The Haunting of Hill House, Page 5

  Since the gate was so clearly locked—locked and double-locked and chained and barred; who, she wondered, wants so badly to get in?—she made no attempt to get out of her car, but pressed the horn, and the trees and the gate shuddered and withdrew slightly from the sound. After a minute she blew the horn again and then saw a man coming toward her from inside the gate; he was as dark and unwelcoming as the padlock, and before he moved toward the gate he peered through the bars at her, scowling.

  “What you want?” His voice was sharp, mean.

  “I want to come in, please. Please unlock the gate.”

  “Who say?”

  “Why—” She faltered. “I’m supposed to come in,” she said at last.

  “What for?”

  “I am expected.” Or am I? she wondered suddenly; is this as far as I go?

  “Who by?”

  She knew, of course, that he was delighting in exceeding his authority, as though once he moved to unlock the gate he would lose the little temporary superiority he thought he had—and what superiority have I? she wondered; I am outside the gate, after all. She could already see that losing her temper, which she did rarely because she was so afraid of being ineffectual, would only turn him away, leaving her still outside the gate, railing futilely. She could even anticipate his innocence if he were reproved later for this arrogance—the maliciously vacant grin, the wide, blank eyes, the whining voice protesting that he would have let her in, he planned to let her in, but how could he be sure? He had his orders, didn’t he? And he had to do what he was told? He’d be the one to get in trouble, wouldn’t he, if he let in someone who wasn’t supposed to be inside? She could anticipate his shrug, and, picturing him, laughed, perhaps the worst thing she could have done.

  Eying her, he moved back from the gate. “You better come back later,” he said, and turned his back with an air of virtuous triumph.

  “Listen,” she called after him, still trying not to sound angry, “I am one of Doctor Montague’s guests; he will be expecting me in the house—please listen to me!”

  He turned and grinned at her. “They couldn’t rightly be expecting you,” he said, “seeing as you’re the only one’s come, so far.”

  “Do you mean that there’s no one in the house?”

  “No one I know of. Maybe my wife, getting it fixed up. So they couldn’t be there exactly expecting you, now could they?”

  She sat back against the car seat and closed her eyes. Hill House, she thought, you’re as hard to get into as heaven.

  “I suppose you know what you’re asking for, coming here? I suppose they told you, back in the city? You hear anything about this place?”

  “I heard that I was invited here as a guest of Doctor Montague’s. When you open the gates I will go inside.”

  “I’ll open them; I’m going to open them. I just want to be sure you know what’s waiting for you in there. You ever been here before? One of the family, maybe?” He looked at her now, peering through the bars, his jeering face one more barrier, after padlock and chain. “I can’t let you in till I’m sure, can I? What’d you say your name was?”

  She sighed. “Eleanor Vance.”

  “Not one of the family then, I guess. You ever hear anything about this place?”

  It’s my chance, I suppose, she thought; I’m being given a last chance. I could turn my car around right here and now in front of these gates and go away from here, and no one would blame me. Anyone has a right to run away. She put her head out through the car window and said with fury, “My name is Eleanor Vance. I am expected in Hill House. Unlock those gates at once.”

  “All right, all right.” Deliberately, making a wholly unnecessary display of fitting the key and turning it, he opened the padlock and loosened the chain and swung the gates just wide enough for the car to come through. Eleanor moved the car slowly, but the alacrity with which he leaped to the side of the road made her think for a minute that he had perceived the fleeting impulse crossing her mind; she laughed, and then stopped the car because he was coming toward her—safely, from the side.

  “You won’t like it,” he said. “You’ll be sorry I ever opened that gate.”

  “Out of the way, please,” she said. “You’ve held me up long enough.”

  “You think they could get anyone else to open this gate? You think anyone else’d stay around here that long, except me and my wife? You think we can’t have things just about the way we want them, long as we stay around here and fix up the house and open the gates for all you city people think you know everything?”

