The Haunting of Hill House (16 page)

Shocked, Eleanor sat up and looked; her feet
were
dirty, and her nails were painted bright red. “It's
horrible,
” she said to Theodora, “it's
wicked,
” wanting to cry. Then, helplessly, she began to laugh at the look on Theodora's face. “I'll go and wash my feet,” she said.

“Golly.” Theodora sat on the floor beside the bed, staring. “Look,” she said. “My feet are dirty, too, baby, honest.
Look
.”

“Anyway,” Eleanor said, “I hate having things done to me.”

“You're about as crazy as anyone
I
ever saw,” Theodora said cheerfully.

“I don't like to feel helpless,” Eleanor said. “My mother—”

“Your mother would have been delighted to see you with your toenails painted red,” Theodora said. “They look nice.”

Eleanor looked at her feet again. “It's wicked,” she said inadequately. “I mean—on
my
feet. It makes me feel like I look like a fool.”

“You've got foolishness and wickedness somehow mixed up.” Theodora began to gather her equipment together. “Anyway, I won't take it off and we'll both watch to see whether Luke and the doctor look at your feet first.”

“No matter what I try to say, you make it sound foolish,” Eleanor said.

“Or wicked.” Theodora looked up at her gravely. “I have a hunch,” she said, “that you ought to go home, Eleanor.”

Is she laughing at me? Eleanor wondered; has she decided that I am not fit to stay? “I don't want to go,” she said, and Theodora looked at her again quickly and then away, and touched Eleanor's toes softly. “The polish is dry,” she said. “I'm an idiot. Just something frightened me for a minute.” She stood up and stretched. “Let's go look for the others,” she said.

Luke leaned himself wearily against the wall of the upstairs hall, his head resting against the gold frame of an engraving of a ruin. “I keep thinking of this house as my own future property,” he said, “more now than I did before; I keep telling myself that it will belong to me someday, and I keep asking myself why.” He gestured at the length of the hall. “If I had a passion for doors,” he said, “or gilded clocks, or miniatures; if I wanted a Turkish corner of my own, I would very likely regard Hill House as a fairyland of beauty.”

“It's a handsome house,” the doctor said stanchly. “It must have been thought of as elegant when it was built.” He started off down the hall, to the large room on the end which had once been the nursery. “Now,” he said, “we shall see the tower from a window”—and shivered as he passed through the door. Then he turned and looked back curiously. “Could there be a draft across that doorway?”

“A draft? In Hill House?” Theodora laughed. “Not unless you could manage to make one of those doors stay open.”

“Come here one at a time, then,” the doctor said, and Theodora moved forward, grimacing as she passed the doorway.

“Like the doorway of a tomb,” she said. “It's warm enough inside, though.”

Luke came, hesitated in the cold spot, and then moved quickly to get out of it, and Eleanor, following, felt with incredulity the piercing cold that struck her between one step and the next; it was like passing through a wall of ice, she thought, and asked the doctor, “What is it?”

The doctor was patting his hands together with delight. “You can keep your Turkish corners, my boy,” he said. He reached out a hand and held it carefully over the location of the cold. “They
cannot
explain this,” he said. “The very essence of the tomb, as Theodora points out. The cold spot in Borley Rectory only dropped eleven degrees,” he went on complacently. “This, I should think, is considerably colder. The heart of the house.”

Theodora and Eleanor had moved to stand closer together; although the nursery was warm, it smelled musty and close, and the cold crossing the doorway was almost tangible, visible as a barrier which must be crossed in order to get out. Beyond the windows the gray stone of the tower pressed close; inside, the room was dark and the line of nursery animals painted along the wall seemed somehow not at all jolly, but as though they were trapped, or related to the dying deer in the sporting prints of the game room. The nursery, larger than the other bedrooms, had an indefinable air of neglect found nowhere else in Hill House, and it crossed Eleanor's mind that even Mrs. Dudley's diligent care might not bring her across that cold barrier any oftener than necessary.

