The Album

I'd been going through Granny's old things. Clearing her house had taken three months, that's something you don't really think about when someone says the word 'hoarder.' I used to love visiting, it was like a dragon's lair, piled floor to ceiling with treasures from across the ages. Any time I went around, I'd ask about something from decades ago.

"Granny, do you still have that blue tea set with the owls?"

And she'd say - "Second bedroom on the right, north-west corner, in the red box on top of the breadmaker."

And like magic, it would be there. It was like a jungle, an ancient tomb - with pillars of papers, crates of cutlery, dolls and lamps hung from the ceiling. An Aladdin's cave. And she was its keeper.

Mum called it a bombsite. My uncle called it a prison. Granny called it home.

Until it crushed her.

We got a call from the hospital, saying there'd been an accident. Dad assumed she'd slipped while trying to get off the bus. Mum thought she'd fallen in the shower. No, neither of those things. She'd been carrying a box upstairs and bumped into a stack of tapes. The lot came down on top of her. She'd refused home help, but a neighbour had heard the noise and popped around to investigate. I won't get into the details, although the doctors were kind enough to assure us that it had been a painless end.

The funeral was lovely. Very tasteful, with all her friends and relatives in attendance. They played her favourite mix tape - the best of Simon & Garfunkel, one that granddad had recorded for her years before. The actual tape had been listened to so much that it sounded all scratchy, so Dad and I put together a CD with all the same songs. The service was followed by her cremation - she'd always been determined that she would be cremated and her ashes scattered.

"I don't want to take up too much space." She'd say.

And we took her ashes, planning to scatter them at the weekend. But first came the lunch at our local pub - her favourite place, The Barrel and Tap, where she would often attend the psychic evenings and monthly quiz night. The owner let us have a round of sloeberry gin on the house - Granny's favourite, since she'd been a frequent customer.

But after the formalities, services, and gatherings were all done, and her ashes scattered at Elling Hill, her immediate family were left alone to pack up her house and sell it on. Mum just wanted to hire people to do it and have a car boot sale for anything of value. Dad was more sympathetic - a lot of his childhood stuff was in that house, even if it wasn't where he'd grown up. He wanted to go through everything himself, finding all his old family photos and heirlooms, and particularly all his collections from when he was a kid - coins, stamps, toy cars and trains.

Granny had left us all things in her will, so Dad didn't want to trust a cleaning company to potentially pocket or throw away the bits that actually had sentimental value.

Day by day, we'd pull up in my uncle's van. A skip blocked the driveway, filling each time with more papers, boxes, rubbish, and anything that was definitely just trash - broken lamps, plastic cutlery, magazines, mouldy garden chairs, and plenty else. We only did two hours at a time, making slow progress as Dad struggled to throw away anything that 'may have a use to someone.' After a few weeks, he finally understood that he needed to be more heartless about it. Yes someone could possibly have made use of a lot of the stuff, or it could have been recycled, but all that took valuable time, effort, and fuel. Downstairs alone filled two skips, seven trips to the recycling centre, and five to local charity shops. Each only accepted one box, since they didn't have anywhere to store it all. I told Dad to call ahead and ask if they had room, but he always forgot, or couldn't be bothered.

After downstairs was done, we headed upstairs. The stairs had been cleared by the paramedics when they'd arrived, so that they'd be able to get her out the door. I felt a little sick knowing I had to stand on the place where she'd died - covered with one of those old carpets with the busy designs that made it impossible to tell which stair it had been. I tried not to think about it.

When the bedrooms and bathroom had been cleared, we'd only the attic to get through. It was remarkably empty compared to the rest of the house - apparently out of Granny's reach. We had to wear masks for the dust, and we used those gardening pads to avoid getting too mucky, but also to protect our knees.

Dad and I had always suffered with dry, sensitive skin. Granny'd had it too - something that ran in the family. I'd spent my childhood in and out of hospital, and kids used to tease me for always coming into school in the summer with long sleeves and trousers, my arms and legs underneath wrapped in cling-film after being slathered in a special moisturiser. Any time I leant on something, or got any amount of muck on my skin, I'd break out in a rash, and my skin would flake. We were both used to it. We avoided certain foods, always used sunscreen - the strong stuff they make for babies, and wore long clothing and coats, even in summertime. I got used to carrying those garden knee pads in my backpack, just in case we needed to sit or kneel down outside.

On what could easily have been our last day tidying up before we'd get a cleaning company in to gut the place, I was in the attic alone. Dad nipped out to get pizza. There were only a couple of boxes left, tucked way at the back of the roof. They were pretty solid - the old metal kind that were practically indestructible. It had been enough to keep the mice and spiders out at least.

I wiped the top with an anti-bacterial wipe, which came up nearly black from the layer of dust and mice droppings, and got the lid open. Inside were a number of photo albums, souvenirs from holiday resorts, and a smaller box of knitted baby clothes that I assumed had been Dad's.

