Chapter One

By the time Mere Cross had dropped behind them, with its bus shelter, shuttered post office and the chip-shop smell still faint in the car, the road had thinned to a strip of cracked tarmac shouldering 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 disappeared 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 had frozen to a grey grid, a blue arrow pointing into nothing. No signal. No street names. Just: Recalculating…

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

“Then what? Pray?”

“That’s plan B.”

A gust shoved the car sideways hard enough to twitch the wheel. Kai corrected it, jaw tight. Ten years of London traffic and a childhood on Manchester estates hadn’t prepared him for being the only moving thing for miles.

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

Kai checked the rear-view mirror, then the side mirror, then the dead strip 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 somewhere to turn around. Instead he shrugged. “Habit.”

She watched him for a second. “You do realise most people’s driving habits don’t include maintaining an escape route from a 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’ve been fine. I’d 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 didn’t answer. He didn’t know yet. That was the point. The job was killing him in slow, beige meetings. The city was a constant low-grade panic. A paid-off house, even in the middle of nowhere, wasn’t something you dismissed out of hand.

“And before you start,” Ellie said, “tell me again why we’re staying three nights.”

“Because it’s a long drive, the place might be half falling down, and I’m not deciding what to do with a house in under an hour.”

“You forgot the bit where you’re apparently auditioning for rural exile.”

He let that one go.

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, then cut him out so completely that neither of them 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 inconvenience one was expected to take gracefully.

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 that sounded 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. 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.

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. “Feels like the end of the world.”

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

“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 went on worrying at the car. The road rose, dipped, then curved. Ahead, a sign leaned drunkenly from the verge, its paint peeled to pale ghosts of letters.

He slowed, squinting through the swept arcs of the wipers.

RIGHT WAY LANE

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

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

“The solicitor mentioned it,” Kai said. “House is at the end.”

“Of course it is.”

He turned the wheel. The tyres bumped over the join, then found the new surface, if you could call it that. The moor seemed to draw closer. The telegraph poles marched alongside for a little 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 found the gaps at his cuffs and collar. His fingers ached around the wheel.

The lane kinked sideways and dipped through a shallow cutting where rocks jutted from the banks like exposed bone. A drainage ditch, half-choked with reeds, gleamed blackly on one side.

“Imagine breaking down here,” Ellie said. “No AA. 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. Put it on a mug.”

The lane climbed again. At the crest, the land fell away ahead of them, and there it was.

The house stood alone on a slight rise, hunched against the sky. A two-storey block of dark stone with small-paned windows glinting dully. The roof sloped in uneven planes, patched here and there with darker tiles where repairs had been made. One chimney. A low stone wall around a scrappy yard. Beyond it, the moor rolled on in shades of peat and ash until it met the horizon.

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

Kai slowed to a crawl.

The roof was patched, not ruined. The windows needed work, but they were there. The wall stood. The outbuilding stood. For one disloyal second his mind leapt ahead of him: a desk upstairs, shopping once a week, a better coat, fewer beige meetings, boots by the door, silence that belonged to him. He hated that the thought arrived sounding practical.

For another second, stranger still, the fantasy tilted. Not him doing the place up, making it modern, imposing himself on it. Him simply taking over. Learning the cupboards, the lane, the weather. Falling into the shape of another man’s life because it happened to be standing open.

The gate hung open. Gravel crackled under the tyres as they rolled into the yard, the house straight ahead of them and the lane at their backs.

“Home sweet necropolis,” Ellie said.

He parked facing back towards the gate. If they needed to leave in a hurry, he didn’t want to waste time reversing in the dark. To the left of the yard, the wall fell away to open moor. To the right stood a squat stone outbuilding with its door hanging shut on rusted hinges.

The engine ticked as it cooled. When he killed it, the quiet came down on them.

Not city quiet. Not even countryside quiet. Just the near-absence of everything. Wind at the edges. Nothing else.

They sat for a moment without moving.

Kai’s breath clouded the glass. He caught his reflection in the windscreen. Tired eyes. Dark curls badly in need of a cut. His father’s nose. An ordinary man in an extraordinary nowhere.

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

The air smelled of wet stone and peat, with something metallic underneath.

Gravel crunched under his boots. Ellie’s door slammed, snatched harder than she meant by the gust. She dragged her coat zip up to her chin.

“Bloody hell. It’s like being slapped by weather.”

“Welcome to the country,” Kai said, going round to the boot.

