The Haunting of Hill House Read Online Free Page A

shoulder, sees something unspeakable (she never describes it) and screams “Run!”
    The scene is extraordinary, in part because whatever Theo sees while looking over her shoulder remains the one significant Hill House manifestation that Eleanor never witnesses. (There is the phantom dog that lures Dr. Montague and Luke out of the house on the night of the first manifestation, but that’s just a decoy.) The two women stand, briefly suspended between a mirage of the familial idyll they have all pined for and whatever monstrous thing has driven them to it. Only Theo dares to look back.
    Later, after Eleanor has been broken by the house, she insists that she will go home with Theodora. She will live near Theo and shop with her every day for the talismans of Eleanor’s fantasy life: gold-rimmed dishes, a white cat, the cup of stars. Theo’s flat rejection of this scenario doesn’t seem to faze Eleanor at all. “Do you always go where you’re not wanted?” Theo asks brutally, eliciting only the mild, self-pitying reply, “I’ve never been wanted anywhere.” No doubt on some level Eleanor never really believes she’ll leave the house with Theo, who is, for better or worse, her only real friend; the whole plan smacks of a last jaunt through the dream world that has comforted Eleanor all her life. She has begun a negotiation with the absolute reality of her own isolation, and the slow process of dissolving into the fabric of Hill House.
    The novel ends with the same lines that open it, closing the circle:
    Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
    There is a moment in the car, the last moment, when Eleanor questions her choice, but it comes too late. If it is Eleanor who now walks in Hill House, then she has arrived at something not too far from her dream of living in the little cottage behind the barricade of poisonous oleander. She walks alone, and that, as Theo would probably point out, is the fate that she most feared and most desired.

Suggestions for Further Reading
    Jackson, Shirley. Come Along With Me . New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
    â€”——. Life Among the Savages . New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
    â€”——. We Have Always Lived in the Castle . New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
    James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction . New York: Bantam Classics, 1981.
    Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson . New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988.

The Haunting of Hill House

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    No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
    Dr. John Montague was a doctor of philosophy; he had taken his degree in anthropology, feeling obscurely that in this field he might come closest to his true vocation, the analysis of supernatural manifestations. He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education. It had cost him a good deal, in money and pride, since he was not a begging man, to rent Hill House for three months, but he expected absolutely to be compensated for his pains by the sensation following upon the publication of his definitive work on the