“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.”
“Already?”
“Did you ever think about being homesick? If your home was Hill House would you be homesick for it? Did those two little girls cry for their dark, grim house when they were taken away?”
“I’ve never been away from anywhere,” Eleanor said carefully, “so I suppose I’ve never been homesick.”
“How about now? Your little apartment?”
“Perhaps,” Eleanor said, looking into the fire, “I haven’t had it long enough to believe it’s my own.”
“I want my own bed,” Theodora said, and Eleanor thought, She is sulking again; when she is hungry or tired or bored she turns into a baby. “I’m sleepy,” Theodora said.
“It’s after eleven,” Eleanor said, and as she turned to glance at the chess game the doctor shouted with joyful triumph, and Luke laughed.
“Now, sir,” the doctor said. “Now, sir.”
“Fairly beaten, I admit,” Luke said. He began to gather the chessmen and set them back into their box. “Any reason why I can’t take a drop of brandy upstairs with me? To put myself to sleep, or give myself Dutch courage, or some such reason. Actually”—and he smiled over at Theodora and Eleanor—“I plan to stay up and read for a while.”
“Are you still reading Pamela?” Eleanor asked the doctor.
“Volume two. I have three volumes to go, and then I shall begin Clarissa Harlowe, I think. Perhaps Luke would care to borrow—”
“No, thanks,” Luke said hastily. “I have a suitcase full of mystery stories.”
The doctor turned to look around. “Let me see,” he said, “fire screened, lights out. Leave the doors for Mrs. Dudley to close in the morning.”
Tiredly, following one another, they went up the great stairway, turning out lights behind them. “Has everyone got a flashlight, by the way?” the doctor asked, and they nodded, more intent upon sleep than the waves of darkness which came after them up the stairs of Hill House.
“Good night, everyone,” Eleanor said, opening the door to the blue room.
“Good night,” Luke said.
“Good night,” Theodora said.
“Good night,” the doctor said. “Sleep tight.”
6
“Coming, mother, coming,” Eleanor said, fumbling for the light. “It’s all right, I’m coming.” Eleanor, she heard, Eleanor. “Coming, coming,” she shouted irritably, “just a minute, I’m coming.”
“Eleanor?”
Then she thought, with a crashing shock which brought her awake, cold and shivering, out of bed and awake: I am in Hill House.
“What?” she cried out. “What? Theodora?”
“Eleanor? In here.”
“Coming.” No time for the light; she kicked a table out of the way, wondering at the noise of it, and struggled briefly with the door of the connecting bathroom. That is not the table falling, she thought; my mother is knocking on the wall. It was blessedly light in Theodora’s room, and Theodora was sitting up in bed, her hair tangled from sleep and her eyes wide with the shock of awakening; I must look the same way, Eleanor thought, and said, “I’m here, what is it? ”—and then heard, clearly for the first time, although she had been hearing it ever since she awakened. “What is it?” she whispered.
She sat down slowly on the foot of Theodora’s bed, wondering at what seemed calmness in herself. Now, she thought, now. It is only a noise, and terribly cold, terribly, terribly cold. It is a noise down the hall, far down at the end, near the nursery door, and terribly cold, not my mother knocking on the wall.
“Something is knocking on the doors,” Theodora said in a tone of pure rationality.
“That’s all. And it’s down near the other end of the hall. Luke and the doctor are probably there already, to see what is going on.” Not at all like my mother knocking on the wall; I was dreaming again.
“Bang bang,” Theodora said.
“Bang,” Eleanor said, and giggled. I am calm, she thought, but so very cold; the noise is only a kind of banging on the doors, one after another; is this what I was so afraid about? “Bang” is the best word for it; it sounds like something children do, not mothers knocking against the wall for help, and anyway Luke and the doctor are there; is this what they mean by cold chills going up and down your back? Because it is not pleasant; it starts in your stomach and goes in waves around and up and down again like something alive. Like something alive. Yes. Like something alive.
“Theodora,” she said, and closed her eyes and tightened her teeth together and wrapped her arms around herself, “it’s getting closer.”
“Just a noise,” Theodora said, and moved next to Eleanor and sat tight against her. “It has an echo.”
