A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

This workaday actuality of ours—with its bricks, its streets, its woods, its hills, its waters—may have queer and, possibly, terrifying holes in it. —Walter de la Mare

Most houses sleep, and nearly all of them dream: of conflagrations and celebrations, births and buckled floors; of children’s footsteps and clapboards in need of repair, of ailing pets and peeling paint, wakes and weddings and windows that no longer keep out rain and snow but welcome them, furtively, when no one is home to notice.

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.