At the bottom of the box, I found a smaller photo album backed in leather. It looked antique, possibly Edwardian. Probably great grandma's, I assumed. I undid the straps and opened it.

The first few photos were, predictably, of fancy-looking people in Edwardian era clothing. There was portrait of a man, a woman, and a young child. Okay, so probably my great-great grandparents then. I continued leafing through them. There were wedding photos, pictures of them in front of a farmhouse in the country, the man driving a tractor, and the child as she grew up. But then there was a strange one, a photo of the woman stood in an empty field, pointing at something. The left side of the photo had been scorched off, like someone had tried to burn it.

There were many photos after that without any people in them. Just empty fields and hills, mountainsides and caves. Lots of caves, loads of caves. And when the following pages finally had people in them again, the girl who had been a child earlier in the photos was at least fifteen years old, and pregnant. I knew that things were different back then, a girl could be married off and become pregnant at that age, but that was the thing, she'd be expected to be married. There were no pictures of other weddings or other men. It was rare for her parents to have let her keep living with them. Well, good on them for being progressive, I guess...

I expected that the next page would have a picture of the baby. I flipped it over, and I couldn't tell what I was seeing at first. I needed more light, so I turned my phone torch on, and my heart stopped. I froze, my guts sunk to the floor, and my eyes burned. The girl's parents had been photographed together, dead, their corpses burned. Other photos showed the farmhouse set alight, their fields burning, the hillside covered in smoke.

I couldn't bear to look at it any longer, quickly turning to the next page, hoping to find some levity. The girl was sat on a stone bench, a baby in her arms - one covered in scales with horns sprouting from its head, and a tail wrapped around it.

Had it been digital, I would have assumed it had been Photoshopped. Sure, in my rational mind, I thought it was probably just one of those genetic things that made some people have scaled skin or horns - someone that might have been sent to a freak show or asylum at one point in history. But the tail, that's what threw me. It was long, scaled, covered in spines, and ended with a spade-shaped tip.

It made me curious, so I turned the page again. The next set of photos were more recent, at least taken with a camera from the forties. The photos were of Granny as a baby... And she had scales too. Her mum didn't, she looked just like I remembered from the pictures from other albums we'd already gone through. No, they couldn't possibly be of Granny - she didn't have scales or a tail. But I couldn't deny it no matter how hard I tried. Granny'd had a mole above her left eye - so did the baby. She'd had a birthmark on the back of her right wrist - so did the baby. And she was wearing the knitted baby clothes I'd found in the other box.

A thousand questions thundered in my head. What were they? How had they managed to change their appearances? What'd happened to my great-great grandparents? And ultimately, what was I? I looked at my own trembling hands, my flaking skin, and as I sat lost in my thoughts, the front door opened, making me jump.

"Pizza's here!"

It was just Dad. I put the lid back on the box and ran to the ladder, slid down, and dashed downstairs to meet him in the kitchen.

"That was quick, you must be starving!"

"Dad, I-" I considered not telling him, partly not wanting to hurt him, though more terrified that he wouldn't believe me. But he'd already seen the album in my hands.

"What did you find then?"

I held my head low, refusing to meet his gaze as I passed him the book. He flipped through the first few pages.

"Oh yes, this must be my great granddad Fredrick, and great grandma Eleanor. The baby will be my grandmother, Bridget. Yeah, your granny used to say you take after Bridget, though your mum insists you look more like her sister, Cathy." He carried on. "And that's their old farm. You know they used to own Elling Hill? That's why your granny wanted her ashes scattering there. She would have been born there, if not for the fire."

"... The fire?"

He nodded. "Yep, the barn caught fire one night. Granny Bridget once told me her dad had left an oil lamp burning in there, it must have fallen. The hill was peat - so the whole lot went up."

"I'm not sure that's what caused it." I muttered.

"Actually, I'm surprised these early photos survived. The house burned down too, I figured everything would have been lost. Oh, yeah, see - the emulsion has separated from the base on these ones-"

He showed me the pages after the one with the woman pointing. Every photograph beyond that point was scorched, the emulsion bubbled and flaking away. Not a single one of them was distinguishable. It was impossible - I'd just been looking through them, how had they all been damaged?

"I could have sworn there were people in those a few minutes ago..." I gasped.

"You might have been able to see the shadow of the image in the dark. It's a shame, it looks like any photos of Bridget are completely ruined." He set the album on the countertop. "Anyway, get some pizza before it goes cold."

For an instant when he turned around, I saw a tail sweeping down from his lower back. I blinked and it was gone. A looked to my right, where a dirty mirror hung on the wall, watching my own reflection. I stared at the flakes of skin in my hair, my peeling cheeks and forehead, the rash at my neck...

I helped myself to a slice of pepperoni.