A/N: Is this the greatest challenge I've ever set myself? Most probably. It is so far. First and foremost, I hope to God I manage to do the wonderful Emily Brontë a little justice. This fic was an idea brought about by my sister and boyfriend. I've been trying to interest them both in Wuthering Heights as I'll be studying it for A-level this year, but my sister claimed the book was a little inaccessible. Though she enjoyed the story, reading the book was a tiresome effort so she stuck to films and TV. And so, this is my adaption of WH, attempting to follow the book as closely as possible, placing it into a modern context to make it more appealing to a younger and non-literature-geek audience. Yes, it's got my own little flare on it and it isn't written from Nelly's perspective (frankly I can't find reason for servants in modern times) but in the third person, and yes I've added my own little scenes. After all, I want to have fun with it, and I hope you all do too!

I'll be uploading the first two chapters so satisfy any insatiable appetite for some Heathcliff action (he'll be in the next one with Cathy). So here's the Lockwood log. Heathcliff intro will be next. I hope you all enjoy it and please let me know what you think!

December, 2012

And so John Lockwood arrived at Wuthering Heights. He had imagined a room of such an ostentatious house, a renovated farmhouse, a lovely moss-eaten grey stone one, might've been open expecting a couple to take it. Honeymooning or make-or-break-break kind of thing. He saw it a lot here. It was the way animals were always fornicating in the grass – whisper and thrust, rabbit hole, burrowing – the perfect aphrodisiac. He got a sense from his host, Heathcliff, that wasn't quite the case. When Lockwood greeted him he was regarded with these dark, shiny bird-black, intent, flitting eyes. His hand clutched the doorknob, and his fingers were slimy and pink and bitten to the quick. If you didn't notice those little details you'd have probably made him out to be an office kind of guy, seeing as he was clearly living in a house far too big to fill up with any happiness or love he might have – maybe there was a little ghost of it, it's voice heaving out like the cold breath of the sea, stirring the dust in the lamplight – but otherwise it was empty, like all office guys lives. Inside there was silence. Every beam and board seemed to throb rottenly, with a toothache, a sadness.

"Yes?" he asked.

"I'm John Lockwood, I called last week, I booked a room for my business trip."

"Business trip?" Lockwood watched as Heathcliff's mouth, thick and bowed sharply so that he might've been his Nana's cherub as a child, tug up quickly in one corner. He supposed Heathcliff was pleased. He didn't seem the sort of guy to express it. He exhaled, and his breath was hot and sour as sick. "Alone?"

"Yeah, alone, mate," Lockwood answered. Strictly speaking, it was more of a business venture – internet publishing was a far more complex game than he had expected, especially concerning the publishing industries terrible pack of leaches and liars, a subsequent lack of money and therefore a subsequent lack of sex life. Strictly speaking it wasn't a 'business' venture at all; just a venture. "Am I alright to dump my bags?"

"Oh, why not?" Heathcliff nudged the door open for him with his foot. He was proper crisp clean dressed, downy white shirt, soft black leather belt on the dark trousers, and Lockwood just knew he'd be the type to wear shoes in the house, the type where is comfortability comes unnaturally, the type that lives in a constant state of agitation, like a bird banging its head against a cage roof. "There are plenty of unwanted things just knockin' about here. Why not?"

When he said it he gestured to a woman (surprisingly, it had been so quiet he thought he lived alone) slouched over a mauve leather sofa, her ankles crossed on its arm. She was girlishly pretty, with light, gingery freckles spattered around her nose, which was slightly perked off her face, a soft round chin and eyes the colour of soapy water, milky. She looked up, understood the significance (there was no mistaking it by the brutally compelling tension in the Heathcliff, the muscles surrounding his shoulder blades visibly gathered and slackened at least three times) and dipped her head down against her shoulder. Her focus was not focused. And her smile to Lockwood clearly wasn't a real one, but it didn't matter.

