The Haunting of Hill House Page 11

  They began reasonably enough with the dining-room door, which they propped open with a heavy chair. The room beyond was the game room; the table against which Theodora had stumbled was a low inlaid chess table (“Now, I could not have overlooked that last night,” the doctor said irritably), and at one end of the room were card tables and chairs, and a tall cabinet where the chessmen had been, with croquet balls and the cribbage board.

  “Jolly spot to spend a carefree hour,” Luke said, standing in the doorway regarding the bleak room. The cold greens of the table tops were reflected unhappily in the dark tiles around the fireplace; the inevitable wood paneling was, here, not at all enlivened by a series of sporting prints which seemed entirely devoted to various methods of doing wild animals to death, and over the mantel a deer-head looked down upon them in patent embarrassment.

  “This is where they came to enjoy themselves,” Theodora said, and her voice echoed shakily from the high ceiling. “They came here,” she explained, “to relax from the oppressive atmosphere of the rest of the house.” The deer-head looked down on her mournfully. “Those two little girls,” she said. “Can we please take down that beast up there?”

  “I think it’s taken a fancy to you,” Luke said. “It’s never taken its eyes off you since you came in. Let’s get out of here.”

  They propped the door open as they left, and came out into the hall, which shone dully under the light from the open rooms. “When we find a room with a window,” the doctor remarked, “we will open it; until then, let us be content with opening the front door.”

  “You keep thinking of the little children,” Eleanor said to Theodora, “but I can’t forget that lonely little companion, walking around these rooms, wondering who else was in the house.”

  Luke tugged the great front door open and wheeled the big vase to hold it; “Fresh air,” he said thankfully. The warm smell of rain and wet grass swept into the hall, and for a minute they stood in the open doorway, breathing air from outside Hill House. Then the doctor said, “Now here is something none of you anticipated,” and he opened a small door tucked in beside the tall front door and stood back, smiling. “The library,” he said. “In the tower.”

  “I can’t go in there,” Eleanor said, surprising herself, but she could not. She backed away, overwhelmed with the cold air of mold and earth which rushed at her. “My mother—” she said, not knowing what she wanted to tell them, and pressed herself against the wall.

  “Indeed?” said the doctor, regarding her with interest. “Theodora?” Theodora shrugged and stepped into the library; Eleanor shivered. “Luke?” said the doctor, but Luke was already inside. From where she stood Eleanor could see only a part of the circular wall of the library, with a narrow iron staircase going up and perhaps, since it was the tower, up and up and up; Eleanor shut her eyes, hearing the doctor’s voice distantly, hollow against the stone of the library walls.

  “Can you see the little trapdoor up there in the shadows?” he was asking. “It leads out onto a little balcony, and of course that’s where she is commonly supposed to have hanged herself—the girl, you remember. A most suitable spot, certainly; more suitable for suicides, I would think, than for books. She is supposed to have tied the rope onto the iron railing and then just stepped—”

  “Thanks,” Theodora said from within. “I can visualize it perfectly, thank you. For myself, I would probably have anchored the rope onto the deer head in the game room, but I suppose she had some sentimental attachment to the tower; what a nice word ‘attachment’ is in that context, don’t you think?”

  “Delicious.” It was Luke’s voice, louder; they were coming out of the library and back to the hall where Eleanor waited. “I think that I will make this room into a night club. I will put the orchestra up there on the balcony, and dancing girls will come down that winding iron staircase; the bar—”

  “Eleanor,” Theodora said, “are you all right now? It’s a perfectly awful room, and you were right to stay out of it.”

  Eleanor stood away from the wall; her hands were cold and she wanted to cry, but she turned her back to the library door, which the doctor propped open with a stack of books. “I don’t think I’ll do much reading while I’m here,” she said, trying to speak lightly. “Not if the books smell like the library.”

