The Right Road

By the time they left the last village behind, the road had thinned to a strip of cracked tarmac shouldering its way through a colourless sea of moor.
Kai watched the land rise around them, swallowing hedges, houses and phone signal. Just land and sky now. Low stone walls ran in crooked lines until they sank into the heather.

“Cheery,” Ellie said, blowing steam from her takeaway coffee. “You sure this is the right road?”

Kai tapped the satnav. The screen was a frozen grid of grey with a single blue arrow inching forward. No signal, no names. Just: Recalculating…

“It’s the only road,” he said. “The solicitor said: past the reservoir, follow the road till the telegraph poles stop, then keep going.”

“Then what? Pray?”

“That’s plan B.”

The wind buffeted the car hard enough to twitch the steering wheel. Kai nudged it back, jaw tight. Ten years in London traffic and a childhood on Manchester estates had not prepared him for the feeling of being the only moving thing in miles.

There were no other cars. No walkers. Even the sheep they’d passed earlier had huddled as if trying to disappear into themselves.

Kai checked the rear-view mirror, then the side mirror, then the dead ribbon of road behind them.

Ellie noticed, because Ellie noticed everything. “What are you looking for?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a lie people tell right before they invent a man with an axe.”

“I’m checking the road.”

“For what?”

He almost said a place to turn around. Instead he shrugged. “Habit.”

She watched him for a second longer. “You do realise most people’s driving habits aren’t ‘maintain escape route from cursed inheritance’.”

“Good thing most people aren’t here, then.”

“This was a terrible idea,” Ellie muttered, more to the window than to him. “Selling it from photos would have been fine. I would have signed anything.”

“We have to see the place,” Kai said. “We need to know what we’re selling. Or if we’re selling.”

“You’re not seriously thinking of living out here.”

He shrugged, not answering. He didn’t know yet. That was the point. The job was killing him in slow, beige meetings. The city was a constant low-level panic. A house, fully paid off, even in the middle of nowhere, was not something you dismissed out of hand.

And then there was the other reason. The one neither of them said aloud: their mother had loved this uncle enough to name Kai after him, but had cut him out so completely that neither sibling had known the house existed until the will arrived.

An entire life in a sealed envelope.

Kai still remembered the solicitor’s voice on the phone. Crisp, practised, faintly apologetic, as if inheriting a house from a relative you’d never met was the sort of administrative inconvenience one ought to take with good grace.

At first he’d assumed debt. Some stale legal nuisance. A form to sign. Permission to dispose of effects. Not a house. Not land. Not a lane with a name like a threat disguised as directions.

Ellie had been there for the call, feet up on Mum’s sofa, mouthing what? across the room while he put it on speaker.

“Right Way Lane,” the solicitor had said.

And from the kitchen, without even turning round, their mother had said, “Sell it.”

That had been it. No hesitation. No surprise. Just sell it, in the same tone she might have used for an old wardrobe.

Ellie had lowered her feet. “Mum, hang on. You haven’t even asked what it looks like.”

“I don’t care what it looks like.”

“Bit harsh.”

Their mother had dried her hands on a tea towel and finally looked in. Her face had been calm in that way that meant it very much wasn’t. “Then let me make it easy for you,” she’d said. “Whatever he left, I don’t want it in this house.”

Afterwards, Ellie had said, “Well. That felt normal.”

Kai had laughed then, because the alternative had been admitting how badly it got under his skin.

Now, out here, with the moor rising around them and the signal long gone, the memory sat differently. Less family awkwardness. More warning.

Ellie tugged her coat tighter round her. “Feels like the end of the world.”

He glanced at her. Wisps of dyed red hair had escaped her beanie, her nose already pink from cold. She looked younger than twenty-six, the way she always did when she was out of her depth and trying not to show it.

“It’s just weather,” he said. “You get that on planet Earth.”

“Don’t do the science teacher voice. I didn’t come all this way for a GCSE recap.”

He smiled despite himself. The wind howled across the moor and the car shuddered again. The road rose, dipped, then curved. Ahead, a sign leaned drunkenly, its paint peeled to pale ghosts of letters.

