A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

But beyond the brightly lit kitchen loomed the rest of the house. If Amanda let her gaze extend past this room, she could sense it, crouching like a trapdoor spider, waiting to spring. Light, she thought, we need more light.

“‘Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils.’”

She seemed to be measuring how best to draw, or perhaps deflect, attention, posed on the threshold between the dining room’s candlelit glow and the deepening shadows of the hall.

“‘The dog, to gain some private ends, went mad and bit the man,’” she recited. “‘The man recovered of the bite, the dog it was that died.’”

“A mote of levity, Stevie, to relieve the dark.”

“‘And so in this twilight and midnight of the world, when sin flourishes everywhere, when charity has grown cold, the evil of witches and their companions surrounds us.’”

“‘And it is a fact that some definite agreement is formed between witches and devils whereby some shall be able to hurt and others to heal, that so they may more easily ensnare the minds of the simple and recruit the ranks of their abandoned and hateful society.’”

Outside, the wind howled, gusting so that the windows shook. Heavy snow obscured the world beyond Hill House, trees and road hidden behind a scrim of leaden gray.

“Who fears a painted devil?” She gazed pointedly at Stevie. “Not me.”

“Why should I fear Lamkin Or any of his men When my doors are all bolted And my windows shut in?”

“There was blood in the nursery And blood in the hall And blood on the stairs Her heart’s blood was all…”

Her eyes caught the flicker of candlelight to gleam eerily from the shadows.

To Amanda, each knock seemed to echo not just through the rooms but inside her, as though she’d become a bell being struck.

a sinuous shadow that slid across the veranda and then flung itself against the glass. As she watched in horror, two other shapes had joined it, all three leaping repeatedly at first the windows, then the doors, striving to get in.

Those minutes when her voice and body and the space around them all seemed to cohere, to create some new, more powerful entity, vaster than Nisa herself. A kind of ecstasy, like an orgasm, only both inside and outside her body.

Nisa had brought beauty and a sense of ancient mystery to Holly’s words. She’d infused them with a power and terror that echoed down through centuries until Nisa held them, protected them, shared them with those she thought she could trust with something so precious.

“Would I had a devil now to tear you all to pieces.”

Since the first time she’d seen his reaction to her voice: the power it held, even when she was a child, a power that had grown stronger in all the years since, until she arrived here and at last found the one place that could do her voice justice, a space she could fill until it shattered.

Radiant light spilled into the room, almost blinding her, the most beautiful light she’d ever seen. It didn’t even register as light; it was more like an emotion, like meeting someone you immediately love.

She needed to save her breath: like readying herself for a crescendo. She felt her vocal cords strain, felt the muscles quiver and vibrate, near a breaking point. But she wasn’t singing, she was barely even breathing. It wants my voice, she realized.

Hill House, he thought in a panic, the words circling his mind, probing for a way in, like that diabolical knocking. It hates us.

How, from outside, her song had sounded like a scream.

Witching Night became a palimpsest—Elizabeth Sawyer’s story, Macy-Lee’s, Nisa’s, my own, shuffled and reshuffled like a deck of tarot cards. The Witch. The Muse. The Singer. The Ghost Child. The Lover. The Balladeer. The Dog. Death.

Now when I cried, I felt like different nerves were firing in my head.

The unsolved disappearance of a beautiful young person always makes good box office.

Only Hill House neither sleeps nor dreams. Shrouded within its overgrown lawns and sprawling woodlands, the long shadows of mountains and ancient oaks, Hill House only watches. Hill House waits.

While writing this novel, I discovered the music of the extraordinary singer/songwriter Fern Maddie, whose rendition of “Hares on the Mountain” haunts Nisa’s own.

Finally, my love to my partner, John Clute, as always my literary and emotional true north.