Allow me to begin by apologising, much of what I’m about to tell you happened a long time ago and some of the details are a little fuzzy and unclear in my head. Nevertheless, I’m going to recount everything that happened to the best of my knowledge. I was never planning on sharing this story with anyone, let alone the internet but after what happened to me yesterday (which will be explained in due course) I felt the need to put my story out there. My apologies for this will be fairly long but allow me to start from the beginning.
My Grandmother has always been a strange woman, for as long as I, or anyone that has ever known her can recall. She was raised in the Lake District in the North West of England along with her older brother by their single father for the first 13 years of her life. The house they occupied was huge, an old country manor nestled behind a thick wood on the shores of an enclosed and isolated lake. By all accounts she lived a very happy and privileged childhood until her brother and father left to serve in the second world war and she was forced to move to the town of Penrith to be fostered by a local family whose own son had succumbed to a fever some months before. She never saw her brother again, or her father. Whilst they were both lucky enough to survive the brutal conditions of the Western front, they both lost their lives in a tragic road accident upon their return home, less than a mile from the house. By all accounts my nan went from a happy, carefree young girl to a bitter, vindictive and withdrawn woman in the years following.
During her time in Penrith she had become very close to one of the boys down the road, resulting in the birth of my father. My grandfather had left to fight a few months after my father was conceived and by the time of his birth, his father was one of the many corpses littering the ravaged European countryside. My father lived alone with my grandmother following the war as she was old enough to move back into her families home and live comfortably on the wealth accumulated by our family for generations. She was never a good mother though, following the deaths of her brother and father, she had become devoutly religious, draping the house in Christian symbols and texts, only sparing time for my father to chastise and beat him, his childhood was awful, she homeschooled him, teaching only the religious texts and forbid him from socialising of any kind or even leaving the house. By the time he had reached adulthood, he had been shaped into a cruel, aggressive alcoholic. As soon as my father was old enough to leave home he did without a second a thought, although he always remained in touch with his mother. His alcoholism spiralled into the use of more dangerous and addictive substances, resulting in him spending more and more time with a group of people with similar interests. It was around this time he met my mother and before they had left their teenage years, both myself and my twin sister were born. A year later my mother was dead, some say it was an overdose, others say it was my father himself. I don’t know the truth, and I never will.
By the time I had reached my early teens, I had become a notorious trouble maker, shoplifting, vandalism, fighting in the streets, my fathers solution was to use the belt but eventually he changed tactics. The result of this was me being carted away for the summer to live with my grandmother, a woman I had heard all about from my father in his drunken rants, but had never once met. I was hoping for a warm welcome, a degree of kindness I had supposed, hearing stories from friends of the lavish presents and expensive treats their grandparents had bestowed on them meant I arrived at the lakeside manor with a feeling of rare optimism. It didn’t last. Soon upon my arrival, I realised my grandmother was every bit as cruel and vindictive as my father, I was expecting this to some degree based on my fathers rants but there was always that little spark of hope deep inside me. It didn’t take long for her to snuff that spark out. The years of isolation since my father left had left her more twisted and strange than any stories he had slurred about her when he’d dragged himself in from the pub, stinking of beer and cigarettes. Within five minutes of meeting her, I had already received a slap across my face for failing to bring my own bible, surprising strength for such a frail woman. Things only deteriorated from there.
I suppose it could be argued that the one mercy of my time with her was due to the size of the house, I had a wide berth of options for whenever I wanted to run away and hide from her temper, a luxury I did not have in our small, cramped apartment back home. But I hated that house. The looming stone walls exuding a cold, dark feeling, the house itself wrapped in shadows and caked in thick dust, with old cobwebs swaying gently in the constant breeze that the old, cracked windows provided us. Surrounded on three sides, by dark, towering trees, looming over my head, yet never a single sound of wildlife added to the ominous sense of entrapment. My one escape from the dank, stone walls that kept my prisoner was the boathouse. A small, wooden structure, built by my great grandfather sitting on the shore of the lake. Its large window providing serene views over the Cumbrian wilderness. Dazzling blue water, mirroring the sun’s rays as they danced it’s lazy ripples. The gentle sound of the water lapping against the structure as it moved with the valley winds. It was the most gorgeous lake I ever had and ever have seen, framed by the majestic mountains surrounding it, verdant shades of green sprawled across the rock and on some days, thick grey cloud circling the peaks, blocking their ascent into the heavens.
