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sky. I froze; my teeth chattered; and when the handle of the bedroom door began to turn I almost wept with relief that someone—Tabby, perhaps; I did not even care if it was the Reverend Brontë himself—had come to assuage my fears. But the turning of the handle was ghostly, too, Uncle, I give you my word it was. ‘Emily!’ came a voice from the passage: a high, squeaky voice, yet the door did not open and my dead bed-companion did not move an inch. ‘Emily’—that is all it said: oh Uncle, do believe me now!’
    Henry, I shall terminate this letter to you with a few words of advice. First, you must expunge from your mind instantly all thoughts of that night at Haworth Parsonage. I believe you were not, as you had at first suspected, the victim of a prankster, but instead the innocent recipient of a potion or dangerous drug administered to you earlier. (The good Tabby had left a carafe of water in the room, I daresay: in your fevered condition you drank some, and hallucinated the rest.) There was no hand at the window; no squeaky-voiced supplicant at the bedroom door; and, most worthy of all to remember, no one whatever in your bed.
    I am interested, however, by your description of the early hours of January 1st in this year of OurLord, 1849. You stated that it ‘brought a sense of returning sanity’ to pull out the contents of the bag of snippets found under the rug in the downstairs study. ‘I had been with people from another, terrible world, all night’, you write, ‘and to read of the exploits of mortals, wicked though they may be—and I speak, naturally, of Mr Heathcliff, of whom I informed you earlier, Uncle—is infinitely better than to be closeted with the dead.
    â€˜So’—as you concluded your (now-destroyed) missive to me, nephew—‘I grasped the pages which spilled readily into my hands as dawn broke. Nobody stirred in the house, and if the dog Keeper barked or howled from time to time, I was happy to remind myself that, for all the hound’s ferocity, it was, like myself, a hot-blooded thing.
    â€˜I knew where I was in the strange story I had begun to read earlier. Mr Heathcliff, rich with his wife’s fortune, was making his way back to England to reclaim his lost love, Cathy. I tremble to confess this, but I had a wish to read more of this lovely girl, this free, wild spirit. I could feel for Heathcliff, even, in his passion for his childhood sweetheart.
    â€˜Yet what I read shocked me, Uncle. You ask me to send you the pages I have read so far. But I cannot.’
    Henry, I conclude this communication to you with an order,
which cannot be disobeyed
, to send the pages you are reading to me directly in London.
    I have written to ask you for these when your letters of January 3rd and 4th arrived here and am most surprised and disappointed to have received nothing from you to date.
    Yours in anticipation
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Thomas Cautley Newby
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Mortimer St, off Cavendish Square
Editor’s Note
    It is with regret that we pronounce ourselves baffled and frustrated by the terror which appears to have afflicted Henry Newby ever since his unfortunate visit to Haworth Parsonage. We must, sadly, date his apparent inability to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the fictional, one might say, from this time. Did Newby perhaps fancy himself a successor to Lockwood, the traveller whose cold and other chest symptoms kept him so conveniently in bed while Nelly Dean recounted the tale of passion that was Heathcliff and Cathy? Was Newby, in fact, as much a story-teller as a reader of tall tales? We cannot know
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Chapter Five
The Deposition of Henry Newby
    The words which follow here, being of a confidential nature, shall not leave my safe keeping. They shall not be posted to London as my uncle demands; and they shall be shown to no-body. It