The Haunting of Hill House (17 page)

“Already?”

“Did you ever think about being homesick? If your home was Hill House would you be homesick for it? Did those two little girls cry for their dark, grim house when they were taken away?”

“I've never been away from anywhere,” Eleanor said carefully, “so I suppose I've never been homesick.”

“How about now? Your little apartment?”

“Perhaps,” Eleanor said, looking into the fire, “I haven't had it long enough to believe it's my own.”

“I want my own bed,” Theodora said, and Eleanor thought, She is sulking again; when she is hungry or tired or bored she turns into a baby. “I'm sleepy,” Theodora said.

“It's after eleven,” Eleanor said, and as she turned to glance at the chess game the doctor shouted with joyful triumph, and Luke laughed.

“Now, sir,” the doctor said. “
Now,
sir.”

“Fairly beaten, I admit,” Luke said. He began to gather the chessmen and set them back into their box. “Any reason why I can't take a drop of brandy upstairs with me? To put myself to sleep, or give myself Dutch courage, or some such reason. Actually”—and he smiled over at Theodora and Eleanor—“I plan to stay up and read for a while.”

“Are you still reading
Pamela
?” Eleanor asked the doctor.

“Volume two. I have three volumes to go, and then I shall begin
Clarissa Harlowe,
I think. Perhaps Luke would care to borrow—”

“No, thanks,” Luke said hastily. “I have a suitcase full of mystery stories.”

The doctor turned to look around. “Let me see,” he said, “fire screened, lights out. Leave the doors for Mrs. Dudley to close in the morning.”

Tiredly, following one another, they went up the great stairway, turning out lights behind them. “Has everyone got a flashlight, by the way?” the doctor asked, and they nodded, more intent upon sleep than the waves of darkness which came after them up the stairs of Hill House.

“Good night, everyone,” Eleanor said, opening the door to the blue room.

“Good night,” Luke said.

“Good night,” Theodora said.

“Good night,” the doctor said. “Sleep tight.”

“Coming, mother, coming,” Eleanor said, fumbling for the light. “It's all right, I'm coming.”
Eleanor,
she heard,
Eleanor
. “Coming, coming,” she shouted irritably, “just a
minute,
I'm
coming
.”

“Eleanor?”

Then she thought, with a crashing shock which brought her awake, cold and shivering, out of bed and awake:
I am in Hill House
.

“What?” she cried out. “What? Theodora?”

“Eleanor? In here.”

“Coming.” No time for the light; she kicked a table out of the way, wondering at the noise of it, and struggled briefly with the door of the connecting bathroom. That is not the table falling, she thought; my mother is knocking on the wall. It was blessedly light in Theodora's room, and Theodora was sitting up in bed, her hair tangled from sleep and her eyes wide with the shock of awakening; I must look the same way, Eleanor thought, and said, “I'm here, what
is
it? ”—and then heard, clearly for the first time, although she had been hearing it ever since she awakened. “What
is
it?” she whispered.

She sat down slowly on the foot of Theodora's bed, wondering at what seemed calmness in herself. Now, she thought, now. It is only a noise, and terribly cold, terribly, terribly cold. It is a noise down the hall, far down at the end, near the nursery door, and terribly cold,
not
my mother knocking on the wall.

“Something is knocking on the doors,” Theodora said in a tone of pure rationality.

“That's all. And it's down near the other end of the hall. Luke and the doctor are probably there already, to see what is going on.” Not at all like my mother knocking on the wall; I was dreaming again.

“Bang bang,” Theodora said.

“Bang,” Eleanor said, and giggled. I am calm, she thought, but so very cold; the noise is only a kind of banging on the doors, one after another; is this what I was so afraid about? “Bang” is the best word for it; it sounds like something children do, not mothers knocking against the wall for help, and anyway Luke and the doctor are there; 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.

“Theodora,” she said, and closed her eyes and tightened her teeth together and wrapped her arms around herself, “it's getting closer.”

