WUTHERING NIGHTS: A Wuthering Heights Teen Fan Fiction

WUTHERING NIGHTS (chapter twenty-six: Secrets)

Chapter Twenty-six

Secrets

     When Katarina arrived at The Hall the next afternoon, Heath was out riding and no one answered the door. Since she’d never met her mother as an adult, she relied on the memories of others. In her bag, she kept her fine cashmere scarf, and longed for more information about the woman in the photographs. Katarina knew there were many images of the young Kate in the boxes hidden in the cupboard. The man who had loved her, perhaps as much as her father (if not more), kept these images tucked away, hidden, along with her mother’s memory.

    Katarina got out of her car. She wore a scarlet coat today and the fierce, biting air made her catch her breath as she walked up to the house. Her dark curls fell in ringlets down her back. The girl took out her mother’s old-fashioned film camera. The camera took amazing photographs and she wanted the particular effect film could create. Katarina snapped The Hall in the morning light, from a distance, then close up on the door handle as the gargoyles threatened her.

    There was an eerie creak, ever present, when Katarina tiptoed into the house.

    Heath suddenly stomped in through the kitchen, taking off his muddy boots in the larder.

    ‘Who’s there?’ he bawled.      

    ‘Just me,’ Katarina said softly.

    ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘I’d forgotten you were coming. Don’t go to the top floor…renovations,’ he grumbled, hurrying upstairs to shower and change. 

     ‘I just wanted to take your picture…’    

     ‘No…’ he replied quickly.

      He’d always refused to have his photograph taken. It would be a pointless exercise but Katarina was not to know that. She had begun to get used to his mercurial personality and shrugged to herself as she wandered through The Hall. Tucked in a corner, she discovered the Blue Room, which was lit with soft lights, chandeliers hanging from the roof and a hall of mirrors. It was so amazing it had once been featured in architectural magazines.

     The girl wandered through the room catching sight of Heath ushering his dog out of the library. As Katarina glanced into the wall of reflections, hers was there but Heath’s was missing. Of course, Katarina thought. The strangeness filled her world. 

     Katarina was nervous, but as she created art by snapping photographs, her nerves disappeared. By mid-morning, it helped that she had not seen a vision of the woman who’d appeared the night of the storm, nor had she heard her. Silence was littered by the sound of paper being ripped and thrown in the rubbish bin once Heath returned from walking the dog. There was a ray of light under the door of Heath’s library and Katarina got the feeling he did not wish to be disturbed.

      Minutes later, the silence was marked by the loud noise Katarina made, as she unlocked her mother’s bedroom with Hinton’s key. Inside, the room was all but empty. It was like a danceless ballroom with billowing long curtains in place of skirts and open windows and a wet floor where the rain had swept in, for company. As she stood, breathless, sensing a visitor apart from herself, Katarina heard a chewing sound and a striped boiled sweet wrapper fell from the ceiling onto her hair, like a feather.

    Immediately, Katarina looked up; nothing. She noticed the floor around her feet was littered with discarded candy wrappers. They had dropped from the shadows in the roof. Katarina peered closer. In the corner of the large room there was a pile of messy, muddied, riding clothes. The jodhpurs and a jacket appeared to have been recently worn and discarded. As Katarina went to touch the fabric, a bird screeched outside the window. Katarina jumped.  She wanted to take a closer look inside the room when she heard a voice behind her and a man took her arm.