Water hits the car's windscreen with such force that it drags me from my sleep, the windscreen wipers screech across the glass as they swipe teardrop-shaped rain away. I glance into the car's rearview mirror at my two children. 

Oliver is sitting behind me, the rabbit carrier on his lap with his arms wrapped tightly around it. Beside him, Sloane is playing on her phone. "It's so boring." She glances up at me, her eyes meeting mine in the mirror. "You've brought us to a place with no signal." She glares at me, like it's all my fault, in her opinion it probably is. 

Beside me, their father and my husband Kent groans, "I think it'd be good to get away from that phone for a bit." I tell her, "It's like you're glued to it." 

"But how will I text Cynthia and Sid?" She asks, her eyes twinkling. She still hasn't realised that Cynthia and Sid aren't true friends. They don't care about her. They only care about themselves, it's always been that way. I've tried to point that out to her, but she always just tells me it's not true and makes me feel like a villain. Like I'm the one who's done something wrong. 

"Maybe you can go a few days without texting Cynthia and Sid," I suggest, but her facial expression tells me that's a no-go. She won't even explore the possibility of not texting them, and for some reason that worries me more than it probably should. 

"You knew there was no signal, didn't you?" She says, her tone carrying a hint of anger that I know my daughter well enough to know that anger can explode into something else. "You did this on purpose. I knew you still didn't like them." She growls, dropping her phone to her lap and crossing her arms across her chest. "Why didn't you just say? You couldn't stand them. I knew it all along, they were so nice to you and yet even they could tell you didn't like them." I tense in my seat, waiting for the final blow I know is coming. "They thought you were a bit-"

"Cinnabun asks if you'd please shut it?" Oliver growls at his sister, clutching the rabbit cage tighter. "She hates your voice."

"Tell Cinnabun I'll chuck her out the window," Sloane growls back, eyeing Cinnabun the way someone would eye their mortal enemy. 

"You can't do that. I'll chuck your phone out the window!" Oliver protests, reaching across for her phone, she grabs it and moves it out of the way quickly. Oliver makes a lunge for it again, and Sloane grabs his wrist with enough effort to make him wince. 

"I'll chuck you out the window, pipsqueak." Sloane retorts, making me roll my eyes as she slaps Oliver's hand away a little too hard. He bursts into tears, cradling his wrist. 

"You can't do that!" Oliver cries, "I'm telling Mum." I don't bother telling them that Mum is watching them both carefully through the mirror, and yes, I'm thinking about how best to punish Sloane. 

"She's right there, dumbass." Sloane motions to me in the front seat. 

I open my mouth to interject, but Oliver gets there before me. "Mum, Sloane said-"

"Ugh, Mum, can I chuck him and his stupid rabbit out of the window?" Sloane sighs. Kent's hand falls on my lap, squeezing my knee gently, reminding me that not all arguments can be won. 

"Can I chuck her out the window?" Oliver retorts. 

They continue arguing until I just can't take it anymore. "Nobody is chucking anything out the window!" I yell. Interrupting their argument, "Everyone and everything in the car, will stay in the car." I lean back against the headrest, motion sickness making my cheeks heavy, and despite the steady stream of wind and air blowing through my window, I'm too hot. "We have an hour until we get there. Why don't we play a game?" 

"What kind of game?" Sloane raises a sceptical eyebrow. 

"Can we play eye spy?" Oliver asks, his eyes lighting up. He sat forward in his seat, excitedly waiting for me to say yes. I open my mouth to tell him that we can indeed play eye spy, but Sloane beats me to a reply, once again. 

"Ew, I'm not seven," Sloane says spitefully. "I'm not playing that." 

I glance at Kent, but he just shrugs and laughs, making it clear that he won't help. Why do I have to be a bad person all the time? Sloane and Oliver are still arguing in the back of the car about who can and can't play Eye Spy, and the conversation inevitably rolls back around to whose getting chucked out the window, and I simply can't take it anymore.

"Whichever of you can be quietest the longest will win yourself a tenner," I tell them. Oliver turns to look out his window, his lips firmly clamped together, and Sloane slumps down in her chair, reaching for her phone again. Whichever parent first decided bribing their kids was a good idea is a genius.

Half an hour later, my eyes flutter open from a deep dreamless sleep, and the car crunches over gravel. Kent grips the steering wheel as it tries to spin out of control in his hands. Then he pulls the gear stick, and the car shudders to a stop. "We're here." He says, in a sing-song voice, instantly making Sloane groan while Oliver cheers. My children are so wildly different from each other that sometimes I wonder if they're even actually both mine. When she was born, Sloane had way more of her dad's qualities than mine, but when Oliver was born, he had more of my qualities, and I found it insanely interesting how genes and DNA worked. 

