Danse Macabre (47 page)

The companion becomes particularly important because it is in her that Hill House seems most specifically to mirror Eleanor's own life. Eleanor too was a companion, during her mother's long terminal illness. Following the death of old Miss Crain, there are stories of neglect; "of a doctor called too late," Montague says, "of the old lady lying neglected upstairs while the younger woman dallied in the garden with some village lout . . ." More bitter feeling followed the death of the old Miss Crain. There was a court case over ownership between the companion and the young Miss Crain. The companion finally wins . . . and shortly after commits suicide by hanging herself in the turret. Later tenants have been . . . well, uncomfortable in Hill House. We have hints that some have been more than uncomfortable; that some of them may actually have fled from Hill House, screaming in terror.

"Essentially," Montague says, "the evil is in the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, and it is a place of contained ill will." And the central question that
The Haunting of Hill House
poses for the reader is whether or not Montague is right. He prefaces his story with several classical references to what we've been calling the Bad Place—the Hebraic for haunted, as in haunted house,
tsaraas
, meaning "leprous"; Homer's phrase for it,
aidao domos
, meaning a house of Hades. "I need not remind you," Montague says, ". . . that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbidden—perhaps sacred—is as old as the mind of man."

As in
The House Next Door
, the one thing we can be sure of is that there are no actual ghosts in Hill House. None of the four characters come upon the shade of the companion flapping up the hall with a rope burn around her ectoplasmic neck. This is well enough, however—Montague himself says that in all the records of psychic phenomena, one cannot find any case where a ghost actually hurt a person. What they do if they are malign, he suggests, is work on the mind.

One thing we do know about Hill House is that it is
all wrong
. It is no one thing we can put our finger on; it's everything. Stepping into Hill House is like stepping into the mind of a madman; it isn't long before you weird out yourself.

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 juxaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair . . . . 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.

And even more chilling, more to the point:

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 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.

We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically, had he lived long enough to read it. It might even have taught the Old Providence Spook a thing or two. H.P.L. was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of nonEuclidian angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle's three corners might equal more or less than 180º. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a man or woman's perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind.

Other writers have dealt with this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire; my own favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Canavan's Back Yard," where an antiquarian bookdealer discovers that his weedy, ordinary back yard is much longer than it seems—it runs, in fact, all the way to the portholes of hell. In Charles L. Grant's
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead
, one of the main characters discovers he can no longer find the borders of the town where he has lived all his life. We see him crawling along the verge of the highway, looking for the way back in. Unsettling stuff.

But Jackson handled the concept better than anyone, I think—certainly better than Lovecraft, who understood it but apparently couldn't show it. Theo enters the bedroom she will share with Eleanor looking incredulously at a stained-glass window, a decorative urn, the pattern in the carpet. There is nothing wrong with these things taken one by one; it is just that when we add up the perceptual equivalent of their angles, we come out with a triangle where the sum of the corners equals a bit more (or a bit less) than 180º.

As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly level—which may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson's concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception. Being in Hill House is like tripping on a low-watt dosage of LSD, where everything seems strange and you feel you will begin to hallucinate at any time. But you never quite do. You just look incredulously at a stained-glass window . . . or a decorative urn . . . or the pattern on the carpet. Being in Hill House is like looking into one of those trick rooms where folks look big at one end and small at the other. Being in Hill House is like lying in bed in the dark on the night you went three drinks beyond your capacity . . . and feeling the bed begin to spin slowly around and around . . . .

Jackson suggests (always in her low, insinuating voice—this, along with
The Turn of the
Screw
, may very well be where Peter Straub got the idea that the horror story works best when it is "ambiguous and low-key and restrained") these things quietly and rationally; she is never strident. It is just, she says, that being in Hill House does something fundamental and unpleasant to the screen of perception. This is what, she suggests, being in telepathic contact with a lunatic would be like.

Hill House is evil; we'll accept Montague's postulate. But how responsible is Hill House for the phenomena which follow? There are knockings in the night—huge thunderings, rather, which terrify both Theo and Eleanor. Luke and Professor Montague attempt to track down a barking dog and get lost within a stone's throw of the house—shades of Canavan the bookdealer (Brennan's story predates
The Haunting of Hill House
) and Charles Grant's strange little town of Oxrun, Connecticut. Theo's clothes are splattered with some foul red substance ("red paint," Eleanor says . . . but her terror suggests a more sinister substance) that later disappears. And written in the same red substance, first in the hall and then over the wardrobe where the ruined clothes have been hung are these words: COME HOME, ELEANOR . . . HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR.

Here, in this writing, is where the lives of Eleanor and of this evil house, this Bad Place, become inextricably entwined. The house has singled her out. The house has chosen her . . . or is it the other way around? Either way, Eleanor's idea that "journeys end in lovers meeting" becomes ever more ominous.

Theo, who has some telepathic ability, begins to suspect more and more that Eleanor herself is responsible for most of the manifestations. A kind of low-key tension has built up between the two women, ostensibly over Luke, with whom Eleanor has begun to fall in love, but it probably springs more deeply from Theo's intuition that not everything which is happening in Hill House is
of
Hill House.