“Just a noise,” Theodora said, and moved next to Eleanor and sat tight against her. “It has an echo.”

It sounded, Eleanor thought, like a hollow noise, a hollow bang, as though something were hitting the doors with an iron kettle, or an iron bar, or an iron glove. It pounded regularly for a minute, and then suddenly more softly, and then again in a quick flurry, seeming to be going methodically from door to door at the end of the hall. Distantly she thought she could hear the voices of Luke and the doctor, calling from somewhere below, and she thought,
Then they are not up here with us at all,
and heard the iron crashing against what must have been a door very close.

“Maybe it will go on down the other side of the hall,” Theodora whispered, and Eleanor thought that the oddest part of this indescribable experience was that Theodora should be having it too. “No,” Theodora said, and they heard the crash against the door across the hall. It was louder, it was deafening, it struck against the door next to them (did it move back and forth across the hall? did it go on feet along the carpet? did it lift a hand to the door?), and Eleanor threw herself away from the bed and ran to hold her hands against the door. “Go away,” she shouted wildly. “Go away, go away!”

There was complete silence, and Eleanor thought, standing with her face against the door, Now I've done it; it was looking for the room with someone inside.

The cold crept and pinched at them, filling and overflowing the room. Anyone would have thought that the inhabitants of Hill House slept sweetly in this quiet, and then, so suddenly that Eleanor wheeled around, the sound of Theodora's teeth chattering, and Eleanor laughed. “You big baby,” she said.

“I'm cold,” Theodora said. “Deadly cold.”

“So am I.” Eleanor took the green quilt and threw it around Theodora, and took up Theodora's warm dressing gown and put it on. “You warmer now?”

“Where's Luke? Where's the doctor?”

“I don't know. Are you warmer now?”

“No.” Theodora shivered.

“In a minute I'll go out in the hall and call them; are you—”

It started again, as though it had been listening, waiting to hear their voices and what they said, to identify them, to know how well prepared they were against it, waiting to hear if they were afraid. So suddenly that Eleanor leaped back against the bed and Theodora gasped and cried out, the iron crash came against their door, and both of them lifted their eyes in horror, because the hammering was against the upper edge of the door, higher than either of them could reach, higher than Luke or the doctor could reach, and the sickening, degrading cold came in waves from whatever was outside the door.

Eleanor stood perfectly still and looked at the door. She did not quite know what to do, although she believed that she was thinking coherently and was not unusually frightened, not more frightened, certainly, than she had believed in her worst dreams she could be. The cold troubled her even more than the sounds; even Theodora's warm robe was useless against the icy little curls of fingers on her back. The intelligent thing to do, perhaps, was to walk over and open the door; that, perhaps, would belong with the doctor's views of pure scientific inquiry. Eleanor knew that, even if her feet would take her as far as the door, her hand would not lift to the doorknob; impartially, remotely, she told herself that no one's hand would touch that knob; it's not the work hands were made for, she told herself. She had been rocking a little, each crash against the door pushing her a little backward, and now she was still because the noise was fading. “I'm going to complain to the janitor about the radiators,” Theodora said from behind her. “Is it stopping?”

“No,” Eleanor said, sick. “No.”

It had found them. Since Eleanor would not open the door, it was going to make its own way in. Eleanor said aloud, “Now I know why people scream, because I think I'm going to,” and Theodora said, “I will if you will,” and laughed, so that Eleanor turned quickly back to the bed and they held each other, listening in silence. Little pattings came from around the doorframe, small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door, trying to sneak a way in. The doorknob was fondled, and Eleanor, whispering, asked, “Is it locked?” and Theodora nodded and then, wide-eyed, turned to stare at the connecting bathroom door. “Mine's locked too,” Eleanor said against her ear, and Theodora closed her eyes in relief. The little sticky sounds moved on around the doorframe and then, as though a fury caught whatever was outside, the crashing came again, and Eleanor and Theodora saw the wood of the door tremble and shake, and the door move against its hinges.

