A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

Hill House neither sleeps nor dreams. Shrouded within its overgrown lawns and sprawling woodlands, the long shadows of mountains and ancient oaks, Hill House watches. Hill House waits.

From the show?

Nisa slept like a child. Unlike me, she was never troubled by nightmares or insomnia.

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. Craft brewers, textile designers, glass artists specializing in bespoke bongs and neti pots. Dog chiropractors. Masons who would demolish a centuries-old fieldstone chimney, number each stone, and then rebuild it, piece by piece, in an adjoining room. People who distilled rare liqueurs from echinacea and comfrey, or made syrup out of white pine needles, or wove intricate rings and brooches from your own hair, charging what I earned as a teacher in a month. A very good month.

“Just don’t bother with Hillsdale.” Giorgio had flicked his fingers, as though Hillsdale were a mosquito buzzing by. “It’s a dump.”

To Hillsdale we shall go

“There must be a problem with the water supply or something. That whole town’s been depressed for as long as we’ve been coming here. You’d think they’d be happy to expand their tax base, but they really, really hate outsiders.”

Some people hate summer’s end, but I always loved it, the same way I always loved the beginning of the school year as a kid. That had changed once I started working at a private school in Queens, a job I fell into by chance nearly two decades ago and had never learned to love. I’d had no teaching degree, I wasn’t certified,

Oh. We're dong this.

For years I’d told myself it was only temporary,

Hamlet.

More Hamlet.

Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to dream, to imagine a life that could conceivably align with the one I’d anticipated,

I noticed a sign for a PYO orchard and thought I’d bring Nisa back later. Nisa loved pie.

You know your town has hit bottom when even the dollar store has closed.

It was more a winding mountain trail than a proper road. Barely wide enough for a single vehicle, with ruts so narrow and deep they might have been made by horse-drawn carriages, not cars.

an enormous rabbit.

Hmmm....rabbits at the start of each chapter

it wasn’t a snowshoe hare—it wasn’t brown or white but glossy black, with ears long and pointed as garden shears, and copper-colored eyes.

for a terrifying moment thought I’d drive straight into the trees.

Ok, Eleanor

Another black hare crouched in the undergrowth. Or was it the same one I’d just seen? I couldn’t be sure, but as I stared, the hare raised itself onto its hind legs. And then it kept rising. Its body extended, growing longer and longer and thinner and thinner, as though made of some substance other than flesh and fur and bone, until it seemed like it might snap like a piece of Silly Putty stretched too far.

Kate's new Black Phillip

Rabbit, hare: whatever it was, it had vanished.

"rabbit" at the start of HH

Everything about this morning had taken on a strange tone—distance, time, even the sunlight, which now looked more like sunset than sunrise, a continuous crimson flicker through the branches of centuries-old trees.

Once again funky btime things

It all should have seemed ominous. Yet I felt a peculiar, almost perverse, exhilaration, the way I used to feel when I’d sit down at my laptop to write. Something is going to happen. I am going to make something happen.

Giving Eleanor at the end vibes

Macy-Lee Barton. Nothing that had happened had been my fault, despite what some people believed.

Tomasin

“And there’s this weird erotic tension between Elizabeth and Tomasin.” “He’s the dog?” “Yeah. Actually, he’s the Devil, but he takes on the form of the black dog. He promises to do Elizabeth’s bidding, take down her enemies and make her rich, et cetera, et cetera. But of course he betrays her and—

So. Black Phillip again.

they were perfect for Elizabeth’s story. Which I had begun to think of as my story, and not just in the sense that I’d modernized it. Like me, Elizabeth Sawyer had been unfairly condemned by others. Like me, she was an older woman—I was barely forty, but in Elizabeth’s time the average life expectancy was only forty-two.

I’d checked the time before I started up the driveway, and it had been 6:47. I grabbed my phone and swiped at the screen. 6:29 I stared at the screen until the numerals changed—6:30—and checked the dashboard clock again. 6:30 I shook my head. I’d gotten the hour wrong, or misread it.

Ma'am, you should leave

The overall design was Victorian Gothic—three stories, with deep gables and carved stone buttresses, elaborate parapet balconies, stained-glass windows, an extensive veranda. I counted eight chimneys, both brick and fieldstone.

