Read Online Wuthering Bites by Sarah Gray - Free Book Online Page B

and, getting a glimpse of the Grange lights, we thought we would just go and see whether the Lintons passed their Sunday evenings standing shivering in corners, while their father and mother sat eating and drinking, and singing and laughing.
    â€˜We ran from the top of the Heights to the park, without stopping—Catherine completely beaten in the race, because she was barefoot. You’ll have to seek her shoes in the bog tomorrow. We crept through a broken hedge, groped our way up the path, and planted ourselves on a flowerpot under the drawing-room window. The light came from there; they had not put up the shutters, and the curtains were only half closed. Both of us were able to look in by clinging to the ledge, and we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the center, and shimmering with little soft tapers. Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were not there; Edgar and his sister had it entirely to themselves. Shouldn’t they have been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven! And now, guess what the children were doing? Isabella—I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy—lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as if the vampires were sinking their fangs into her. Edgar stood on the hearth weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog, shaking its paw and yelping, which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had nearly pulled in two between them. The idiots! That was their pleasure! To quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each began to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things; we did despise them! When would you catch me wishing to have what Catherine wanted? I’d not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton’s at Thrushcross Grange—not if I might have the privilege of tying Joseph to the front gate and painting the house-front with Hindley’s blood to lure the beasties to him!’
    â€˜Hush, hush!’ I interrupted, fearing the master might hear him. ‘Still you have not told me, Heathcliff, how Catherine is left behind?’
    â€˜I told you we laughed,’ he answered. ‘The Lintons heard us, and they shot like arrows to the door; there was silence, and then a cry, “Oh, Mamma, Mamma! Oh, Papa! Oh, Mamma, come here. Oh, Papa, oh!” They really did howl out something like that. We made frightful noises to terrify them still more, trying to sound like vampires scratching at the window and then we dropped off the ledge, thinking we had better flee. I had Cathy by the hand, and was urging her on, when all at once one of the bloodsuckers, a particularly ugly fellow I had encountered in the moors earlier in the week, fell upon her, dragging her down.
    â€˜ “Run, Heathcliff, run!” she cried. “He holds me!”
    â€˜The devil had seized her ankle, Nelly. I heard his abominable snorting. But Cathy did not yell out—no! She would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow. I did, though. I vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom, regretting that I had left my sword at the edge of the drive that leads up to the Grange. Without a weapon, I got a stone and thrust it between her attacker’s jaws, and tried with all my might to cram it down his throat. A servant came up with a lantern, at last, swinging a hoe, shouting, “Keep fast, beast of Satan, keep fast!”
    â€˜He changed his note, however, when he saw the vampire’s game, which was not to kill, but maim. The beast was throttled off, his huge purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendant lips steaming with bloody slaver. Then another servant threw a bowl of ground garlic at the