We know there has been an incident of telekinesis in Eleanor's past; at the age of twelve, stones fell from the ceilings "and pattered madly on the roof." She denies—hysterically denies—that she had anything at all to do with the incident of the stones, focusing instead on the embarrassment it caused her, the unwanted (she
says
it was unwanted, anyway) attention that it brought upon her. Her denials have an odd effect upon the reader, one of increasing weight in light of the fact that most of the afferent phenomena which the four of them experience in Hill House could be ascribed either to poltergeists or to telekinetic phenomena.

"They never even told me what was going on," Eleanor says urgently even after the conversation has moved on from the episode of the stones—no one is even really listening to her, but in the closed circle of her own narcissistic world, it seems to her that this strange, long-ago phenomenon must be all they can think of (as it is all she can think ofthe outer weather must reflect the inner weather). "My mother said it was the neighbors, they were always against us because she wouldn't mix with them. My mother—"

Luke interrupts her to say, "I think all we want here is the facts." But for Eleanor, the facts of her own life are all she can cope with.

How responsible is Eleanor for the tragedy which ensues? Let's look again at the peculiar words the ghost-busters find written in the hall: HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR.
The Haunting of Hill House
; submerged as' it is in the twin ambiguities of Eleanor's personality and those of Hill House itself, becomes a novel that can be read in many different ways, a novel which suggests almost endless paths and a wide range of conclusions. HELP ELEANOR, for instance. If Eleanor herself is responsible for the writing, is she asking for help?

If the house is responsible, is it asking her for help? Is Eleanor creating the ghost of her own mother? Is it mother who is calling for help? Or has Hill House probed Eleanor's mind and written something which will play on her gnawing sense of guilt? That long-ago companion whom Eleanor so resembles hung herself after the house became hers, and guilt may well have been her motive. Is the house trying to do the same to Eleanor?
In The House Next Door
, this is exactly how the contemporary Kim Dougherty has built works on the minds of its tenants—probing for the weak points and preying on them. Hill House may be doing this alone . . . it may be doing it with Eleanor's help . . . or Eleanor may be doing it alone. The book is subtle, and the reader is left in large part to work these questions out to his or her own satisfaction.

What about the rest of the phrase—COME HOME ELEANOR? Again we may hear the voice of Eleanor's dead mother in this imperative, or the voice of her own central self, crying out against this new independence, this attempt to escape Park's "cloying authoritarianism" and into an exhilarating but existentially scary state of personal freedom. I see this as the most logical possibility. As Merricat tells us in Jackson's final novel that "we have always lived in the castle," so Eleanor Vance has always lived in her own closed and suffocating world. It is not Hill House which frightens her, we feel; Hill House is another closed and suffocating world, walled in, cupped by hills, secure behind locked gates when the dark of night has fallen. The real threat she seems to feel comes from Montague, even more from Luke, and most of all from Theo. "You've got foolishness and wickedness all mixed up," Theo tells Eleanor after Eleanor has voiced her unease at painting her toenails red like Theo's. She simply tosses the line off, but such an idea strikes very close to the basis of Eleanor's most closely held life concepts. These people pose to Eleanor the possibility of another way of life, one which is largely antiauthoritarian and antinarcissistic. Eleanor is attracted and yet repelled by the prospect—this is a woman who, at thirty -two, feels daring when buying two pairs of slacks, after all. And it is not very daring of me to suggest that COME HOME ELEANOR is an imperative Eleanor has delivered to herself; that she is Narcissus unable to leave the pool. There is a third implication here, however, one which I find almost too horrifying to contemplate, and it is central to my own belief that this is one of the finest books ever to come out of the genre. Quite simply stated, COME HOME ELEANOR may be Hill House's invitation for Eleanor to join it. Journeys end in lovers meeting is Eleanor's phrase for it, and as her end approaches, this old children's rime occurs to her:

Go in and out the windows,

Go in and out the windows,

Go in and out the windows,

As we have done before.

Go forth and face your lover,

Go forth and face your lover,

Go forth and face your lover,

As we have done before.

Either way—Hill House or Eleanor as the central cause of the haunting—the ideas Park and Malin set forth hold up. Either Eleanor has succeeded, through her telekinetic ability, in turning Hill House into a giant mirror reflecting her own subconscious, or Hill House is a chameleon, able to convince her that she had finally found her place, her own cup of stars caught in these brooding hills.

I believe that Shirley Jackson would like us to come away from her novel with the ultimate belief that it was Hill House all along. That first paragraph suggests "outside evil" very strongly—a primitive force like that which inhabits Anne River Siddons's house next door, a force which is divorced from humankind. In Eleanor's end we may feel that there are three layers of "truth" here: Eleanor's belief that the house is haunted; Eleanor's belief that the house is her place, that it has just been waiting for someone like her; Eleanor's final realization that she has been used by a monstrous organism—that she has, in fact, been manipulated on the subconscious level into believing that she has been pulling the strings. But it has all been done with mirrors, as the magicians say, and poor Eleanor is murdered by the ultimate falsehood of her own reflection in the brick and stone and glass of Hill House:

I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway. I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last: this is me. I am really really really doing it by myself.