It sounded, Eleanor thought, like a hollow noise, a hollow bang, as though something were hitting the doors with an iron kettle, or an iron bar, or an iron glove. It pounded regularly for a minute, and then suddenly more softly, and then again in a quick flurry, seeming to be going methodically from door to door at the end of the hall. Distantly she thought she could hear the voices of Luke and the doctor, calling from somewhere below, and she thought, Then they are not up here with us at all, and heard the iron crashing against what must have been a door very close.
“Maybe it will go on down the other side of the hall,” Theodora whispered, and Eleanor thought that the oddest part of this indescribable experience was that Theodora should be having it too. “No,” Theodora said, and they heard the crash against the door across the hall. It was louder, it was deafening, it struck against the door next to them (did it move back and forth across the hall? did it go on feet along the carpet? did it lift a hand to the door?), and Eleanor threw herself away from the bed and ran to hold her hands against the door. “Go away,” she shouted wildly. “Go away, go away!”
There was complete silence, and Eleanor thought, standing with her face against the door, Now I’ve done it; it was looking for the room with someone inside.
The cold crept and pinched at them, filling and overflowing the room. Anyone would have thought that the inhabitants of Hill House slept sweetly in this quiet, and then, so suddenly that Eleanor wheeled around, the sound of Theodora’s teeth chattering, and Eleanor laughed. “You big baby,” she said.
“I’m cold,” Theodora said. “Deadly cold.”
“So am I.” Eleanor took the green quilt and threw it around Theodora, and took up Theodora’s warm dressing gown and put it on. “You warmer now?”
“Where’s Luke? Where’s the doctor?”
“I don’t know. Are you warmer now?”
“No.” Theodora shivered.
“In a minute I’ll go out in the hall and call them; are you—”
It started again, as though it had been listening, waiting to hear their voices and what they said, to identify them, to know how well prepared they were against it, waiting to hear if they were afraid. So suddenly that Eleanor leaped back against the bed and Theodora gasped and cried out, the iron crash came against their door, and both of them lifted their eyes in horror, because the hammering was against the upper edge of the door, higher than either of them could reach, higher than Luke or the doctor could reach, and the sickening, degrading cold came in waves from whatever was outside the door.
Eleanor stood perfectly still and looked at the door. She did not quite know what to do, although she believed that she was thinking coherently and was not unusually frightened, not more frightened, certainly, than she had believed in her worst dreams she could be. The cold troubled her even more than the sounds; even Theodora’s warm robe was useless against the icy little curls of fingers on her back. The intelligent thing to do, perhaps, was to walk over and open the door; that, perhaps, would belong with the doctor’s views of pure scientific inquiry. Eleanor knew that, even if her feet would take her as far as the door, her hand would not lift to the doorknob; impartially, remotely, she told herself that no one’s hand would touch that knob; it’s not the work hands were made for, she told herself. She had been rocking a little, each crash against the door pushing her a little backward, and now she was still because the noise was fading. “I’m going to complain to the janitor about the radiators,” Theodora said from behind her. “Is it stopping?”
“No,” Eleanor said, sick. “No.”
It had found them. Since Eleanor would not open the door, it was going to make its own way in. Eleanor said aloud, “Now I know why people scream, because I think I’m going to,” and Theodora said, “I will if you will,” and laughed, so that Eleanor turned quickly back to the bed and they held each other, listening in silence. Little pattings came from around the doorframe, small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door, trying to sneak a way in. The doorknob was fondled, and Eleanor, whispering, asked, “Is it locked?” and Theodora nodded and then, wide-eyed, turned to stare at the connecting bathroom door. “Mine’s locked too,” Eleanor said against her ear, and Theodora closed her eyes in relief. The little sticky sounds moved on around the doorframe and then, as though a fury caught whatever was outside, the crashing came again, and Eleanor and Theodora saw the wood of the door tremble and shake, and the door move against its hinges.
“You can’t get in,” Eleanor said wildly, and again there was a silence, as though the house listened with attention to her words, understanding, cynically agreeing, content to wait. A thin little giggle came, in a breath of air through the room, a little mad rising laugh, the smallest whisper of a laugh, and Eleanor heard it all up and down her back, a little gloating laugh moving past them around the house, and then she heard the doctor and Luke calling from the stairs and, mercifully, it was over.
When the real silence came, Eleanor breathed shakily and moved stiffly. “We’ve been clutching each other like a couple of lost children,” Theodora said and untwined her arms from around Eleanor’s neck. “You’re wearing my bathrobe.”
