The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words.

Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by.

The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.

It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

When she tried to speak, her voice was drowned in the dim stillness, and she had to try again to make a sound.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside. ‘No,’ she said aloud, and the one word echoed.