The wind comes cool off the river and pulls at my skirt hem. The house is the same, slouching into the river’s edge, its roof thatch thick with waving weeds that seem to match the eddies of the river water. A scuff in the road behind makes me turn. I catch my cousin, hands still tucked, just looking away. His forearms are bare where he’s rolled his sleeves. Black hairs curl round them. I can still feel his hands grabbing at my legs from when he and his brother held me down in the kitchen so long ago.

I don’t want to go inside.

I am a curse, I say silently to the doorway.

I am a nightmare, I chant in my heart as I cross under the door beam.

I chant them both as I step on the uneven floorboards. I chant them as I hear my cousin’s footfalls behind me, not two paces away.

Out of habit, I go to the kitchen. The roof is lower than I remember, or it’s sunk. The old stove sits in the corner, cold. I turn and find my cousin doubled. One stands on either side of the doorframe, leaning their lankiness against its posts. They avoid my gaze, playing at idleness, but I can feel their thoughts on me.

I hear a thud from the ceiling and nearly jump. One cousin’s cheek cracks into the half-moon Daffrey smile. My granddam must be up the stairs, through the door my cousins flank.

I stir my blood, lift my head and walk towards them, praying they will move. They fold out of the way just before I reach them. Their nearness curls in my guts like filth spreading, going up to where my hair begins and down between my legs to where my other hair begins. I want to scratch and scrub the filth away and wash myself clean.

Instead, I walk the floorboards to the stairs, feeling their gaze behind me, chanting my chant:

I am the curse.

I am more frightful than them.

In an entire year living in this house I never once mounted the stairs. The old roof is too low for me to properly stand except where the house beams prop it up, and it all stinks of mildew. There are only two chambers on the second level, one shut tight, the other ajar. The mildew smell grows as I push the door open.

It’s not the roof thatch that’s made the rotting smell. It’s her.

White tallow candles are lit by the wall. She’s below a faded blanket atop a rope-strung bed. Old straw mattress ticking pokes out of a linen cover, embroidered with flowers. The bedcover is velvet and was once red, now the brown of an old bloodstain. The rogue dowager queen.

Her eyes are milky in the candlelight, like eggs half boiled. ‘Who is it come?’