Wuthering Bites Read Online Free PDF Page A

hurled both into the back kitchen.
    I reached for this book, and a pot of ink from the shelf, and pushed the house door ajar to give me light, and I have got the time on with writing for twenty minutes. Heathcliff is impatient, though, and proposes that we should appropriate the dairy woman’s cloak and have a scamper on the moors, where he can practice the deadly arts he is secretly acquiring.
    Â 
    I suppose Catherine fulfilled her project, for the next sentence took up another subject.
    Â 
    How little did I dream that Hindley would ever make me cry so! she wrote. My head aches, till I cannot keep it on the pillow, and still I can’t give over. Poor Heathcliff! Hindley calls him a vagabond and won’t let him sit with us, nor eat with us anymore. He says he and I must not play together. Most tragic of all, he has forbidden Heathcliff to practice the skills necessary to fight the vampires running rampant on the moors. My brother threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders.
    He has been blaming our father (how dared he?) for treating H. too liberally, and he swears he will reduce him to his right place.
    Â 
    I began to nod drowsily over the dim page, hearing the sound of a branch of a fir tree touch my window as the blast wailed by and rattled against the panes. I listened an instant, detected the disturber, then turned and dozed, and dreamt.
    I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, only it was now a silk-lined casket, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind and the driving of the snow. I heard, also, the fir bough repeat its teasing sound, but it annoyed me so much that I resolved to silence it. I rose from my grave and endeavored to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple, a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten.
    â€œI must stop it, nevertheless!” I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass and stretching an arm out to seize the branch, instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!
    The intense horror of nightmare came over me. I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed—
    â€œLet me in—let me in!”
    â€œWho are you?” I asked, struggling to disengage myself.
    â€œCatherine Linton,” it replied shiveringly. “I’m come home. I’d lost my way on the moor and been chased by the bloodthirsty devils!”
    As it spoke, I discerned a child’s pale face, her neck punctured and bleeding freely, staring through the window. Terror made me cruel, and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist onto the broken pane and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes. Still it wailed, “Let me in!” and maintained its tenacious grip. Horror gripped me at the icy touch of the unholy thing!
    â€œHow can I!” I said. “You must let me go, if you want me to let you in!”
    The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer.
    I seemed to keep them closed above a quarter of an hour; yet, the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on!
    â€œBegone!” I shouted. “I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.”
    â€œIt is twenty years,” mourned the voice. “Twenty years. I’ve been a fed-upon for twenty years! Dead but not dead.”
    The feeble scratching outside began anew, and the pile of books moved as if thrust forward.
    I tried to jump up, but could not stir a limb in the tight confines of my death chamber, and so I yelled aloud, in a frenzy of fright.
    To my confusion, I discovered the yell was not ideal. Hasty footsteps approached my chamber door; somebody pushed it open with a vigorous hand, and a light pierced the top of my coffin, which had transformed into a bed again. I sat