I loved that boathouse, with one exception. The walls were covered in my grandmother’s oil paintings for when she wasn’t engrossed in one of her many bibles or searching for me after having earned yet another beating, she would paint. Say what I will about her, she was a skilled painter, catching the essence of the world’s natural beauty in dabs and swathes of oil resulting in marvellous pictures I would stare out for hours, and the walls of the boathouse were adorned with these pictures, say for one. The rear wall overlooking the water was completely barren, save for one huge, ornately framed portrait of her brother and father, dressed in uniform and stood side by side, the last image she, or anyone one else has of them. I hated that picture, it always just seemed wrong to me. Their eyes would bore into you from across the room, their vision tearing through my skin and searching deep into my soul. Every time I looked at that picture I felt small, cold and uneasy. The boathouse caught the sun’s beams and on a hot day would reach stifling temperatures but their gaze felt like it turned my blood to ice in my veins, goosebumps invading my skin and hair standing on end. Whenever I entered the boathouse I would cover it with one of my grandmother’s musty old blankets, but the following the day, the blanket would be gone everytime without fail. I never saw my grandmother enter or even step a foot near the boathouse which always left me feeling spooked and unnerved when I’d see the discarded blanket lying in a heap below the picture but I always reasoned to myself that she had gone down their in the dead of night and removed it. Maybe she liked it in there too, maybe it let her feel close to the family she had lost so young.
I think upon my return home, my father had expected me to have had some sense knocked into me by his mother, but he was disappointed to see that little had changed, in no time at all I was back out with my friends, stealing, beating people up for looking at us the wrong way and threatening any one who looked worth our time for whatever money they had on their person. So the next summer I found myself back at that awful place, my freedom stolen from me and once again I spent most of my time in that boathouse, under the cold, watchful gaze of my dead relatives. After a month however, I noticed something, one of the older oil paintings, depicting a small stone cottage was different. I knew this place as the home my grandmother resided in during her teenage years in Penrith, only now, there were two elderly figures stood outside. I asked her over dinner that night, cold, chewy beef that was more fat than meat and boiled potatoes that seemed harder than the pebbles adorning the lakeshore. I can recall asking who the people were that she had added to the painting of the cottage in Penrith and whether they were the couple who had looked after her. She didn’t say I word, didn’t even look up from her meal, but I couldn’t help but notice the small flicker of a frown followed by a moment of confusion that passed across her weathered features before her face returned to the stony, gaunt visage I had grown so accustomed to.
I woke that light to an orange flicker in the distance, peeking through the trees that tried so hard to block the outside world from view. When the sun crested the mountains the following morning, and broke the darkness of the valley, I could see a thin plume of smoke in the distance, twisting and dancing as it climbed into the clouds above. I later found out the building that burnt down that night, killing the elderly couple who had lived there nearly all their lives, was that same cottage my grandmother had spent her youth residing in. She never spoke of the incident, and I never dared to ask her. Another month later, and I was gone.
This same process repeated annually throughout my childhood. I would spend most of my year at home, enduring my fathers ire and anger, and taking it out on anyone in the local area that I could, and I would spend my summers up at the lakes. Mainly in the boathouse, enjoying the only peace and tranquilty my upbringing had afforded me. It happened again when I was 17. I once again found myself in the boathouse on a cold, gloomy day. The mountains and most of the lake obscured by a dense fog that had crept down the sheer slopes and cliffs that morning, slowly filling the valley as it had crept over the water. I was sat there, huddled in a blanket when I saw it. My grandmother’s most impressive piece of artwork, a huge oil painting that captured the lake and mountains beyond, the white tufts of cloud seemed to drift across the sky and the plants swaying in the breeze. It was the most impressive piece of artwork by far and it always left me feeling a sense of awe. But something had changed, there on the lakeshore was a figure. At a closer glance I realised it was my father. Face as sullen as ever with downcast eyes looking towards the ground. I was surprised my grandmother had done this, she and him had never been close and in all the time I had spent with her she hadn’t mentioned his name once.
