Heathcliff Before Heathcliff - Contest Winner

Heathcliff Before Heathcliff

The inkwell had become a dry well.

"A gentleman," I had written at the top of the page some three days previous, and there the words remained, orphaned and inert, wanting the vitality I could not supply.

But the gentleman simply would not come. He lay flat upon the page, a paper construction. My soul craved something else entirely – something that could not be purchased with money or conferred by birth. Something rougher, wilder, with dirt beneath its fingernails and vengeance in its heart.

I noticed how late the hour had grown. The candle had burnt to a stub, guttering in its own tallow; the fire had collapsed to embers.

I sought my bed. I lay back against the bolster and closed my eyes, intending only to rest them a moment. Sleep, however, came faster than I expected – rushed up to meet me like dark water – and I felt myself sinking into it gratefully, surrendering to its weight.

Then I dreamt.

The parsonage walls dissolved. The ceiling lifted away. And in their place I perceived the heather spread in every direction, colourless beneath the starless sky. The wind tore at my hair and my skirts with hands that felt almost sentient. I knew this landscape – I had walked it a thousand times in waking life – but it was altered now, the proportions strange, the distances deceptive.

I was upon the moors.

And somewhere ahead of me, materialising from the darkness as though the earth itself had exhaled him...

A figure.

He was tall. His complexion suggestive of origins beyond Yorkshire. His eyes, when they found mine, were black and deep-set, and they regarded me with a suspicion that bordered on hostility – as though I were the intruder here, not he.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

His lip curled.

"My name is yours to choose – is it not, Emily?"

The wind gusted between us. I understood, with the peculiar certainty that dreams confer, that I had made him. That he had not existed before this moment. That he was mine.

I studied his face – the sharp bones, the bitter mouth, the eyes that seemed to contain some private furnace of resentment – and a name rose to my lips unbidden:

"Heathcliff."

Something shifted in his expression – then he turned and began walking into the darkness, and I understood that I was meant to follow.

***

We walked for what felt like hours, though time moves strangely in such countries of sleep. I followed a few paces behind, watching how his boots found their way among the treacherous ground without hesitation, how his body leaned into the wind as into an old adversary.

At last we reached a ridge of pale stone, and he stopped.

"Why did you make me?" he asked, without turning.

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

I considered.

"I think perhaps I was tired of gentlemen."

He turned then, and studied me with those unnerving eyes.

"You don't look like the kind of person who dreams of men like me, Emily."

"What kind of person do I look like?"

"A woman who sits in parlours and embroiders."

"I despise embroidery."