Heathcliff, Vampire of Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff, Vampire of Wuthering Heights

by

Emily Bronte and Amanda Paris

Published by Amanda Paris at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 by Amanda Paris

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Table of Contents

Chapter One. The Letter

Chapter Two. The Madness of the Heights

Chapter Three. The Wandering Spirit

Chapter Four. Confessions of a Vampire

Chapter Five. Death Visits the Heights

Chapter Six. In Which All Seems Lost

Chapter Seven. The Great Transformation

Chapter Eight. Lightness of Being

Chapter Nine. The Return

Chapter Ten. Confrontations

Chapter Eleven. The Vampire Bride

Chapter Twelve. Immortal Beloved

Chapter Thirteen. Isabella

Chapter Fourteen. Birth and Death

Chapter Fifteen. Catherine

Chapter Sixteen. Escape

Chapter Seventeen. After-courses: Witterling

Chapter One. The Letter

Written from The Old White Horse Inn, Bingley, West Yorkshire

1801—

My Dear Witterling,

You will little guess how affairs have passed with me these last tormented days. When I wrote to you some six weeks ago, I had devised my plans with such careful deliberation and determined to follow the direction of my fancy, to quest after that most elusive and fascinating of creatures, the vampire. Though I left the particulars of my journey a mystery—deciding, as I did, that you and the others would scoff at my wild imaginings and discourage me from pursing that most fantastical of beings—I gave out that I had received direction from my employer to visit Yorkshire and meet with a new client, a recluse who would not travel to London. In this, I had settled myself on equivocating the circumstances, for indeed, the client in question had pursued a matter of law and absolutely refused to travel outside his estate, Wuthering Heights. So far, I told nothing that was an untruth. But I speak in riddles, Witterling! Be patient, for I find myself so disordered, so little accustomed to suffering under such a malady of the mind—in truth, I have striven to convince myself that I really have fallen prey to some lunacy—that I have lost the thread of logic that so characterized my former abilities.

As you know, I embarked on my journey in some excitement. I looked to be a young man, just turned twenty-five, with dark hair, no tell-tale receding line to indicate the onset of approaching age, and a smooth face that neither time nor worry had marked. But the horrors I encountered there would leave me entirely transformed, for I witnessed the executor of the most diabolical of plots undertaken to destroy those desperate humans who dared to oppose the fiendish Mr. Heathcliff, the vampire whose legend I sought.

Upon first beholding Heathcliff, my hair entirely turned to white, and I bethought I saw a ghost in the reflecting glass! I shuddered and started, for the face that gazed back belonged to me—myself and yet an entirely new being! My eyes lost their former aspect, depleted of the animation which characterizes the human sparkle; they acquired a widened, affrighted look, as though they registered a perpetual fear of that lurking predator. Dread, now frozen upon my features, has so twisted them in torture as to render me a stranger to anyone who once knew me. Well may you wonder at the change wrought in your acquaintance; tremble, indeed, to call one such as me your friend, for I am surely destined to serve as a victim of this ignoble devil and fall into the ranks of the damned!

Yesterday evening, I escaped from the confines of the Heights, that accursed, tormented house, with its villainous monster, who has drained the life force of everyone connected to that cursed estate. He has already feasted upon all but its most stalwart inhabitants and nearly decimated forever two of those worthy Yorkshire families, the Lintons and Earnshaws, whose fate you shall read hereafter.

Beware!—For it is a tragic tale I bear, one that has nearly left me, the recorder of all this carnage, in the most dangerous of positions. A villainous murderer, who neither respects nor regards the sanctity of life, held me captive and even now may stalk me to my doom. During the course of my confinement, I feared many times for my fate in that prison-house, for Heathcliff, having invited me inside under the guise of another, forbid me safe passage from the house. I escaped him only by a fortuitous occurrence, the particulars of which I little understand myself. It is enough that I yet live and pray fervently that Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton, the last of both their lines, may, united against him, forever smite him from the earth and send him to the devil, his maker.

