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.
‘I told you not to go in here,’ Heath said.
He was standing to her right, fully
dressed for the office.
‘Whose clothes?’
Heath led her out of the room.
‘Please…just ignore what you see here.
Most of it is…old washing. Greta must have left it. I’ve made us some tea.’
Katarina was so stunned she followed
meekly. The interior of the room loomed
behind like a secret as they walked downstairs.
Heath seemed oblivious to the anomalies
of Hareton Hall. In the kitchen, he was more interested in demolishing the
honey soy chicken drumsticks Greta had left sealed in a dish. He ate at least
three of these while Katarina stood there, sipping tea, even though it was
barely mid-morning.
They observed the view from the parlour
of a now famous statue of one of their ancestors (an author or poet, no doubt,
Katty thought) that was all but obscured behind a fence. Occasionally, tourists
stopped by in summer to take photographs. Sometimes the iron gates would open
quicker than they realised and usher those same tourists out of the way. Who
knows what these tourists had really seen through the windows.
‘I never planned to open the house and
grounds up to the public, but with the worldwide financial situation, my advisors
convinced me it was the smart thing to do. I want this house to stay in the
family…forever,’ he added quietly.
Katarina changed the film in her camera as
they sat at the table watching day turn to dusk.
‘May I?’ Katarina took Heath’s photograph
as he turned to take his car keys from the fruit ball. The crystal bowl was
full of peaches and Italian oranges.
‘Hinton told me you know our secret. You
must have worked it out by now. You can take as many photographs of me as you
like. The images won’t come out. I have to go to my office, there’s something going
on at work. Greta is coming around soon. Don’t return to the rooms upstairs.
They’re locked now. Just shut the door when you leave,’ Heath said, offering no
further explanation. Not fond of idle chit chat, he stood up and walked
away.
Katarina was left to ponder her
predicament. Then she remembered that Hinton told her he used to scale the wall
to his room when he was a child.
Katarina wandered outside. The gardens
grew wild. According to her mother’s journals, they were once perfectly
manicured. Although now unkempt, they appeared lusher than any of her mother’s
recollections. The wind began to howl as Katarina followed the path from the
surrounding grounds of the estate, towards the lap pool (covered in a blanket
of leaves) and past the stables. Katarina noticed a few security cameras which
unnerved her, but there were no lights on, so she assumed like everything else,
they were in a state of disrepair. It was remarkable how useless the cameras would
be in tracking the real inhabitants of the estate, Katarina thought, but then
she supposed that was not the reason they were installed. At the gates, beyond
the stables, Katarina saw her first sign of human life.
There was an elderly groom working with a
horse - the other horse remained under cover. Both animals were black and sleek
with sweat. It was obvious Heath had not been out riding alone.
‘Good Afternoon, Miss. Katarina isn’t it?’
he mumbled, looking at her quizzically, as if he’d seen a ghost.
‘Good Afternoon,’ Katarina replied.
‘I’m George. I’ve been working for the
Spencers… forever. Greta said you’d be coming. She got held up at her meeting.
She collects her grandson from his pre-school on Fridays…’
‘Oh,’ Katarina said. ‘That’s okay.
The…owner has given me permission to take photographs...over there.’
George shook his head as she walked
towards the garden. Seconds later, rain started to spit from the sky and
Katarina found herself standing near the outside wall that led to the upper
floors of the house, contemplating how to climb it.
She’d forgotten it was Friday; she’d
promised Linus and Hinton that she’d meet them for dinner tonight. Katarina
would have to be quick. She would also try to act as normally as possible with
Hinton. They hadn’t had a moment alone to talk and Katarina wasn’t sure what to
say, but she knew she had less and less recollection of her real life outside
the family she was beginning to understand.
She glanced over her shoulder. George was nowhere to be seen. Quickly,
she climbed the wall, using the strength and muscles she’d developed from years
of riding. When Kat reached the window, she lifted the glass easily and crawled
through the dusty ledge, landing on her feet inside her mother’s old room.
She looked above her, to the roof of the
room. It was empty. There was nothing except chandeliers. Then she walked to
the hallway and up the stairs. They creaked with every step she took. The girl
was compelled to walk higher, to the forbidden floor. Linus had told her where
Heath had stashed the keys and she retrieved them from his desk.
