A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

Stevie stared at the trail she’d left in her wake: a sluice of water that was no longer pink but deep crimson, extending across the veranda floor.

Ooookkkkkkk

“Of course! Any coarse shape will blind human eyes like yours—cat, dog, hare, ferret, frog, toad.”

Hmmm.....we have a hare

Amanda checked the time. Nearly an hour had passed, which seemed impossible.

Holly had been talking in her sleep last night. Nisa knew she was totally wound up about being here: excitement and also anxiety. Still, it had been creepy. At first, Nisa had thought someone else was in the room with them. But what they were saying didn’t make any sense, just nonsense sounds, besides which she knew there weren’t two other people there.

Ok. 3/4 heard the two voices

But most of the songs she’d written for herself. Nisa knew they were good. More than good, another reason Holly was so edgy. When people saw Witching Night, they’d be impressed by Amanda Greer’s comeback. But they wouldn’t be able to forget Nisa Macari. She’d spent so long working toward something like this.

Truly. This can only end badly.

“You need to inhabit the characters, Nisa. Think of them like a house you’re supposed to live in, not demolish.”

Nisa didn’t want to wait that long for success. Like Holly. Like Stevie. Like Amanda. She wanted to grab it and swallow it whole, right now.

She left Amanda’s room and went downstairs to get some breakfast. She wondered if Amanda would notice she was wearing her lipstick.

She's wildin'. And The Worst™

Yet now all that seemed like it might unravel. I’d assumed that getting away from the city with my friends would be inspiring, but being sequestered at Hill House seemed to have given the others an excuse to behave badly.

Girl.

Unbidden, the face of Macy-Lee Barton came to me. I didn’t like to dwell on it, but she’d looked a bit like Nisa, dark-haired and dark-eyed. And while Nisa’s stillness suggested self-assurance, Macy-Lee’s had seemed almost premonitory, and ominous. Macy-Lee didn’t sing, though her speaking voice carried the Appalachian twang I associated with old-timers like Ralph Stanley. It had been a cold voice, I thought at the time, especially for someone so young, her tone bleak as she recounted what had happened to her—what she claimed had happened to her. Her voice didn’t hold the undercurrent of anticipation or pleasure I was accustomed to hearing when someone told a ghost story. She’d sounded numb.

I was old enough to know what I was doing, just not old enough to understand the repercussions of telling someone else’s story, the tale Macy-Lee had recounted to me one drunken night, about how she’d once seen a ghost.

Please tell the whole thing.

a subdued grief. For Macy-Lee, and also for myself, the young artist who’d been so vulnerable, poised for a flight that never came.

Uh huh.

She picked up her lipstick and opened it, twisting the gold cylinder. She gasped. The top of the lipstick had been bitten off. She could clearly see the imprints of tiny teeth—a rat? A mouse? Too small for a person for sure, and who would bite off a lipstick? A child, maybe, but there were no children here. Shuddering, she twisted the lipstick back into the case, replaced the cap, and threw it into the wastebasket.

Hmmmm

She’d never had any intention of jumping. She wasn’t afraid of heights, for one, and didn’t killing yourself somehow mean facing your fear, or overcoming it, or giving in to it, or something? Amanda couldn’t remember. Back then, it had been such a long time since she’d thought about that sort of thing. But she hadn’t been afraid of the catwalk. And she hadn’t been thinking about suicide, she’d been thinking about the opposite. Well, not the opposite—what was the opposite of suicide?

To this day, Amanda couldn’t get over how stupid she’d been, falling for him so quickly. But then he’d fallen for her, ha ha ha.

Oh my…

the Scottish play,

Ok. There might be *too much* Hamlet.

A scrap of paper dropped out, and she caught it, not part of the script but something torn from a magazine. Not torn, she realized as she paused to stare at it, but cut with scissors. A man’s face, vaguely familiar from some ad campaign dating back thirty or forty years. Strange. She looked around uneasily, but her concern over being late won out. She tossed the scrap into the wastebasket with the discarded lipstick and hurried downstairs.

Jason Jason, I assume?

So far, everything seemed—well, not exactly wrong, but off-balance.

If Nisa knew I was rattled, she’d use it to her advantage.

Perhaps not the healthiest way to think of the person you’re in a relationship with….

Now I found myself thinking about the way she and Stevie had exchanged glances in the car yesterday and at dinner last night. The way she’d brought her songs up, again and again. She could never keep silent. To Nisa, any quiet moment was a void waiting to be filled.

Why do I get the feeling she’s like….gonna kill everyone.

“Ainsley said we shouldn’t start a fire.” “Ainsley said she preferred we didn’t start a fire,” Nisa corrected me. “Go for it, Stevie, this place is freezing.”

Truly if this remains spooky and they all die I will not be upset.

“Were you able to get the stain out?” asked Stevie. “No. It won’t ever come out—

With a mewling shriek, a dark mass tumbled onto the hearth, a shape with too many legs and too many eyes. A charred log spun out onto the floor next to it and Stevie barely managed to kick it back toward the fireplace. The writhing shape emitted a high-pitched squeal, revealing its long legs and equally long ears, sparks that I had mistaken for eyes. Its lips peeled back in blackened petals. Nisa screamed as it leapt from the hearth, bumping into her chair. Stevie grabbed a fireplace poker. “Don’t hurt it!” shrieked Nisa. The black hare darted from the room.

What.