"Mrs Heathcliff," said Lockwood's host, quickly waving towards the open doorway where she could be seen with such flamboyancy of gesture it was obvious that acknowledging her existence caused him some sort of terrible difficulty. In all honesty Lockwood could see his appeal, despite him being a bit of a creepy bastard. She probably relished the feel of the breath of a filthy beast in the shell of her ear when she got all hot and bothered. He responded with equal nonchalance to her smile and went to place his bags on the floor, but Heathcliff grabbed his arm.

"No, you booked at the Grange, didn't you?"

"I –"

"The Heights is just for check in. You won't be staying here."

"But I -"

"Thrushcross Grange is only two miles away," he said, gritting his molars.

He seemed to have ignored the snow sliding beneath Lockwood's collar, covering him in its glossy wet trails and seeping into his clothes.

"Might I pay for a room here tonight, if I can? The snow's a buggar for driving in; I thought I was going to slip to my death down some of those roads. No grip."

Heathcliff watched him with those shiny bird eyes and then nodded, "But it will cost you fifty more."

"That's fine."

It wasn't fine, of course, but he'd rather play it safe. Playing it safe was being here in the first place.

"Then Haden, see that the horses are fed for the night!" Heathcliff called. He should have known these people would have owned horses, living in a renovated farmhouse with every possible gadget and gizmo and hardly a streak of feeling in their eyes and actions.

"Horses?" he asked.

"My old man earned his money breeding and trading them," Heathcliff said indifferently. "It is my inheritance."

Then he looked pointedly at the young man emerging from the kitchen. His hair was full, bouncy brown curls and he had a considerable amount of stubble for a young guy – a thick, ginger-brown beard was growing on his jaw. Unlike the rest of the family he was dressed in pretty shoddy clothing – his jeans were faded that musty, mud-washed brown colour at the hems and steadily fraying, and his t-shirt was quite possibly a hand-me-down from a fat bloke, maybe his Dad or an uncle. He went to walk straight past Lockwood, but Heathcliff clucked his tongue and immediately he froze. For this reason it wasn't clear whether he was a member of the staff (they clearly had a cleaner, he could see through the open kitchen door; and he couldn't help but feel ruthless jealousy of the rich bastards), or a member of the family.

"Are you not going to greet our guest?"

Haden obeyed him and offered a hand, which Lockwood accepted and shook strongly.

"Haden Earnshaw," he explained himself. The house had a plaque above the door reading something about Earnshaw, he'd noticed. It was confusing.

"Nice to meet you," he responded.

"Haden is Mrs Heathcliff's cousin," Heathcliff elaborated upon his expression with a subtle smirk; he'd achieved his aim in confusing further.

"You live with your wife and her cousin – what a good, ah, family ethic. I've never known it myself."

"My wife?" Extraordinarily Heathcliff seemed to find it hilarious, and threw his head back and hissed with laughter, "Mrs Heathcliff is my daughter-in-law."

Haden left through the side entrance hurriedly, and Lockwood decided to leave the matter completely –this place was stranger than he'd imagined. Perhaps one of those horses was Haden's niece?

"The fifty will be fine," he back-tracked, clearing his throat. Heathcliff nodded.

"Yes. Then I will leave you to it."

He placed his bags down and a member of staff, he assumed, took them from him and led him to a room.

The house was clearly an old one, they had kept a lot of original features; there was cherrywood panelling all across the hall walls, floral grey and pale pink velvet wallpaper in the lounge, an old, black marble fireplace in the reception room. Other than that it was light wooden flooring, cream and grey carpeting. He could hear the faint hum of a computer monitor from one room with a wall full of books and 'Mrs' Heathcliff's face changed red, black, blue, red below the kaleidoscope of a plasma screen TV. He got the feeling the harshness of it all numbed her senses to her father-in-law, who was one of the most uptight idiots Lockwood had ever met.