Included here is the true account, set down by my own hand, of the fiercest vampire in England, whose desire to tell me the entirety of his story, his fortunes and misfortunes, and his quest to immortalize Catherine Earnshaw still remains a mystery to me. To what evil purpose he agreed to make me the recipient of his horrid confession, I hope never to discover, for the terrible knowledge must surely mean my own death.

How wretched are we who undertake such foolhardy quests! Had I sought your wise counsel, I never would have embarked on this dangerous journey, the details of which I must now lay before you, in all truth, both the particulars of my own inclination and the strange circumstances that whetted my pursuit of this vampire. It was my original design to understand the inner workings of the creature’s mind, then to relate my findings to the world in a series of articles comprised of a rational inquiry into the supernatural origins of such a species. Long had I wondered about the existence of the vampiric genus, for I had devised my own theory, drawn from others’ recent speculations that required evidence, such as only direct contact with the creature could provide. The most convincing of these posited that the vampire had evolved from a race of sturdy, long-lived humans, perhaps one of those tribes springing from the far shores of the empire’s outlying colonies, which we read in surviving travelogues to have held cannibalistic savages. They had resorted to consuming, in absence of other nourishment, their own kind, drinking the blood of their mortal enemies. Or perhaps, as some argue, they sprang from the line of Dracule, whose legend has engendered not a few foolish men, like myself, into traveling into the Transylvanian forests, often to their doom. Only by confronting a real vampire could I know for certain. And here was one, roaming the Yorkshire moors in search of prey!

Never before had I been so close or so determined to pursue the gothic wonderings of my imagination, intrigued by those earlier investigators, about whom we have long held discourse, the intrepid vampire hunters. They developed their own theories about the creature’s immortality and blood frenzy. I, in my wildest mental meanderings, fancied myself as one similarly fashioned, with preternatural instincts well attuned to stalking these predatory beings. How little we mortals know of that world beyond us!

Of some, though not all, of the strange happenings of Wuthering Heights I learned some time ago from a letter misdirected to me in London. You will remember at that time that I took lodgings near the Inns of Court, where, before I began this terrible quest, I became a clerk, my morbid interests forming nothing so much as an inner drive, a pursuit in the little free time my professional life in London afforded me. But a force, I know not where or how or why, drew me as I read the letter, the contents of which were meant for the previous occupant of my rooms, a lawyer, William Shively; only later would I discover his integral role in this drama of blood and death.

The letter gave a short history of Wuthering Heights and its mysterious owner, Mr. John Hunt, Esq., who wanted the deeds—which, upon my breaking the seal, directly fell into my hands—transferred to his account, along with those acquired from son’s daughter, who’d recently inherited Thrushcross Grange. According to Hunt, she placed entire control of the estate into the hands of her husband’s father, not being, the letter read, ‘of sound mind or body herself, with some peculiar hereditary disorder that is accustomed to afflict the female members of her family.’

At first, I dismissed the letter’s contents, recognizing, as I did, an entirely normal request by a client to his lawyer, such as we are accustomed to seeing everyday in our office. But the penultimate paragraph caught my attention. Included therein was a short account of a local vampire, Heathcliff, rumored to feast upon strangers to the area. The letter thus warned Shively not to travel to Yorkshire, as several newcomers to the nearby village of Gimmerton had lately gone missing. It seemed the vampire had a taste only for the blood of outsiders.

Curious, I again inspected the contents and deeds, out of which fell a small slip of paper. Written upon it was the illegible scrawl presumably verifying the account and signed, in a barely discernable hand, by the distraught and bereaved daughter-in-law, Mrs. Catherine Hunt, a woman whom I have learned does not exist.

Lest you believe I neglected to find the true recipient of the letters, I made a thorough search through all my legal acquaintance in London, but the man in question had vanished; many knew him, but none could identify his whereabouts. His sudden disappearance must surely owe itself to his having discovered the mysterious identity of the vampire masquerading as Mr. Hunt!