“I forgot mine. Is it really over?”
“For tonight, anyway.” Theodora spoke with certainty. “Can’t you tell? Aren’t you warm again?”
The sickening cold was gone, except for a reminiscent little thrill of it down Eleanor’s back when she looked at the door. She began to pull at the tight knot she had put in the bathrobe cord, and said, “Intense cold is one of the symptoms of shock.”
“Intense shock is one of the symptoms I’ve got,” Theodora said. “Here come Luke and the doctor.” Their voices were outside in the hall, speaking quickly, anxiously, and Eleanor dropped Theodora’s robe on the bed and said, “For heaven’s sake, don’t let them knock on that door—one more knock would finish me”—and ran into her own room to get her own robe. Behind her she could hear Theodora telling them to wait a minute, and then going to unlock the door, and then Luke’s voice saying pleasantly to Theodora, “Why, you look as though you’d seen a ghost.”
When Eleanor came back she noticed that both Luke and the doctor were dressed, and it occurred to her that it might be a sound idea from now on; if that intense cold was going to come back at night it was going to find Eleanor sleeping in a wool suit and a heavy sweater, and she didn’t care what Mrs. Dudley was going to say when she found that at least one of the lady guests was lying in one of the clean beds in heavy shoes and wool socks. “Well,” she asked, “how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house?”
“It’s perfectly fine,” Luke said, “perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.” He had the brandy bottle and glasses, and Eleanor thought that they must make a companionable little group, the four of them, sitting around Theodora’s room at four in the morning, drinking brandy. They spoke lightly, quickly, and gave one another fast, hidden, little curious glances, each of them wondering what secret terror had been tapped in the others, what changes might show in face or gesture, what unguarded weakness might have opened the way to ruin.
“Did anything happen in here while we were outside?” the doctor asked.
Eleanor and Theodora looked at each other and laughed, honestly at last, without any edge of hysteria or fear. After a minute Theodora said carefully, “Nothing in particular. Someone knocked on the door with a cannon ball and then tried to get in and eat us, and started laughing its head off when we wouldn’t open the door. But nothing really out of the way.”
Curiously, Eleanor went over and opened the door. “I thought the whole door was going to shatter,” she said, bewildered, “and there isn’t even a scratch on the wood, nor on any of the other doors; they’re perfectly smooth.”
“How nice that it didn’t mar the woodwork,” Theodora said, holding her brandy glass out to Luke. “I couldn’t bear it if this dear old house got hurt.” She grinned at Eleanor. “Nellie here was going to scream.”
“So were you.”
“Not at all; I only said so to keep you company. Besides, Mrs. Dudley already said she wouldn’t come. And where were you, our manly defenders?”
“We were chasing a dog,” Luke said. “At least, some animal like a dog.” He stopped, and then went on reluctantly. “We followed it outside.”
Theodora stared, and Eleanor said, “You mean it was inside?”
“I saw it run past my door,” the doctor said, “just caught a glimpse of it, slipping along. I woke Luke and we followed it down the stairs and out into the garden and lost it somewhere back of the house.”
“The front door was open?”
“No,” Luke said. “The front door was closed. So were all the other doors. We checked.”
“We’ve been wandering around for quite a while,” the doctor said. “We never dreamed that you ladies were awake until we heard your voices.” He spoke gravely. “There is one thing we have not taken into account,” he said.
They looked at him, puzzled, and he explained, checking on his fingers in his lecture style. “First,” he said, “Luke and I were awakened earlier than you ladies, clearly; we have been up and about, outside and in, for better than two hours, led on what you perhaps might allow me to call a wild-goose chase. Second, neither of us”—he glanced inquiringly at Luke as he spoke—“heard any sound up here until your voices began. It was perfectly quiet. That is, the sound which hammered on your door was not audible to us. When we gave up our vigil and decided to come upstairs we apparently drove away whatever was waiting outside your door. Now, as we sit here together, all is quiet.”
“I still don’t see what you mean,” Theodora said, frowning.
“We must take precautions,” he said.
“Against what? How?”
“When Luke and I are called outside, and you two are kept imprisoned inside, doesn’t it begin to seem”—and his voice was very quiet—“doesn’t it begin to seem that the intention is, somehow, to separate us?”