A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

Nisa was a little terrier: as quickly as she’d pursue some new enthusiasm, she’d hang on to a grudge, usually for some nonexistent slight, and not let go until you really did get pissed off at her.

So many beautiful, talented people were like that. They wielded their glamor like a weapon, usually aiming at the people closest to them.

But getting mad at Nisa was as fruitless as getting mad at a sparrow hawk, a creature he’d once seen attack and tear apart a bluebird in a tumult of sky-colored feathers and blood. The best thing to do was remember their beauty, and try to forget the mess they left behind.

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.

“What do you think—Narnia?” She cocked an eyebrow, switched on her phone’s light, and peered into a large space, dark and empty and reeking of mothballs. “Nope.”

Nisa laughed, too loudly. Stevie fought the urge to tell her to shut up. If he did that, she’d just start to sing. She was like a graffiti artist who always has to tag a blank wall.

“You could play Hamlet and disappear,” Holly’d once told him. “Hamlet wants to disappear,” he retorted.

Downstairs, she could pretend Hill House was a normal place: a kitchen, living room, library, billiards room, conservatory… So okay, a normal place if you lived in Boddy Manor in Clue.

It was why she sang, to reach people on a level they didn’t truly notice until much later. It might be the next day or even longer before they realized that something had changed inside them, forever. Her song became part of them, in a way that only music can. Like a scar.

The hallway felt contagious—if she touched the walls the sickness would get into her.

Sometimes, on getaways, she’d felt like she was in a place that kept its own time.

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.

But she couldn’t shake that terrible sense of recognition. As if her fever was progressing, now her stomach began to hurt.

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

I was losing my focus, my passion for Witching Night, in the pressure cooker atmosphere of Hill House, distracted by the impossible burden I’d put on myself and the others, to get everything perfect.

Hillsdale is sort of the last redoubt for the rebel forces holding back flatlanders like us.

Any house will have its share of deaths and accidents over a century or more.

“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.”

“Hill House—how do you think it survives?”

Hill House looks almost the same today as when it was built a hundred and forty years ago.

Holly was one of those people so practiced at self-delusion that it had become as natural as smiling.

Had she made the actor’s fatal mistake? Confusing their derision with genuine laughter? No doubt they were talking about her even now.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,

But a great performance is the best revenge.

In spite of that, they seemed bound together—by isolation, by precarious finances, by the fact that they were women. And also, I thought, by Hill House itself. Its face appeared through the trees in front of me: upstairs windows catching the late-afternoon light so they appeared to wink, the big front door a mouth eager to open and welcome me. There was something about this place, something that recognized me, knew me.

A sharp ebullience filled me as I ran up the steps to the veranda, 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.

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.

“A nursery,” said Stevie. “Big old houses like this, they stuck all the kids away with a nanny or governess. That’s why it’s so hot—they’d have kept it warm for the children.”

Once, working on an old downtown stage, he’d touched a live section of the outdated lighting system and been thrown to the ground. It hadn’t felt like an electrical shock, more like he’d punched a slab of concrete. His hand and forearm had been numb for hours. Passing through the nursery doorway felt similar: like a physical assault.

As he spoke, a sharp dread lodged in his chest—a foreboding so palpable, he might reach inside his rib cage and grasp it, razor-edged like an arrowhead.

As they reached the doorway, it seemed to waver, its stiles moving inward so that the space between them narrowed. The air grew darker and also somehow thicker, as though he fought against an oncoming wave, its force pressing against his mouth and nostrils so he couldn’t breathe, crushing his eyes like two thumbs seeking to blind him.

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…

Darkness swaddled me, soft and somehow greasy, seeping into my nose and throat until I choked, filling my ears like warm oil. The light dissolved. I dissolved, feeling myself floating apart, face and limbs and vertebrae liquefying, to be absorbed like a stain by the walls around me.

“Can we please talk about how messed up this place is? I feel like we’re suppressing it, or ignoring it.”

Curled in her comfortable leather chair, she still radiated that catlike self-possession, yet I saw how her eyes shifted. She listened intently to whatever was said, including—especially—by me, and calibrated her reactions accordingly. Nisa could never admit to being wrong. It was a central fact of how she moved through the world.

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.

“Do you know why certain houses make people feel uneasy?”

“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. Like when you’re in bed at night and all of a sudden you can’t fall asleep because you hear your heartbeat? It’s not that your heart has suddenly started beating—you’re just lying down with nothing else going on in your mind.

“The very essence of the tomb.” Static momentarily drowned the man’s voice. “… the heart of the house.”

“Could there be a draft across that doorway?” “A draft? In Hill House?”

He seemed to shrink into his seat—really shrink, the shadows engulfing him, an amoeba devouring an inconsequential microbe.

“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.”

A ghost has some kind of agency, right? Usually they’re seeking retribution, or trying to tell you something about what happened to them. They interact with people on some level.

this place, it absorbs our energy. Like a battery, only it gets its charge from us. What if those people were here, too, at some point?

The temporary sanctuary of the performance had been destroyed, breaking the implicit promise between actor and viewer: that none of this was real, that there was a boundary between the two that could not, would not, be breached.

Amanda was accustomed to hyperbole from directors and playwrights, along with their criticism and rafts of notes—you needed that unbridled, occasionally delusional, belief to carry you through opening night.

Now it felt like winter. Or, if not winter, its sullen and tantrum-prone younger sibling.

She hadn’t rehearsed what she was going to say—sometimes it was better just to improvise.

Beard the lioness in her den,