A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

Inside, Holly turned in a slow circle, staring at the walls.

Inside, things were being carried along by the dark flow, like leaves in a stream. Scraps of purple velvet, a twist of silver thread. Part of a shoe. An ankle boot?

As she stared, something else emerged from the crack, glistening white and streaked with red. Oh my god, please no…

She felt the house bearing down on them, saw blood trickling from the walls, a clotted shape clutching a ribbon of wallpaper, peeling it from the wall.

“She was singing,” Holly went on through chattering teeth. “That song, her favorite. When I was in the nursery, I could hear her.” Amanda shivered, remembering Nisa in the tower. How, from outside, her song had sounded like a scream. She could never tell Holly. “I don’t think so, Holly.” That thing in the ceiling. “I didn’t hear anything.”

None of us ever told anyone else what happened at Hill House. Sometimes—often—I dream of it, and of Nisa. Not as I’d last seen her, trapped within the nursery, but singing “Hares on the Mountain” in a forest clearing. Three fluid black shapes circle her, their dark forms gradually shimmering into columns of light, figures that rise into the night sky, silver rings bright as stars. Stevie had the same dream, he told me once, and Amanda, too.