He slowed, squinting through the swept arcs of the wipers. You could just make them out if you knew what to look for:

RIGHT WAY LANE

The arrow beneath pointed off the main road to a narrower track, barely more than a strip of patched tarmac between ragged grasses.

“Right way,” Ellie read. “How reassuringly culty.”

“The solicitor mentioned it,” Kai said. “House is at the end of Right Way Lane.”

“Of course it is.”

He turned the wheel. Tyres bumped over the join, then found the new road, if you could call it that. The moor seemed to press closer, leaning in. The telegraph poles marched along a while longer, then thinned, then stopped.

Past that point, the sky felt heavier.

It wasn’t raining, not properly, but the wind carried something wet and needling that got into the gaps at his cuffs and collar. It made Kai’s fingers ache around the wheel.

After a few minutes, the lane kinked sideways and dipped through a shallow cutting where rocks jutted like broken teeth. A drainage ditch, half-choked with reeds, glistened darkly on one side.

“Imagine breaking down here,” Ellie said. “No AA man. Just ghosts and sheep.”

“The car’s fine.”

“For now.”

She flipped down the passenger mirror and peered at herself, smudging eyeliner with a gloved thumb. “Do I look like someone who inherits haunted houses?”

“Everyone looks like someone who inherits haunted houses.”

“Deep.” She snapped the mirror back. “Put that on a mug.”

The lane climbed again. At the crest, the world dropped away ahead, and there it was.

The house stood alone on a slight rise, hunched against the sky. A two-storey rectangle of stone, small-paned windows glinting dullishly. The roof sloped in uneven planes, patched with darker tiles. One chimney. A low stone wall enclosing a scrappy yard. Beyond, the moor rolled on in shades of peat and ash until it touched the horizon.

No other buildings. No trees, except one stunted hawthorn tortured into a permanent lean by the wind.

Kai slowed to a crawl. Gravel crackled under the tyres as they turned through the open gate.

“Home sweet necropolis,” Ellie said.

He parked facing back towards the lane, already wanting the easiest possible exit. The engine ticked as it cooled. When he killed the ignition, the quiet hit them.

Not city quiet. This was the absence of almost everything. Just the wind, endlessly worrying at the edges of things.

They sat for a moment, neither moving.

Kai’s breath clouded the glass. He saw his reflection in the windscreen: tired eyes, dark curls in need of a cut, his father’s nose. A vaguely ordinary man in an extraordinary nowhere.

He opened the door. The wind hit him like cold hands.

The air smelled of wet stone, peat, something metallic beneath. Sound seemed to vanish into it.

Gravel crunched under his boots. Ellie’s door slammed, snatched a little by the gust. She swore, wrestling her coat zip up.

“Bloody hell, it’s like being slapped.”

“Welcome to the country,” Kai said, hoisting his rucksack. His words whipped away.

He looked up at the house.

Its windows were blank. Not boarded, but nothing moved behind them. No curtains twitched. The glass reflected the low sky in dull, fractured bands.

The front door was heavy oak, silvered with age, set in a shallow porch with a single stone step. An old horseshoe had been nailed above it, rusted to a dark crescent.

Ellie joined him on the step, shivering. “Do we knock?”

“On what, exactly? The ghost of Uncle Caius?”

She gave him a sideways look. “Kai inherits a house from Uncle Kai. That’s not weird at all.”

“It’s not the same name.” He fished the key from his pocket. Weighted brass, worn smooth.

“You’re not superstitious, are you?” she pressed.

“Not about names.”

“About anything?”

He hesitated, then slid the key into the lock.

The lock resisted, then turned with a reluctant clunk. The door opened a few inches, then stuck. He put his shoulder to it and shoved.

Something gave with a gritty complaint. The smell hit them first: cold, old air, dust and disuse, undercut with something else. Not rot. Not quite.

It reminded him of second-hand bookshops. Or churches on weekdays.

He flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. “Great.”

