Wuthering Bites (28 page)

T
he evening after the funeral, my young lady and I were seated in the library musing mournfully. For reasons of perfect logic, I told myself, I had not spoken to her of what I saw from the window that night at Wuthering Heights. As days passed, I half convinced myself that I had fallen asleep and dreamed the hideous nightmare, or I had simply been mistaken in what I
thought
I saw in the shadows of the night. The moors could be like that, like the mirages of the desert, making you think you have seen one thing when you have seen another. But in truth, I think mostly I did not tell her because what would have been the purpose? Her fate was her fate.

We had just agreed the best destiny that could await Catherine would be permission to continue to reside at the Grange. Linton could join her, and I would remain as housekeeper. That seemed rather too favorable an arrangement to be hoped for, and yet I did hope, and began to cheer up under the prospect of retaining my home, and my employment, and, above all, my beloved young mistress. But then a servant—one of the discarded ones, not yet departed—rushed hastily in and said that
that devil Heathcliff
was coming through the court.

If we had been mad enough to dare to attempt to lock him out, we wouldn't have had the time. He made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name; he was master, and availed himself of the master's privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word.

The sound of our servant's voice directed him to the library; Heathcliff entered, and motioning him out, shut the door.

It was the same room into which Mr. Heathcliff had been ushered, as a guest, eighteen years before. The same moon shone through the window, and the same autumn landscape lay outside. We had not yet lighted a candle, but all the apartment was visible, even the portraits on the wall—the splendid head of Mrs. Linton and the graceful one of her husband.

Heathcliff advanced to the hearth. Time had little altered his person, either. There was the same man, his face rather sallower, and more composed, his frame thinner, and no other difference. I saw no sign of the vicious canine teeth he had bared a few nights before, but since he did not smile, I could only imagine they were still there.

Catherine had risen, with an impulse to dash out, when she saw him.

‘Stop!' he said, grabbing her arm. ‘No more running away! Where would you go? I'm come to fetch you home, and I hope you'll be a dutiful daughter and not encourage my son to further disobedience. I was embarrassed to punish him when I discovered his part in helping you escape. He's such a cobweb; a pinch would annihilate him. But you'll see by his look that he has received his due! I brought him down one evening, the day before yesterday, and set him in a chair in the courtyard and allowed a couple of our
neighbors
to pay their respects.'

‘You fed your son to the vampires?' I demanded, unable to control my temper.

‘I did not,' he said coolly. ‘There was no need. We simply
held court.
In two hours' time, I called Joseph to carry him inside and, since then, my presence is as potent on his nerves as a ghost. I fancy he sees me, or them, or often both, though we are not near. Hareton says he wakes and shrieks in the night and calls you to protect him from me, Catherine. And so, whether you like your precious mate or not, you must come and see to his welfare.'

‘Why not let Catherine continue here?' I pleaded. ‘You could send Master Linton here. As you hate them both, you'd not miss them. With you, they can only be a daily plague to your unnatural,
lifeless
heart,' I dared to say.

‘I'm seeking a tenant for the Grange,' he answered sternly, returning the evil eye I had offered him. ‘And I want my children around me. Besides, that lass owes me her services for her bread. I'm not going to nurture her in luxury and idleness after Linton is gone.' He glanced at Catherine. ‘Make haste and get ready now. And don't oblige me to compel you.'

‘I shall come,' said Catherine, leaping to her feet, her jaw set stubbornly.

‘Catherine, no,' I protested, wondering now if I had been mistaken not to tell her what her father-in-law was.

‘Hush, Nelly! This is my life, my life that I will control.' She turned her gaze on Mr. Heathcliff. ‘Linton is all I have to love in the world, and though you have done what you could to make him hateful to me, and me to him, you
cannot
make us hate each other! And I defy you to hurt him when I am by, and I defy you to frighten me.'

‘You are a boastful champion,' replied Heathcliff. ‘It is not I who will make him hate you—it is his own sweet spirit. He's as bitter as gall at your desertion and its consequences, so don't expect thanks for this noble devotion now. I heard him draw a pleasant picture to Zillah of what he would do if he were as strong as I. The inclination is there, and his very weakness will sharpen his wits to find a substitute for strength.'

‘I know he has a bad nature,' said Catherine. ‘He's your son. How could he not? But I know he loves me, and for that reason I love him. Mr. Heathcliff, you have
nobody
to love you, and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge that your cruelty arises from your greater misery! You
are
miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him?
Nobody
loves you—
nobody
will cry for you when you die! I would not want to be you.'

‘You shall be sorry to be yourself presently,' said her father-in-law, ‘if you stand there another minute. Begone, witch, and get your things.'

She scornfully withdrew.

In her absence, I began to beg for Zillah's place at the Heights, offering to resign mine to her, but he would not hear of it. He bid me be silent, and then, for the first time, allowed himself a glance round the room and a look at the pictures. ‘I'll tell you what I did yesterday.'

‘Will you?' I said, my sarcasm thick.

‘I got the sexton who was digging Linton's grave to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. Do you know, Nelly, that she looked no different than she did the day we buried her? As beautiful, as perfect, as when last I saw her living.'