  “I hadn’t noticed a smell,” the doctor said. He looked inquiringly at Luke, who shook his head. “Odd,” the doctor went on, “and just the kind of thing we’re looking for. Make a note of it, my dear, and try to describe it exactly.”

  Theodora was puzzled. She stood in the hallway, turning, looking back of her at the staircase and then around again at the front door. “Are there two front doors?” she asked. “Am I just mixed up?”

  The doctor smiled happily; he had clearly been hoping for some such question. “This is the only front door,” he said. “It is the one you came in yesterday.”

  Theodora frowned. “Then why can’t Eleanor and I see the tower from our bedroom windows? Our rooms look out over the front of the house, and yet—”

  The doctor laughed and clapped his hands. “At last,” he said. “Clever Theodora. This is why I wanted you to see the house by day. Come, sit on the stairs while I tell you.”

  Obediently they settled on the stairs, looking up at the doctor, who took on his lecturing stance and began formally, “One of the peculiar traits of Hill House is its design—”

  “Crazy house at the carnival.”

  “Precisely. Have you not wondered at our extreme difficulty in finding our way around? An ordinary house would not have had the four of us in such confusion for so long, and yet time after time we choose the wrong doors, the room we want eludes us. Even I have had my troubles.” He sighed and nodded. “I daresay,” he went on, “that old Hugh Crain expected that someday Hill House might become a showplace, like the Winchester House in California or the many octagon houses; he designed Hill House himself, remember, and, I have told you before, he was a strange man. Every angle”—and the doctor gestured toward the doorway—“every angle is slightly wrong. Hugh Crain must have detested other people and their sensible squared-away houses, because he made his house to suit his mind. Angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another. I am sure, for instance, that you believe that the stairs you are sitting on are level, because you are not prepared for stairs which are not level—”

  They moved uneasily, and Theodora put out a quick hand to take hold of the balustrade, as though she felt she might be falling.

  “—are actually on a very slight slant toward the central shaft; the doorways are all a very little bit off center—that may be, by the way, the reason the doors swing shut unless they are held; I wondered this morning whether the approaching footsteps of you two ladies upset the delicate balance of the doors. Of course the result of all these tiny aberrations of measurement adds up to a fairly large distortion in the house as a whole. Theodora cannot see the tower from her bedroom window because the tower actually stands at the corner of the house. From Theodora’s bedroom window it is completely invisible, although from here it seems to be directly outside her room. The window of Theodora’s room is actually fifteen feet to the left of where we are now.”

  Theodora spread her hands helplessly. “Golly,” she said.

  “I see,” Eleanor said. “The veranda roof is what misleads us. I can look out my window and see the veranda roof and because I came directly into the house and up the stairs I assumed that the front door was right below, although really—”

  “You see only the veranda roof,” the doctor said. “The front door is far away; it and the tower are visible from the nursery, which is the big room at the end of the hallway; we will see it later today. It is”—and his voice was saddened—“a masterpiece of architectural misdirection. The double stairway at Chambord—”

  “Then everything is a little bit off center
?” Theodora asked uncertainly. “That’s why it all feels so disjointed?”

  “What happens when you go back to a real house?” Eleanor asked. “I mean—a—well—a real house?”

  “It must be like coming off shipboard,” Luke said. “After being here for a while your sense of balance could be so distorted that it would take you a while to lose your sea legs, or your Hill House legs. Could it be,” he asked the doctor, “that what people have been assuming were supernatural manifestations were really only the result of a slight loss of balance in the people who live here? The inner ear,” he told Theodora wisely.

  “It must certainly affect people in some way,” the doctor said. “We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.” He turned away. “We have marvels still before us,” he said, and they came down from the stairway and followed him, walking gingerly, testing the floors as they moved. They went down the narrow passage to the little parlor where they had sat the night before, and from there, leaving doors propped open behind them, they moved into the outer circle of rooms, which looked out onto the veranda. They pulled heavy draperies away from windows and the light from outside came into Hill House. They passed through a music room where a harp stood sternly apart from them, with never a jangle of strings to mark their footfalls. A grand piano stood tightly shut, with a candelabra above, no candle ever touched by flame. A marble-topped table held wax flowers under glass, and the chairs were twig-thin and gilded. Beyond this was the conservatory, with tall glass doors showing them the rain outside, and ferns growing damply around and over wicker furniture. Here it was uncomfortably moist, and they left it quickly, to come through an arched doorway into the drawing room and stand, aghast and incredulous.

