Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (Horror Classic)

She nearly stopped for ever just outside Ashton, because she came to a tiny cottage buried in a garden. I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin. . . . But the cottage was far behind, and it was time to look for her new road, so carefully charted by Dr Montague.

‘Turn left on to Route 5 going west,’ his letter said, and, as efficiently and promptly as though he had been guiding her from some spot far away, moving her car with controls in his hands, it was done; she was on Route 5 going west, and her journey was nearly done. In spite of what he said, though, she thought, I will stop in Hillsdale for a minute, just for a cup of coffee, because I cannot bear to have my long trip end so soon. It was not really disobeying, anyway; the letter said it was inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask the way, not forbidden to stop for coffee, and perhaps if I don’t mention Hill House I will not be doing wrong. Anyway, she thought obscurely, it’s my last chance.

Hillsdale was upon her before she knew it, a tangled disorderly mess of dirty houses and crooked streets. It was small; once she had come on to the main street she could see the corner at the end with the gas station and the church. There seemed to be only one place to stop for coffee, and that was an unattractive diner, but Eleanor was bound to stop in Hillsdale and so she brought her car to the broken kerb in front of the diner and got out. After a minute’s thought, with a silent nod to Hillsdale, she locked the car, mindful of her suitcase on the floor and the carton on the back seat. I will not spend long in Hillsdale, she thought, looking up and down the street, which managed, even in the sunlight, to be dark and ugly. A dog slept uneasily in the shade against a wall, a woman stood in a doorway across the street and looked at Eleanor, and two young boys lounged against a fence, elaborately silent. Eleanor, who was afraid of strange dogs and jeering women and young hoodlums, went quickly into the diner, clutching her pocketbook and her car keys. Inside, she found a counter with a chinless, tired girl behind it, and a man sitting at the end eating. She wondered briefly how hungry he must have been to come in here at all, when she looked at the grey counter and the smeared glass bowl over a plate of doughnuts. ‘Coffee,’ she said to the girl behind the counter, and the girl turned wearily and tumbled down a cup from the piles on the shelves; I will have to drink this coffee because I said I was going to, Eleanor told herself sternly, but next time I will listen to Dr Montague.

There was some elaborate joke going on between the man eating and the girl behind the counter; when she set Eleanor’s coffee down she glanced at him and half-smiled, and he shrugged, and then the girl laughed. Eleanor looked up, but the girl was examining her fingernails and the man was wiping his plate with bread. Perhaps Eleanor’s coffee was poisoned; it certainly looked it. Determined to plumb the village of Hillsdale to its lowest depths, Eleanor said to the girl, ‘I’ll have one of those doughnuts too, please,’ and the girl, glancing sideways at the man, slid one of the doughnuts on to a dish and set it down in front of Eleanor and laughed when she caught another look from the man.

‘This is a pretty little town,’ Eleanor said to the girl. ‘What is it called?’

The girl stared at her; perhaps no one had ever before had the audacity to call Hillsdale a pretty little town; after a moment the girl looked again at the man, as though calling for confirmation, and said, ‘Hillsdale.’

‘Have you lived here long?’ Eleanor asked. I’m not going to mention Hill House, she assured Dr Montague far away, I just want to waste a little time.

‘Yeah,’ the girl said.

‘It must be pleasant, living in a small town like this. I come from the city.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you like it here?’

‘It’s all right,’ the girl said. She looked again at the man, who was listening carefully. ‘Not much to do.’

‘How large a town is it?’

‘Pretty small. You want more coffee?’ This was addressed to the man, who was rattling his cup against his saucer, and Eleanor took a first, shuddering sip of her own coffee and wondered how he could possibly want more.

‘Do you have a lot of visitors around here?’ she asked when the girl had filled the coffee cup and gone back to lounge against the shelves. ‘Tourists, I mean?’

‘What for?’ For a minute the girl flashed at her, from what might have been an emptiness greater than any Eleanor had ever known. ‘Why would anybody come here ?’ She looked sullenly at the man and added, ‘There’s not even a movie.’

‘But the hills are so pretty. Mostly, with small out-of-the-way towns like this one, you’ll find city people who have come and built themselves homes up in the hills. For privacy.’

The girl laughed shortly. ‘Not here they don’t.’

‘Or remodelling old houses——’

‘Privacy,’ the girl said, and laughed again.

‘It just seems surprising,’ Eleanor said, feeling the man looking at her.

‘Yeah,’ the girl said. ‘If they’d put in a movie, even.’

‘I thought,’ Eleanor said carefully, ‘that I might even look around. Old houses are usually cheap, you know, and it’s fun to make them over.’

‘Not around here,’ the girl said.

‘Then,’ Eleanor said, ‘there are no old houses around here? Back in the hills?’

‘Nope.’

The man rose, taking change from his pocket, and spoke for the first time. ‘People leave this town,’ he said. ‘They don’t come here.’

When the door closed behind him the girl turned her flat eyes back to Eleanor, almost resentfully, as though Eleanor with her chatter had driven the man away. ‘He was right,’ she said finally. ‘They go away, the lucky ones.’

‘Why don’t you run away?’ Eleanor asked her, and the girl shrugged.

‘Would I be any better off?’ she asked. She took Eleanor’s money without interest and returned the change. Then, with another of her quick flashes, she glanced at the empty plates at the end of the counter and almost smiled. ‘He comes in every day,’ she said. When Eleanor smiled back and started to speak, the girl turned her back and busied herself with the cups on the shelves, and Eleanor, feeling herself dismissed, rose gratefully from her coffee and took up her car keys and pocketbook. ‘Good-bye,’ Eleanor said, and the girl, back still turned, said, ‘Good luck to you. I hope you find your house.’

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The road leading away from the gas station and the church was very poor indeed, deeply rutted and rocky. Eleanor’s little car stumbled and bounced, reluctant to go farther into these unattractive hills, where the day seemed quickly drawing to an end under the thick, oppressive trees on either side. They do not really seem to have much traffic on this road, Eleanor thought wryly, turning the wheel quickly to avoid a particularly vicious rock ahead; six miles of this will not do the car any good; and for the first time in hours she thought of her sister and laughed. By now they would surely know that she had taken the car and gone, but they would not know where; they would be telling each other incredulously that they would never have suspected it of Eleanor. I would never have suspected it of myself, she thought, laughing still; everything is different, I am a new person, very far from home. ‘In delay there lies no plenty; . . . present mirth hath present laughter. . . .’ And she gasped as the car cracked against a rock and reeled back across the road with an ominous scraping somewhere beneath, but then gathered itself together valiantly and resumed its dogged climb. The tree branches brushed against the windshield, and it grew steadily darker; Hill House likes to make an entrance, she thought; I wonder if the sun ever shines along here. At last, with one final effort, the car cleared a tangle of dead leaves and small branches across the road, and came into a clearing by the gate of Hill House.