A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

she would wrap her supple voice around all those old ballads, squeezing them to see what came out, twisting the words until they become something unrecognizable, something you might hear in the dark.

That was another thing we had in common—witches. One reason I taught Macbeth to my students was that I’d fallen in love with Shakespeare when I was the same age, watching the three Weird Sisters stand over a plastic cauldron filled with dry ice, their faces painted with eldritch symbols I knew represented secrets far darker than anything ordinary thirteen-year-olds should know.

“It’s called a witch ball. My grandmother’s from Salem, everyone has one. They use them for scrying. And protection.”

We climbed the last few steps side by side. As we neared the landing, I paused to look back. The individual stair treads held dark impressions, left by generations of feet passing up and down.

“It’s like the room in a Bergman movie where the maid lives. The one who ends up sleeping with her employer, who then kills her and takes on her identity.” “That’s a different movie,” said Nisa. “It’s actually like five different movies. Bergman, Argento, Hitchcock, De Palma, I forget who else. Whatever.”

“I don’t think anything’s really been done here since it was built. Things get started, but nothing’s ever finished.”

Holly had pitched it as a mansion: it felt more like a gargantuan folly, one of those smaller, faux-Gothic buildings that rich English people stuck somewhere on the grounds of their stately homes.

One needed to keep up appearances in the hinterlands, a lesson she’d learned doing summer stock as a girl. You never knew who you might run into, even in a cultural wasteland, and you never knew who might prove useful.

Being away from performing felt like an endless sick day. Not the good kind, where she’d lain in bed and watched Grand Hotel and To Be or Not to Be on TV, but the kind where you feel muddy-headed and leaden.

She could have sleepwalked through the role. But her old habits of discipline and body memory took over. She burrowed into the part, ferreting out the darkest bits of the script in hopes that somebody in one of those folding chairs would feel their skin crawl.

A performance is a temporary sanctuary: dismantling its architecture, even slightly, can shatter a sensitive audience member.

A one-eyed old woman who sells her soul to the Devil to take revenge on her tormentors? Amanda could relate.

Some people called it vanity, which Amanda found offensive. Though what was wrong with vanity, anyway? When young women took a million selfies, they called it empowerment.

Not a beautiful face, but a powerful one. Like Maria Callas’s, or Jeanne Moreau’s, designed to command attention from the last rows in the balcony. Movies didn’t treat it as kindly as the stage. Lingering closeups allowed you to detect a slight asymmetry.

During those seconds, we witnessed an entire life collapse upon itself, burying Amanda Wingfield’s hope for her child as swiftly and silently as someone tossing a flower into an open grave.

The room was identical to ours, though the walls had been painted an ugly pink, again without removing the blotched wallpaper beneath. The effect was of a fading bruise.

When he’d finished slotting them all in place he stood back to admire the miniature theater, in all its gilt and painted glory. He liked to envision himself living in that imaginary space—not with Bluebeard, maybe, but inhabiting that tiny secondary world nestled within this one. It comforted him, the way that his friends found comfort in gaming or social media.

I don’t ask for much, but what I have should be of very good quality.

When he was very young, acting had been joyful. Now the best he could hope for was catharsis, and the chance to disappear, even if it was just for a few hours during a rehearsal, or when he was behind his laptop, creating a soundscape that would inexorably draw others into it.

Often, the audience couldn’t even tell if there was a star, or former star, or almost-star, onstage. But she knew: she’d witnessed how something else takes over when a great actor performs. A pedestrian sentence becomes poetry. Words that didn’t make sense on the page sound like an incantation. It made sense, really—theaters began as sacred spaces. Probably the first actors were participating in some ritual sacrifice. There was undeniably ancient power there. How else to account for the fact that people were still producing Euripides?

Liddell, that was it. Like the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland.

The dining room was gloomy, the only light an old standing lamp with a vaguely sinister Art Nouveau look, like that Aubrey Beardsley drawing she’d immediately regretted looking at in the Tate.