“You can't get in,” Eleanor said wildly, and again there was a silence, as though the house listened with attention to her words, understanding, cynically agreeing, content to wait. A thin little giggle came, in a breath of air through the room, a little mad rising laugh, the smallest whisper of a laugh, and Eleanor heard it all up and down her back, a little gloating laugh moving past them around the house, and then she heard the doctor and Luke calling from the stairs and, mercifully, it was over.

When the real silence came, Eleanor breathed shakily and moved stiffly. “We've been clutching each other like a couple of lost children,” Theodora said and untwined her arms from around Eleanor's neck. “You're wearing my bathrobe.”

“I forgot mine. Is it really over?”

“For tonight, anyway.” Theodora spoke with certainty. “Can't you tell? Aren't you warm again?”

The sickening cold was gone, except for a reminiscent little thrill of it down Eleanor's back when she looked at the door. She began to pull at the tight knot she had put in the bathrobe cord, and said, “Intense cold is one of the symptoms of shock.”

“Intense shock is one of the symptoms I've got,” Theodora said. “Here come Luke and the doctor.” Their voices were outside in the hall, speaking quickly, anxiously, and Eleanor dropped Theodora's robe on the bed and said, “For heaven's sake, don't let them knock on that door—one more knock would finish me”—and ran into her own room to get her own robe. Behind her she could hear Theodora telling them to wait a minute, and then going to unlock the door, and then Luke's voice saying pleasantly to Theodora, “Why, you look as though you'd seen a ghost.”

When Eleanor came back she noticed that both Luke and the doctor were dressed, and it occurred to her that it might be a sound idea from now on; if that intense cold was going to come back at night it was going to find Eleanor sleeping in a wool suit and a heavy sweater, and she didn't care what Mrs. Dudley was going to say when she found that at least one of the lady guests was lying in one of the clean beds in heavy shoes and wool socks. “Well,” she asked, “how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house?”

“It's perfectly fine,” Luke said, “perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.” He had the brandy bottle and glasses, and Eleanor thought that they must make a companionable little group, the four of them, sitting around Theodora's room at four in the morning, drinking brandy. They spoke lightly, quickly, and gave one another fast, hidden, little curious glances, each of them wondering what secret terror had been tapped in the others, what changes might show in face or gesture, what unguarded weakness might have opened the way to ruin.

“Did anything happen in here while we were outside?” the doctor asked.

Eleanor and Theodora looked at each other and laughed, honestly at last, without any edge of hysteria or fear. After a minute Theodora said carefully, “Nothing in particular. Someone knocked on the door with a cannon ball and then tried to get in and eat us, and started laughing its head off when we wouldn't open the door. But nothing really out of the way.”

Curiously, Eleanor went over and opened the door. “I thought the whole door was going to shatter,” she said, bewildered, “and there isn't even a scratch on the wood, nor on any of the other doors; they're perfectly smooth.”

“How nice that it didn't mar the woodwork,” Theodora said, holding her brandy glass out to Luke. “I couldn't bear it if this dear old house got hurt.” She grinned at Eleanor. “Nellie here was going to scream.”

“So were you.”

“Not at all; I only said so to keep you company. Besides, Mrs. Dudley already said she wouldn't come. And where were
you,
our manly defenders?”

“We were chasing a dog,” Luke said. “At least, some animal like a dog.” He stopped, and then went on reluctantly. “We followed it outside.”

Theodora stared, and Eleanor said, “You mean it was
inside?
”

“I saw it run past my door,” the doctor said, “just caught a glimpse of it, slipping along. I woke Luke and we followed it down the stairs and out into the garden and lost it somewhere back of the house.”

“The front door was open?”

“No,” Luke said. “The front door was closed. So were all the other doors. We checked.”