WUTHERING BITES

Chapter Six: Katarina - Present Day

Chapter Six

Katarina – Present Day

After a relatively comfortable sleep and the beginnings of an unusual story told to me by Greta Gardner as I sat by the fire in the owner's favourite chair, I was more than intrigued. I finally visited The Hall the next morning, cited the property, spoke briefly to the owner regarding matters of importance and took down the details required. I was then, surprisingly, invited to dinner at the pub the following week to finish up our business. As I drove out of the gravel driveway and slowly passed the pub, I saw that it was closed for the morning. I imagined the fireside warmly lit in the evening and the owner, who harboured his own secrets, sitting in my place...

That evening, Heath sat in his favourite armchair, reading the newspaper with more interest than he usually showed. He had the look of a burnt out rock star in his late twenties, still handsome and relatively young. He called his dog to heel and turned to sit at his chair near the fire. Greta was nowhere in sight; she'd gone home earlier to take care of her own children. A barman had taken her place.

Heath was sipping ale and still reading the newspaper when he heard a gaggle of shrieking teenagers who instantly irritated him. It was legal to drink at eighteen but he wondered why - girls dressed like tramps in denim shorts and black tights chugging down alcohol was a negative result. He should have imposed a dress code, he thought gruffly. Society had really gone downhill since the nineties. Then he remembered some of the looks of that era were pretty bad, too. He must be getting old, he thought, although no one would have known it. His face was harder but retained the handsome, boyish features of his youth. Recently, since turning thirty-nine, he'd felt quite ancient. Yet many of his business associates assumed he was much younger than he really was. There was no point in an explanation, revealing the secret of his youth.

He resigned to gruffly patting his dog and when he looked up the teenaged girls began joking around, making more noise than before. One of them, with long blonde hair and too much black mascara, waved at him. He turned away and stoked the fire. He wondered where their parents were and felt annoyed that his candle-lit lair was being infiltrated by the local riff raff. He looked back at his paper and shook his head.

His own son, annoyingly public school educated and hopelessly addicted to clubbing and drinking and smart-mouthing him, would no doubt have tried to chat them up. Heath had mostly, throughout his bizarre and unexpected life, been interested in people who at least seemed the same age as he really was. Since school, he'd felt people who hadn't lived as much of the journey as he had, had less to teach him. There was also the inevitable problem of his lack of ageing. People had started to notice. One of his old school acquaintances had asked him if he was on human growth hormones.

Hard living had taken its toll but Heath would never look older than thirty. His specialist told him that, realistically, he shouldn't expect to physically age more than twenty-six years (the age when his bones stopped growing and his venom fully matured). His sleeplessness kept him looking closer to thirty. The only thing that could finish him was a prolonged dose of sunlight or a stake through his heart, but agelessness, immortality was becoming a problem. His friends and associates looked a decade older. The longer he stayed in Hampstead, the more the whispers grew until they became openly hostile questions.

Heath flicked past the entertainment section in the paper, highlighting yet another vapid celebrity. His gaze then rested on the financial columns of the newspaper.

Normally these articles would have bored him but since the most recent financial crisis, he'd found them a lot more interesting. The companies he'd bought and discarded prior to 2008 had made him very rich, even richer than the acquisition of land and residential property. He was so wealthy that he only kept the Hampstead house out of sentiment. Just the thought of being nostalgic at his age, when some were just beginning family life, made him question his own sanity.