“If it’s not the site of an ax murder, it’s structural problems. What it really means is, the house is haunted.”

“In this rental market, you can get away with not disclosing anything.”

“Actors, we channel the spirits. What do you think acting is? Bringing the dead to life.”

“We memorize words, arrange objects in a ritual space, wear special clothing. Then, after weeks or months of preparation we’re transformed. We’re possessed. Something else enters us.”

“If you’ve opened yourself to it—if the words are under your skin so you can feel them moving when you move—you become a vessel. All those figures brought back to life, over and over again across the centuries—Clytemnestra and Hamlet, Doogie Howser and Prior Walter, Alexander Hamilton, and of course your Elizabeth Sawyer…”

all that schtick about acting and possession, the knowing glances and deliberate pauses for an appreciative laugh. Some actors do it all the time, they’re incapable of holding a conversation. Stevie calls it Death by Monologue.

He was way too familiar with the kind of embarrassment that swiftly becomes something more unsettling: the sensation of another self taking over before he came to his senses and booted it out.

The mere thought of it filled him with an unexpected surge of gleeful anticipation: an emotion close to arousal, but, oddly, even more intense.

I’ve never experienced darkness like that. Not a color or sensation but a void in which I dissolved, like a sand castle at high tide. I couldn’t feel the flashlight in my hand, couldn’t move or breathe. For a few seconds I couldn’t even remember where I was, or who, or what. I was conscious of myself as nothing but a pinprick of being, consumed by an incoherent darkness.

The worst thing you can do if you can’t sleep is obsessively check the time.

The darkness was like a liquid I couldn’t feel or taste or smell, but which somehow coated my eyes or was absorbed by them.

I couldn’t move, and soon a great weight began to press against my chest, grew heavier and heavier until I couldn’t breathe. I’d read about this happening in nightmares—witches and night hags riding victims while they slept.

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

It was a shame about that tablecloth but honestly, who used white linen tablecloths these days? White was just asking for trouble. Red absorbed or hid a variety of sins. Wine, spaghetti sauce, blood.

Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot.

Yet surely haunting was just a matter of perspective and perception.

I’ve only to pick up a newspaper to glimpse ghosts gliding between the lines.

But Shakespeare knew that words were also spells, designed to intoxicate and enthrall the senses.

That souls of animals infuse themselves / Into the trunks of men.

The house had been horribly designed, if indeed it had been designed and not just constructed piecemeal, its corridors and doors and rooms like the aimless tunnels made by worms in the dirt.

She knew from her own small town that creatives like herself had to do a delicate dance to stay in the good graces of those who cleaned their houses, plowed their driveways, repaired their cars, delivered their firewood. Amanda sometimes hired people from a few towns over, just to avoid the awkwardness of dealing with people she had absolutely nothing in common with. Rude mechanicals, like in Shakespeare.

She thought she’d come a good distance, but she clearly saw Hill House through a thin curtain of dying leaves and bare branches, so close it seemed to loom above her. The upper windows caught the light in a way that gave its facade a wide-eyed, deranged appearance.

It is evil, Amanda thought, staring up at Hill House. You can’t fool me, I have magic eyes and I see you. I played Medea, and Clytemnestra—the fall of another house, the House of Atreus! So there.

She turned, nearly lost her balance as she was buffeted by a sudden gust, not cold like the autumn morning but hot with the carious reek of rotting gums and tongue. I see you too, it whispered.

Better to postpone the pleasure. Like sex: let the anticipation build.

This was exactly the kind of house he’d daydreamed about as a kid, huge and rambling and just waiting to be explored. Yet Hill House pushed back against all that. Standing alone in the main hall, he felt it—like a hand shoved hard against his face, making it impossible for him to breathe, to see or call out for help…

“Last night I served the Devil’s dog, And gently laid him down, And all the thanks I’ve gotten this night Is to be burned in London town…”

“Meaning people from the city. Interlopers, flatlanders, gentrifiers—whatever you want to call us.