Luke had stepped back across the cold spot and was examining the hall carpet, then the walls, patting at the surfaces as though hoping to discover some cause for the odd cold. “It
couldn't
be a draft,” he said, looking up at the doctor. “Unless they've got a direct air line to the North Pole. Everything's solid, anyway.”

“I wonder who slept in the nursery,” the doctor said irrelevantly. “Do you suppose they shut it up, once the children were gone?”

“Look,” Luke said, pointing. In either corner of the hall, over the nursery doorway, two grinning heads were set; meant, apparently, as gay decorations for the nursery entrance, they were no more jolly or carefree than the animals inside. Their separate stares, captured forever in distorted laughter, met and locked at the point of the hall where the vicious cold centered. “When you stand where they can look at you,” Luke explained, “they freeze you.”

Curiously, the doctor stepped down the hall to join him, looking up. “Don't leave us alone in here,” Theodora said, and ran out of the nursery, pulling Eleanor through the cold, which was like a fast slap, or a close cold breath. “A fine place to chill our beer,” she said, and put out her tongue at the grinning faces.

“I must make a full account of this,” the doctor said happily.

“It doesn't seem like an
impartial
cold,” Eleanor said, awkward because she was not quite sure what she meant. “I felt it as
deliberate,
as though something wanted to give me an unpleasant shock.”

“It's because of the faces, I suppose,” the doctor said; he was on his hands and knees, feeling along the floor. “Measuring tape and thermometer,” he told himself, “chalk for an outline; perhaps the cold intensifies at night? Everything is worse,” he said, looking at Eleanor, “if you think something is looking at you.”

Luke stepped through the cold, with a shiver, and closed the door to the nursery; he came back to the others in the hall with a kind of leap, as though he thought he could escape the cold by not touching the floor. With the nursery door closed they realized all at once how much darker it had become, and Theodora said restlessly, “Let's get downstairs to our parlor; I can feel those hills pushing in.”

“After five,” Luke said. “Cocktail time. I suppose,” he said to the doctor, “you will trust me to mix you a cocktail again tonight?”

“Too much vermouth,” the doctor said, and followed them lingeringly, watching the nursery door over his shoulder.

“I propose,” the doctor said, setting down his napkin, “that we take our coffee in our little parlor. I find that fire very cheerful.”

Theodora giggled. “Mrs. Dudley's gone, so let's race around fast and get all those doors and windows open and take everything down from the shelves—”

“The house seems different when she's not in it,” Eleanor said.

“Emptier.” Luke looked at her and nodded; he was arranging the coffee cups on a tray, and the doctor had already gone on, doggedly opening doors and propping them. “Each night I realize suddenly that we four are alone here.”

“Although Mrs. Dudley's not much good as far as company is concerned; it's funny,” Eleanor said, looking down at the dinner table, “I dislike Mrs. Dudley as much as any of you, but my mother would
never
let me get up and leave a table looking like this until morning.”

“If she wants to leave before dark she has to clear away in the morning,” Theodora said without interest. “
I
'm certainly not going to do it.”

“It's not nice to walk away and leave a dirty table.”

“You couldn't get them back on the right shelves anyway, and she'd have to do it all over again just to get your fingermarks off things.”

“If I just took the silverware and let it soak—”

“No,” Theodora said, catching her hand. “Do you want to go out into that kitchen all alone, with all those doors?”

“No,” Eleanor said, setting down the handful of forks she had gathered. “I guess I don't, really.” She lingered to look uneasily at the table, at the crumpled napkins and the drop of wine spilled by Luke's place, and shook her head. “I don't know what my mother would say, though.”

“Come on,” Theodora said. “They've left lights for us.”

The fire in the little parlor was bright, and Theodora sat down beside the coffee tray while Luke brought brandy from the cupboard where he had carefully set it away the night before. “We must be cheerful at all costs,” he said. “I'll challenge you again tonight, Doctor.”