Taking upon myself to inquire into the particulars of this strange case, I traveled north to Wuthering Heights. How far from the truth had the writer of this cryptic missive—certainly Heathcliff himself—trod! Nothing in that letter could have prepared me for the greeting I received that first evening at the Heights, as it is familiarly called. Never did I expect to meet with the vampire himself! The hungry gleam in those faraway eyes pierced me with their mesmeric intensity; the short account given of the local vampire, which had so piqued my interest, did little justice to the creature before me.

Expecting to find that wealthy gentleman, Mr. Hunt, who could relate the particulars of the legend, I instead found his replacement. Hunt had been murdered and Heathcliff taken his place! What force propelled me through that forbidding door, sensing, as I did, that all was not right in that house?

Beckoning me within the dark hall with one long finger, he unfolded his life story, day by wretched day. What made him desire to confess such horrific acts to me, a mere mortal? Perhaps he saw a young man, so little regarded by the outside world, as a figure of interest or derision, even the distant memory of what he had been himself, an unknown, insignificant creature.

He moved with restless speed. I felt rather than witnessed those inhuman reflexes as the monster related his tale. Though I longed to leave, he would not have it. Only by the help of Nelly Dean, the long-suffering housekeeper, did I finally escape, alone to run through those dreary, storm-tossed moors, itself a death sentence had I encountered some tearing gale to sweep me from the earth. If not for a wandering gypsy, himself acquainted with the legend of Heathcliff, I would surely have perished in that lonesome clime. My good Samaritan took me into his caravan and bore me, nearly half-dead from starvation and inner turmoil, to this Inn, where I await the stagecoach for London, longing as I never have before to leave this deadly place, the farthest corner of England, perhaps the world, never hoping to hear or see another vampire again!

A gnawing fear refuses to release its grasp over me. Perhaps, after all, the fiend will not let me go. In my wilder fancies, I expect those long, steely fingers to curl themselves about my throat, to suspend me in the air and then drain the last drop of blood from my body. If such is the case, this bears proof to the reasons for my death at the hand of Heathcliff, the vampire of Wuthering Heights…

Chapter Two. The Madness of the Heights

The journey up from London—away from what I have known to be the normal course of human events, away from friends, acquaintances, and professionals—left me famished and longing for the comfort of a warm fire, a hearth to set down my weary burden, and a meal to break the inner rumblings of hunger. Along my journey, I dwelt on the remoter beauties of the West Yorkshire Pennines, the windswept heather, and the wild bluster sweeping over the moors, which had nearly blown me off my mount. In all of England I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society—a perfect misanthropist’s heaven.

A large and winding road leads up to the house, situated upon a hilltop and constantly blasted by the howling winds, which never cease their moaning. Its design, apparently of Tudor origin, nevertheless conveys a somewhat older age, with the dark stone, turrets, and heavy arches of a century or more before. Several gables jut out from the front and side façades. Looking across them, I perceived some shadows moving behind the lattices and a set of eyes gazing out at me through the darkness. They seemed to follow my progress through the gate. Staring transfixed, I attributed the mirage to some twilight trick that had fooled my weary senses, clinging, as I did, to the world of rational thought, no matter the billowing gusts and strange sights that fired my eager imagination.

The manor house makes some pretentions to grandeur, though it is of the kind that must require the viewer to recall former golden days, for the name Wuthering, a local term meaning wild and storm-blown, puts me more in mind of the withering state of the house’s collapsing decay. Its layout reveals the workings of a once-functioning farm, though few creatures remain there. The outlying garden is overgrown with briars that would draw blood if one had the unfortunate luck to fall into them. A few stunted firs, with thorns permanently bent by the wind, grow up close to the house, as though standing sentinel against some evil force that might intrude. They appear nearly as old as the edifice they protect.

A stone gate, all but swallowed by nettles, surrounds the house, and it seemed to open its door—I marked, in perfect reason, how the wind blew it—for my arrival and then close shut behind my horse. Not perceiving any servant to greet me, I dismounted in the yard and led my poor steed, in as much need of rest and refreshment as his rider, aloft, not wishing to stable him unasked or risk an accusation of stealing oats.

