the woman half silly in her behavior. She ran into her chamber, and made me come with her, and there she sat shivering and clasping her hands, and asking repeatedly, ‘Are they gone yet?’
Then she began describing with hysterical emotion the effect it produced on her to see black, and she fell a-weeping. I asked what was the matter and she said she was afraid of dying herself. She greatly feared death at the hands of the vampires that she had heard plagued the moors! Her dear mother warned her not to come, forbidding her to marry young Earnshaw, and now she feared her good mother might have been right.
I imagined her as little likely to die of an attack as myself. The wife was rather thin, but young, and fresh complexioned, and her eyes sparkled as bright as diamonds. We could both run, if it was a dire necessity. In those days, it was only the sickly or elderly or feeble-minded the vampires preyed upon. Would that were the case now, for these are a cunning, diabolical race of bloodsuckers that hunt us now.
Why, only three Sundays past, the strangest case did unfold in the village of Crumpton-on-Ween, not two days’ walk from here. I had the whole tale from my sister Bess, who had it from the butcher’s wife, who had the misfortune to live in the town. She’s not a Quaker, you understand, but good Church of England, but there are Quakers in Crumpton-on-Ween. ’Tis said that the Quakers have an odd sort of service. Mostly they sit in silence and pray, on occasion rising to speak aloud some thought that has come to them.
“Do you not think it unnatural, Mr. Lockwood?”
“No, I do not,” I piped in. “I have in my scope of acquaintances several men of the Quaker persuasion, and I find them quite sensible and pious gentlemen.”
“Perhaps these be a different lot,” Mrs. Dean suggested diplomatically. “In any case, the butcher’s wife’s niece said that two strangers in black entered a service whilst it was in progress and took seats on the back bench near the door. The meeting house lay in shadows that day, the weather being inclement and the Quakers quite sparing of their candles, so the congregation was unable to see their visitors clearly. And by and by, an elderly gentleman sitting on the very same bench, a wool merchant by trade, was seen to fall into a deep sleep. Then the two strangers moved forward, taking places directly in front of the slumbering wool merchant.”
“Mrs. Dean, I don’t see how—”
“Did I mention they were all in black?” She bunched up the nightcap she was stitching in her hands in her excitement to tell the story. “Black hats, black cloaks, black boots and trousers. Their hair, their eyes, the deepest black. Anyway, the service was a long one, and halfway through, after the visitors had moved up three rows, another stranger entered the meeting house. He took a seat at the back of the room, near to the sleeping wool merchant, but within the space of two minutes, he gave a cry that brought the worshipers to their feet. Down went the elderly wool merchant, a Mr. Uriak Wittlebalm by name, not sleeping but dead. Every drop of his blood drained out of him! Out came the most recent arrival’s sword, and he—a gypsy vampire slayer in disguise—fell upon the two strangers with great shouts and the flashing of blades.”
“My word,” I breathed. “So the two visitors were—”
“How clever you are, sir, to see at once what they were,” she said, not allowing me to voice my deduction. “They’d not have pulled the wool over your eyes, had you been there, I’m certain. But as I was saying, the strangers leapt up and sprang at the gypsy slayer, fangs bared. A terrible battle ensued, and before the end came, it was discovered that not one, but five of the Quakers had been murdered by the two fiends. Five dead, including Mr. Wittlebalm, and a master thatcher near to dead from loss of blood.”
“And did this slayer succeed? Did he destroy the foul villains?”
“Such strength they had! Only by a stroke of luck that the wool merchant was oft to take a drop of spirits for his health did the slayer have a chance. The vampires had drunk so much of his blood and the blood of other parishioners who must have had a nip or two to fight the cold that the creatures became so in their cups that they could not put up their usual show of strength.”
“So the gypsy slayed them both?”
Mrs. Dean rose to shovel more coal into the fire. “One through the heart with his silver-bladed sword. The second, he would have but the beastie leapt from a window and vanished into the chestnut woods. The slayer tried to assemble a group to go after him, but none of the parishioners had the fortitude.”
“The nerve of them, to enter a house of worship,” I observed. “Five dead in such a short time.”
She peered at me over her shoulder from where she crouched before the fire. “Aye, sir, come to dinner, as it were. If not for the gypsy slayer, they might have drained the entire congregation.”
“And you take this tale to be the truth?” Mrs. Dean, being the sort she was, I wondered if her stories needed to be taken with a grain of salt.
“True as earth, word for word as I heard it.” She settled back in her chair and picked up her stitching again.
“Frightening that the vampires should be so bold as to invade a place of worship on a Sunday,” I pronounced.
“Indeed. It makes me nervous to sit through service ever since.” She snipped a bit of thread between her sharp little incisors and I took note that she seemed to have unusually fine teeth for a woman her age. None blackened or broken, and none missing that I could see. It was a rare condition among those of her class.
“I’ll sit by no strangers, I wager that.” She touched her throat. “Sad, indeed, that one cannot even feel safe in church.”
“But you were telling me about Mr. Hindley’s new wife.” I redirected her back to the tale that interested me most. “When she first arrived at Wuthering Heights.”
That I was. I must say I had no impulse to sympathize with her. We don’t take to foreigners, here, Mr. Lockwood, unless they take to us first. If that’s one thing we’ve learned from the infestation, and the tales that come from towns like Crumpton-on-Ween, it’s that the unknown should not be welcomed. That’s how they first got in, you know, though few care to admit it. From their own ravaged countryside they came, making noises of changed ways and feeding off animals. But it’s still humans they prefer, though in a pinch they will take a sheep or two, even dogs.
Young Earnshaw was altered considerably in the three years of his absence. He had grown sparer, and lost his color, and spoke and dressed quite differently, so differently that some whispered with wonder if he had already fallen under the spell of the beasties. They were in the cities as well, you know, despite what the young missus might have said. But I never thought he had been made vampire. Nor did I think he had followed with the training to fight them that his good father—God rest his soul—had sent him to obtain.
On the very day of his return, Hindley told Joseph and me we must thenceforth quarter ourselves in the kitchen, and leave the house for him. The young missus expressed pleasure, at the beginning, at finding a sister among her new acquaintance. She prattled to Catherine and ran about with her, and gave her all sorts of presents. Her affection tired very soon, however, when she learned how the young miss traipsed about the moors, near daring the vampires to take her, even lifting a sword, on occasion. Eventually the wife withdrew her affection from Catherine and grew peevish, and then Hindley became tyrannical. A few words from her were enough to rouse in him all his old hatred he held for Catherine and Heathcliff. He drove the boy from their company to the servants’, deprived him of his school books, and allowed him only pease porridge, the rinds of cheese, and stale crusts at supper. The lad who had led the life of a gentleman’s favored child was put to coarse labor outside, compelled to muck stalls, skin and butcher livestock, clear fields of stones, and dig fresh pits for the necessary. From dawn until night, poor Heathcliff had to work harder than any other lad on the farm, and him not fed more table scraps than would keep a stoat alive.
“And did he accept this turn of fate, poor lad?”
Heathcliff bore his degradation pretty well at first because Cathy taught him what she learnt, and worked