Before dinner they had ransacked the other downstairs rooms for comfortable chairs and lamps, and now their little parlor was easily the pleasantest room in the house. “Hill House has really been very kind to us,” Theodora said, giving Eleanor her coffee, and Eleanor sat down gratefully in a pillowy, overstuffed chair. “No dirty dishes for Eleanor to wash, a pleasant evening in good company, and perhaps the sun shining again tomorrow.”

“We must plan our picnic,” Eleanor said.

“I am going to get fat and lazy in Hill House,” Theodora went on. Her insistence on naming Hill House troubled Eleanor. It's as though she were saying it deliberately, Eleanor thought, telling the house she knows its name, calling the house to tell it where we are; is it bravado? “Hill House, Hill House, Hill House,” Theodora said softly, and smiled across at Eleanor.

“Tell me,” Luke said politely to Theodora, “since you
are
a princess, tell me about the political situation in your country.”

“Very unsettled,” Theodora said. “I ran away because my father, who is of course the king, insists that I marry Black Michael, who is the pretender to the throne. I, of course, cannot endure the sight of Black Michael, who wears one gold earring and beats his grooms with a riding crop.”

“A most unstable country,” Luke said. “How did you ever manage to get away?”

“I fled in a hay wagon, disguised as a milkmaid. They never thought to look for me there, and I crossed the border with papers I forged myself in a woodcutter's hut.”

“And Black Michael will no doubt take over the country now in a
coup d'état?
”

“Undoubtedly. And he can have it.”

It's like waiting in a dentist's office, Eleanor thought, watching them over her coffee cup; waiting in a dentist's office and listening to other patients make brave jokes across the room, all of you certain to meet the dentist sooner or later. She looked up suddenly, aware of the doctor near her, and smiled uncertainly.

“Nervous?” the doctor asked, and Eleanor nodded.

“Only because I wonder what's going to happen,” she said.

“So do I.” The doctor moved a chair and sat down beside her. “You have the feeling that something—whatever it is—is going to happen soon?”

“Yes. Everything seems to be waiting.”

“And
they
”—the doctor nodded at Theodora and Luke, who were laughing at each other—“
they
meet it in
their
way; I wonder what it will do to all of us. I would have said a month ago that a situation like this would never really come about, that we four would sit here together, in this house.”
He
does not name it, Eleanor noticed. “I've been waiting for a long time,” he said.

“You think we are right to stay?”

“Right?” he said. “I think we are all incredibly silly to stay. I think that an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us, and break us apart in a matter of days. We have only one defense, and that is running away. At least it can't
follow
us, can it? When we feel ourselves endangered we can leave, just as we came. And,” he added dryly, “just as fast as we can go.”

“But we are forewarned,” Eleanor said, “and there are four of us together.”

“I have already mentioned this to Luke and Theodora,” he said. “Promise me absolutely that you will leave, as fast as you can, if you begin to feel the house catching at you.”

“I promise,” Eleanor said, smiling. He is trying to make me feel braver, she thought, and was grateful. “It's all right, though,” she told him. “Really, it's all right.”

“I will feel no hesitation about sending you away,” he said, rising, “if it seems to be necessary. Luke?” he said. “Will the ladies excuse us?”

While they set up the chessboard and men Theodora wandered, cup in hand, around the room, and Eleanor thought, She moves like an animal, nervous and alert; she can't sit still while there is any scent of disturbance in the air; we are all uneasy. “Come and sit by me,” she said, and Theodora came, moving with grace, circling to a resting spot. She sat down in the chair the doctor had left, and leaned her head back tiredly; how lovely she is, Eleanor thought, how thoughtlessly, luckily lovely. “Are you tired?”

Theodora turned her head, smiling. “I can't stand waiting much longer.”

“I was just thinking how relaxed you looked.”

“And
I
was just thinking of—when was it? day before yesterday?—and wondering how I could have brought myself to leave there and come here. Possibly I'm homesick.”