He hauled out his rucksack, then Ellie’s overnight bag. She looked at it with open accusation.

“Still can’t believe we packed for this.”

“It’s a long weekend, not a séance.”

“At this point I’d say the overlap is significant.”

He almost smiled and looked up at the house.

Its windows were blank. Not boarded, but empty. 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. A date stone above the lintel read 1782, its numbers softened by weather. 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? 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 jacket pocket. Weighted brass, worn smooth by decades of use.

“Caius, Kai. Same name with a waistcoat on.”

“It’s Latin.”

“So’s caveat emptor, and that one’s actually useful right now.”

He almost smiled. “You’re not superstitious, are you?”

“About names? No. About creepy old houses in the arse end of nowhere? Deeply.”

He slid the key into the lock.

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

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

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

He found the light switch by the door and flicked it. Nothing.

“Great,” he muttered.

“Power’s probably off at the mains,” Ellie said. “Torch?”

“Yeah.” He pulled out his phone and thumbed the flashlight on. A weak cone of white cut into the gloom. Ellie did the same.

The hallway beyond was narrow and straight, running from front door to back. A staircase rose along the left wall. To the right, an open doorway led into the front room. Further down, past a closed door and a coat stand listing slightly to one side, the hall narrowed into the kitchen at the rear.

The wallpaper had faded to a tired yellow that might once have been flowers. The seams were starting to peel.

The floorboards creaked under their weight. Their boots left darker prints on the dusty wood.

“Hello?” Ellie called. “We’re the relatives. Inheritors. New owners of your earthly domain?”

Her voice sounded wrong in here. Too bright. As if the walls resented it.

No answer.

They moved through the ground floor slowly. The front room looked over the yard, the car, and the open gate beyond. A sagging sofa sat beneath the window. Opposite it stood an old television with a dead black screen. The room had the half-stripped feel of a place someone had lived in carefully rather than comfortably.

The kitchen was at the back, low-ceilinged, with old painted cabinets and an Aga squatting against the far wall, its enamel knobs fat and cream-coloured. A deep ceramic sink sat beneath a window looking out over the rear wall and empty moor beyond. Nothing moved there except the grass flattening and rising in the wind.

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

“Comforting.”

Kai tried the tap on impulse. It coughed, shuddered, then spat a thin stream of brown that slowly cleared to cloudy, then something close enough to clear. The pipes clanked inside the walls like someone testing them with a wrench.

“At least there’s water,” he said.

“For now.”

They found the fuse box in a cupboard near the back door and flipped the main switch. Somewhere deeper in the house, a fridge hummed reluctantly to life. Lights flickered on along the hall, dim and yellow with age, but lights.

“Better,” Ellie said. “Hate using the phone torch. Makes me feel like I’m in a found-footage film right before the camera catches something it shouldn’t.”

He pocketed his phone. With the lights on, the house felt slightly less ominous and slightly more like what it probably was: a place where time had thickened and stayed put.

For a minute or two they did what people always did in unfamiliar places, pretending 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 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 paused. “Yet.”

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

“What is?”

“He lived here. Properly.” She gestured with the soft 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 got bored of telling.”

Kai looked at the mantelpiece, 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 simply not been told he was dead.

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

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. For a second the room loosened.

Then the silence closed over it again.

The furniture was sparse. No clutter. No photos. No sign of visitors. It was neat, but not in the way of someone who liked neatness. More like someone had removed everything that could be knocked out of place.

Ellie ran a finger along the mantelpiece. “No real dust,” she said. “Not for a place that’s been empty since March.”

“The solicitors probably had someone in to clean,” Kai said.

“Out here?” She looked at him. “Who? The sheep?”

He didn’t answer.

She moved to the bookcase and scanned the spines. “Religious stuff,” she murmured. “Commentaries. Theology. Church history.” She pulled one halfway out, then let it fall back. “Odd collection for a man Mum described as, and I quote, a selfish apostate bastard.”

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

“Word for word. Christmas, three years ago. I asked about Dad’s side and got that instead. Didn’t push it.”

He pulled a volume at random. The black cover crackled. Inside, dense columns of text, underlined in careful pencil. Notes in the margins in small, neat handwriting. Not rushed. Not angry. Deliberate. The hand of someone who had sat with these pages for a long time.

His eyes caught on a phrase boxed 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 settled with a small, precise click, like a lock finding its place.