A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

“Hill House.” If Evadne wasn’t going to mince words, neither would she. “I have some questions.”

When all else fails, tell the truth.

He knew how Nisa’s otherworldly voice could cast its spell, even, especially, among those who’d heard it many times. He couldn’t shake the feeling that here, it might wake something none of them would want to acknowledge.

You may not feel safe in your real life, but inside a character you can disappear, you can have control.

It would be good to disappear into him, slough off this exhausted, human form and sink into another, stronger one.

Something woke and moved behind her eyes, something Stevie was more accustomed to seeing when he looked at himself in the mirror. Something he’d never in all these years seen in Nisa: raw terror.

He felt another self uncoil within this one, a thread that rippled inside him, slipping from his groin through his heart until it reached his throat, where he felt it tighten.

He reached to take the person’s face in his hand—it was a person, he remembered that, how soft they were and warm and pliant. He moved closer to her eyes, his mouth filling with saliva. He swallowed, tasting something foul yet also sweet. Her eyes.

“Those who are denied joy must take delight In death and darkness—the Devil’s right.”

But Holly’s gaze had returned to the hearth, once again watching some imagined scene unfold within.

“Why do you live here?” “To keep an eye on it.” “Hill House?”

“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.”

And there was something else, something that scratched at the border of his consciousness, trying to get in. The same sensation as when he was on the verge of falling asleep, trying to hold on to a thought that dissolved before he could grab it.

He took out his phone and turned on the flashlight. Immediately he felt better, not because it illuminated much—he could still see only a few feet ahead of him—but because it gave him an illusion of control. He knew that was what it was—an illusion—but for decades his therapists had told him how important it was for him to feel in control, even if he wasn’t.

It was like whoever had designed and built the place had then abandoned it to fend for itself.

Those who are denied joy must take delight In death and darkness…

He loved small spaces, felt safe in them.

He still felt it, a flash of the intense charge he got when he’d nailed a part, a shivery current that ran through his entire body, everything seeming to tremble, on the verge of coming apart. The others had laughed when Amanda talked about actors being possessed, but he knew that she was right.

This was what he’d been secretly praying for, the chance to give himself over to something more powerful than himself. The muse, an old acting teacher had called it.

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

She felt the heat ebb from the room as the flames flickered out, but she was too pissed off to set another log on the embers. Let them die, let them all die.

You wouldn’t just cut off your nose to spite your face, you’d cut off your whole face.

the rest of Hill House seemed like it could survive into the next century with barely a new coat of paint.

she’d never seen anyone look like that. As though someone else had slid inside him, to stare out from Stevie’s eyes.

The three of them were like the Weird Sisters.

The spiral stairway had a queasy tilt, like a carnival ride that had frozen in place. But otherwise the tower seemed safe enough. Stabilized by those gigantic rebars, Nisa thought, noting where they protruded like ribs through the lower section of the wall.

What was that song? Nisa could almost remember it. Ominous drumbeats and a man’s voice, a repetitive chorus like an incantation. The song had spooked Nisa back then, especially after what her mother told her. She squinted at the label, struggling to read the list of songs in the afternoon’s dying light. And there it was—“Sister Europe.” All at once the words came back to her, along with a rush of yearning she’d been too young to comprehend when she’d first heard it: yearning and threat.

Like the rest of Hill House, the tower seemed to generate its own weather.

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

“Dead girl, dead girl, won’t you come to me? O, where did you lie last night? In the earth, in the earth, where my soul found its worth And I waited but no morning came…”

It was—originally recorded by Bill Monroe and then Lead Belly in the 1940s, long before it became notorious after Kurt Cobain sang it in his final performance before his death, broadcast on MTV thirty-odd years ago. Nisa had watched the clip on YouTube when she was a girl. It had terrified her. Not the words, which went over her head, but the way Cobain sang them. The verses an incantation until the end, when his voice rose to a scream then dropped to a hoarse whisper.

It was the most extraordinary feeling she’d ever had: as if she and her voice had merged with the tower itself, bringing everything around her, stone, stairs, even the old books, into being.

A wave of loss overcame her. To have heard her own voice echoing within this glorious space, carving another room from the air.

“‘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.

They’d think he was crazy. Maybe he was crazy. He practiced his mindful breathing, tried to clear his head of dark thoughts and bring up memories of tranquil blue water, green trees, birdsong. All the shit he’d been taught.

He felt the same horrible sense that an immense black wave was hanging just above his head, poised to drown him, if he let it.

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…

“‘O, treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!’”

She tipped back her head as though listening, and gazed up at the ceiling. Her eyelids fluttered shut, and when she opened them wide, I saw her anger give way to something like despair.

And why would he—why would anyone—choose to remain here, in this world, rather than in the shimmering landscape he’d glimpsed, just out of reach?

“So we won’t end up like the Donner Party,” said Nisa. “More the Dishonor Party,” said Amanda.

But this is like one of those spaces Stevie always talks about with his pagan friends—a thin place, where you can access things you can’t, normally.

“If all those old women were like hares on the mountain Then all us young maids would get scythes and go hunting…”

Her voice, too, sounded altered—much deeper, almost like it had been looped through Stevie’s music software.

Something about the mark of true intelligence being the ability to keep two opposed ideas in your head at the same time.

Now she felt a sharp, electrical urge to walk there, open it and fling herself inside. Like the way she felt sometimes when she was onstage, gazing down at the upraised faces: at the longing and ecstasy they held, rapture or desire that Nisa herself had ignited, that she wanted to leap into, to let herself be swallowed by that sea of yearning. She’d never leapt, of course—folk singers don’t have mosh pits.

Staring at her yet somehow not seeing her.

“Don’t worry about it,” Stevie said after a moment. Only it didn’t sound like Stevie, but someone pretending to be him. Like an actor playing Stevie, she thought, even though that was crazy. An actor playing himself. “Yeah, okay.” She looked at him and smiled, an actor playing Nisa.

This place was like a funhouse; everyone was constantly stumbling over some new pocket of weirdness.

Acting demanded a safe space, a fine and private place within the larger world: Amanda knew that Hill House was fulfilling that role.