I open the car down and climb out, counting my first steps on this new land the way a child does whenever a long car journey is over, my first step onto the Northumberland gravel, and what will hopefully be the first of many. I look up at our new home, with its three floors and its big chimneys. I pull my phone out of my pocket and snap a picture of the house. As soon as Kent has managed to get the wifi up and running, it's going on social media. I imagine wandering the huge corridors late at night, the moonlight tumbling through the huge bay windows. I imagine listening to the music on a staticky gramophone and dancing with Kent all over the vast house. 

"Why are we here again?" Sloane's voice cuts into my imagination, and the pictures rip down the middle and shatter around my feet. Her voice is harsh and mean, full of spite and I wonder when my small smiley gap-toothed daughter who always wanted her hair in pigtails, became the girl she is now, a million miles away from having her hair in pigtails, and she probably doesn't remember what a smile is. 

"Because it's nicer than the city." Kent tells her, "And if all goes well, we'll only be here for Summer; we're only doing renovations." Kent inherited this house from his Grandmother, who he claimed he never met. We have no aspiration to keep this house. As soon as we've done the renovations, we'll rent it out to someone who actually wants it.

Sloane sighs but doesn't say anything more.

Oliver clutches the rabbit carrier tightly in his arms, "you grew up here?" He asks.

"No." Kent says, "It was my Grandmother's house, I didn't even know it existed. She never lived here."

"Where did she live?" Oliver asks, "Why didn't she live here?"

"I don't know," Kent replies, raking a hand through his hair. I wish I could read him, but he's not giving anything away. I know my husband, I know what he's thinking, most of the time. Today, it's like staring at someone I've never seen before.

"Where did she live?" Oliver asks, not wanting to let the subject go.

"I don't know," Kent repeats. He walks around the back of the car to rifle in the boot.

I stare up at the manor house in front of me, it's bricks are a light fawn colour, like a beach on a cloudy day. Each brick is worn and uneven, they bulge and sink in places, as if the house is breathing. The mortar has eroded in so many places that I'm surprised the house is still standing, and spots of mould create small dark gaps.

Creeping ivy clings to the walls, it's dark green tendrils weaving in and out of the brickwork like a kraken curling around a pirate ship. The ivy has grown thick over the years, obscuring parts of the building, adding to its neglected charm.

The lawn is overgrown and bushy. Sloane scratches at her legs where brambles claw her skin. Bushes border the edge of the front yard, uncut and uneven. The house stands tall and proud, unlived in and unloved, for almost a hundred years.

I watch the ghosts of past tenants running down the field, two girls chasing each other, laughing and squealing. I see a tall woman standing, watching. She turns to look at me, through me, and a shiver runs down my spine.

"Can I let Cinnabun out to run around?" Oliver asks, making me jump, dragging me back to the present.

I reach into the car for my coat and pull it around myself, why is it so cold? It was hot on the motorway, so stifling hot that we cruised along with our windows open and sweat pouring from every one of our pores, but here it's so cold that I am shaking, my teeth chattering together.

Kent looks over at me, and notices my shaking.  "Let's go inside." He sighs. He wraps his arm around me, before looking at Oliver, "We'll take Cinnabun into the living room, he can stay there until we find somewhere more suitable."

Kent steps away from me and leads Oliver towards the house. Sloane slinks after them, leaving me alone on the driveway. I glance back up at the house.

The windows are tall and narrow, their wooden frames peeling and cracked. Behind each window, is just a void of darkness, that makes me frown, it's as if the house doesn't have a soul, it's just an empty void. Some of the window panes are either missing or fractured, leaving jagged shards like a wide gaping mouth full of razor sharp teeth. It inhales, and it smiles at me.

I follow the others inside.

My eyes travel upwards. Decay creeps into every corner, touching everything it can. The air whispers secrets through the bricks, but the words meanings are lost by the time they reach my ears. Oliver and Sloane run off up the grand staircase to claim their bedrooms. Oliver leaves Cinnabun's cage at the bottom of the bottom of the stairs, abandoned for something more exciting. She looks at me through her prison bars, black eyes shining in the half light.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Kent says, wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me into him. "We'll be happy here."

I grin at him. "We certainly will be." But I can't shake the feeling that he's wrong, that something inside this house is very wrong, and that it'll get to all of us.

What is it they say? "When your heart has claimed a house, you can exit but you can never truly leave."