Wow, time has flown.
Anyways, today I want to share a part of the book I'm writing. It's called The Old House, and it's about a girl named Sara Kelly who travels to... actually, I'm not gonna tell you, you'll have to keep reading! :)
Sara and Katy had finally gotten to sleep around two in the morning. They had been chattering all night in an effort to “pack every drop of summer full of amazingness,” as Katy had said.
But rest was short lived, as Sara woke to somebody shaking and poking her at four twenty-seven precisely.
She rolled over sleepily and mumbled, “Katy?”
Katy hit Sara’s shoulder with a pillow.
“Shush! Do you want my mum to wake up?”
Sara sat up and rubbed her eyes.
“Why on earth did you wake me up?” she demanded.
Katy gave a suspicious smile (curiously similar to the one Sara had gotten from Josh Mason earlier), and Sara noticed for the first time that she was dressed in all black.
“Katy, what’s going on?” Sara asked seriously.
“I’ll tell you when we get there! Now put these on!” She said throwing dark clothing at Sara.
. . .
Sara smacked Katy’s shoulder. Hard.
They were standing in front of Church Cottage.
It looked especially ominous with the weak moonlight illuminating the mist around them in the cold night.
Hell would freeze over before Sara was going inside that creepy old house.
Tell the devil to grab some snow boots, Sara thought miserably as she and Katy stepped through the door.
The inside of Church Cottage was warmer than the crisp summer night, but it was to dark to see.
Katy pulled out her bag and Started rummaging while Sara fumbled for a light switch, but didn’t find anything.
Just as her eyes were getting somewhat used to the lack of light, Sara’s vision was flooded with brightness, as Katy found her flashlight and turned it on.
Katy grinned like an idiot and said, “Shall we have a look around?”
Sara was about to shout at the top of her lungs that she was leaving right this instant and that if Katy had any sense she’d come back too, but instead she heard herself say (somewhat breathless and shakily)
“Okay.”
The house was amazingly well kept on the inside.
The paint was a bit flaky, and the rooms were almost totally empty of furniture, but it was cozy, and the photos on the walls were still mostly all right, but some of them were a bit bizarre.
Sara’s favorite was a picture of a girl a little older than herself in a victorian portrait. The strange thing was that she was sharing the photograph with a particularly elaborate grandfather clock. The top of the clock looked oddly like a crown.
Katy found a painting of someone with a clock for a head.
Sara would never ever admit it, but she was having fun snooping around the cottage and pointing out strange pictures, and was kind of sad when they had looked through all the rooms.
“Well not all of them,” Katy had remarked.
There was only one room in the entire house that was locked, and it happened to be the most interesting.
The door was in the hallway. It was painted crimson red, and had the number “8281” engraved elaborately into it.
Katy said it was probably just another bedroom, but Sara wasn’t so sure.
She loved to read about all those old houses with secret passages and secret doors, and thought it would be utterly fantastic to live right near one.
“Sara, I’m gonna go look at the portraits again, that door freaks me out,” Katy whispered barely audible, “I think it’s locked for a reason.”
Sara shrugged.
“I’ll stay here.”
Katy Ran off as if she were being chased. She had seemed really scared of the locked door, where as Sara felt she was sort of drawn to it.
Sara jiggled the handle again, just to make sure it really was locked. The handle didn’t budge.
She sighed and leaned against the door.
It creaked open, like something that hadn’t been moved in twenty years.
Sara reminded herself, that it probably hadn’t.
Sara poked her head through the door.
It was a sitting room, painted the color of banana pudding. There was a crackling fire in the fireplace.
Hanging on the mantlepiece was a photo of a young woman looking extremely cross at whoever was taking it.
Sara froze.
There was somebody in the house.
Sara stepped into the room and the door slammed closed behind her.
“Lydia? Is that you I hear? You’ve been gone nearly a week, you impetuous little freeloader!” a woman’s voice yelled out.
Sara ran back to the door and started pushing on it furiously, trying to open it before the woman realized she was there.
“Lydia Winnoway, if you think you can sneak about like this! If you think I don’t know you’ve been off with that… that ticker on one of those flying machines, you are sorely mistaken!”
The voice was closer now.
“When my brother and his mettlesome wife died, I swore I would protect their only child! I seriously doubt they meant for you to…”
She broke of as she rounded the corner into the living room and saw Sara.
The woman was a short plump old lady in a floral dress covered in flour, her steel-gray hair was tightly coiled into two buns on either side of her head. She was carrying a spatula covered in something sticky.
“Who the hell are you?” the woman asked with an odd mix of shock and general grumpiness on her wrinkly face.
“Er, Sara, Sara Kelly”
“What are you doing in my house?”
“I didn’t mean to be! I came in from Church Cottage!”
“Oh course you did, and I’m King Christopher!” She tried to whack Sara with her gooey spatula. Sara ducked and ran for it. She rushed through the rooms of the unfamiliar house while the lady chased her.
“You rascals always trying to break in here! Well, you go back and tell whoever you work for that Muriel Winnoway’s private belongings don’t belong to no-one! No-one, nohow!”
Muriel picked up Sara by the scruff of her neck and threw her out the door.
“And if you see that no good niece of mine give ‘er this!” The old lady spit on Sara’s face and slammed the door.
