The Haunting of Hill House (15 page)

“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.
Any
one 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 and 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. . . .

“You'll fall,” Luke said, and Eleanor gasped; she brought her eyes down with an effort and found that she was griping the veranda rail tightly and leaning far backward. “Don't trust your balance in my charming Hill House,” Luke said, and Eleanor breathed deeply, dizzy, and staggered. He caught her and held her while she tried to steady herself in the rocking world where the trees and the lawn seemed somehow tilted sideways and the sky turned and swung.

“Eleanor?” Theodora said nearby, and she heard the sound of the doctor's feet running along the veranda. “This damnable house,” Luke said. “You have to watch it every minute.”

“Eleanor?” said the doctor.

“I'm all right,” Eleanor said, shaking her head and standing unsteadily by herself. “I was leaning back to see the top of the tower and I got dizzy.”

“She was standing almost sideways when I caught her,” Luke said.

“I've had that feeling once or twice this morning,” Theodora said, “as though I was walking up the wall.”

“Bring her back inside,” the doctor said. “It's not so bad when you're
inside
the house.”

“I'm really all right,” Eleanor said, very much embarrassed, and she walked with deliberate steps along the veranda to the front door, which was closed. “I thought we left it open,” she said with a little shake in her voice, and the doctor came past her and pushed the heavy door open again. Inside, the hall had returned to itself; all the doors they had left open were neatly closed. When the doctor opened the door into the game room they could see beyond him that the doors to the dining room were closed, and the little stool they had used to prop one door open was neatly back in place against the wall. In the boudoir and the drawing room, the parlor and the conservatory, the doors and windows were closed, the draperies pulled together, and the darkness back again.

“It's Mrs. Dudley,” Theodora said, trailing after the doctor and Luke, who moved quickly from one room to the next, pushing doors wide open again and propping them, sweeping drapes away from windows and letting in the warm, wet air. “Mrs. Dudley did it yesterday, as soon as Eleanor and I were out of the way, because she'd rather shut them herself than come along and find them shut by themselves because the doors belong shut and the windows belong shut and the dishes belong—” She began to laugh foolishly, and the doctor turned and frowned at her with irritation.

“Mrs. Dudley had better learn her place,” he said. “I will nail these doors open if I have to.” He turned down the passageway to their little parlor and sent the door swinging open with a crash. “Losing my temper will not help,” he said, and gave the door a vicious kick.

“Sherry in the parlor before lunch,” Luke said amiably. “Ladies, enter.”

“Mrs. Dudley,” the doctor said, putting down his fork, “an admirable soufflé.”

Mrs. Dudley turned to regard him briefly and went into the kitchen with an empty dish.

The doctor sighed and moved his shoulders tiredly. “After my vigil last night, I feel the need of a rest this afternoon, and you,” he said to Eleanor, “would do well to lie down for an hour. Perhaps a regular afternoon rest might be more comfortable for all of us.”

“I see,” said Theodora, amused. “I must take an afternoon nap. It may look funny when I go home again, but I can always tell them that it was part of my schedule at Hill House.”

“Perhaps we will have trouble sleeping at night,” the doctor said, and a little chill went around the table, darkening the light of the silver and the bright colors of the china, a little cloud that drifted through the dining room and brought Mrs. Dudley after it.

“It's five minutes of two,” Mrs. Dudley said.

Eleanor did not sleep during the afternoon, although she would have liked to; instead, she lay on Theodora's bed in the green room and watched Theodora do her nails, chatting lazily, unwilling to let herself perceive that she had followed Theodora into the green room because she had not dared to be alone.

“I love decorating myself,” Theodora said, regarding her hand affectionately. “I'd like to paint myself all over.”

Eleanor moved comfortably. “Gold paint,” she suggested, hardly thinking. With her eyes almost closed she could see Theodora only as a mass of color sitting on the floor.

“Nail polish and perfume and bath salts,” Theodora said, as one telling the cities of the Nile. “Mascara. You don't think half enough of such things, Eleanor.”

Eleanor laughed and closed her eyes altogether. “No time,” she said.

“Well,” Theodora said with determination, “by the time I'm through with you, you will be a different person; I dislike being with women of no color.” She laughed to show that she was teasing, and then went on, “I think I will put red polish on your toes.”

Eleanor laughed too and held out her bare foot. After a minute, nearly asleep, she felt the odd cold little touch of the brush on her toes, and shivered.

“Surely a famous courtesan like yourself is accustomed to the ministrations of handmaidens,” Theodora said. “Your feet are dirty.”