Eleanor awakened to find the blue room grey and colourless in the morning rain. She found that she had thrown the quilt off during the night and had finished sleeping in her usual manner, with her head on the pillow. It was a surprise to find that she had slept until after eight, and she thought that it was ironic that the first good night’s sleep she had had in years had come to her in Hill House. Lying in the blue bed, looking up into the dim ceiling with its remote carved pattern, she asked herself, half asleep still, What did I do; did I make a fool of myself? Were they laughing at me?

Thinking quickly over the evening before, she could remember only that she had—must have—seemed foolishly, childishly contented, almost happy; had the others been amused to see that she was so simple? I said silly things, she told herself, and of course they noticed. Today I will be more reserved, less openly grateful to all of them for having me.

Then, awakening completely, she shook her head and sighed. You are a very silly baby, Eleanor, she told herself, as she did every morning.

The room came clearly alive around her; she was in the blue room at Hill House, the dimity curtains were moving slightly at the window, and the wild splashing in the bathroom must be Theodora, awake, sure to be dressed and ready first, certain to be hungry. ‘Good morning,’ Eleanor called, and Theodora answering, gasping, ‘Good morning—through in a minute—I’ll leave the tub filled for you—are you starving? Because I am.’ Does she think I wouldn’t bathe unless she left a full tub for me? Eleanor wondered, and then was ashamed; I came here to stop thinking things like that, she told herself sternly and rolled out of bed and went to the window. She looked out across the verandah roof to the wide lawn below, with its bushes and little clumps of trees wound around with mist. Far down at the end of the lawn was the line of trees which marked the path to the creek, although the prospect of a jolly picnic on the grass was not, this morning, so appealing. It was clearly going to be wet all day, but it was a summer rain, deepening the green of the grass and the trees, sweetening and cleaning the air. It’s charming, Eleanor thought, surprised at herself; she wondered if she was the first person ever to find Hill House charming and then thought, chilled, Or do they all think so, the first morning? She shivered, and found herself at the same time unable to account for the excitement she felt, which made it difficult to remember why it was so odd to wake up happy in Hill House.

‘I’ll starve to death.’ Theodora pounded on the bathroom door, and Eleanor snatched at her robe and hurried. ‘Try to look like a stray sunbeam,’ Theodora called out from her room. ‘It’s such a dark day we’ve got to be a little brighter than usual.’

Sing before breakfast you’ll cry before eight, Eleanor told herself, because she had been singing softly, ‘In delay there lies no plenty. . . .’

‘I thought I was the lazy one,’ Theodora said complacently through the door, ‘but you’re much, much worse. Lazy hardly begins to describe you. You must be clean enough now to come and have breakfast.’

‘Mrs Dudley sets out breakfast at nine. What will she think when we show up bright and smiling?’

‘She will sob with disappointment. Did anyone scream for her in the night, do you suppose?’

Eleanor regarded a soapy leg critically. ‘I slept like a log,’ she said.

‘So did I. If you are not ready in three minutes I will come in and drown you. I want my breakfast.’

Eleanor was thinking that it had been a very long time since she had dressed to look like a stray sunbeam, or been so hungry for breakfast, or arisen so aware, so conscious of herself, so deliberate and tender in her attentions; she even brushed her teeth with a niceness she could not remember ever feeling before. It is all the result of a good night’s sleep, she thought; since Mother died I must have been sleeping even more poorly than I realised.

‘Aren’t you ready yet?’

‘Coming, coming,’ Eleanor said, and ran to the door, remembered that it was still locked, and unlocked it softly. Theodora was waiting for her in the hall, vivid in the dullness in gaudy plaid; looking at Theodora, it was not possible for Eleanor to believe that she ever dressed or washed or moved or ate or slept or talked without enjoying every minute of what she was doing; perhaps Theodora never cared at all what other people thought of her.

‘Do you realise that we may be another hour or so just finding the dining-room?’ Theodora said. ‘But maybe they have left us a map—did you know that Luke and the doctor have been up for hours? I was talking to them from the window.’

They have started without me, Eleanor thought; tomorrow I will wake up earlier and be there to talk from the window too. They came to the foot of the stairs, and Theodora crossed the great dark hall and put her hand confidently to a door. ‘Here,’ she said, but the door opened into a dim, echoing room neither of them had seen before. ‘Here,’ Eleanor said, but the door she chose led on to the narrow passage to the little parlour where last night they had sat before a fire.

‘It’s across the hall from that,’ Theodora said, and turned, baffled. ‘Damn it,’ she said, and put her head back and shouted. ‘Luke? Doctor?’

