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Barren House by Nikki Grim
- , by Nicole English
- 12 min reading time
Introduction...
The village never speaks of the house on the hill.
Once, it belonged to Aileen Byrne, a woman who longed for motherhood but was cursed with loss. One by one, her children slipped away, buried beneath the ash tree in the garden. When grief consumed her, her husband fled—but Aileen remained. Watching. Waiting.
Then, on a misty night, the village children wandered inside.
By morning, the house stood silent. The children lay still. And Aileen was found in the nursery, seated in her rocking chair—a ghost of the woman she once was.
No one dares enter the house now. But sometimes, on the wind, the village still hears it—
A lullaby. A creaking cradle.
And a mother’s voice, whispering to the child she never held.
####
I do not like to speak of the house on the hill.
Not anymore.
It has stood there for as long as I can remember, watching over the village like a silent sentry, its windows dark, its doors heavy with secrets. It was a grand house once—built of sturdy stone, with a garden that stretched out in a frenzy of wild roses and ivy.
My mother used to say that it was the most beautiful house in the county, that only a family of great fortune could ever call it home. And for a time, it was a home. Aileen Byrne and her husband, Morris, moved into it as newlyweds, full of hope and laughter. I remember the way she looked on the day she arrived—a slip of a woman, with bright, clever eyes and hair that shone like black silk in the sunlight. She carried herself like she belonged to something greater than this village, like she had stepped out of a world of books and stories and into the real one. She would walk through the village in those first months,stopping to chat with the baker, laughing with the butcher’s wife, gathering ribbons and trinkets at the market stall for the daughter she was sure she would have.
She would smile sweetly at me when we passed one another, though I was always too shy to say much beyond “Good morning, Mrs. Byrne.”For a while, she was happy. You could hear it in the way she hummed as she walked down the road, in the way she stood on the front steps of the house, watching the sun slip beneath the hills. But happiness is fragile.
The first time she lost a child, we all told ourselves it was something that happened. Born in stillness. A tragedy, yes, but not an uncommon one. Women lose babies. It is the way of the world, cruel as it is. But when she lost the second, people began to whisper. By the third, no one would meet her eye. The ribbons and trinkets she had once bought for her daughters were gathering dust in a drawer. The nursery her husband had built remained empty, the wooden cradle untouched. Aileen no longer walked to the village market. No longer stopped to laugh or chat. Instead, she stood at her window. Watching. Waiting.
###
I don’t know what was worse—her silence or the way her husband disappeared piece by piece. Morris Byrne was a good man, I think. At least, that’s whatmy mother told me. Later, she’d comment that he did what men are taught to do—he worked; he mended things. Ensuring there was always food and warmth in the house was his priority. But he did not know what to do with grief, not when it kept knocking at his door.
And so, eventually, he did what many men do. He left. First emotionally, then physically told people he needed space. Needed to clear his head. He would return in a few weeks, he said, once things felt less heavy. At the time, I was too young to know what that meant. Every time a person came near the house, I’d rush out, convinced I’d see Morris coming home to Aileen. My mother told me not to be foolish. Morris knew what the other adults knew–once a darkness that heavy moved into a person, there was no room for light.
Aileen did not cry that day Morris left. I know this because I was watching from my window when he rode away, and she stood there on the porch, dry-eyed and unmoved, her hands clutching at the fabric of her dress. That was the last time I saw her outside the house. She became something else after that. Something hollow. Some say grief is like a weight upon the chest.
For Aileen Byrne, it settled into her bones, into the walls of that house, into the very air that surrounded her. The children did not fear her at first. To them, she was only the sad woman who lived in the big house with no husband or children. They played in the fields near her garden, their laughter ringing through the hills, their voices bright as summer.
“Ring-a-ring o’ Rosie...”
I saw her standing behind the lace curtains, watching them. I do not know if she envied them or if she hated them. Perhaps it was both.
I can’t tell you when the change came, but I felt it happen. Something was in the air, a shift in the wind that carried something colder than the Irish autumn chill. It was in the way the village women spoke in hushed tones, their voices barely above whispers, when her name passed their lips. It was in the way the children, once fearless, began hesitating near her garden, their games slowing, their laughter fading into uneasy silence.
One evening, I heard my mother sigh as she set a pot on the stove.“She’s cursed,” she murmured, stirring the stew with slow, deliberate strokes.
“That house has never known a joyful mother, and it never will.”
I wanted to ask her what she meant, but something in her tone told me not to. The days shortened, and the nights stretched long. And Aileen watched. She stood in that window for hours, unmoving, a ghost in her own home. And always, her gaze was fixed on the children. They still played, though more cautiously now, glancing over their shoulders toward the looming house. They still sang their rhymes, their little voices rising like birds over the fields.