When Katarina reached the attic, the door
was slightly ajar. The curtains were open and blowing in the wind. Rain splayed
the sill. The door did not creak when she pushed it further. The rain stopped;
birds sang. Outside, a rainbow appeared. She stood silent as the door quietly
closed behind her, untouched.
It was quieter and lighter up here than
she imagined. There were no cobwebs. In the corner lay another pile of girls’
clothes, used and unused, thrown into a washing basket. At the top of the pile
lay the same bunch of riding clothes, recently worn. There were boots with
fresh mud on them discarded in the corner of the room.
Kate looked at the carpet; no footprints.
Then she looked at the window sill. Mud dripped upon it. An exaltation of larks
outside the window announced her intrusion.
The fine hairs on Katarina’s arms stood up.
When she tried to take a photograph through the closed window, the black
covering in her camera froze. The birds hushed and through the silence,
Katarina heard only the softness of her breathing and her beating heart. She
sighed and leaned into the bar nailed on to the attic wall. It occurred to her
then that the whole room had been converted into some kind of ballet studio.
There were floor length mirrors along one entire wall. The roof of Hareton Hall loomed above her
like one of the great baroque ceilings she’d seen in Italy on a school trip.
Only the outside scenery, the wrought iron gate, fragile in the mist, placed
her at Hareton Hall as opposed to some kind of Netherworld.
Just then, a bird flew in through the
window, startling Katarina who crouched onto the floor. A scream rang out
before she realized it was hers. When Katarina stopped screaming, the sound of
another breath took over.
Slowly, slowly, Katarina raised her head
until she looked directly above her. Hovering in the roof beams was a young
woman. Sleeping, eyes closed, hair matted across her eyes, her face was
obscured. She was curled up in pink cotton pyjamas and seemed no older than
twenty-one although it was difficult to tell in the dark. The tiny hint of a
corner cobweb touched the edge of her hair. Her arms were folded across her
chest. She was cocooned in a pink, mohair blanket.
Katarina’s scream woke her and the hybrid
girl somersaulted down from the rafters. In a split second she back flipped off
the high beam and landed on her feet. The young woman, a mirror image of
Katarina, opened her eyes where she landed. Then she stood and drank in
Katarina’s face as if she could hardly believe the vision was real. With the
threat of tears in her eyes, the beautiful hybrid uncrossed her arms and
reached out her hand. She walked towards Katarina with an open palm. In the
same moment, her image disappeared into shadows, leaving nothing but air.
The objects in the attic - an antique
hairbrush, some ballet shoes in a basket, a used pink towel with cream lace
edging, more wrappers of lollipops and sweets - also disappeared in that
moment. The only thing Katarina had left was a memory. She stood frozen.
Katarina felt sure no one would believe her if she told them what she saw. The
girl’s face had been identical to her own.
The teenage girl backed out of the room
then turned and ran down the stairs, two at a time. Her camera strap was still
wrapped around her wrist and she heard the snap in sunlight as the film started
automatically, winding again.
George, the groundsman, hovered at the
front door.
‘The master won’t be happy about you
wandering through the house alone.’
‘He gave me permission to take
photographs,’ Katarina sniffed. ‘Besides, he’s not my master!’ Katarina added.
‘Nor yours. Do you… Do you know what… who
is in this house?
George raised his eyes and pulled some
leaves out of the rake he held.
‘Yes.’ He spoke in a thick, Northern
accent. Katarina could still hear the high, sweet voice of a Lark, singing in
the rafters.
‘Did you hear that?’ Katarina asked aloud.
He nodded. ‘There’s been talk of…
bloodsuckers here for years. Some like to refer to them as ghosts…makes people
feel better I suppose. It’s because they’re up all night,’ he added. The pretty tune stopped and all that remained
was the noise of George’s rake, as if he’d already forgotten what he said.
Reality seemed to elude all who visited
The Hall, except her. Katarina felt sure the secrets held the key to the
mystery of her family. The vampire girl in the roof was similar to her and
to…her mother. Katarina needed answers.
George simply stared into the distance.
Katarina waited on the front steps. Greta
had texted to apologise and re-schedule. It was all that kept Katarina from
running away forever. It was late in the day by then and already the sun was
setting.
‘They say memory is something that exists
in a person’s mind forever; we just have to know how to unlock it when we
forget something.’ George said out of the blue.
‘You must have a lot of memories of this
place,’ Katarina replied.
‘Oh yes, Miss. What I have seen… ’ he
sighed as he walked towards the shed.