Distantly they heard an answering shout, and Theodora moved to open another door. ‘If they think,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘that they are going to keep me for ever in this filthy hall, trying one door after another to get to my breakfast——’

‘That’s the right one, I think,’ Eleanor said, ‘with the dark room to go through, and then the dining-room beyond.’

Theodora shouted again, blundered against some light piece of furniture, cursed, and then the door beyond was opened and the doctor said, ‘Good morning.’

‘Foul, filthy house,’ Theodora said, rubbing her knee. ‘Good morning.’

‘You will never believe this now, of course,’ the doctor said, ‘but three minutes ago these doors were wide open. We left them open so you could find your way. We sat here and watched them swing shut just before you called. Well. Good morning.’

‘Kippers,’ Luke said from the table. ‘Good morning. I hope you ladies are the kipper kind.’

They had come through the darkness of one night, they had met morning in Hill House, and they were a family, greeting one another with easy informality and going to the chairs they had used last night at dinner, their own places at the table.

‘A fine big breakfast is what Mrs Dudley certainly agreed to set out at nine,’ Luke said, waving a fork. ‘We had begun to wonder if you were the coffee-and-a-roll-in-bed types.’

‘We would have been here much sooner in any other house,’ Theodora said.

‘Did you really leave all the doors open for us?’ Eleanor asked.

‘That’s how we knew you were coming,’ Luke told her. ‘We saw the doors swing shut.’

‘Today we will nail all the doors open,’ Theodora said. ‘I am going to pace this house until I can find food ten times out of ten. I slept with my light on all night,’ she confided to the doctor, ‘but nothing happened at all.’

‘It was all very quiet,’ the doctor said.

‘Did you watch over us all night?’ Eleanor asked.

‘Until about three, when Pamela finally put me to sleep. There wasn’t a sound until the rain started some time after two. One of you ladies called out in her sleep once——’

‘That must have been me,’ Theodora said shamelessly. ‘Dreaming about the wicked sister at the gates of Hill House.’

‘I dreamed about her too,’ Eleanor said. She looked at the doctor and said suddenly, ‘It’s embarrassing. To think about being afraid, I mean.’

‘We’re all in it together, you know,’ Theodora said.

‘It’s worse if you try not to show it,’ the doctor said.

‘Stuff yourself very full of kippers,’ Luke said. ‘Then it will be impossible to feel anything at all.’

Eleanor felt, as she had the day before, that the conversation was being skilfully guided away from the thought of fear, so very present in her own mind. Perhaps she was to be allowed to speak occasionally for all of them so that, quieting her, they quieted themselves and could leave the subject behind them; perhaps, vehicle for every kind of fear, she contained enough for all. They are like children, she thought crossly, daring each other to go first, ready to turn and call names at whoever comes last; she pushed her plate away from her and sighed.

‘Before I go to sleep tonight,’ Theodora was saying to the doctor, ‘I want to be sure that I have seen every inch of this house. No more lying there wondering what is over my head or under me. And we have to open some windows and keep the doors open and stop feeling our way around.’

‘Little signs,’ Luke suggested. ‘Arrows pointing, reading THIS WAY OUT.’

‘Or DEAD END,’ Eleanor said.

‘Or WATCH OUT FOR FALLING FURNITURE,’ Theodora said. ‘We’ll make them,’ she said to Luke.

‘First we all explore the house,’ Eleanor said, too quickly perhaps, because Theodora turned and looked at her curiously. ‘I don’t want to find myself left behind in an attic or something,’ Eleanor added uncomfortably.

‘No one wants to leave you behind anywhere,’ Theodora said.

‘Then I suggest,’ Luke said, ‘that we first of all finish off the coffee in the pot, and then go nervously from room to room, endeavouring to discover some rational plan to this house, and leaving doors open as we go. I never thought,’ he said, shaking his head sadly, ‘that I would stand to inherit a house where I had to put up signs to find my way around.’

‘We need to find out what to call the rooms,’ Theodora said. ‘Suppose I told you, Luke, that I would meet you clandestinely in the second-best drawing-room—how would you ever know where to find me?’

‘You could keep whistling till I got there,’ Luke offered.

Theodora shuddered. ‘You would hear me whistling, and calling you, while you wandered from door to door, never opening the right one, and I would be inside, not able to find any way to get out——’

‘And nothing to eat,’ Eleanor said unkindly.

Theodora looked at her again. ‘And nothing to eat,’ she agreed after a minute. Then, ‘It’s the crazy house at the carnival,’ she said. ‘Rooms opening out of each other and doors going everywhere at once and swinging shut when you come, and I bet that somewhere there are mirrors that make you look all sideways and an air hose to blow up your skirts, and something that comes out of a dark passage and laughs in your face——’ She was suddenly quiet and picked up her cup so quickly that her coffee spilled.