“Ring-a-ring o’ Rosie...”
And with Aileen, behind her lace curtains, I imagined her clutching her hands tightly–her nails digging into her palms, drawing blood.
One evening, just as the sun dipped behind the hills, a group of them lingered too long near her fence. I was walking home from the market with my mother when I saw them—a cluster of tiny figures, huddled together in that golden light.
“She’s looking again,” one of them whispered, barely audible over the wind.
The others giggled, though it was not the same carefree sound I was used to. It was nervous, daring. One boy—the butcher’s son, I think—cupped his hands around his mouth and sang louder than the rest.
“We all fall down!”
And then they collapsed into the grass, shrieking with laughter. From my place on the road, I felt my stomach twist. Because Aileen was still watching. And that time, she wasn’t just standing there. She was smiling.
###
It happened two days later. The air was thick with mist, the kind that wrapped around the village like fish chowder, muffling sound and blurring the edges of the world. No one saw the children go inside. I imagine they thought nothing of it at first. After all, where would be the harm? Just a sad and lonely woman. Maybe she had called to them, her voice soft, inviting. Perhaps she had told them she had something sweet waiting for them inside.
Or it could be they had gone in on their own, laughing, daring one another to step over the threshold. None of us will ever know. What we do know is that that evening, mothers called their children in for supper, but they never came. Nothing too unusual about that, though. In a little village such as ours, children often stayed out long after dark playing in the fields together, sneaking in long after their fathers were snoring in armchairs from too much whiskey.
The next morning, the house was silent. Too silent. The mist had lifted, but the house clung to its own damp breath, the air thick with the scent of wet stone and something sweet—something rotten. A door stood ajar, swinging slightly in the breeze, its hinges creaking like the groan of an old man.
The butcher was the first to arrive. He had woken to an empty bed where his son should have been. His wife’s sobs still echoed in my ears as he sprinted through the village, calling the boy’s name. And then someone else spoke. The schoolteacher...
“My daughter did not come home last night.”
A ripple of unease passed through the gathered crowd. More voices. More missing names. And then all eyes turned to the house on the hill. The butcher was the first to enter. He ran up the path, his boots pounding against the frozen ground. Others followed, though some hesitated at the door, their hands gripping the wooden frame as if touching it tethered them to something unholy. I was not brave enough to step inside. But I heard the screams.
###
They found the children in the front parlour. Laid out in a circle, their small hands curled as if they had fallen asleep mid-play. Their lips were parted slightly, the remnants of something sweet still clinging to their skin. The air was thick with the scent of lavender and something sharper—something bitter.
They found Aileen upstairs. Seated in the nursery, in the rocking chair beside the empty cradle. Her hands lay limp in her lap, her body still, her eyes closed as if she had simply drifted into a deep and peaceful sleep. But there was a strange thing, something the priest would not speak of again, something the men who carried her body were terrified of speculating about after that day.
The cradle. They said it had been moving. Back and forth. Back and forth. Rocking in the still air, as though someone had just set it in motion.
###
No one touched the house after that. They locked the doors. Left the windows to gather dust. The garden crept forward, its vines curling around its stone path as if reaching for something just out of grasp. With its branches curling like skeletal fingers toward the sky, the once-proud ashtree withered. The village buried the children. But Aileen—no one knew what to do with her. The priest refused to hold a proper funeral. They buried her far beyond the graves of the innocent, in cold, unblessed earth. And yet, even now, I wonder if she is truly there. If she ever was.
Because sometimes, at night, when the wind moves just right, you can hear it—the faintest echo of children’s laughter, carried through the hills. And on the stillest nights, if you stand near the house and listen closely, you can hear something else.
A whisper.
A lullaby.
A woman’s voice, singing to a child that never was. And if the wind shifts, just for a moment—You might hear the cradle rocking.Back and forth.Back and forth.
In the dark.
###
And what of my village? It never recovered from that night. Grief is a cruel thing, but anger is uglier. The butcher struck his own wife when she tried to stop him from drinking himself to ruin. The schoolteacher was found weeping in the empty classroom, her hands clutching a book no one would read. Mothers turned on one another.
“If you had kept them inside—”
“If you had not let them wander so close to her garden—"
If only...
It was easier to tear one another apart than to face the truth. That the house had never been meant for a happy family. The land had soaked up too much grief to bear life. That Aileen had been left to deal with her grief in isolation.
That they had all heard the wind whispering in the nights before, warning them of what was coming, and had chosen to do nothing...
To read more about Nikki Grim, go here: https://nikkigrim.com/