Approaching that heavy, oak-ironed door, I felt some dread come upon me and fancied I could see a few strangely dark stains in the shape of human handprints. Dismissing the fanciful wanderings of my wearied mind, I eagerly anticipated meeting the elusive Mr. Hunt, the writer of that cryptic message I received. I did not yet feel the trembling that would characterize each day of my stay in that place, for my natural inquisitiveness drove me onward to introduce myself to the unknown master here—some ancient rustic, I supposed—and discover the mysteries of the local vampire, perhaps over a glass of fine claret or, at the very least, a cup of warm tea, something to warm my inner chill. A dilettante in the deceptive habits of night creatures, I little suspected that I had traveled straight into the heart of darkness.

Timidly, I knocked on the door, which seemed, like the gate, to open expectantly, as though of its own accord. There in the darkness appeared the same two eyes, matching in intensity the ones I first beheld in the window. The creature drew closer to me, and I saw, not more than a foot away, the blackest orbs withdrawn so suspiciously under their brows as to make me tremble where I stood.

Mr. Hunt? I said in a tremulous voice.

A nod was the answer. I tried to recollect myself and answer in a more confident voice,

Mr. Lockwood, sir. I am the unintended recipient of your letter to Mr. Shively, the former occupant of my lodgings in London. His whereabouts I have not, as yet, discovered. I must confess to opening the letter, which intrigued me, and I am come to return your deeds and follow the legend of Heathcliff, the vampire near Wuthering Heights. May I put to you a few questions to satisfy my curiosity? In addition to studying the law, I am an avid follower of the vampire. I hope you will make me welcome. Breathless, for I explained this history in a torrent of words, I held out his letter and pointed to its contents to justify my existence there on the doorstep.

He regarded me with those glowing black eyes, but I, to my everlasting regret, dismissed the suspicion, attributing it to my wearied state. The house seemed to beckon me, independent of its master, and I little heeded the prickling sensations he provoked.

 Walk in! he said in a chilling voice.  The walk in was uttered with closed teeth, two of which appeared longer than the rest; they expressed the sentiment, Go to the devil. I think that circumstance determined me to accept the invitation, for with terrifying prescience, I felt myself on the precipice of dark knowledge, and like our first ancestor, Adam, I could not refuse the temptation thus held out to me, no matter the after-consequences of my fall.

I realized, in some embarrassment, a practical circumstance that forbid me to enter the house; that should have given me due pause to reflect upon my hasty actions. When he saw my horse’s breast fairly pushing across the threshold, he called out in a rough, barking voice, Joseph, take Mr. Lockwood’s horse, and bring up some wine for our guest.

Here we have the whole establishment of domestics, I suppose, I reflected to myself. No wonder the grass grows up in the courtyard, and cattle are the only hedge-cutters. But I dared not to utter these mental perambulations.

Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man—very old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy, long immured to the hardship here. The Lord help us! he soliloquized in an undertone almost of desolate desire to reach a God who’d forgotten him in this remote place, as though he, with all the company of fallen angels, had really followed Satan out of heaven, to regret the decision in an eternity of hell.

Before passing the threshold, the last moment of my normal human life, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carvings lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door; above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins, I detected the date 1500 and the name Hareton Earnshaw. I had in my possession a short history of the place but instinctively withheld my questions of the surly owner, whose unnaturally pale face both fascinated and frightened me. His attitude appeared to demand my speedy entrance, and I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium.

One step brought us into the family sitting-room, without any introductory lobby or passage. They call it here the house pre-eminently. It includes a kitchen and parlor generally. But, I believe, at Wuthering Heights the kitchen is forced to retreat altogether into another quarter; I observed no signs of roasting, boiling, or baking about the huge fireplace, nor any glitter of copper saucepans and tin utensils on the walls.

My first, most immediate sensation, was that I’d entered one of those dwellings found in the popular novels I have been fond of reading by Mrs. Radcliffe, whose villains torment some poor soul in an architectural twisting of narrow passageways and labyrinthine mazes. Just so with Wuthering Heights, whose windows are deeply set in the wall, the corners defended with large jutting stones fashioned in the style of leering gargoyles. You may wonder at my personification of this place, but it is indeed a character in this history, almost as dark and solitary as its master Heathcliff,