A Haunting on the Hill

by Elizabeth Hand

Most houses sleep, and nearly all of them dream: of conflagrations and celebrations, births and buckled floors; of children’s footsteps and clapboards in need of repair, of ailing pets and peeling paint, wakes and weddings and windows that no longer keep out rain and snow but welcome them, furtively, when no one is home to notice. Hill House neither sleeps nor dreams. Shrouded within its overgrown lawns and sprawling woodlands, the long shadows of mountains and ancient oaks, Hill House watches. Hill House waits.

And yet those afternoons with the students did, sometimes, ease my despair. Running lines with them; watching them slowly gain confidence; witnessing the magic that never failed to take over, when they finally put on costumes and makeup and looked at themselves in amazement, realizing they had become someone, something, new and wonderful and strange. For those few hours, I could imagine that it wasn’t too late. That I, too, might still be transformed.

“Why are the curtains moving? The windows are all shut.” “It’s an old house,” replied Ainsley. “It breathes.”

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.