  “It’s not there,” Theodora said, weak and laughing. “I don’t believe it’s there.” She shook her head. “Eleanor, do you see it too?”

  “How . . . ?” Eleanor said helplessly.

  “I thought you would be pleased.” The doctor was complacent.

  One entire end of the drawing room was in possession of a marble statuary piece; against the mauve stripes and flowered carpet it was huge and grotesque and somehow whitely naked; Eleanor put her hands over her eyes, and Theodora clung to her. “I thought it might be intended for Venus rising from the waves,” the doctor said.

  “Not at all,” said Luke, finding his voice, “it’s Saint Francis curing the lepers.”

  “No, no,” Eleanor said. “One of them is a dragon.”

  “It’s none of that,” said Theodora roundly; “it’s a family portrait, you sillies. Composite. Anyone would know it at once; that figure in the center, that tall, undraped—good heavens!—masculine one, that’s old Hugh, patting himself on the back because he built Hill House, and his two attendant nymphs are his daughters. The one on the right who seems to be brandishing an ear of corn is actually telling about her lawsuit, and the other one, the little one on the end, is the companion, and the one on the other end—”

  “Is Mrs. Dudley, done from life,” Luke said.

  “And that grass stuff they’re all standing on is really supposed to be the dining-room carpet, grown up a little. Did anyone else notice that dining-room carpet? It looks like a field of hay, and you can feel it tickling your ankles. In back, that kind of overspreading apple-tree kind of thing, that’s—”

  “A symbol of the protection of the house, surely,” Dr. Montague said.

  “I’d hate to think it might fall on us,” Eleanor said. “Since the house is so unbalanced, Doctor, isn’t there some chance of that?”

  “I have read that the statue was carefully, and at great expense, constructed to offset the uncertainty of the floor on which it stands. It was put in, at any rate, when the house was built, and it has not fallen yet. It is possible, you know, that Hugh Crain admired it, even found it lovely.”

  “It is also possible that he used it to scare his children with,” Theodora said. “What a pretty room this would be without it.” She turned, swinging. “A dancing room,” she said, “for ladies in full skirts, and room enough for a full country dance. Hugh Crain, will you take a turn with me?” and she curtsied to the statue.

  “I believe he’s going to accept,” Eleanor said, taking an involuntary step backward.

  “Don’t let him tread on your toes,” the doctor said, and laughed. “Remember what happened to Don Juan.”

  Theodora touched the statue timidly, putting her finger against the outstretched hand of one of the figures. “Marble is always a shock,” she said. “It never feels like you think it’s going to. I suppose a lifesize statue looks enough like a real person to make you expect to feel skin.” Then, turning again, and shimmering in the dim room, she waltzed alone, turning to bow to the statue.

  “At the end of the room,” the doctor said to Eleanor and Luke, “under those draperies, are doors leading onto the veranda; when Theodora is heated from dancing she may step out into the cooler air.” He went the length of the room to pull aside the heavy blue draperies and opened the doors. Again the smell of the warm rain came in, and a burst of wind, so that a little breath seemed to move across the statue, and light touched the colored walls.

  “Nothing in this house moves,” Eleanor said, “until you look away, and then you just catch something from the corner of your eye. Look at the little figurines on the shelves; when we all had our backs turned they were dancing with Theodora.”

  “I move,” Theodora said, circling toward them.

  “Flowers under glass,” Luke said. “Tassels. I am beginning to fancy this house.”