‘Not as bad as all that,’ the doctor said easily. ‘Actually, the ground floor is laid out in what I might almost call concentric circles of rooms; at the centre is the little parlour where we sat last night; around it, roughly, are a series of rooms—the billiard room, for instance, and a dismal little den entirely furnished in rose-coloured satin——’

‘Where Eleanor and I will go each morning with our needlework.’

‘—and surrounding these—I call them the inside rooms because they are the ones with no direct way to the outside; they have no windows, you remember—surrounding these are the ring of outside rooms, the drawing-room, the library, the conservatory, the——’

‘No,’ Theodora said, shaking her head. ‘I am still lost back in the rose-coloured satin.’

‘And the verandah goes all around the house. There are doors opening on to the verandah from the drawing-room, and the conservatory, and one sitting-room. There is also a passage——’

‘Stop, stop.’ Theodora was laughing, but she shook her head. ‘It’s a filthy, rotten house.’

The swinging door in the corner of the dining-room opened, and Mrs Dudley stood, one hand holding the door open, looking without expression at the breakfast table. ‘I clear off at ten,’ Mrs Dudley said.

‘Good morning, Mrs Dudley,’ Luke said.

Mrs Dudley turned her eyes to him. ‘I clear off at ten,’ she said. ‘The dishes are supposed to be back on the shelves. I take them out again for lunch. I set out lunch at one, but first the dishes have to be back on the shelves.’

‘Of course, Mrs Dudley.’ The doctor rose and put down his napkin. ‘Everybody ready?’ he asked.

Under Mrs Dudley’s eye Theodora deliberately lifted her cup and finished the last of her coffee, then touched her mouth with her napkin and sat back. ‘Splendid breakfast,’ she said conversationally. ‘Do the dishes belong to the house?’

‘They belong on the shelves,’ Mrs Dudley said.

‘And the glassware and the silver and the linen? Lovely old things.’

‘The linen,’ Mrs Dudley said, ‘belongs in the linen drawers in the dining-room. The silver belongs in the silver chest. The glasses belong on the shelves.’

‘We must be quite a bother to you,’ Theodora said.

Mrs Dudley was silent. Finally she said, ‘I clear up at ten. I set out lunch at one.’

Theodora laughed and rose. ‘On,’ she said, ‘on, on. Let us go and open doors.’

They began reasonably enough with the dining-room door, which they propped open with a heavy chair. The room beyond was the game room; the table against which Theodora had stumbled was a low inlaid chess table (‘Now, I could not have overlooked that last night,’ the doctor said irritably), and at one end of the room were card tables and chairs, and a tall cabinet where the chessmen had been, with croquet balls and the cribbage board.

‘Jolly spot to spend a carefree hour,’ Luke said, standing in the doorway regarding the bleak room. The cold greens of the table tops were reflected unhappily in the dark tiles around the fireplace; the inevitable wood panelling was, here, not at all enlivened by a series of sporting prints which seemed entirely devoted to various methods of doing wild animals to death, and over the mantel a deerhead looked down upon them in patent embarrassment.

‘This is where they came to enjoy themselves,’ Theodora said, and her voice echoed shakily from the high ceiling. ‘They came here,’ she explained, ‘to relax from the oppressive atmosphere of the rest of the house.’ The deerhead looked down on her mournfully. ‘Those two little girls,’ she said. ‘Can we please take down that beast up there?’

‘I think it’s taken a fancy to you,’ Luke said. ‘It’s never taken its eyes off you since you came in. Let’s get out of here.’

They propped the door open as they left, and came out into the hall, which shone dully under the light from the open rooms. ‘When we find a room with a window,’ the doctor remarked, ‘we will open it; until then, let us be content with opening the front door.’

‘You keep thinking of the little children,’ Eleanor said to Theodora, ‘but I can’t forget that lonely little companion, walking around these rooms, wondering who else was in the house.’

Luke tugged the great front door open and wheeled the big vase to hold it; ‘Fresh air,’ he said thankfully. The warm smell of rain and wet grass swept into the hall, and for a minute they stood in the open doorway, breathing air from outside Hill House. Then the doctor said, ‘Now here is something none of you anticipated,’ and he opened a small door tucked in beside the tall front door and stood back, smiling. ‘The library,’ he said. ‘In the tower.’

‘I can’t go in there,’ Eleanor said, surprising herself, but she could not. She backed away, overwhelmed with the cold air of mould and earth which rushed at her. ‘My mother——’ she said, not knowing what she wanted to tell them, and pressed herself against the wall.

