored my tears and looked back at the road. She turned the radio volume up to its maximum. The Cutting Crew, I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight blasted in the car and all around us.

“Mum… Mum! MUM!” I reached for the volume control. She slapped my hand away, again and again. The music hammered my head but Mum didn’t care.

When we got back Mum opened the passenger door, took my wheelchair from the boot, set it up and left it next to my door, but didn’t help me get in it. She turned away.

“Aren’t you going to help me?”

She walked off. The sound of her feet splatting against the mud accompanied the rain. She’d never exploded like that.

I entered the kitchen. “Sorry...” Hopefully, she’d see how sorry I was and apologize too.

She stood with her back to me, was dry and wearing her nightgown. She took another sip of water and stared at the rain hitting the grass and mud outside.

Emotion pierced her previously cold tone. “I’m sorry, Emma. Dad dying, you leaving… The mention of that… bastard… It just...” She turned to see me shivering, and my dress and jacket soaked. She hugged me.

“Sorry mum, I didn’t mean to upset you...”

She grabbed a dirty kitchen towel stained with last night’s lasagna, and dried my hair and face. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not leaving, Mum. I’m just going on a long trip.” I smiled. “This is my house and I’ll always come back.”

She smiled back.

The cabin.

“I was thinking, mum. I never got to see granddad’s cabin.”

She nodded.

“I’d like to say goodbye properly, you know. Maybe there’s something I can keep, a reminder of Granddad.”

Mum stood up and refilled her bottle of water. “Go to bed, Emma. You’re never going to that cabin.” Her eyes glazed-over.

“Why not?”

She walked past me.

“Mum?”

*  *  *

The cabin.

I put my pillow over my face. Why was Mum being so weird? I closed my eyes and thought about other things, like what it would be like at university. Would people be nice or mean about my disability? Would I meet my future husband? That’s why university is so important to me, a chance to meet so many people and hopefully see myself as more than a disabled girl.

The cabin.

Those damn words hammered at my brain. All my life I’d wanted to communicate with Granddad, to ask him about Grandma, about Dad, and when he finally managed words they were worthless. Maybe there was something he wanted me to have. Maybe he wanted me to sell some circular thing for lots of money to fund university. Or maybe he was just strange and I couldn’t dwell on anything a dying old man would say.

I folded the pillow under my head and went to sleep. In the morning I’d leave and in time I’d forget about the whole thing.

*  *  *

Something soft pressed against my belly and moved in a circular motion. Was it a dream? Both of my hands were by my sides. The smell of cigarettes shot up my nostrils. Fast breaths drowned out the thoughts but my eyes wanted to open. Thankfully there was nothing, just the dark and the outline of my Due Lipa poster.

Adrenaline pumped through my body. I scratched my stomach, sickened and worried. Was he haunting me? The heavy rain hitting the roof was soothing, somehow meditative, but it wouldn’t banish the thoughts.

With the chances of getting to sleep slim I wheeled to the bedroom door, pushed it open and it creaked, like everything in this old place. Mum’s snoring filled the corridor. I entered the kitchen and filled the bottle of water. The back door clicked open.

The cabin.

Curiosity won the battle. I sipped my water, put the bottle down, and then turned on my phone torch, took an umbrella from the shoe rack and set off into the cold, wet air.

I wheeled through the muddy field. The umbrella was more of a nuisance and blew all over the place so threw it away. Getting soaked would have to be part of the journey. The farmhouse glowed in the moonlight, two hundred yards away.

A slope stretched to the cabin and I scanned the ground with my phone. The slope was too steep for my chair. What was I thinking? Maybe I should go back. Perchance Mum would change her mind by tomorrow and we could go together.

A gray figure flashed in the bedroom window. I jerked and the chair slipped onto the slope, taking me backwards down it. One of the wheels hit a tree, flinging me onto the mud and my chair bumped away. I slid down the slope with rain hammering my ears and slapping my face. I stopped at the bottom, shaken, and wiped the mud from my eyes. I expected the figure to be at the top of the slope. Luckily it wasn’t. Perhaps my eyes were tricking me. I’d been on edge for a while and there was a lot of weird stuff going on with Mum. The phone was somewhere in the darkness but the light was non-existent. I faced the cabin’s French windows, and dragged myself along the dirt, up the steps, and to the wood framed glass door.

