(no subject)
The Harkness house was an ideal place to haunt. It was built about a hundred years ago, when houses were large and roomy, and it was full of fireplaces and chimneys. Later on, the family had installed a central heating system. The huge hot air furnace that occupied half of one end of the musty basement looked like a giant octopus. Hot air ducts radiated from it in every direction. They ran through the floors and walls of the old house to every room, and they were big enough for a man to crawl through. There were false ceilings, hidden cupboards, and old-fashioned laundry chutes that ran all the way from the upstairs halls to the basement. And a dumbwaiter that still worked hung in a shaft that reached from the kitchen all the way up to the third floor bedrooms.
*
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.
* Far away a chiming clock struck out the quarters of the hours, but otherwise a deathly silence lay upon the old house. And then suddenly, in the very dead of the night, there came a sound to my ears, clear, resonant, and unmistakable. It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow. I sat up in bed and listened intently. The noise could not have been far away, and was certainly in the house. For half an hour I waited with every nerve on the alert, but there came no other sound save the chiming clock and the rustle of the ivy on the wall.
*
Jill came back to our place afterwards, last night, and helped to straighten things. Graymalk and I slipped out while they were drinking another sherry and hit it over to the vicarage. The study was illuminated and Tekela was perched on the roof beside the chimney, head beneath her wing.
"Snuff, I'm going after that damned bird," Graymalk said.
"I don't know that it's good form, Gray, doing something like that right now."
"I don't care," she said, and she disappeared.
I waited and watched, for a long while. Suddenly, there was a flurry on the roof. There came a rattle of claws, a burst of feathers, and Tekela took off across the night, cawing obscenities.
Graymalk descended at the corner and returned.
"Nice try," I said.
"No, it wasn't. I was clumsy. She was fast. Damn."
We headed back.
"Maybe you'll give her a few nightmares, anyway."
"That'd be nice," she said.
Growing moon. Angry cat. Feather on the wind. Autumn comes. The grass dies.
*