Topic: Brambles - The First Day

Marin · Date: 2012-04-02 12:44 EST

1st March, 2012

They say some people have a sensitivity, a sort of extra sense that tells them when something is amiss with the people they love. Certainly, the majority of people who live in Rhy'Din, no matter their race, have this ability. I can't help regretting that I'm not one of them.

Granted, I haven't been to Rhy'Din in over six years, not since my father and brother died. I should have stayed then, but Mama was so insistent that I come back to Earth and pursue the music I love so much - and I was so happy to be told to do exactly what I truly wanted anyway - that I left before the end of the week they held the funeral. I was twenty years old, with no real concept of the economy of a business or interest in my family's long established line of farmers and perry-makers. I wanted to make music, and the place I had found to do that was Earth.

Looking back, I realise I should have seen the signs. Each letter she wrote me holds some hint of the increasing desperation she must have felt as the months and years went by and her grasp on the orchard began to weaken. She even mentioned in one Christmas letter that she had had to lay off the permanent hands - even in my selfish, wrapped up world, I should have recognised what a terrible thing that was. I had grown up with most of those men - the permanent hands lived on the farm all year 'round, tending to the orchards and plantations. They were family, and Mama had no choice but to let them go. From then on, she was living alone on that big farm acreage, and again, I never considered what that must have been like for her.

All I remembered from Brambles was lots of people, all the time, the place always bustling and cheerful, even during bad years. We lived in the big house - my father, mother, brother and me - together with the five men who ran the land alongside my father. A sixth, Don, lived in a small house only a mile away on my father's land, with his wife and children. When the harvesting season came around, things got even busier - it was then that extra hands would be hired to harvest the fruit and crush the juice, leaving the brewing of the perrys our family was so proud of to us.

It's heartbreaking to imagine how all these memories must have weighed on my mother's mind and heart as she struggled to keep afloat. With no money to hire permanent hands, the orchards and fields fell into neglect and the harvests fell off dramatically. With no harvest, there was no hope of profit each year, and I'm not surprised Mama turned to our neighbors for help. What surprises me is that none of them did help her; the lawyers tell me that she was forced to go to Sid Rogier, the cattle rancher, for assistance. Thankfully, he did help her, but she had to mortgage the Brambles to him.

No one really knows what she was doing the night she died. Apparently she was found curled into a crouch by the oven in the kitchen of the house, clutching a rifle to her chest. What could possibly have frightened my sweet mama so much to make her take up arms? Of course, things being the way they were, Mr Rogier assumed that with her death the Brambles would automatically fall to him, and he moved in to take control of the place. Discovering from the lawyers that I was still alive must have been a dreadful shock for him, but I am told that they are in the process of assisting him to leave and secure the property against trespassers.

I'll find out everything when I get back to Rhy'Din and meet with my family's solicitor. I can't countenance staying on Earth now, not when I'm the last Richards on Brambles Orchard. I don't know much about business, and less about pears, but if there's a way to revive my family's business, then I'll find it. I can't let the Brambles just disappear forever.

Marin · Date: 2012-04-03 14:28 EST

April, 2012

The Brambles. Strange how it looked exactly as she remembered it, and yet not at all alike her memories in the same motion. The drive up the overgrown pathway between the fields and orchards had told her enough - everything was overgrown with two years of unkept flora. Without hands to help her on the farm, her mother must have watched everything disappear beneath bracken and brambles and despaired of ever making a profit.

"Are you absolutely certain that this is what you want to do' There's no way to guarantee your safety all the way out here."

Marin looked over at the old gentleman behind the wheel of the 4x4 that had brought them up this far. Mr Hayes, her family's solicitor, had been so gentle in explaining the state of the Brambles to her, but horrified to hear what her intention was. She knew he wouldn't be comfortable to leave her here on her own, but despite how fragile she was in comparison to the rowdy little girl who had left eight years before, Marin was determined that her childhood home would not stand empty a day longer.

"This is my home, Mr Hayes," she reminded him gently. "What could possibly happen to me out here? The land is mine for at least fifteen miles all around."

The old man winced, shaking his head. "Oh, I had hoped I would not have to share this with you," he worried aloud, reaching over to take her hand. "Your mother, may she rest in peace, came to me a few days before her death. She said she thought that someone was trying to frighten her off the land. She'd heard people walking through the house at night; that she'd found the horses sweating and exhausted in the morning when only a hard run could have done that to them. She asked me to procure that shotgun for her." The old man's face crumpled in concern. "I never dreamed she would die so soon. It shouldn't have happened, Marin, she was perfectly healthy."

