The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step.

“Fear,” the doctor said, “is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.”

Fear and guilt are sisters;

in the churning darkness where she fell endlessly nothing was real except her own hands white around the bedpost.

I am home, she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.

Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.