A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

At the end of the street, an old church missing its steeple stood on a corner. A sign was perched in front of it. I ATE THIS CHURCH —SATAN

When you’re confronted with something deeply strange or obviously implausible in a book or movie or painting, you know it means something. It’s a symbol, a clue. A warning.

the first instant during a reading when an actor disappears and your character takes their place. That moment of transformation had always felt like ecstasy, like a ritual of transubstantiation.

Luck had brought me here, I decided, luck or fate or some other impulse I couldn’t name. A few hours ago, I couldn’t even have imagined a place like this. Now I could think of nothing else.

She seemed out of sync with the make-do furnishings and the town itself, an urban boho marooned in the gray desolation of Hillsdale.

“Why are the curtains moving? The windows are all shut.” “It’s an old house,” replied Ainsley. “It breathes.” She opened another door. “This was the music room.”

“‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,’” I said, and Nisa laughed. “Does the house get lonely, too?”

“Is that normal?” Nisa pointed to a line. “‘Psychological trauma’?” “In this state, you have to disclose to buyers if any tenant has ever considered the house to be haunted.”

“Haunted houses never have cell reception.” Nisa turned to face Stevie. “That’s how you know they’re haunted.”

She loved that tragedy could be transformed into works of uncanny, unsettling beauty, passed down for hundreds of years.

“Not by Fagin. Or Bill Sykes,” he confided one night. “That would at least have been, you know, Dickensian. But he was this random guy in the chorus. He was just an ordinary pedophile.”