The car shakes us as it travels over gravel. I watch the bushes at the side of the road. My head is against the glass of the window. The seatbelt is at my neck. The bushes have spiky leaves in yellow, light green, dark green. We pass a set of bushes with fuzzy red berries, long spindles of branches. ‘What are they?’ I turn to ask Martha. She doesn’t look away from the road.

‘Just bushes,’ she says.

The house at the end of the drive rises. Its white columns are like the bones of another house, a house that has long ago withered into this one. It’s a sun bleached carcass of a house. Martha’d said that she’d found it last minute. That the reviews were good. That the pictures were good. We’d spend a few days here then head up to meet the others at the mountain lodge. My ex was going to be there, at the lodge. Christmas isn’t the right time to break this to her, we both think that, so we’re stealing a few extra days stolen before we have to be just friends.

‘Spooky house,’ I say.

Martha shrugs as she pulls our bags from the boot. ‘You think everything in the countryside is spooky.’

‘Bring me to a city,’ I say, ‘I’ll be happy.’

‘New York next year then,’ she says, slapping my arse. ‘Here, help me with the keys.’

The door sighs as it opens, a mustiness breathing out of the hallway.

‘So this was the only unbooked place?’

‘I know,’ says Martha, ‘a real bargain.’

I set our bags in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. There are five other bedrooms along the corridor. ‘We could’ve all stayed here,’ I say, opening each door and peering in.

‘Mmm that wouldn’t have been awkward at all.’ Martha heads down the stairs to the kitchen, holding three bags of salad items, snacks, wine.

‘Do you need help?’ I call down the stairs. No answer. I keep exploring. All the rooms have tall windows and high ceilings. The windows are shuttered leaving the rooms dark despite the bright outdoors.

There’s supposed to be more air in the countryside. Each room has this same mustiness. In the next room I look into, one of the window shutters is open and a cold breeze flaps the thin gauze curtain. I go in. The door doesn’t open fully. Behind the door is a broken crib, wooden like everything in this house. I hope I didn’t do that trying to force the door. I bend over it, reaching out my hand, there’s a grimy blanket in it, something gleaming inside the baby blue folds, some tiny white beads that try to escape my fingers as I tug on the blanket. I pull them out and in my hand I see they are teeth, pearly white baby teeth. I hear a scream downstairs.

I run down the stairs, the teeth gripped in my palm. Martha’s in the kitchen, blood running from her fingers onto the wooden kitchen table. ‘It bloody bit me,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘The house is fucking feral. It bit me,’ she says. She gestures to the kitchen counter. A drawer is half-open with a red smear on its handle. Tutting when she sees my face she says, ‘Okay, it didn’t actually bite me. I just caught my hand. Calm yourself, I’m fine.’ She roots through the shopping bags with her unhurt hand. ‘I’ve got some plasters in here, can you help me look?’

‘I found something creepy upstairs,’ I say. I show her the baby teeth.

‘Oh, gross,’ she says. ‘I’d better wash this wound out.’ She’s preoccupied. She doesn’t think the teeth are that weird. ‘Bit of a freaky thing to leave behind. But you never know who’s rented a place like this before you.’

In the evening she makes us a feast. We eat pork cooked til it gently melts on my tongue, potatoes roasted in fat, beetroot that stains the plates pink and red. We drink two, maybe three bottles of wine between us. I’ve brought whiskey, single malt, 11 years old. I meant it for Christmas eve so it’s still in the car. I run out to get it. We may as well start on that too. I have to get into the back seat of the car. It’s cold and dark. I can’t remember which bag I packed it in so I have to disturb our careful packing. My fingers touch the cold glass of the bottle and I pull it out. I look back at the house where I can see Martha’s silhouette lengthen at the window. As I go up to the door I notice a light going on in the bedroom window.

I jog back into the house and straight up the stairs. No lights. I check each room. No-one about, no lights.

‘We’re the only ones here, right?’ I say to Martha when I go back downstairs.

