The Haunting of Hill House (14 page)

“First we all explore the house,” Eleanor said, too quickly perhaps, because Theodora turned and looked at her curiously. “I don't want to find myself left behind in an attic or something,” Eleanor added uncomfortably.

“No one wants to leave you behind anywhere,” Theodora said.

“Then
I
suggest,” Luke said, “that we first of all finish off the coffee in the pot, and then go nervously from room to room, endeavoring to discover some rational plan to this house, and leaving doors open as we go. I never thought,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “that I would stand to inherit a house where I had to put up signs to find my way around.”

“We need to find out what to call the rooms,” Theodora said. “Suppose I told you, Luke, that I would meet you clandestinely in the second-best drawing room—how would you ever know where to find me?”

“You could keep whistling till I got there,” Luke offered.

Theodora shuddered. “You would hear me whistling, and calling you, while you wandered from door to door, never opening the right one, and I would be inside, not able to find any way to get out—”

“And nothing to eat,” Eleanor said unkindly.

Theodora looked at her again. “And nothing to eat,” she agreed after a minute. Then, “It's the crazy house at the carnival,” she said. “Rooms opening out of each other and doors going everywhere at once and swinging shut when you come, and I bet that somewhere there are mirrors that make you look all sideways and an air hose to blow up your skirts, and something that comes out of a dark passage and laughs in your face—” She was suddenly quiet and picked up her cup so quickly that her coffee spilled.

“Not as bad as all that,” the doctor said easily. “Actually, the ground floor is laid out in what I might almost call concentric circles of rooms; at the center is the little parlor where we sat last night; around it, roughly, are a series of rooms—the billiard room, for instance, and a dismal little den entirely furnished in rose-colored satin—”

“Where Eleanor and I will go each morning with our needlework.”

“—and surrounding these—I call them the inside rooms because they are the ones with no direct way to the outside; they have no windows, you remember—surrounding these are the ring of outside rooms, the drawing room, the library, the conservatory, the—”

“No,” Theodora said, shaking her head. “I am still lost back in the rose-colored satin.”

“And the veranda goes all around the house. There are doors opening onto the veranda from the drawing room, and the conservatory, and one sitting room. There is also a passage—”

“Stop, stop.” Theodora was laughing, but she shook her head. “It's a filthy,
rotten
house.”

The swinging door in the corner of the dining room opened, and Mrs. Dudley stood, one hand holding the door open, looking without expression at the breakfast table. “I clear off at ten,” Mrs. Dudley said.

“Good morning, Mrs. Dudley,” Luke said.

Mrs. Dudley turned her eyes to him. “I clear off at ten,” she said. “The dishes are supposed to be back on the shelves. I take them out again for lunch. I set out lunch at one, but first the dishes have to be back on the shelves.”

“Of course, Mrs. Dudley.” The doctor rose and put down his napkin. “Everybody ready?” he asked.

Under Mrs. Dudley's eye Theodora deliberately lifted her cup and finished the last of her coffee, then touched her mouth with her napkin and sat back. “Splendid breakfast,” she said conversationally. “Do the dishes belong to the house?”

“They belong on the shelves,” Mrs. Dudley said.

“And the glassware and the silver and the linen? Lovely old things.”

“The linen,” Mrs. Dudley said, “belongs in the linen drawers in the dining room. The silver belongs in the silver chest. The glasses belong on the shelves.”

“We must be quite a bother to you,” Theodora said.

Mrs. Dudley was silent. Finally she said, “I clear up at ten. I set out lunch at one.”

Theodora laughed and rose. “On,” she said, “on, on. Let us go and open doors.”

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.