The House of Dead Maids Clare B. Dunkle
The dead hold no terrors for me. I have watched by the beds of those who have passed on, comforted by their sorrowless repose. But this little maid was a ghastly thing, all the more horrible because she stood before me. It wasn't the palid hue of her grimy face that shocked me, or her little gray hands and feet. It was the holes where her eyes should have been, great round sockets of shadow.
The dead girl opened her lips as if she meant to speak. Her mouth was another black pit like the black pits of her eyes. She was nothing but a hollowed-out skin plumped up with shadow. I had the horrible idea that if I were to scratch her, she would split open, and the darkness within her would come pouring out. p. 24
This is a prequel to Wuthering Heights-- the story of where Heathcliff was before.
But, you really don't need to know anything about Wuthering Heights to love this book. I don't even like Wuthering Heights, but I love this book.
The story does little to explain why Heathcliff is the way he is-- he is already that way before this tale begins. But, we have a manor that is not passed down through generations. Seldom House requires a family that is related by death instead of birth. Tabitha is brought from the orphanage to be the maid for the new master. Once there, she is haunted by the ghosts of the maids that have gone before, cold figures with no eyes that slip into her bed at night.
After meeting the new young master, more ghosts appear and haunt them. Tabitha knows something is very not right with the house and the village, but doesn't know how to fix it or what to do.
It's spooky and tense and terrifying in all the right ways. The entire story is filled with an atmosphere for foreboding and doom, and its length (146 pages) give it a sparseness that heightens the mystery and mood.
If it were a movie, it'd be the kind where you throw your hands over your eyes because you can't bear to watch, but you're still peeking through your fingers, because you can't look away.
Totally awesome.
Book Provided by... my local library
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I’ve known Heathcliff for a long time.
I met him in the pages of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights, when I was only nine years old. That’s a hard novel for nine-year-olds to read, but my mother was an English professor, and hard novels were the only kind she owned. During the summer, I would start out playing with my dog, Brit (the inspiration for the German shepherd robot in my book, The Sky Inside). Then I would walk around our neighborhood, looking for other bored kids to play with. But sooner or later, I’d run out of things to do, and I’d sit down with one of my mother’s hard novels.
That’s how I met Heathcliff.
If you’ve never read Wuthering Heights, it’s a strange, creepy story. Near the beginning, on a snowy night, a ghost named Cathy comes knocking at the window of Heathcliff’s house, begging to be let in. It turns out that twenty years ago, Cathy and Heathcliff were childhood sweethearts, but when she decided to marry someone else, he ran away from home. Cathy died a few years later, blaming Heathcliff for breaking her heart.
(Heathcliff disagreed. He blamed her for breaking his heart.)
Now Heathcliff’s a grown man—a grim, silent man—with a mansion and a farm and the two children of his most hated enemies living in the house with him. But underground, Cathy misses him, and he misses her. Even in death, they don’t want to be parted.
This is a picture of Heathcliff and of Cathy in her grave from the book I read when I was nine.
Wuthering Heights scared me half to death. But it didn’t just scare me. It fascinated me! I wanted to find out more about these two sweethearts and their pledge to remain true to each other after death.
Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights, doesn’t give many clues about that. She doesn’t tell readers where Heathcliff is from, how he got his money, or what promises he and Cathy have made to each other. She doesn’t even give a hint about whether she thinks Heathcliff is the hero or the villain. We readers have to decide that for ourselves. And readers have been arguing about it for over a hundred and fifty years—ever since the book came out.
So I decided to write my own story about Heathcliff, to explain where he’s from and what he wants out of life and why he intends to stay on earth after he dies.
In my book, Heathcliff is a little boy. He hasn’t met Cathy yet. What he does meet in my book are ghosts. Here are some of them:
Because my story is creepy too! It gave me nightmares when I wrote it, and readers have already been telling one another on the Internet not to read it at night.
I think that’s a good thing! It means my book matches Wuthering Heights. When I was nine years old, I didn’t dare to finish that book after dark.
(Top illustration by Fritz Eic
In This Show:
A multimedia text set by Andrea Spann
Jim Crow Laws
The Civil Rights Movement
Two Hundred Years of Black Paper Dolls:
The Collection of Arabella Grayson at the Anacostia Community Museum
I am not my hair by India Arie
I Love My Hair by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley
Thanks To:
Andrea Spann for [...]
By Rachel Ferguson
Yes! I have this and a matching Jane Eyre that he illustrated. (I was very excited when I found them.)
I have the Jane Eyre book too. I felt that same when I found mine, though it's been awhile, I still remember.