The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

The hero (“victim” might be a better word) typically hasn’t got much personality beyond his intrusiveness. He’s just someone inclined to put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and to rue the consequences.

The literary effect we call horror turns on the dissolution of boundaries, between the living and the dead, of course, but also, at the crudest level, between the outside of the body and everything that ought to stay inside.

Within, 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.

Sometimes the people who knock you down never turn once to look.”

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.

Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself; in these few seconds I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front.

“In delay there lies no plenty,” she thought, “in delay there lies no plenty.”

“In delay there lies no plenty; . . . present mirth hath present laughter. . . .”

she made no attempt to get out of her car, but pressed the horn, and the trees and the gate shuddered and withdrew slightly from the sound.

No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.

“We never know where our courage is coming from.”

When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them.

“Destined to be inseparable friends, in fact. A courtesan, a pilgrim, a princess, and a bullfighter.

“Stoutly, upon the ramparts,”

People,” the doctor said sadly, “are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.”

“I will not put a name to what has no name,” the doctor said. “I don’t know.”

but they were delighted to believe that she was dishonest, certainly because they were capable of dishonesty themselves when opportunity arose.

individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me.

Sing before breakfast you’ll cry before night, Eleanor told herself, because she had been singing softly, “In delay there lies no plenty. . . .”

and then thought that if the house burned away someday the tower would still stand, gray and forbidding over the ruins, warning people away from what was left of Hill House, with perhaps a stone fallen here and there, so owls and bats might fly in and out and nest among the books below.

Everything is worse,” he said, looking at Eleanor, “if you think something is looking at you.”

It’s like waiting in a dentist’s office, Eleanor thought, watching them over her coffee cup; waiting in a dentist’s office and listening to other patients make brave jokes across the room, all of you certain to meet the dentist sooner or later.

how lovely she is, Eleanor thought, how thoughtlessly, luckily lovely.

is this what they mean by cold chills going up and down your back? Because it is not pleasant; it starts in your stomach and goes in waves around and up and down again like something alive. Like something alive. Yes. Like something alive.

have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine.

This curious life agrees with you.”

“It’s too silly,” Eleanor said, trying to understand her own feelings.

I suppose because things are not afraid.” “I think we are only afraid of ourselves,” the doctor said slowly. “No,” Luke said. “Of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise.” “Of knowing what we really want,” Theodora

magnanimous.