A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

“Some family bought it in the eighties, and after they moved in, their teenage son apparently flipped out. I don’t know all the details, but there was some story about a couple of his friends visiting for the weekend? One of them was poisoned.” “Poisoned?” “Yeah. Mushrooms, I think, like they were supposed to be magic mushrooms but they were poisonous. The friend died. No, wait—it wasn’t the friend who died”—she could hear the rising excitement in Giorgio’s voice as he went on—“it was the boy’s sister. He took off into the woods and they never saw him again. One of the other kids who survived thought he did it on purpose—the boy had told them some disturbing things. The parents sold Hill House back to the original owner and hightailed it out of there.”

Well well well.

they definitely encourage people to believe that some bad shit has gone down at Hill House over the years.”

as a teacher I’d undergone a depressing amount of training over the last few years.

Yesterday, its mirrored curves had captured the colors of autumn leaves and blue sky. Now the ball held ominous clouds and a shifting pattern like broken glass, jet black and dull pewter. I watched, fascinated by how different they appeared from the sky overhead, their dance hypnotic and constantly changing. I glanced up at the sky, and when I looked down again, the miniature panorama of gray and black clouds had disappeared. In its place was a watery smear of pus-green and yellow, crosshatched with staticky black and white lines. What the fuck? As I stared the lines moved and swiftly formed a blurred but unmistakable image: Hill House.

Hmmmm.

I glanced down warily, saw Evadne’s gnarled hands poking from the sleeves of her hooded sweatshirt. On the ring finger of her right hand was a ring with a thick silver band, set with a chunk of amber. It caught the dim light and I saw flecks of gold and scarlet in the resin, surrounding a minute black star that might have been a spider.

she was extending the hand with the ring on it, so I could get a better look. I clearly saw the fragment trapped inside the amber. Not a spider but what appeared to be a skeletal embryo, with infinitesimally tiny ribs, too many legs, an extra skull.

“Listen to me.” Evadne’s tone was more threat than warning. “I worked with victims of domestic violence for thirty-seven years. They stay with the devil they know, and the devil they know kills them. Hill House is like that. Most people realize in a few days and get out.”

“Ainsley’s done virtually nothing to maintain it. No one has. Hill House looks almost the same today as when it was built a hundred and forty years ago.

It seemed clear that he and Nisa had some history, and might even still be involved. Did Holly know? Amanda would bet not.

Oh goodness.

Sturm und Drang.

Amanda paused on one shot. Here, Nisa wasn’t smiling. She was looking at Amanda’s camera, her expression disdainful, even disgusted. Amanda blinked, enlarging the photo. Nisa’s disgust was even more obvious. And, behind her, so was Holly’s. Amanda had remembered Holly bent over her notes, but here she gazed directly at Amanda, seemingly repelled. And Stevie’s smile was, in fact, pitying. Also amused, as though Amanda was doing something both mortifying and ridiculous.

Hill House adapts.

She looked at the door to the hall. It was shut, but as she listened, she could hear them. Low voices, one quite deep—it didn’t sound like Stevie but it had to be him. The other was sniggering, murmuring, then erupting in soft plosive laughter. Like cruel children, she thought, mocking her.

She’d die before she let them know she’d heard them.

I sense she might

There was something about this place, something that recognized me, knew me.

the same feeling I’d had when I first drove up to Hill House. The sense that I belonged here, that we all belonged here, but me most of all.

Eleanor

A few yards ahead of them, at the end of the hall, a half-opened door beckoned: bigger than the tiny secret door in his room but charged with a similar feeling of anticipation, and also a fluttery sense of déjà vu.

Light spilled from the room beyond, illuminating a carved face mounted on each side of the door, like the masks of comedy and tragedy, only both of these were grinning—lipless smiles distorted by time or shadow into leers.

Masks in OG

But just inside she stopped and cried out, turning to Stevie. “Do you feel that?” He followed her, holding tight to his microphone after a check to make sure the recorder was on. “Holy cow. It’s like walking into a freezer.”

Also in OG

Passing through the nursery doorway felt similar: like a physical assault.

Oh, grant me power for good or ill! Show me how to avenge myself upon these men, Teach me to invite rage into my body And let it burst from this ruined house of bone…

it had been like when I first wrote down Macy-Lee’s story: like someone whispered to me as I slept, and I merely transcribed the words once I woke.

Hmm....and now we have whispers in the night

emailing the new pages

Ma'am how

I recalled seeing a small parlor on the first floor, perfect for another read-through—Ainsley had blown past it when she gave Nisa and me our first tour.