  Theodora pulled at Eleanor’s hair. “Race you around the veranda,” she said and darted for the doors. Eleanor, with no time for hesitation or thought, followed, and they ran out onto the veranda. Eleanor, running and laughing, came around a curve of the veranda to find Theodora going in another door, and stopped, breathless. They had come to the kitchen, and Mrs. Dudley, turning away from the sink, watched them silently.

  “Mrs. Dudley,” Theodora said politely, “we’ve been exploring the house.”

  Mrs. Dudley’s eyes moved to the clock on the shelf over the stove. “It is half-past eleven,” she said. “I—”

  “—set lunch on at one,” Theodora said. “We’d like to look over the kitchen, if we may. We’ve seen all the other downstairs rooms, I think.”

  Mrs. Dudley was still for a minute and then, moving her head acquiescently, turned and walked deliberately across the kitchen to a farther doorway. When she opened it they could see the back stairs beyond, and Mrs. Dudley turned and closed the door behind her before she started up. Theodora cocked her head at the doorway and waited a minute before she said, “I wonder if Mrs. Dudley has a soft spot in her heart for me, I really do.”

  “I suppose she’s gone up to hang herself from the turret,” Eleanor said. “Let’s see what’s for lunch while we’re here.”

  “Don’t joggle anything,” Theodora said. “You know perfectly well that the dishes belong on the shelves. Do you think that woman really means to make us a soufflé? Here is certainly a soufflé dish, and eggs and cheese—”

  “It’s a nice kitchen,” Eleanor said. “In my mother’s house the kitchen was dark and narrow, and nothing you cooked there ever had any taste or color.”

  “What about your own kitchen?” Theodora asked absently. “In your little apartment? Eleanor, look at the doors.”

  “I can’t make a soufflé,” Eleanor said.

  “Look, Eleanor. There’s the door onto the veranda, and another that opens onto steps going down—to the cellar, I guess—and another over there going onto the veranda again, and the one she used to go upstairs, and another one over there—”

  “To the veranda again,” Eleanor said, opening it. “Three doors going out onto the veranda from one kitchen.”

  “And the door to the butler’s pantry an
d on into the dining room. Our good Mrs. Dudley likes doors, doesn’t she? She can certainly”—and their eyes met—“get out fast in any direction if she wants to.”

  Eleanor turned abruptly and went back to the veranda. “I wonder if she had Dudley cut extra doors for her. I wonder how she likes working in a kitchen where a door in back of her might open without her knowing it. I wonder, actually, just what Mrs. Dudley is in the habit of meeting in her kitchen so that she wants to make sure that she’ll find a way out no matter which direction she runs. I wonder—”

  “Shut up,” Theodora said amiably. “A nervous cook can’t make a good soufflé, anyone knows that, and she’s probably listening on the stairs. Let us choose one of her doors and leave it open behind us.”

  Luke and the doctor were standing on the veranda, looking out over the lawn; the front door was oddly close, beyond them. Behind the house, seeming almost overhead, the great hills were muted and dull in the rain. Eleanor wandered along the veranda, thinking that she had never before known a house so completely surrounded. Like a very tight belt, she thought; would the house fly apart if the veranda came off? She went what she thought must be the great part of the circle around the house, and then she saw the tower. It rose up before her suddenly, almost without warning, as she came around the curve of the veranda. It was made of gray stone, grotesquely solid, jammed hard against the wooden side of the house, with the insistent veranda holding it there. Hideous, she thought, 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. Halfway up windows began, thin angled slits in the stone, and she wondered what it would be like, looking down from them, and wondered that she had not been able to enter the tower. I will never look down from those windows, she thought, and tried to imagine the narrow iron stairway going up and around inside. High on top was a conical wooden roof, topped by a wooden spire. It must have been laughable in any other house, but here in Hill House it belonged, gleeful and expectant, awaiting perhaps a slight creature creeping out from the little window onto the slanted roof, reaching up to the spire, knotting a rope. . . .