Padlocked! Why would he make me come here and padlock it? I pounded at the glass as fear closed in. I’d never make it back up the slope and would have to stay on these steps for the night. I crawled back onto the mud and found a big enough rock. I beat at the door and smashed an entrance. I poked the jagged bits of glass out of the way and crawled in. Glass shards stabbed at my elbows.

The smell of cigarettes carried in the wind and the light didn’t work. Did he sit here in darkness most of the time? I used the bicycle light to look around. The cabin had a fridge, cooker, toilet, and a bed in the corner. It was tidy but full of boxes. It was as miserable as Granddad looked.

“Okay Granddad, I’ve done part one, now what the hell was that circle?”

I was on a circular rug. I shuffled off it and rolled it up, revealing just a pound coin and a few dead spiders. O for oven? But nothing in there.

World maps from the 1950s crookedly hung from the wall. I dragged myself to the stack of old cardboard boxes that looked like they could perish in the wind.

I opened one, revealing several photo albums. I scanned them, hoping to find photos of Dad or Grandma, but only found photos of Granddad and Mum, barely a smile between them. Each album had gaps where a piece of history should have been.

Another box contained old clothes and Granddad’s army medals. I pulled a heavier box towards me. It was sealed with layers of tape. I dug my nails into it. No use. I bit at it. Nothing but a dusty taste in my mouth for the trouble. I took one of the army medals and cut through the tape, revealing a gramophone that looked older than the house and a violin with a moldy and rotten bow. I held the violin to my chin. The wood stank of copper and stained my hands and pajamas a reddish-brown. I placed the gramophone next to me and plugged it in.

There was a record on it.

The circle.

He wasn’t just making a circle but repeating it, like a spinning record.

Simon and Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence played. I’d crawled through the mud in the pissing rain to listen to fucking Simon and Garfunkel? What’s so important about this? I’d heard old people say they made good music ‘back in the day’ but I didn’t care. I sat back and listened, wondering how the hell I would get back. I didn’t want to stay in this shithole. A laugh escaped my angry mouth. I imagined my granddad sat here alone in the dark listening to this on repeat. Bridge Over Troubled Water began.

Maybe he just wanted me to enjoy something he liked. Of course it wasn’t anything important, but I suppose it bonds us more, even if he is dead now. It was my fault for coming here on spooky o’clock. If Mum wasn’t being such a dickhead, this would’ve been far less painful. Maybe we could’ve enjoyed listening together and she could tell me stories about Granddad.

I dragged over a box full of records and sifted through. Neil Young. Someone in my old English class had that name. King Crimson. Don’t know who that is. I took out the envelope for Simon And Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits 1972. I don’t know which of the men was Simon or Garfunkel, but they both needed better haircuts. Something hard nestled in the envelope. Three diaries and a pen.

I opened the diary with an apple embroidered on the cover.

June 26^th, 2010

I miss you, Margaret. Every day I miss you. I even miss the way you’d tell me off for nothing in particular.

All I want to do is sleep. It’s the only time I get relief from this...

He wanted me to learn about Grandma. He knew! My throat hurt as I choked up. I turned the page.

Yesterday I tried to end it, but Bridget came over earlier than her regimented four o’clock. When she saw the rope she screamed ‘Family’ at me. ‘Family.’ ‘Family.’ ‘Family.’ It takes me back to... I have a duty to keep her alive. I’m her only protection.

My neck stiffened. Poor mum had to deal with his behavior for so long. Now I get it. The next song started. I took another diary. The entries started the year grandma died. I guess this was his way of feeling like they were still in contact. I learned that mum had difficulties growing up as Granddad regularly wrote ‘Bridget seems back to normal now.’

Hoping to find information about Dad, I skipped through the diaries searching for an entry from when I was born. But there was a huge gap. The earliest entry was from when I was three.