He was shown to a smaller room in the left wing of the house. It was white, with the same long, white-framed windows and red cottony curtains. The bed was a double with a mahogany headboard and white sheets with red embroidery. He guessed it had been a little girl's room at some point, which worried him, should the sheets smell of girl sweat and turn his stomach. He sat upon the bed and inhaled thickly, relishing the clean linen and its smell. Then he lay down, and as he lay he realised the headboard was not embellished originally. Carved into the wood by what he assumed must have been some small, sharp object (maybe a sewing needle or a pair of tweezers) were words. It was baby scrawl, baby talk. Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine Heathcliff. Catherine Heathcliff. Cathy Heathcliff. Catherine Linton. And over and over it went, a cycle of Catherines. How had a little girl got around to scratching such expensive wood so deeply? She must've been strong.

His eyes were growing so heavy he might have had marbles in the sockets, and so he set to looking into the mahogany shelves for something to entertain himself – kids always kept their old Gameboy somewhere in a bookcase or draw, maybe there was some sort of model aeroplane magazine or a music box to watch and wind. He sought something out. She'd nothing interesting but a few old note books. He gave them a go, hoping to find some sort of teenage dirty doodles, maybe some whiny poetry or details on a broken heart, something entertaining, like an agony aunt page – he often experienced a perverse pleasure at another's misfortune, most probably because he dwelled on his own far too often.

It was a diary, for the most part – the perfect reflection of her mind, chaotic, evocative. It was a diary with a few sums, details about birds, drawings of dogs and butterflies and a brown-haired girl with the wings of an angel, flying over the farmhouse. The nesting and breeding habits of lapwings was large part – the girl had drawn a picture of four olive, black freckled eggs and messy sketches of the birds' eyes and beaks, connected by inky scribbles. He guessed living out in such a wide open space had encouraged such an interest in nature, unusual in someone of her age. She must've been a mucky pup. In the rest of the pages were pressed dandelions and daisies which fell out into his fingers like scabs. After this some diary entries began, but the dates were muddled and spaced oddly. She discussed her first time remedying a nettle sting contracted by 'H', and then she wrote about a brother, Howard, and her sister-in-law, and her father.

He checked the labelling of the title of the last entry, which was 1986; so around twenty-five years ago. He could tell it was old by the faded ink and some sort of bright coloured stain on the corner of the paper of the yellow front cover, paling with age – it was most probably from chewy sweeties, the saliva slicked globules bleeding rainbows onto children's fingers. He remembered it well and smiled. He felt as if he had uncovered some sort of treasured beaten relic, as though the house sighed emptily with the memory. 'H' had been cast out to sleep in the house's wine cellar by Howard, she explained to herself, and she had cried herself to sleep, lying against the very pale wooden floorboards beneath his feet to 'be closer to the ground, and to him'. Lockwood thought 'H' might've been an imaginary friend. It seemed that way. For now this Cathy would have to be his.

He slapped his head on the pillow to read in a more comfortable position, as craning his neck was doing it no favours, his muscles and skin already chilled and slimy a steak fillet fresh from the fridge. Once again, the shock of warmth from the sheets held him rapt in dreamy bliss, and before long he was asleep, Catherine Earnshaw's books laid open across his chest, pressed flower petals scattered around him like chips of broken glass.

The dream he had was unpleasant. He was roused from sleep (sleep within his sleep, that is) by the insistent tapping of a branch of a fir tree against the window pane. He grunted awake, his annoyance making him lose any inhibition or fear of the cold, and flicked open the little golden latch. The brilliant wind filled his lungs in a single tiny breath, squealed into his face like a broken, hungry animal, thrashed with rain; spat it into him, cold glassy phlegm. He stuck his hand out into the dark and felt for the tree branch to coldly snap it, cut its vocal cord, but instead he clutched a humanoid form. A miniature hand, the bones beneath it frail as a bird's wing, the skin grey and dry as grave-flowers. A breath hitched up in his throat and remained there, and he sat for a moment, neither dead nor alive as he felt the labyrinth of little blue veins slowly and steadily beat the body's respiration. It clung so tight the nails formed red grooves above his knuckles.