“The power’s probably off,” Ellie said. “Got your torch?”

“Yeah.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and thumbed the flashlight on. A weak cone of light cut into the grey gloom. Ellie did the same.

The hall beyond was narrow, wallpaper faded to a tired yellow pattern that might have been flowers once. Peeling at the seams.

The floorboards creaked under their weight with each cautious step. Their boots left darker prints on the dusty boards.

“Hello?” Ellie called. “We’re the… relatives? Inheritors?”

Her voice sounded wrong in here, as if the walls resented the intrusion.

No answer. Of course there wasn’t.

They moved through the ground floor slowly. The kitchen was at the back, low-ceilinged, with old cabinets and an AGA with fat enamel knobs. A big ceramic sink sat under a window that looked out onto the moor.

“It’s like a set from one of those gritty detective dramas,” Ellie said softly. “Where the victim is always middle-aged and sad.”

“Comforting.”

He checked the tap on impulse. It coughed, then spat a thin stream of brown that cleared to cloudy, then faintly clear. The pipes clanked inside the walls like someone hitting them with a wrench.

“At least there’s water,” he said.

“For now,” she said again, voice trailing.

They found the fuse box near the back door and flipped the main switch. Somewhere, a fridge hummed back to tentative life. Lights clicked on one by one down the hall, dim and yellow with age.

“That’s better,” Ellie said. “Hate using my phone torch. Makes me feel like I’m in a found-footage film right before something jumps at the camera.”

He grunted agreement and pocketed his phone. With the lights on, the house felt slightly less ominous and more like a place time had simply slowed in.

For a minute or two they did what people always did in unfamiliar places. Pretended normality would arrive if they moved around briskly enough.

Kai set his rucksack down by the sofa and opened it, checking for chargers, painkillers, the envelope with the solicitor’s number. Ellie drifted through the front room, opening drawers with the wariness of someone expecting either dead spiders or a personal letter that would ruin the evening.

Instead she found three elastic bands, a church newsletter from six years ago, and a packet of mints gone soft in their wrappers.

“Bleak haul,” she said, holding them up.

“Don’t eat those.”

“I wasn’t going to. I’m not feral.”

She glanced around again, slower this time. “It’s weird, though.”

“What is?”

“He lived here properly.” She gestured with the sad mints. “Not like some old relative whose house gets frozen in time and turns into a museum. He was here. Making tea. Buying mints. Existing. And Mum somehow made him sound like a story she’d got bored of telling.”

Kai looked at the mantel, the sofa, the old television with its dead black screen. She was right. The place didn’t feel abandoned so much as recently vacated, as if its owner had stepped outside into the weather and had not yet been informed that he was dead.

“He must have wanted it that way,” Kai said.

Ellie gave him a look. “You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make people into admin. ‘He must have wanted it that way.’ You sound like HR explaining a stabbing.”

He laughed despite himself, and the sound helped. Just for a second. The room loosened.

Then the silence folded back over it.

The furniture was sparse. A sagging sofa in the front room, a crooked bookcase, a small TV that looked twenty years out of date. No clutter. No photos on the walls. No evidence of visitors.

It was neat, but not in the way of someone who enjoyed neatness. More like someone who had removed everything that could be knocked out of place.

Ellie ran her fingers along the mantelpiece. “No dust,” she said. “Not really, anyway.”

“He died in March,” Kai reminded her. “The solicitors have probably had someone in to clean.”

She moved to the bookcase and scanned the spines. “Religious stuff,” she murmured. “Commentaries. Theology. Odd for a man Mum described as a ‘selfish apostate bastard’.”

Kai raised an eyebrow. “She actually said that?”

“Word for word.”

He pulled a volume at random. The black cover crackled. Inside, dense columns of text, underlined in places with careful pencil, notes in the margins in small, neat handwriting.

His eyes snagged on a phrase boxed in at the top of one page, underlined twice.

There is a way that seems right to a man…

The rest of the sentence disappeared under his thumb. He shifted it.

…but its end is the way to death.

Somewhere behind him, the house gave a small settling click.