I shuddered at this monstrous revelation. I wanted to tell him that was impossible, but I knew from my own eyes that the grass would not grow over her grave, and the soil, no matter how many winters passed, still looked freshly turned. So who knew? Perhaps she had not rotted properly as the rest of us would. Why he would not find this odd, I did not know. Unless he already knew the explanation.

‘I struck one side of the coffin loose and I bribed the sexton to pull it away when I'm laid there, and slide mine out, too. With the walls of the coffins removed, we will lie side by side for all eternity!'

‘You were very wicked, Mr. Heathcliff!' I exclaimed. ‘Were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?' What I really wanted to know, though, was how he thought
he
would be
resting
anywhere for eternity, considering the truth of what he was. There was no
resting for eternity
for vampires!

‘Disturbed her? No, Nelly! It is she who has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years—incessantly—remorselessly—till yester-night, and yester-night I was at last tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.' He looked to me. ‘I know what she wants now, what she must have to rest peacefully, at last.'

‘Indeed?' I said, unable to think of any other comment I could make that would not leave me drained of my blood.

‘I expected a transformation on raising the lid, but I'm better pleased that it should not commence till I share the soil with her. You know, I was wild after she died, from dawn to dawn, praying for her to return to me—her spirit. I have a strong faith in ghosts. I have a conviction that they can, and do exist, among us!'

What he was saying made little sense to me, but I let him go on because I could not, for the life of me, think how to stop him.

‘The day she was buried, there came a fall of snow. In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as winter—all round was solitary. I didn't fear that her fool of a husband would wander up so late, and no one else had business to bring them there.

‘Being alone, and conscious that two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—“I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills
me,
and if she be motionless, it is sleep.”

‘I got a spade from the tool house, and began to delve with all my might.'

‘You dug her up the day she was buried?' I asked, surprised anything could shock me anymore. Particularly concerning him. ‘Is that why her grave always looks freshly laid? Because you dig her up with regularity?'

‘No, I do not dig her up with
regularity.
Listen to me, Nelly. I am trying to tell you what happened that night. My shovel, it scraped the coffin. I fell to work with my hands. The wood commenced cracking about the screws. I was on the point of attaining my object when it seemed that I heard a sigh from someone above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down. “If I can only get this off,” I muttered. “I wish they may shove in the earth over us both!” and I wrenched more desperately still. There was another sigh, close at my ear. I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by, but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt that Cathy was there. She was not under me, but on the earth.

‘A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart, through every limb. I relinquished my labor of agony, and turned consoled at once. Her presence was with me; it remained while I re-filled the grave, and led me home. You may laugh, if you will, but I was sure I should see her there. I was sure she was with me, and I could not help talking to her.

‘Having reached the Heights, I rushed eagerly to the door. It was fastened; that accursed Earnshaw and my wife were attempting to keep me out. I remember stopping to kick the breath out of him, and then hurrying upstairs to my room, and hers. I looked round impatiently—I felt her by me—I could
almost
see her, and yet I
could not!
I ought to have sweat blood then, from the anguish of my yearning—from the fervor of my supplications to have but one glimpse! I had not one. She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And, since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that intolerable torture! Infernal—keeping my nerves at such a stretch, that, if they had not resembled catgut, they would, long ago, have relaxed to the feebleness of Linton's.

‘When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out, I should meet her. When I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return. She
must
be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I tried to sleep in her chamber, I couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child. And I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night—to be always disappointed! It racked me!

‘Now, since I've seen her, I'm pacified—a little. It was a strange way of killing, not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, to beguile with the specter of a hope, through eighteen years!'

Mr. Heathcliff paused and wiped his forehead. His hair clung to it, wet with perspiration; his eyes were fixed on the red embers of the fire, the brows not contracted, but raised next to the temples, diminishing the grim aspect of his countenance, but imparting a peculiar look of trouble and a painful appearance of mental tension toward one absorbing subject.

Realizing he had reached the end of his mad ranting, I looked at him. ‘Sounds to me as if her soul is as tortured as yours,' I observed. When I was dead, I was hoping to enter the pearly gates of heaven. I did not want to roam the moors at night haunting Mr. Heathcliff.

‘Tortured, indeed. Caught between the here and the hereafter,' he said softly, speaking more to himself than to me. ‘But I suspect now I know what she needs. What I must do.'

‘What she needs?' I asked, thinking back to what he had said earlier. ‘You mean to rest peacefully.'

‘In time you will know all,' he said.

Questions still dangled on the end of my tongue. First and foremost, I wanted to know how it was that he had come to be both a gypsy slayer and vampire, for I had never heard of such a creature and could only imagine what a tortured soul
that
creature would be. But Catherine entered, announcing that she was ready when her pony was saddled, and I did not have further opportunity to quiz him.

Heathcliff turned to her. ‘You may do without your pony; it is a fine evening, and you'll need no ponies at Wuthering Heights. For what journeys you take, your own feet will serve you—Come along.'

‘Good-bye, Nelly!' whispered my dear little mistress. As she kissed me, her lips felt like ice.

Protect her from the beasties,
I prayed silently, half fearing she had already been bitten. What else would make her so cold?

‘Come and see me, Nelly. Don't forget.'

‘Take care you do no such thing, Mrs. Dean!' said her new father. ‘When I wish to speak to you, I'll come here. I want none of your prying at my house!'

He signed her to precede him, and casting back a look that cut my heart, she obeyed.