He screeched, "Leggo!"

"Let me in – let me in!"

He tried, desperately, to fling his arm inside, but it did no use. It was a child's voice, and a crushingly miserable female one at that. She held him quick and fast. He attempted to look into her eyes through the rain and glass, and there he saw the sweet, pussy-cat face of a small girl, with the most peculiar blue eyes, glistening wetly out of the dark.

He struggled further but it she did not give up, "Who are you?" He howled, terrified by now. "Oh God I'm cracked, I must be fuckin' cracked!"

"I'm Catherine Linton," she shuddered. "I'm home now; let me in, I got lost on the moors!"

He shook and shook but her grip was too tight, and, crazed and cruel in his fear, he held onto the girls hand and smashed and thwacked it up against the glass, to sever it. It shattered with a high-pitched, deliciously bright sound, and steadily the jagged shapes of it were drooled on by the thick, syrupy cranberry blood of the girl. Now it flickered onto his face, drenched the bedclothes. Still she moaned, "Let me in! Let me in!"

"Let go of me so I can let you in, then!" he protested, cleverness hitting him quick as a brick. Her fingers relinquished their grip and he snatched his hand from her, bolting the window shut once again and stacking her exercise books on the window sill to close the spiky hole in the glass. He stuck his index fingers in his ears, tickled the damp wax there, and noisily hushed himself, anxious for consolation. For fifteen minutes it seemed to have ended, and he rubbed his fingers on the knees of his jeans to clean them, leaving sticky yellowy markings. She was still crying, yowling like a banshee, a baby.

"Go away!" he screeched, "I won't ever let you in – I won't let you in!"

She bawled, "I have been, I am trapped here, I have been for twenty years!" And then his barricade of books jutted forward, pushed hard by her tiny hands like dead flowers, and he went to bolt up, and leave, run a mile, but he could neither tense nor relax a single muscle, and so he screamed.

He heard the sound of footsteps down the hall and a light sneered beneath the door. Someone was behind the wood, muttering harshly. He looked about himself. There was no blood, no rain, and only the fragments of the flower petals about him, no broken glass. Silence pierced his ears, and he opened his mouth as wide as possible, as if sat ready for a dentist's spit-sucker, to call them, but he couldn't conjure the noise. Then he heard more muttering.

Finally he heard the low voice of Heathcliff, weirdishly gentle, quiet, speak into the room.

"Hello? Who's there?"

It was the kindliest whisper he had ever heard, but also a rickety one, as if he was scared of receiving an answer, and also receiving none at all. And finally he could manage a word, "John, I – I'm sorry for all the kerfuffle, pal. I had a funny turn. A dream."

The door beat open. Heathcliff stood in the threshold scowling at him, panting like a pregnant bitch. His tongue swirled his lower lip in a strange, reptilian motion, and then he clenched his teeth, baring them, taking two handfuls of his shirt and balling his fists.

"Who –" he seethed, speaking through his teeth, "who let you in here?"

"Zillah, she thought it'd be the most suitable."

"Suitable!" he exclaimed, and then coughed out laughter that was definitely a result of shock and anger rather than amusement. It sounded like a broken shredder. "I do not let people in this room."

"I'm sorry if I've caused a problem, though I would like to leave this room, if that's alright? It's like something out of fucking Most Haunted." He stood up quickly, brushed himself down, and rubbed the nape of his neck dry.

Those black eyes were shining stark out of Heathcliff's face, jutting about the room, wild as a dog in the final throes of rabies. "What?"