  “Please get away from my car.” She dared not admit to herself that he frightened her, for fear that he might perceive it; his nearness, leaning against the side of the car, was ugly, and his enormous resentment puzzled her; she had certainly made him open the gate for her, but did he think of the house and gardens inside as his own? A name from Dr. Montague’s letter came into her mind, and she asked curiously, “Are you Dudley, the caretaker?”

  “Yes, I’m Dudley, the caretaker.” He mimicked her. “Who else you think would be around here?”

  The honest old family retainer, she thought, proud and loyal and thoroughly unpleasant. “You and your wife take care of the house all alone?”

  “Who else?” It was his boast, his curse, his refrain.

  She moved restlessly, afraid to draw away from him too obviously, and yet wanting, with small motions of starting the car, to make him stand aside. “I’m sure you’ll be able to make us very comfortable, you and your wife,” she said, putting a tone of finality into her voice. “Meanwhile, I’m very anxious to get to the house as soon as possible.”

  He snickered disagreeably. “Me, now,” he said, “me, I don’t hang around here after dark.”

  Grinning, satisfied with himself, he stood away from the car, and Eleanor was grateful, although awkward starting the car under his eye; perhaps he will keep popping out at me all along the drive, she thought, a sneering Cheshire Cat, yelling each time that I should be happy to find anyone willing to hang around this place, until dark, anyway. To show that she was not at all affected by the thought of the face of Dudley the caretaker between the trees she began to whistle, a little annoyed to find that the same tune still ran through her head. “Present mirth hath present laughter . . .” And she told herself crossly that she must really make an effort to think of something else; she was sure that the rest of the words must be most unsuitable, to hide so stubbornly from her memory, and probably wholly disreputable to be caught singing on her arrival at Hill House.

  Over the trees, occasionally, between them and the hills, she caught glimpses of what must be the roofs, perhaps a tower, of Hill House. They made houses so oddly back when Hill House was built, she thought; they put towers and turrets and buttresses and wooden lace on them, even sometimes Gothic spires and gargoyles; nothing was ever left undecorated. Perhaps Hill House has a tower, or a secret chamber, or even a passageway going off into the hills and probably used by smugglers—although what could smugglers find to smuggle around these lonely hills? Perhaps I will encounter a devilishly handsome smuggler and . . .

  She turned her car onto the last stretch of straight drive leading her directly, face to face, to Hill House and, moving without thought, pressed her foot on the brake to stall the car and sat, staring.

  The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.

  2

  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 juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because 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. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a
dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil. This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

  I should have turned back at the gate, Eleanor thought. The house had caught her with an atavistic turn in the pit of the stomach, and she looked along the lines of its roofs, fruitlessly endeavoring to locate the badness, whatever dwelt there; her hands turned nervously cold so that she fumbled, trying to take out a cigarette, and beyond everything else she was afraid, listening to the sick voice inside her which whispered, Get away from here, get away.

  But this is what I came so far to find, she told herself; I can’t go back. Besides, he would laugh at me if I tried to get back out through that gate.

  Trying not to look up at the house—and she could not even have told its color, or its style, or its size, except that it was enormous and dark, looking down over her—she started the car again, and drove up the last bit of driveway directly to the steps, which led in a forthright, no-escape manner onto the veranda and aimed at the front door. The drive turned off on either side, to encircle the house, and probably later she could take her car around and find a building of some kind to put it in; now she felt uneasily that she did not care to cut off her means of departure too completely. She turned the car just enough to move it off to one side, out of the way of later arrivals—it would be a pity, she thought grimly, for anyone to get a first look at this house with anything so comforting as a human automobile parked in front of it—and got out, taking her suitcase and her coat. Well, she thought inadequately, here I am.