May 3^rd, 2001

I did it, Margaret. I got a clue to him. I’d waited so long for her to let her guard down and she did when she finally let me cook dinner. She’s normally so attentive but I undercooked some old chicken I’d hidden at the back of the fridge. She wolfed the whole thing down. I still felt awful for deliberately hurting her.

What?

The song abruptly cut. My eyes darted to the gramophone. The music jerked then started again. I got back to the diary.

Later, while she vomited I snuck him a note. David’s a good man. It was a huge risk, and there was every chance he’d show her, but he destroyed it and told me he would help. He said she’d become violent since he suggested we all move and was always snapping at him. She threatened him with a knife and complained that the house is part of the family, and this is the family land. He’s going to get me and Emma out of here this weekend.

A lump formed in my throat. What the hell was going on? The urge to read the next entry tormented me. A shiver pierced my body.

Mum spent her life looking after him, and his thanks was to write horrible stories to make her seem like a monster.

The gramophone crackled and the song struggled. I removed the record and put it back in the envelope and turned the gramophone off.

“Time to go home,” I hoped talking would fight the fear.

I pulled myself towards the door. A waft of cigarette smoke blew up my nose, making me cough.

“And what’s your name?” a man’s voice came from the gramophone speaker.

I froze.

“Bridget,” an enthusiastic child’s voice announced. It was Mum.

“Yes it is.” It had to be Grandma. Her tone melted my fear. It was so alive, so energetic.

“And what are you going to play for us, Bridget?” Granddad’s gentle voice was nothing like the pained, worried one I’d heard.

“Music!” she answered. I laughed along with Grandma and Granddad.

“Go on then, honey. Play us some music.”

“OK.”

The bright violin sound absorbed me, so peaceful and soothing.

“You can play this to our new neighbors in Ipswich,” my grandma told her.

“But I like it here!”

“And you’ll also like it in Ipswich.”

Bridget’s tone switched and she stopped playing. “But, this, house, is, part, of, our, family. This is our land!”

She played the violin again.

“It’s okay. Everything will be fine,” my granddad said.

The violin sound became disjointed and violent.

“Bridget. Practice is over!”

The violin stopped, replaced by groaning. A wave of worry replaced the joy I felt. “Bridget?” Granddad said.

Mum released a deathly scream.

My whole body went numb. 

“No, Bridget!” Granddad cried over Grandma’s screams.

A crash. My granddad’s voice disappeared. There were just my grandma’s desperate pleas, and thuds, until the pleading stopped with a crack and only dull thuds remained.

I picked the gramophone up and hurled it at the wall. I lay back, thankful for the silence. I closed my eyes, trembling, and took deep breaths. I said any words that came to my mind, just to block out the atmosphere. I needed my phone.

The sound of Mum crying boomed out of the gramophone. Granddad struggled to speak.  I sat up and opened the diary.

I don’t even know what fucking day it is. David tried to get us away, but Bridget caught us. That anger is not from humanity, and those screams…they’re the screams of the dead. When I regained consciousness I was back in here, with scabs all over my arms and burns on my chest. He’s gone. I don’t dare ask her where he is…

My head throbbed.

The only thing she lets me do is smoke so I’m going to until my lungs explode. It’s this bloody land. There was no charm offensive as my parents claimed. Some ramblers found remains, Margaret! My ancestors brutally tortured and killed the family that lived here so they could take the house. The great romance they preach was built on darkness, and it hangs over this place. It’s inside Bridget, and she won’t let people leave.

And poor Emma will never walk again. I saw her do it Margaret. She took a hammer to Emma’s spine. 

Mum…

Tears formed in my eyes and I was short of breath.

I looked up and she was barefoot, stood on broken glass in the smashed doorway, staring at me. Words froze in my mouth. She smiled, showed me my mobile phone and smashed it against the wall and threw the remains at me. She turned around, and walked out into the rain, leaving bloody footprints. Each squelching step in the mud a thud on my heart. She disappeared up the slope.

That noise will haunt me until the day I die. Something tells me this is my new home.

About the Author:

Mark Boutros is an award winning writer, and author of fantasies that celebrate broad worlds, hapless characters and freedom of imagination. He also writes short stories and thrillers. Mark lives in London, loves RPSs (the computer game kind) and binge watching Netflix with his wife.