death. He wanted to be with Cathy in eternal life. laid on his back. His eyes met mine so keen and fierce, I started, and then he seemed to smile. I could not think him dead: but his face and throat were washed with rain; the bed-clothes dripped, and he was perfectly still. The lattice, flapping to and fro, had grazed one hand that rested on the sill; no blood trickled from the broken skin, and when I put my fingers to it, I could doubt no more: he was dead and stark! The implication is that Catherine, having earlier haunted Mr Lockwood at his window, has made a similar visitation on Heathcliff, bearing him away with her so that they may be together beyond the grave, which has long been Heathcliff's aspiration. Nelly relates his revealing admission: "I got the sexton, who was digging Linton's grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again — it is hers yet — he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose and covered it up — not Linton's side, damn him! I wish he'd been soldered in lead — and I bribed the sexton to pull it away, when I'm laid there, and slide mine out too. I'll have it made so, and then, by the time Linton gets to us, he'll not know which is which!" "You were very wicked, Mr Heathcliff!" I exclaimed; "were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?" At the very close of the novel, a servant boy tells Nelly that he has seen the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine walking the moors together, although Nelly and Lockwood both insist that they must be treated as if their souls were at peace. The novel closes with Lockwood wandering past their graves and wondering "how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." As Charlotte Brontë, Emily's older sister wrote, "Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition", which adds to the uncertainty over whether he not only repented for his sins but was actually a real human being after all; since Lockwood's vision of Catherine at the window