At the right front corner rose a granite tower, its base wood-shingled, which had begun to pull away from the main structure. Someone had repaired it with a series of rebars, binding it to the front of the house like a severed arm that had been sutured back in place.

that feeling that the house held some subcutaneous wrongness, like cancerous cells manifesting in the body years before detection

You are correct

I’ve made it almost perfect—” Nisa’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve made it perfect?” “We’ve both made it,” I said quickly, and grabbed her hand. “It’s so much better with your music, Nis—” “And my voice.” “And your voice. Everything you do just makes what I’ve done so much better. I’m so lucky. We’re so lucky.

Not sure I like this vibe

After suggesting we incorporate murder ballads into my play, she’d also come up with a character who’d perform them. And of course she intended to take on that role, when the time came. I hadn’t argued. Nisa was a brilliant performer—I’d first fallen in love with her because of her voice. Yet it was still my play: a play with music, not a proper musical. When I submitted Witching Night for the grant, I’d left out her lyrics, a fact we’d argued about ever since. At the time, they’d felt ancillary to me, the same way the snippets of original text had become subsidiary to what I’d added.

This can only end badly

the church that Satan ate

Ha

The hare rose on its powerful back legs to face me head-on. My wonder turned to horror as, very slowly, it smiled, its mouth opening onto a row of square teeth stained red.

“There were some beautiful statues, too. Carrara marble.

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

I stayed where I was, confused. That morning on the veranda, I’d looked through the windows and seen a room with a pool table, small tables for bridge, paintings on the wall. This had been the same room, I was sure of it.

“Does the house get lonely, too?”

Hill House…” “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.”

“Hill House plays to people’s expectations.

“Your song… Did you see it? When I first got here and you came out to the porch to meet me?” “See what?” “A hare, a big black hare.” She stared at me blankly. “Like a rabbit? No. How come?” “Then why were you singing that song?” “I don’t know. It just came into my head. It’s one of the songs we’re using in the show, I guess I’d been thinking about it. Why?” “I saw one earlier, too, by the trailer, and again when I first got here. But I hadn’t told you about it,

I listened, enthralled as, gradually, the song’s tone changed—not the tune but the words, and the way that the singer made them come alive, as though awakening something that might have better been left sleeping.

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

Sometime near dawn, we went to bed for the first time. She stayed over the next night, too, and pretty much never left.

How very lesbian

the kitchen—the most comfortable part of the house so far. The walls were painted a sunny yellow,

“Do he and Melissa stay over sometimes? Is that why he keeps his equipment here?” “Never. They won’t stay overnight. That same couple hired him to come in a few days a week to cook. The cookware was theirs; they left it all behind. Melissa won’t let him bring it back to their place.”

I always think it will change.” She turned to me, the expression on her pale face now utterly defeated. “It never, ever does.”

“People project their own expectations onto it. Old houses can be noisy. They settle. The beams and walls expand and contract with the weather. Raccoons get into the attic; there are mice and flying squirrels and critters everywhere. House shrews, voles. That’s country life. If you live here, you get used to it.”

“Are those rabbits hers? I saw a black rabbit by the trailer, and another one here before I came inside. It was huge. It—” I fell silent, recalling the animal’s disturbingly human grin. “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Ainsley. Somehow, I knew that she was lying.

“When will we ever have another chance to stay somewhere like this, with enough room to really be alone? When will I ever have another chance to work without being interrupted?” I saw Nisa flinch, but I didn’t stop. “And Amanda and Imani will love it, right? It makes me look like I’m the real deal, like for once in my fucking life I know what I’m doing.”

Nisa stared at the tower and shook her head. “We can never let Amanda up there, you know.” I tugged up my hood against the wind. “Yeah,” I said, and we headed to the car. “I know.”

Well. We all know where Amanda will wander off to

There were also a number of clauses holding Ainsley free of any liability due to unforeseen causes, including loss of life, sight, hearing, and many other unpleasant events.

“The woman whose husband built the place was killed when her carriage ran into a tree. That was in 1880. Then another woman was killed about sixty years ago when her car ran into the same tree. Same thing happened again with another woman in the eighties. They finally cut the tree down.”