Hmmm....parlor...

Nisa could never admit to being wrong. It was a central fact of how she moved through the world.

“Just some mothballs in a linen closet,” he said finally. Stevie’s face was as transparent as a glass of water: a single drop of doubt or fear or desire or joy, no matter how small, colored it for all to see. He was lying.

“Do you know why certain houses make people feel uneasy?” Nisa rolled her eyes and cut in. “Because they’re obviously haunted?” “No. It’s because we can’t tell whether they’re actually a threat. I heard it on a podcast. If you were to open the door to Hill House and see a dead body, or a collapsed ceiling, you’d refuse to enter. But nothing here is obviously wrong. It’s just all slightly wrong. Which makes it harder for us to know if it’s safe.”

It’s cool because there are all these noises that are constantly going on around us but we just don’t notice them.

Only there was no thunderclap. No boom, no explosive sound of any sort.

I'm shocked

followed by an unknown man’s voice. “Could there be a draft across that doorway?” “A draft? In Hill House?” A young woman laughed, but not any of the three of us. “Not unless you could manage to make one of those doors stay open.” “What the fuck—” murmured Nisa. I grabbed her hand. “Shut up.” “The very essence of the tomb.” Static momentarily drowned the man’s voice. “… the heart of the house.”

Oh boy

“The booms—I think they occurred at the same time as the voices. I mean, the voices come in at the moment when we heard the booms.

“Those voices—I think they were more like echoes, or an auditory imprint. Have you ever seen the shadow print left by a leaf on a beach house deck? The leaf is gone, but the bright light makes a kind of photo of it—a sun print. I think these voices are like that.”

“What can I say? I’m a font of useless knowledge.”

Same Stevie

And after listening to Stevie’s recording, she wondered if the sniggering whispers she’d heard in her bedroom had in fact been him and Holly and Nisa. What if there really was another force at play?

Nice to see that her brain seems to work

there was a boundary between the two that could not, would not, be breached. That was what was happening at Hill House, she thought. A protective threshold had been breached, some kind of psychic fourth wall broken.

Stevie felt a shaft of intense arousal pierce him: desire, and jealousy, unusual for him.

Eew

“There’s a kind of wasp that lays its eggs inside insect larvae,” she said. “When the egg hatches, a baby wasp grows, just as the insect grows around it. Over time, the wasp eats the insect from the inside. Eventually the insect dies, and the adult wasp finds another host to lay its own eggs in.” “Stop it,” said Amanda. “Stop it, that’s horrible.” Evadne turned to her. “No, it’s not. That wasp is part of the natural world. Hill House isn’t. You and your friends need to leave. Now, before it’s full dark.”

Tell them you’re having a medical emergency.” “I am absolutely fine,” Amanda said coldly. “You’re an actor. Convince them otherwise.”

He checked his phone for the time. Much too early for dinner, only three thirty,

WHAT

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Really.

How was it moving? He heard again that buzzing in his skull. Before he could blink, the ball leapt into the air and flew straight at his face. He flung himself to the floor, covering his head with his arms. The cue ball smashed into the wall behind him. He lay there, panting, until he could finally ease his hands from his head and look around.

COME IN

Probably shouldn't

Pretending she appreciated everything Nisa brought to this play, when she was really just thinking about herself, as always. They could have used this time without Amanda to rehearse some of Nisa’s songs. Instead, she’d been used as a punching bag by someone who hadn’t had an Equity role in ten years.

They are all truly The Worst

Let them die, let them all die.

Rather ominous

she remembered how fabulous the acoustics had been, on that first house tour with Ainsley. Nisa had barely had a chance to play with them yet. The tower, for instance—if only she could get in there.

Girl no.

she texted, pleased to see a flickering bar of service for once.

Oh no.

She turned to gaze at the door to the tower. The heavy padlock bolted to the wood frame hung loose. Not broken but unlocked.

Great.

there was a door up there, at the top.

Same as OG

She liked that, for a few minutes, she had a secret.

These people and their secrets

It will be rain tonight,’” she said in a sepulchral tone, waiting to see if the others would recognize the line that presaged Banquo’s death in the Scottish play. Holly nodded, then slowly smiled. “‘Let it come down.’”

Does the world revolve around The Scottish Play?

I’ll stretch myself, make my body small as a silver wire And enter the next soul through a breath of tobacco smoke— They will never know I’m there, Nestled between heart and ribs, a mote of darkness Smaller still than air…