Echo Thomas Olde [ENGLISH]

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Notes by Sam Avery
"The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in – let me in!'
- Emily Brontë"

1.

"The morose came on November 7. It was everything Louetta had said and worse. You knew it when a human scream came from the clouds that morning. A scream you heard in the vibration of the rabbets of the large window. You knew it when the wind picked up around the eaves and you felt the arrival of the dense, cold air mass in the atmosphere tingle in your teeth. You knew because your cerebral cortex started to itch. Because your bone marrow was itching. Because a weight pressed on your guts and something unpleasant happened in your gut. You knew it like rats and weasels knew an earthquake was imminent. Like fish swimming away before a tsunami. The blowing of the fireplace was only a harbinger. The drop of the barometer is just a prophecy. Nick, he's been pacing back and forth in front of that big window all morning."

"Like a tiger in a cage. Peering out, his gaze drawn like a magnet to that spot beyond the ridges where the Maudit was supposed to be. At his feet a growing scuff in the parquet. He had gotten a little scary. Fuck that, he was scary on a whole new level. Milly-Shapiro-in-Hereditary-eng. Point was, I couldn't get in touch with him anymore. I couldn't find Nick in there anymore. Every time I said his name, every time I licked my bone-dry lips and carefully took a step in his path, it was as if he was looking right through me. As if I didn't exist. Then you thought you heard another scream, an echo, a resonance, and your gaze shot out. The valley waited. Held his breath for what was to come. At ten past ten the chamois trek started. Suddenly the woods came alive. Suddenly black-and-white striped snouts broke loose between the conifers."

"Whole herds of Rupicapra rupicapra, waving their horns with their bowed heads, passed the chalet without giving it a glance and followed the stream in the direction of the valley. Not exactly what National Geographic would describe as "natural behavior." Not exactly what the zoologically sophisticated intelligentsia would even describe as an "ecological anomaly," but Nick didn't even see them. This is where I drew the line. Nick might have taken me hostage; the morose took him hostage. To know how we got here I have to take you back to not even a day before, to the moment I hit rock bottom. Last night, Julia on FaceTime for the first time in weeks, her voice over my wireless earphones: "I'm seriously worried about you. Amy Winehouse's corpse looked even better than you. Why aren't you responding to my messages anymore?"

"Even at the lowest point, every alcoholic, every junkie, every addict found a way to say, I got this. Everything under control. You didn't tell her, of course, that you feared you had been deliberately set up. Now, in one of your few clean moments, when you feared being seduced under false pretenses. After all, I just let it get stronger. Sit empowering, by constantly tearing off that bandage and releasing that predator. I, are aphrodisiac; he my cocaine. No, you just said you'd been busy. According to every rehab, that was the addiction talking. Because in reality your fingers were shaking. In reality, the cold sweat was down your neck because you were having withdrawal symptoms. Listening with one ear out if you didn't hear Nick downstairs, if he didn't hear you, because everyone knew this was your cry for help. Now, taking advantage of one of your sparse clean moments, this was the much-needed intervention in the making. Not to kill the suspense, but sometime during this conversation my mask would break. Even I knew that."

"Even the little boy who set fire to the house of his childhood and if death were ever to be caught, knew you couldn't hide forever. You see, how my grandfather told the story, he just let Prometheus rot. Chained to that mountaintop above Phenicia, exposed in his sexy loincloth with that eagle that came to tear out his liver every night. According to the ancient Greeks, the liver was the seat of your emotional experience. With that under attack and plundered a little further, Prometheus' mind grew thinner and thinner over time. His body is nothing but an empty shell. Every night, so the story went, his guilt that his emotions came to eat. Do you look familiar? My grandfather never liked a happy ending. It wasn't until years later that you discovered that there was also an alternate ending to the story. In it, one day, a handsome Hero named Hercules came to rescue poor Prometheus from his plight. Prometheus the princess in the castle tower, Ethon the dragon to be slain."