“Her rabbit,” Nisa said breathlessly, slowing down at last, “the crazy lady in the mobile home.” “Evadne,” I snapped. “And she’s not crazy, so stop saying that.” Nisa shook her head. “It’s her familiar. Like in the play, only it’s a black hare, not a black dog.” “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 here for a sort of Salem mass hysteria….

“Listen to me.” I used the tone for wrangling unruly students back into their seats.

Always awkward when you use your teacher voice with your friends/family.

it could be a fetch. That’s when you summon something that looks like a person but is really just an empty vessel. Usually it takes the form of a human, but it could be an animal.”

“There’s definitely something strange about Hill House,” Stevie continued. His eyes glinted in the dim light. “It’s not what I thought it would be like. It knows we’re here.

I had to maintain control of my project—my cast, my friends, my partner. The money and time I’d invested. My career.

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.”

At least the old wing chair was really astonishingly comfortable. A relic of the original furniture: it was a shame they’d gotten rid of the rest. She ran her fingers across the fabric, velvet worn to a smooth nap, like skin. 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.

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.

He felt energized—weed made him hyperaware, not sleepy. So, no tarot cards, but he thought he might take a walk.

The previous two walks did not go so well, I’m sure this one will totally not be terrifying.

He’d made the bed before he went downstairs that morning, put away his clothes as he usually did. Fight chaos with the tools at hand.

Instead he peeked behind the dresser. The tiny brass knob of the secret door winked, beckoning him. The urge overcame him to open it. Not just open it: enter. See what it revealed. Live there, like he’d sometimes longed to live inside one of his toy theaters. The idea made him giddy.

This is gonna be interesting.

“Are you ghost hunting?” Nisa pointed at the microphone in his hand, then let her fingers slide over his own.

Maybe let’s not do that.

Nisa reminded Stevie of the fox in Pinocchio—one of those sly companions he should know better than to follow.

he felt a bit vulpine himself. No, not foxlike; more like Tomasin, with an undercurrent of cunning and provocation that he must have absorbed from his character. Not Stevie’s normal way of behaving, certainly not sober.

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. Stevie sometimes regretted that night, and all the other nights and occasional afternoons that followed.

Oh shit

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.

HC. Stevie frowned. “That looks like the other tablecloth.” “Was it monogrammed?” He nodded. “We could bring this one down?” Stevie glanced at his palm. A drop of blood welled anew from the cut. Flustered, he wiped it onto his jeans. “I don’t want another tablecloth on my conscience.”

But the musician’s photo had been cut out. The only reason Stevie knew it was Billy Idol was that the cover showcased his name in big white letters above the words Sneer of the Year.

there, too, the head had been cut out. He began to turn the pages, more slowly. All the heads had been cut out. Not just the heads of stars, but those of people in advertisements, figures in the background of group shots, even the head of a Labrador retriever in an ad for scotch. The owner’s head was missing, and so was the dog’s. But they hadn’t been cut with scissors. If someone had used scissors, you’d see where they’d cut in, from the side of the pages, or where the scissor’s point had first broken through. Right? These had been cut with laser precision, even those heads so small you’d need a magnifying glass to remove them.

Well that is unsettling

Better for just one of us to pay Evadne an unexpected visit, I thought, and again set out from the house.

In the sleet??

The upper hall at Hill House felt like that. Scarred.

Here it felt like it was always the middle of the night, and not in a good way. Shadows groped at the ceiling high above them. And where did those shadows come from, if there were no windows? The lights were barely bright enough to see by. And while she felt cold and clammy, the air was unpleasantly warm and close, breathing down her neck.

As her eyes adjusted she realized it wasn’t an animal but a woman. Her long hair was fanning out around her head, her arms extended as they reached for someone, or something. Her dress appeared torn, though that might be imperfections in the wood grain. Vines encircled her bare feet. The entire image wasn’t more than twelve inches long and half again as high. It looks like me, she thought. A ridiculous idea—her hair was short, for one—yet in the same way the door knocker held a passing resemblance to Stevie, this seemed to reflect something of her posture, her hair, even her face.

She closed her eyes, willing him to stop, to turn back and take her hand and lead her downstairs, or perhaps to his room, to his bed. It worked. She didn’t hear him pause, but his footsteps echoed softly through the hall, no longer walking away from her but toward her, slowly. She remained where she was, eyes shut, savoring the moment: he’d listened to her, he believed her, and somehow those two things would make it all right, erase the memory of that terrible carved image, all the inexplicable events and emotions that had torn through her since they tumbled from Holly’s car the day before. The footsteps grew louder, more forceful, moving more quickly as they drew near. Nisa kept her eyes closed tight, playing a game now, heart fluttering in her breast. What are you doing, Stevie? She forced a smile, forced herself not to move even though he was so close now, she could stretch her arm out to stop him, why was he walking so fast, what was he— Gasping, she opened her eyes a fraction of a second before he collided with her. A blast of icy air struck her cheeks, flattened her curls against her skull as she saw Stevie at the end of the hall, his back to her. She couldn’t breathe; something squeezed her chest like a bellows as she fought to cry out.

I walked away from Hill House without looking back. I had an uneasy sensation that if I did, I’d feel compelled to return.

this was only our first day here.

I feel like so much has happened

I could hear his sharp intake of breath. “Hill House? Really?” “Really.” “Wow. I’m surprised it’s for rent, after what happened.”

Wha happened?