"In all honesty this place does look like one of those old houses on that programme. I think I just fancy it for one. I seemed to imagine little Catherine Linton haunts the bloody place," Lockwood pointed to the headboard of the bed and popped his eyes, shrugging, "that her soul was trapped here for twenty years, something like that. She was asking to come in. I let my imagination run away with me too much. I'm a writer and –"

Any composure Heathcliff had seemed to die in that instant – a noise came from the back of his throat, as if he was gargling milk, and then he stormed into the room and sat on the bed, directly facing the window, his lower lip dithering. His black hair reflected rainbow lights in the dark, like the oily feathers of a crow. Lockwood watched him, confused.

"Take my room," Heathcliff said suddenly, in the most determined, hungry tone he'd ever heard – Lockwood had noticed he always spoke with little emotion, but now he seemed to be restraining an unfamiliar, violent surplus of it. "Or walk somewhere. I won't sleep tonight because of – of your ridiculous fucking noises. I won't be a minute, just – I –"

He took it as a cue to leave, but as his foot hit the carpeted floor of the hallway Heathcliff burst out a sore roaring sound from his throat, jittering, his body swelling as he stretched and wretched out tears in some sort of irrepressible passion. He snapped open the gold latch with his long dark fingers and then flung his face into the rain, the wet slithers of black hair writhing across his cheeks. He snatched his hands out too, grasping at the thin air, almost lifting half of his body into the mad, swirling ice, soaking his shirt until he wore a dripping ghost of the garment.

"Come in! Come in! Cathy – oh, Cathy, please, once more! Please come in!" The sobbing was earnest, terrified, starving. Lockwood stood, compelled to continue to watch, as all people are, the destruction of another. "Don't leave!"

And as they always do, the 'ghost' remained silent and unseen, mocking him almost – Lockwood had an odd sense perhaps little Cathy enjoyed these tears. He left the room abruptly when he began raking his hands, his nails, down his face – it was too much to bear considering a stupid dream of his had been its causation. He wandered about the hallway searching for the stairs.

Down there was the cleaner, holding a yellow polishing rag. She was falling asleep in the red leather armchair by the fireplace in the reception room. She had a rosy face, chubby, papery, with fair hair tied in a loose bun and a simple black dress. She was stirring, but he had no idea as to whether sensing his presence had woken her or, perhaps, she was likewise caught in the icy clutches of little Cathy.

"Excuse me?"

Her eyes slid open. "Yeah?"

"Would you mind if I sat with you? I'm not sleeping too good."

"They put you in Catherine's room, no wonder. I'm pretty sure he'll have chucked you out and strung you up in a bit." She referred to Heathcliff in a bitter way, her lips pinching dryly like an oboe player. "Sit down though, there. It's nice to have some other company. Cathy isn't too much fun these days."

"Cathy?" he yelped.

"His daughter-in-law."

Why the fuck would someone name her Cathy? He didn't understand and he made it blatant to her, raising an eyebrow and shaking his head.

"She was married to Heathcliff's son, who's Mother was Isabella Linton. Her brother Edgar married Catherine Earnshaw and had the little bloody madam you met today, Cathy Linton. Or Heathcliff, now. She married her cousin, but he died a little while after they were married."

"Is that... is that even legal?"

"Perfectly legal. Just disapproved of," she shrugged. "It doesn't seem to matter what folk think around here anymore though. It's like we're a million miles away, we're out in the jungle."

Heathcliff, he understood, must've loved the rule of the jungle, and being the big cat he was.

"Unmistakably." A weird, haunted incestuous jungle, he thought. "When will the snow have cleared?"

"Tomorrow afternoon I'd guess," she said sleepily. "You'll be stuck here for a while."

He couldn't help thinking perhaps he was not the only one. Upstairs he heard Heathcliff shut the window and scream "Come home!"

Perhaps they were all stuck here for a reason of their own, all trapped. Heathcliff he knew was bound to the place by ties stronger than reasoning. The woman looked up to the ceiling and slowly, painfully almost, closed her eyes against it. "Come home to me!" he went again and her fingers curled a little in her lap and her eyes stayed closed.

Lockwood sat there, frowning. The day –