‘Yep,’ she says, ‘why?’

I don’t want to spook her. I must’ve imagined it. I say nothing but pour her a healthy measure of whiskey. She’s got a fire going in the grate. I kiss her, she kisses me, things are warm and enveloping. We’re too drunk for more than going to sleep when we go to bed. I cradle her body with mine. I put my face into her hair. She mumbles, already asleep. I follow her into her dreams, or she follows me into mine.

Sometime in the night I wake up with Martha’s hair tickling my ear. I reach out without opening my eyes to bring her in closer to me. The bed is cold under my arm. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness when I open them. Martha’s not in the bed. I rub my ear. It still feels ticklish. Somewhere in the house something creaks. She must’ve gone to the toilet. I go back to sleep.

Cold settles into me and wakes me up again. Still no Martha. I roll over to find my phone. It’s six a.m.; the sun should be coming up soon. My phone has no reception so I lock the screen and put it back down. Rubbing my face I swing out of bed.

‘Martha?’

The floor is rough bare boards, probably full of splinters. I pad up and down the hall on my toes.

‘Martha?’

She’s not up here.

‘Martha?’

She’s not in the kitchen, the front room, the study.

‘Martha?’

I go outside. The car’s still there. Did I leave the back passenger door open? There’s no trace of Martha in there. I hug my arms across my chest. My breath comes out in clouds. Back inside the house I try not to run  as I re-check room to room. She’s not anywhere. I go back to the bedroom. Should I just get back into bed? Maybe she’s gone for a run. There’s no need to worry. There’s nothing around here, no pubs, no other houses. I would’ve heard a car pull up. I pull back the covers of the bed. It is full of hair. Between the blankets and the sheets there are reams and reams of hair. Shaking I touch it. It’s the same colour as Martha’s hair, the same silkiness. I run to the bathroom to retch into the toilet.

‘This isn’t funny Martha,’ I say, although I know this isn’t a joke. I can feel it.

I check each room again, keeping half an eye on our bedroom door. Where the fuck is she? The car keys are on the kitchen counter. I can drive to the nearest village, town, whatever. My phone – I head back to the bedroom. I push the door open with my foot, scared of what could be in there. The room’s as I’ve left it. The covers of the bed pulled back and hair strands seeming to grow out from them. My phone’s on the pillow that Martha’d lain on. I grab the phone. The pillow slides and hits the floor with no noise. My phone is dead. It won’t turn on.

‘Fuck it,’ I say. I run back down the stairs, out of the door and into the car. The sound of the engine stops my hands trembling against the steering wheel.

‘Okay,’ I say to myself. Into town then find someone to help find Martha. This is the right thing to do, isn’t it? Too late now anyway, I’m already driving. Martha did all the driving and navigating to get here but it was basically one long road, a couple of turns and then – the car judders as it rolls over gravel. The house rises into view. I must have turned back around somehow in my panic.

Rosy dawn light makes the house turn pinkish. I reverse the car, drive out again. This time I pay attention to where I’m going. Down the road, turn left at the junction, there will be another turn. These country roads are too narrow. The bushes on the sides of the road brush the car windows with their leaves, yellow, light green, dark green. Red fuzzy berries. Gravel under the car. The house again. Impossible.

I jar the gears to turn the car around, start again. There is no road. I get out of the car. This is impossible. There is no road, just rows of bushes with red berries and trees beyond them. It’s daylight now, but dark still. Gray clouds hang full of snow. I pat my arms with my hands. The cold is getting inside me. I get back into the car and drive up and down the row of bushes. I can hear something. I kill the engine. I can hear traffic coming from somewhere beyond the rows of trees. There’s no way I can get the car through so I get out, pull a blanket from the back-seat around my shoulders and run into the trees. The traffic sound fades but that’s okay because I did hear it, I know it’s there somewhere. The trees thin. I push through bushes.

The house.

Martha’s car still parked where I left it, the driver side door wide open and no way out.