Marin felt a deep spike of trepidation lurch through her as the old solicitor spoke, but some stubborn streak that she had to have inherited from her mother made itself known. "I'm not so easy to frighten as you might think, Mr Hayes," she assured him, patting his hand gently. "Besides, I'm not too proud to call for help from the Rhy'Din Watch if I think people are trespassing on my land with the intention of hurting me."

"The Watch are not much use so far from the city," he reminded her in a tense tone, but she shook her head, refusing to listen.

"Nonsense, everything will be fine," she insisted, opening the door of the car to slide out. "Just let me get my bags from your trunk, and you can start back for the city. It's a long drive."

Despite his reluctance, Hayes had her belongings lined up on the porch within a few minutes and was back behind the wheel of his borrowed 4x4, driving back down the lane with a promise to check on her in a few days' time if she did not come into the city herself. Watching him go, Marin shivered lightly, hugging her arms about herself. All was quiet. Perhaps a little too quiet.

Marin · Date: 2012-04-04 09:05 EST

Perhaps it was the stillness, the strange, unsettling knowledge that she was the only person within a ten-mile radius, but Marin felt as though she were being watched. She twisted from her lean against the stable doorway, her blue eyes scanning the fields to the north and west, the orchards to the south and east. There was no sign of anyone there, nothing to say that her disquiet had any real foundation.

One of the horses bumped at her outstretched hand, and she chuckled softly, laughing off her discomfort to go back to scratching forelocks and generally getting to know the two big Shires who came with the farm. This, at least, was something one of the neighbors had been prepared to help with; after her mother's death, Josef Kramer - the owner of the poultry farm to the north-east - had taken on the horses and kept them in good health, bringing them back to their stable that morning in preparation for Marin's arrival. She'd been grateful for it, too; she herself had had too much to do so far today to even have begun to think about heading over to pay her respects to the neighbors.

Once she had checked on the house itself, taking her belongings and the freshly bought food supplies inside to be packed away, Marin had turned her attention to something Mr Hayes would no doubt have been deeply relieved to know about. She'd bought a complete set of new locks while she'd been in Rhy'Din, both for the doors on the house, storage barns and crofts, and stable, and for the windows on the house, too. With the old solicitor's warnings about her mother's last days ringing in her ears, the last remaining Richards had spent the first two hours back on her family's farm diligently changing all the locks.

That done, she'd turned her attention to making three rooms of the house liveable. The family bathroom had only needed a standard clean, thankfully - her mother had been a little OCD when it came to keeping the bathing facilities sparkling. The kitchen, too, had not needed too much care, although Marin did spend a further three hours head and shoulders inside the stove to give it the most thorough scrub it had ever been subjected to. And finally, a bedroom.

She hadn't even been able to face going into her parents' bedroom, knowing from memory how filled with keepsakes and trinkets it was, how much of them would still be in there. The redhead knew she wouldn't be able to cope with that, not yet. Instead, she went straight to her old room, and was surprised to discover that her mother had apparently cleaned it regularly. The dust was not so thick as she had thought it would be, nor did the room smell as fusty as she had expected. Indeed, it had been so well cared for that it was only a matter of airing the room, dusting down the surfaces, and changing the sheets and quilt to make it suitable for habitation once again.

And since by this time the sun had begun to sink toward the horizon, Marin had come out of the house to the paddock to call the horses into the stable for the night, pleased that Mr Kramer had left her fodder and hay enough to keep them fed and bedded down for at least two weeks. She could almost have convinced herself that everything was fine ....were it not for that awful feeling of eyes boring into her back everytime it wasn't against a solid wall.

Marin · Date: 2012-04-04 10:54 EST

Midnight, that first night

She came awake with a start, blue eyes snapping wide open to stare at the ceiling, every sense suddenly alert for whatever it was that had woken her. She could hear the thundering speed of her heartbeat in her ears, the pain of her chest as she forced her breath to slow. Hands clutched at her blankets as she lay still, straining her ears for any sign of the noise that must have woken her.

Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary grated against the unquiet stillness of the night. Perhaps it was just that she wasn't used to the sound of the wind over the shingle roof above her, or the swaying of the trees outside, having grown desensitized to the sounds of a bustling city over the past years. Maybe she should have closed the window before settling to sleep. As her mind reasoned away each sound that came to her ears - crickets, the wind, the occasional audible snort from the horses in the stable closeby - Marin felt herself relax, drifting back toward sleep with a quiet sigh.

Bang.

She sat bolt upright in the bed, suddenly all too aware that whatever had woken her at first was not a natural sound, not at all welcome, and shocking to hear. It was the sound of something hard being struck off the door downstairs - not the front door, but the back door, the door that led into the kitchen where her mother's body had been found.

Terrified, Marin clutched her quilt close to her chest, feeling herself shake violently in the grip of that unaccustomed emotion, her stomach churning with the horrible idea that whatever was outside wanted to get in. And thankfully, her logical reasoning came to the fore, reminding her that she had changed all the locks and made sure all the shutters were closed before retiring to bed. Whoever or whatever it was would have to try a lot harder to get in than just banging.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

She jumped violently as the banging resumed, the sharpness and clarity of the sounds suggesting that it was no hand rapping on that door, but some hard thing ....the butt of a rifle, perhaps. As this came to mind, she remembered the shotgun Mr Hayes had taught her how to load and fire the day before, his insistence on her having it with her at all times. Forcing herself to move from her frozen position of whimpering fear, she slid from the bed, barely feeling the chill of the breeze from the window against her bare arms and legs as she crept to the dresser. The weapon was there, where she had left it, loaded and heavy in her hands when she lifted it up.

The banging had stopped again, though Marin held out little hope that it would stay away for long. But some fierceness that must have been inherited gripped her in the silence, offering up enough courage to get her into her robe and out into the upper hallway, creeping toward the stairway in the darkness. The shotgun was icy cold in her hands, but even that chill was reassuring, reminding her that she wasn't as helpless as she might seem.

At the top of the stairs, she halted in a crouch, one foot on the first step down, peering into the gloom of the main living space. She knew nothing had gotten in, that no one was down there, but still she peered and squinted, needing to be certain that none of the shadows were moving at all before she began to venture down the stairs and into that encompassing darkness.

Bang!

Halfway down the stairs, Marin let out a loud yelp of terror, thumping back against the wall as this time the banging came from the main door. The door that led into this room, the door across from her. The shotgun almost slipped from her hands, but somehow she managed to get the stock to her shoulder as she trembled, biting down on her lips as she stifled the urge to sob in fear.

"Wh ....who's there?" she asked, her voice too small even to travel to the ground floor, much less to whoever it was outside. She cleared her throat, forcing herself despite her terror to raise her voice. "Who's there" I'm, I'm armed!"

Bang. Bang.

And something worse ....a low, sinister sounding laugh.

Marin pressed back against the wall of the stairs, water beginning to leak from her eyes as she shook with petrified tears, the shotgun lowering from her shoulder once again as she hugged it close to herself. "Go away," she whispered into the darkness. "Go away, leave me alone."

Bang. Bang. Bangbangbangbangbang!

The sudden cacophony of noise brought a scream from her lips, and her nerve failed completely. She spun, scrambling to get back up the stairs, along the hallway, diving in through her bedroom door. Dropping the gun onto the bed, she rushed to the window, slamming the sash down and locking the inner shutters. Then she turned, looking around wildly in the gloom until her eyes fell on the dresser, and for several long, agonising minutes, she struggled with the heavy piece of furniture, forcing it in front of the door she had just run through.

Below, the banging continued, driven into a frenzy by her terrified scream, the sound of her fortifying her bedroom against the perpetrator. Weeping with mind-numbing fear, Marin dived back into her bed, hugging the shotgun tight to her chest with one hand as the other held her pillow hard over her ear. Breathing hard, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she sobbed into the heavy cloth of her bed linens, willing her tormentor to leave her alone.

Reprieve did not come for over an hour, and it was not just Marin the intruder terrified. When the banging on her doors downstairs finally ceased, she heard it begin again against the door to the stable, and the alarmed noises of her Shires as they whinnied and pawed at the stalls. But again, thanks to the locks she had changed, the intruder did not get in. By three o'clock, all was still, and had been still for over an hour itself, and finally Marin drifted back to a sleep troubled by unknown phantoms in her dreams.