She got the letter a week later, I walked into the house and she was sat at the long, dusty oak table, her face set in the same stony expression I had come to expect. She turned to me and told me my father was dead. A couple of days prior, he had reportedly been walking back along the river bank late at night from the pub when he had supposedly lost his footing and fallen into the river. They didn’t find his bloated, waterlogged body until the following morning, tangled with the reeds on the bank, hair matted with mud and grime. I never shed a tear for him, to this day I still haven’t. I pitied him, but I never loved him. He made my life awful and my twin sisters. She had never been allowed to come with me on my summer trips up to the Lakes and I had always feared how he treated her. I had been planning on mentioning the painting to her but it didn’t seem important anymore, it slipped from my mind and remained forgotten.
I didn’t see my grandmother again after that, not for a long time. It had been over a decade when I was informed that she was nearing death’s door. I had never been close to her, and neither had she to me, but I still went anyway out of a sense of duty I suppose. She had been suffering with dementia, her mind and soul slowly eaten away by the disease leaving her a hollow shell of the person she once was with only the rare glimmer of her old personality shining through. I stayed with her for her final months, making her as comfortable as possible. I had matured a lot since my youth and had managed to make somewhat of a name for myself. I would never forget how my father had treated me and how she had treated him, I guess that’s why I stayed by her side, to try and prove to myself that I was different from them.
I was down in the boathouse one night when I saw it, another figure stood besides my father. I was shocked that my grandmother even had the mental capacity to paint anything. But when I took a closer look I went numb, my legs collapsed and I fell back into my chair, heart hammering in my throat and breaths coming and going as rapidly as the rain drops thudding on the roof. It was her, my twin sister, stood alongside my father, hair billowing out behind her. Now you may be wondering what the big deal is, it was just a painting. My grandmother had never met my sister, hadn’t ever seen her with the exception maybe of a few photos of my sister during her youth. But she had painted her exactly as she looked to that day, down to the tiniest little brush strokes. I couldn’t stay in that boathouse any longer, I could feel the cold creeping in around me, smothering me. I ran back to that house, determined to confront my grandmother and get some answers. Before I reached the base of the grand oak staircase however, her phone rang. Gingerly, I lifted it off the receiver, my hands clammy from the cold sweat that had broken out over me. My sister was dead, her neighbour had heard a short, sharp screen followed by a dull thud and a screech of rubber late last night. Upon peering out of her window there was my sister’s body, lying broken and twisted in the street, a dark red pool already spreading around the huge gash in her skull. I collapsed to the ground and cried, huddled in a ball until exhaustion overcame me.
As soon as I woke the following day, my body aching from a night huddled on the hard mahogany floor I stormed upstairs to my grandmother’s room, barging in I demanded she explain. First the picture of the elderly couple, then my father and now my sister. How on earth could they have all turned up dead so soon after her painting them into her artwork. I got nothing, her dementia was attacking her full force. Even as I demanded answers I knew it was a lost cause, as I looked into her watery, grey eyes I saw nothing, just the blank expression and I knew there and then she didn’t even know who I was. It was later that day, I was taking her an evening meal. I set it down gently in front of her and turned to leave when I felt her sickly, gnarled hand wrap around my wrist. I turned to meet her eyes, boring into mine with fear, and desperation. Slowly, she opened her mouth and rasped ‘I never painted any people’ before her head fell back against the pillow and her raspy breathing that I had grown so accustomed to those last few months stopped forever.
I was gone the morning after, I never looked back, I’d always hated that place and there was nothing there for me. My grandmother’s words had chilled me to the core but the more I thought about it my rationality overcame my fear, she had been suffering severely from dementia and I reassured myself that she probably didn’t even know what she was talking about. The paintings? Mere coincidences, I mean after all, what else could it have been? That’s what I’ve been telling myself for the last 15 years. I had come to terms with everything that happened and moved on with my life. Until yesterday. I kept her house ever since, don’t ask me why I couldn’t tell you, but last year my wife finally pressured me enough to sell it as we needed the money. We received a very generous offer and the past week I have been in the process of clearing out all the dusty and decrepit old furniture. Yesterday I stepped into the boathouse again for the first time in 15 years. The place where I had some of my best childhood memories. I felt it immediately, the intrusive gazes of my great uncle and great-great grandfather. But that wasn’t what turned my life upside down, it wasn’t what made me question my sanity and it wasn’t the reason I’m sharing this story with you today. No, the thing that absolutely terrified me was the still wet oil paint depicting a figure alongside my late father and sister. The figure depicting me.