  It was an act of moral strength to lift her foot and set it on the bottom step, and she thought that her deep unwillingness to touch Hill House for the first time came directly from the vivid feeling that it was waiting for her, evil, but patient. Journeys end in lovers meeting, she thought, remembering her song at last, and laughed, standing on the steps of Hill House, journeys end in lovers meeting, and she put her feet down firmly and went up to the veranda and the door. Hill House came around her in a rush; she was enshadowed, and the sound of her feet on the wood of the veranda was an outrage in the utter silence, as though it had been a very long time since feet stamped across the boards of Hill House. She brought her hand up to the heavy iron knocker that had a child’s face, determined to make more noise and yet more, so that Hill House might be very sure she was there, and then the door opened without warning and she was looking at a woman who, if like ever merited like, could only be the wife of the man at the gate.

  “Mrs. Dudley?” she said, catching her breath. “I’m Eleanor Vance. I’m expected.”

  Silently the woman stood aside. Her apron was clean, her hair was neat, and yet she gave an indefinable air of dirtiness, quite in keeping with her husband, and the suspicious sullenness of her face was a match for the malicious petulance of his. No, Eleanor told herself; it’s partly because everything seems so dark around here, and partly because I expected that man’s wife to be ugly. If I hadn’t seen Hill House, would I be so unfair to these people? They only take care of it, after all.

  The hall in which they stood was overfull of dark wood and weighty carving, dim under the heaviness of the staircase, which lay back from the farther end. Above there seemed to be another hallway, going the width of the house; she could see a wide landing and then, across the staircase well, doors closed along the upper hall. On either side of her now were great double doors, carved with fruit and grain and living things; all the doors she could see in this house were closed.

  When she tried to speak, her voice was drowned in the dim stillness, and she had to try again to make a sound. “Can you take me to my room?” she asked at last, gesturing toward her suitcase on the floor and watching the wavering reflection of her hand going down and down into the deep shadows of the polished floor, “I gather I’m the first one here. You—you did say you were Mrs. Dudley?” I think I’m going to cry, she thought, like a child sobbing and wailing, I don’t like it here. . . .

  Mrs. Dudley turned and started up the stairs, and Eleanor took up her suitcase and followed, hurrying after anything else alive in this house. No, she thought, I don’t like it here. Mrs. Dudley came to the top of the stairs and turned right, and Eleanor saw that with some rare perception the builders of the house had given up any attempt at style—probably after realizing what the house was going to be, whether they chose it or not—and had, on this second floor, set in a long, straight hall to accommodate the doors to the bedrooms; she had a quick impression of the builders finishing off the second and third stories of the house with a kind of indecent haste, eager to finish their work without embellishment and get out of there, following the simplest possible pattern for the rooms. At the left end of the hall was a second staircase, probably going from servants’ rooms on the third floor down past the second to the service rooms below; at the right end of the hall another room had been set in, perhaps, since it was on the end, to get the maximum amount of sun and light. Except for a continuation of the dark woodwork, and what looked like a series of poorly executed engravings arranged with unlovely exactness along the hall in either direction, nothing broke the straightness of the hall except the series of doors, all closed.

  Mrs. Dudley crossed the hall and opened a door, perhaps at random. “This is the blue room,” she said.

  From the turn in the staircase Eleanor assumed that the room would be at the front of the house; sister Anne, sister Anne, she thought, and moved gratefully toward the light from the room. “How nice,” she said, standing in the doorway, but only from the sense that she must say something; it was not nice at all, and only barely tolerable; it held enclosed the same clashing disharmony that marked Hill House throughout.

  Mrs. Dudley turned aside to let Eleanor come in, and spoke, apparently to the wall. “I set dinner on the dining-room sideboard at six sharp,” she said. “You can serve yourselves. I clear up in the morning. I have breakfast ready for you at nine. That’s the way I agreed to do. I can’t keep the rooms up the way you’d like, but there’s no one else you could get that would help me. I don’t wait on people. What I agreed to, it doesn’t mean I wait on people.”

  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.

  2

  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 veranda onto 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 realized that while she unpacked she had been in her stocking 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 veranda 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 realized that she was afraid to go back across the room.