Read Online The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson - Free Book Online

You—you did say you were Mrs. Dudley?” I think I’m going to cry, she thought, like a child sobbing and wailing, I don’t like it here . . . .
    Mrs. Dudley turned and started up the stairs, and Eleanor took up her suitcase and followed, hurrying after anything else alive in this house. No, she thought, I don’t like it here. Mrs. Dudley came to the top of the stairs and turned right, and Eleanor saw that with some rare perception the builders of the house had given up any attempt at style—probably after realizing what the house was going to be, whether they chose it or not—and had, on this second floor, set in a long, straight hall to accommodate the doors to the bedrooms; she had a quick impression of the builders finishing off the second and third stories of the house with a kind of indecent haste, eager to finish their work without embellishment and get out of there, following the simplest possible pattern for the rooms. At the left end of the hall was a second staircase, probably going from servants’ rooms on the third floor down past the second to the service rooms below; at the right end of the hall another room had been set in, perhaps, since it was on the end, to get the maximum amount of sun and light. Except for a continuation of the dark woodwork, and what looked like a series of poorly executed engravings arranged with unlovely exactness along the hall in either direction, nothing broke the straightness of the hall except the series of doors, all closed.
    Mrs. Dudley crossed the hall and opened a door, perhaps at random. “This is the blue room,” she said.
    From the turn in the staircase Eleanor assumed that the room would be at the front of the house; sister Anne, sister Anne, she thought, and moved gratefully toward the light from the room. “How nice,” she said, standing in the doorway, but only from the sense that she must say something; it was not nice at all, and only barely tolerable; it held enclosed the same clashing disharmony that marked Hill House throughout.
    Mrs. Dudley turned aside to let Eleanor come in, and spoke, apparently to the wall. “I set dinner on the dining-room sideboard at six sharp,” she said. “You can serve yourselves. I clear up in the morning. I have breakfast ready for you at nine. That’s the way I agreed to do. I can’t keep the rooms up the way you’d like, but there’s no one else you could get that would help me. I don’t wait on people. What I agreed to, it doesn’t mean I wait on people.”
    Eleanor nodded, standing uncertainly in the doorway.
    “I don’t stay after I set out dinner,” Mrs. Dudley went on. “Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.”
    “I know,” Eleanor said.
    “We live over in the town, six miles away.”
    “Yes,” Eleanor said, remembering Hillsdale.
    “So there won’t be anyone around if you need help.”
    “I understand.”
    “We couldn’t even hear you, in the night.”
    “I don’t suppose—”
    “No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.”
    “I know,” Eleanor said tiredly.
    “In the night,” Mrs. Dudley said, and smiled outright. “In the dark,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
    Eleanor almost giggled, thinking of herself calling, “Oh, Mrs. Dudley, I need your help in the dark,” and then she shivered.

2
    She stood alone beside her suitcase, her coat still hanging over her arm, thoroughly miserable, telling herself helplessly, Journeys end in lovers meeting, and wishing she could go home. Behind her lay the dark staircase and the polished hallway and the great front door and Mrs. Dudley and Dudley laughing at the gate and the padlocks and Hillsdale and the cottage of flowers and the family at the inn and the oleander garden and the house with the stone lions in front, and they had brought her, under Dr. Montague’s unerring eye, to the blue room at Hill House. It’s awful, she thought, unwilling to move,