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

Eleanor nodded, standing uncertainly in the doorway.

‘I don’t stay after I set out dinner,’ Mrs Dudley went on. ‘Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.’

‘I know,’ Eleanor said.

‘We live over in the town, six miles away.’

‘Yes,’ Eleanor said, remembering Hillsdale.

‘So there won’t be anyone around if you need help.’

‘I understand.’

‘We couldn’t even hear you, in the night.’

‘I don’t suppose——’

‘No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.’

‘I know,’ Eleanor said tiredly.

‘In the night,’ Mrs Dudley said, and smiled outright. ‘In the dark,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.

Eleanor almost giggled, thinking of herself calling, ‘Oh, Mrs Dudley, I need your help in the dark,’ and then she shivered.

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She stood alone beside her suitcase, her coat still hanging over her arm, thoroughly miserable, telling herself helplessly, Journeys end in lovers meeting, and wishing she could go home. Behind her lay the dark staircase and the polished hallway and the great front door and Mrs Dudley and Dudley laughing at the gate and the padlocks and Hillsdale and the cottage of flowers and the family at the inn and the oleander garden and the house with the stone lions in front, and they had brought her, under Dr Montague’s unerring eye, to the blue room at Hill House. It’s awful, she thought, unwilling to move, since motion might imply acceptance, a gesture of moving in, it’s awful and I don’t want to stay; but there was nowhere else to go; Dr Montague’s letter had brought her this far and could take her no farther. After a minute she sighed and shook her head and walked across to set her suitcase down on the bed.

Here I am in the blue room of Hill House, she said half aloud, although it was real enough, and beyond all question a blue room. There were blue dimity curtains over the two windows, which looked out over the roof of the verandah on to the lawn, and a blue-figured rug on the floor, and a blue spread on the bed and a blue quilt at the foot. The walls, dark woodwork to shoulder height, were blue-figured paper above, with a design of tiny blue flowers, wreathed and gathered and delicate. Perhaps someone had once hoped to lighten the air of the blue room in Hill House with a dainty wallpaper, not seeing how such a hope would evaporate in Hill House, leaving only the faintest hint of its existence, like an almost inaudible echo of sobbing far away. . . . Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest possible tolerable length; this is where they want me to sleep , Eleanor thought incredulously; what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high corners—what breath of mindless fear will drift across my mouth . . . and shook herself again. Really , she told herself, really , Eleanor.

She opened her suitcase on the high bed and, slipping off her stiff city shoes with grateful relief, began to unpack, at the back of her mind the thoroughly female conviction that the best way to soothe a troubled mind is to put on comfortable shoes. Yesterday, packing her suitcase in the city, she had chosen clothes which she assumed would be suitable for wearing in an isolated country house; she had even run out at the last minute and bought—excited at her own daring—two pairs of slacks, something she had not worn in more years than she could remember. Mother would be furious , she had thought, packing the slacks down at the bottom of her suitcase so that she need not take them out, need never let anyone know she had them, in case she lost her courage. Now, in Hill House, they no longer seemed so new; she unpacked carelessly, setting dresses crookedly on hangers, tossing the slacks into the bottom drawer of the high marble-topped dresser, throwing her city shoes into a corner of the great wardrobe. She was bored already with the books she had brought; I am probably not going to stay anyway, she thought, and closed her empty suitcase and set it in the wardrobe corner; it won’t take me five minutes to pack again. She discovered that she had been trying to put her suitcase down without making a sound and then realised that while she unpacked she had been in her stockinged feet, trying to move as silently as possible, as though stillness were vital in Hill House; she remembered that Mrs Dudley had also walked without sound. When she stood still in the middle of the room the pressing silence of Hill House came back all around her. 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. She went quickly across the room and pushed aside the blue dimity curtains, but the sunlight came only palely through the thick glass of the windows, and she could see only the roof of the verandah and a stretch of the lawn beyond. Somewhere down there was her little car, which could take her away again. Journeys end in lovers meeting, she thought; it was my own choice to come. Then she realised that she was afraid to go back across the room.

She was standing with her back to the window, looking from the door to the wardrobe to the dresser to the bed, telling herself that she was not afraid at all, when she heard, far below, the sounds of a car door slamming and then quick footsteps, almost dancing, up the steps and across the verandah, and then, shockingly, the crash of the great iron knocker coming down. Why, she thought, there are other people coming; I am not going to be here all alone. Almost laughing, she ran across the room and into the hall, to look down the staircase into the hallway below.

‘Thank heaven you’re here,’ she said, peering through the dimness, ‘thank heaven somebody’s here.’ She realised without surprise that she was speaking as though Mrs Dudley could not hear her, although Mrs Dudley stood, straight and pale, in the hall. ‘Come on up,’ Eleanor said, ‘you’ll have to carry your own suitcase.’ She was breathless and seemed unable to stop talking, her usual shyness melted away by relief. ‘My name’s Eleanor Vance,’ she said, ‘and ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

‘I’m Theodora. Just Theodora. This bloody house——’

‘It’s just as bad up here. Come on up. Make her give you the room next to mine.’

Theodora came up the heavy stairway after Mrs Dudley, looking incredulously at the stained-glass window on the landing, the marble urn in a niche, the patterned carpet. Her suitcase was considerably larger than Eleanor’s, and considerably more luxurious, and Eleanor came forward to help her, glad that her own things were safely put away out of sight. ‘Wait till you see the bedrooms,’ Eleanor said. ‘Mine used to be the embalming room, I think.’

‘It’s the home I’ve always dreamed of,’ Theodora said. ‘A little hideaway where I can be alone with my thoughts. Particularly if my thoughts happened to be about murder or suicide or——’

‘Green room,’ Mrs Dudley said coldly, and Eleanor sensed, with a quick turn of apprehension, that flippant or critical talk about the house bothered Mrs Dudley in some manner; maybe she thinks it can hear us, Eleanor thought, and then was sorry she had thought it. Perhaps she shivered, because Theodora turned with a quick smile and touched her shoulder gently, reassuringly; she is charming, Eleanor thought, smiling back, not at all the sort of person who belongs in this dreary, dark place, but then, probably, I don’t belong here either; I am not the sort of person for Hill House but I can’t think of anybody who would be. She laughed then, watching Theodora’s expression as she stood in the doorway of the green room.