A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

Little towns long since colonized by self-styled artists and artisans who are really just people rich enough to flee the city and call themselves whatever they want.

And yet those afternoons with the students did, sometimes, ease my despair. Running lines with them; watching them slowly gain confidence; witnessing the magic that never failed to take over, when they finally put on costumes and makeup and looked at themselves in amazement, realizing they had become someone, something, new and wonderful and strange. For those few hours, I could imagine that it wasn’t too late. That I, too, might still be transformed.

“John Ford” rang a bell—a Jacobean playwright best known for “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.”

Elizabeth Sawyer had been a real person, a woman accused of witchcraft in what is now part of North London.

I’ve seen Witchfinder General seven times. The M.O. is always to find an unmarried woman, blame her, and execute her.”

She was enthralled with the Child Ballads, the classic collection of ancient songs

As if sensing my thoughts, the next curve revealed ragged lawns shaded by immense old oaks and evergreens. Beside the road, one had been cut down long ago, leaving a stump choked with poison ivy, a riot of scarlet leaves and white berries.

Nisa loved murder ballads the way some people love show tunes.

“It’s an old house,” replied Ainsley. “It breathes.

“Does the house get lonely, too?”

“Is it haunted?” asked Nisa. Ainsley turned to her. “Haunted? No one has ever seen a ghost here, if that’s what you mean. I would say that it’s troubled, though Jez used to say it’s demented.” “‘Demented’?” Nisa started to giggle, then quickly covered her mouth at Ainsley’s expression. “Sorry! I never heard someone say that about a house. Maybe in a movie but not in real life.” “Is this real life?” Ainsley stared at each of us, so keenly I thought she must be joking.

“If all those young maids were like hares on the mountain…”

The room filled with a susurrus of whispered and half-sung words

“If all those young boys were hares on the mountain How many young girls would get guns and go hunting?”

Like Ainsley said, this house plays to people’s strengths.” “That’s not what she said.”

Nisa stared at the tower and shook her head. “We can never let Amanda up there, you know.”

“I feared I’d never have a home— An outcast, hated and reviled Until you found me, dear Tomasin, And by your craft my enemies beguiled…”

her extremely special coffee hand-roasted by cloistered nuns…” “Oh my god,” moaned Nisa. “How many weeks of this, Holly? And it’s not nuns, it’s Trappist monks.”

“They think maybe one of them killed herself. And there was something about a kid who might have poisoned his family when they were living there. No, not his family,” he said, musing. “Someone visiting them. But that was a lot later, in the eighties, maybe.”

“Nobody said they saw a ghost,” Stevie said mournfully. “Just, you know, that Hill House has bad vibes.

I was surprised to see a silver ring like Ainsley’s, with a chunk of amber big enough I could tell something was embedded in it, a tiny insect or petal.

Peach-colored curtains patterned with mottled carnations that had an unpleasantly meaty appearance,

she’d witnessed how something else takes over when a great actor performs. A pedestrian sentence becomes poetry. Words that didn’t make sense on the page sound like an incantation. It made sense, really—theaters began as sacred spaces. Probably the first actors were participating in some ritual sacrifice. There was undeniably ancient power there.

“We’re the ones haunting it,” she proclaimed.

For a few seconds I couldn’t even remember where I was, or who, or what. I was conscious of myself as nothing but a pinprick of being, consumed by an incoherent darkness.

I couldn’t move, and soon a great weight began to press against my chest, grew heavier and heavier until I couldn’t breathe. I’d read about this happening in nightmares—witches and night hags riding victims while they slept. But I wasn’t asleep.

the voices burbled on, like a steady drip of noxious water from the eaves, gutters clogged with rotting leaves and the soft pulp of small birds that had been trapped there.

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

Ainsley said Hill House isn’t haunted, Stevie had said last night. Yet surely haunting was just a matter of perspective and perception.

Shakespeare knew that words were also spells, designed to intoxicate and enthrall the senses.

Betrayal twists love into blazing hatred, an evil that destroys even those helpless ones we love best.

“Some call me witch, and through their hatred they’ve taught me how to be one…”

I shook my head, coughing as though I were the one who’d been inhaling smoke.

“It’s not her familiar.” Stevie returned to the driveway, brandishing a stick. “A familiar stays with whoever summons it—it’s a servant, or someone enslaved, like Caliban.” “An animal can’t be enslaved,” said Amanda. “A demon can,” retorted Stevie.

“I’m more neo-pagan adjacent.

I had to maintain control of my project—my cast, my friends, my partner.

doesn’t get scared.” “So tap into that. You’re a demon in a big spooky house—you should feel right at home.” “I do.” He glanced around: a wild thing released from its cage, measuring the threat and opportunities of its new surroundings. He turned back to me and nodded. “That’s what scares me.”

Holly seemed to weigh her words before replying. “Of course. Two women who were badly treated, getting away with murder—yes, I can see that.”

Goddamned Holly. Nisa, too, grandstanding with her secondhand songs. And Stevie’s insecurity, teetering on the edge of acute anxiety—never a good look for an actor. She’d come here expecting professionals but found herself among children.

The upholstery had a faint smell, smoke and rust and something sweet. It made her mouth water; what an odd thing for a chair to do.

But of course, as if reading his mind, Nisa asked, “What happened with that tablecloth?” Stevie pretended to not hear the question. It freaked him out when Nisa did that, as though she could beam in on his thoughts.

He’d brought his tarot cards, thinking it might be a hoot to get stoned and do a reading here. After a day and a night at Hill House, that no longer seemed like such a fun prospect.

Inside, Holly and Nisa had their heads together, whispering or kissing, he couldn’t tell.

he knew that he’d played right into Nisa’s hands. Like when she’d come on to him that first night after a party, with Holly asleep in the next room, and they’d fucked on the couch.

getting mad at Nisa was as fruitless as getting mad at a sparrow hawk, a creature he’d once seen attack and tear apart a bluebird in a tumult of sky-colored feathers and blood. The best thing to do was remember their beauty, and try to forget the mess they left behind.

The lack of windows frightened him, too. It reminded him of when he’d briefly been in a hospital on suicide watch, a long time ago but he could still picture his room: windowless, its walls a smeary yolk-yellow. The sickly light here was like that. Jaundiced.

This is a lost place, he thought, and felt a growing, profound unease. Despair lapped at the walls and floors of Hill House like fetid, rising water: anyone who stayed here might drown. The others might not feel how it fed off their rancor and petty resentments, like a battery being recharged, but he did.

Nisa laughed, too loudly. Stevie fought the urge to tell her to shut up. If he did that, she’d just start to sing. She was like a graffiti artist who always has to tag a blank wall. Stevie was the opposite. “You could play Hamlet and disappear,” Holly’d once told him. “Hamlet wants to disappear,” he retorted. “Be careful what you wish for.”

He slid open the bag, grimacing at an earthy, foul odor. A tiny handful of withered gray stems clung to the bag. Dried mushrooms.

Stevie’s voice was steady, but the sight of the headless bodies made him feel sick. Worse, like there was something important he was missing, beyond those cutout faces.