She knew it was just the sun casting a shadow over the glass, but even so, those windows had always looked like heavily lidded eyes to her. Below them a solid wooden door like a mouth, ready to breathe her in.

Helen Whitmore stood at the end of the gravel driveway and stared at the house. She shuddered, even though this had been her home for most of her life. The root of many an urban legend in the village, causing small children to shiver as they walked past the end of the driveway, their eyes looking anywhere but at the house.

Tall tales whispered into little ears.

This eccentric, unusually tall house, unimaginatively named “Cliffside”, was Helen’s childhood home and before her, that of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Cliffside had belonged to the women in her family for generations, each one compelled to return to it with their husbands and raise their children there. Every generation that had lived there had added on another bit – an extension here, another floor there – until it stood in the present day, lopsided and gangly, but still with those eyes of glass, all seeing and yet revealing nothing. That gaping mouth.

It had always felt like a living, breathing entity. Helen had never wanted to come back here, but it had a way of pulling at you, tugging until you succumbed. The longer you spent here, the more you could feel its malevolence creeping into your bloodstream.

Nothing good had ever happened to her here. And yet, she couldn’t pull herself away. It was her home. As simple and as complicated as that.

She reached into the letterbox by the gate post and grabbed the handful of envelopes inside, picked up the shopping bags and headed up the gravel driveway, feet crunching, teeth grinding.

Arthur, the caretaker of the property, waved at her from where he was pruning the roses along the driveway, his grey hair tucked into a flat cap against the breeze, his gnarled hands in thick gardening gloves. Helen couldn’t fathom how old he was, but he had worked for her family for as long as she could remember, all the way back to when her parents had employed him. She waved back, swapping the bags of shopping into her other hand, but feeling like the weight of returning home from work was straining her shoulders more.

Helen owned a small, independent bookshop in Hamblemere, a little village on the Cornish coast not far from the more popular tourist area of Padstow. The house was situated on the cliff above the sea, as though it was looking down in judgement on the vast expanse of agitated water. In return, the waves inched closer to the cliff walls with every passing year, the sea reminding the house that it was there and that it could swallow it whole at any point. The coastal path weaved along the far edge of the property, acting as an ineffective mediator.