‘Indeed?’ said the doctor, regarding her with interest. ‘Theodora?’ Theodora shrugged and stepped into the library; Eleanor shivered. ‘Luke?’ said the doctor, but Luke was already inside. From where she stood Eleanor could see only a part of the circular wall of the library, with a narrow iron staircase going up and perhaps, since it was the tower, up and up and up; Eleanor shut her eyes, hearing the doctor’s voice distantly, hollow against the stone of the library walls.

‘Can you see the little trapdoor up there in the shadows?’ he was asking. ‘It leads out on to a little balcony, and of course that’s where she is commonly supposed to have hanged herself—the girl, you remember. A most suitable spot, certainly; more suitable for suicides, I would think, than for books. She is supposed to have tied the rope on to the iron railing and then just stepped——’

‘Thanks,’ Theodora said from within. ‘I can visualise it perfectly, thank you. For myself, I would probably have anchored the rope on to the deerhead in the game room, but I suppose she had some sentimental attachment to the tower; what a nice word “attachment” is in that context, don’t you think?’

‘Delicious.’ It was Luke’s voice, louder; they were coming out of the library and back to the hall where Eleanor waited. ‘I think that I will make this room into a night club. I will put the orchestra up there on the balcony, and dancing girls will come down that winding iron staircase; the bar——’

‘Eleanor,’ Theodora said, ‘are you all right now? It’s a perfectly awful room, and you were right to stay out of it.’

Eleanor stood away from the wall; her hands were cold and she wanted to cry, but she turned her back to the library door, which the doctor propped open with a stack of books. ‘I don’t think I’ll do much reading while I’m here,’ she said, trying to speak lightly. ‘Not if the books smell like the library.’

‘I hadn’t noticed a smell,’ the doctor said. He looked inquiringly at Luke, who shook his head. ‘Odd,’ the doctor went on, ‘and just the kind of thing we’re looking for. Make a note of it, my dear, and try to describe it exactly.’

Theodora was puzzled. She stood in the hallway, turning, looking behind her at the staircase and then around again at the front door. ‘Are there two front doors?’ she asked. ‘Am I just mixed up?’

The doctor smiled happily; he had clearly been hoping for some such question. ‘This is the only front door,’ he said. ‘It is the one you came in yesterday.’

Theodora frowned. ‘Then why can’t Eleanor and I see the tower from our bedroom windows? Our rooms look out over the front of the house, and yet——’

The doctor laughed and clapped his hands. ‘At last,’ he said. ‘Clever Theodora. This is why I wanted you to see the house by day. Come, sit on the stairs while I tell you.’

Obediently they settled on the stairs, looking up at the doctor, who took on his lecturing stance and began formally, ‘One of the peculiar traits of Hill House is its design——’

‘Crazy house at the carnival.’

‘Precisely. Have you not wondered at our extreme difficulty in finding our way around? An ordinary house would not have had the four of us in such confusion for so long, and yet time after time we choose the wrong doors, the room we want eludes us. Even I have had my troubles.’ He sighed and nodded. ‘I dare say,’ he went on, ‘that old Hugh Crain expected that some day Hill House might become a showplace, like the Winchester House in California or the many octagon houses; he designed Hill House himself, remember, and, I have told you before, he was a strange man. Every angle’—and the doctor gestured towards the doorway—‘every angle is slightly wrong. Hugh Crain must have detested other people and their sensible squared-away houses, because he made his house to suit his mind. Angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another. I am sure, for instance, that you believe that the stairs you are sitting on are level, because you are not prepared for stairs which are not level——’

They moved uneasily, and Theodora put out a quick hand to take hold of the balustrade, as though she felt she might be falling.

‘—are actually on a very slight slant towards the central shaft; the doorways are all a very little bit off centre—that may be, by the way, the reason the doors swing shut unless they are held; I wondered this morning whether the approaching footsteps of you two ladies upset the delicate balance of the doors. Of course the result of all these tiny aberrations of measurement adds up to a fairly large distortion in the house as a whole. Theodora cannot see the tower from her bedroom window because the tower actually stands at the corner of the house. From Theodora’s bedroom window it is completely invisible, although from here it seems to be directly outside her room. The window of Theodora’s room is actually fifteen feet to the left of where we are now.’

Theodora spread her hands helplessly. ‘Golly,’ she said.

‘I see,’ Eleanor said. ‘The verandah roof is what misleads us. I can look out my window and see the verandah roof and because I came directly into the house and up the stairs I assumed that the front door was right below, although really——’

‘You see only the verandah roof,’ the doctor said. ‘The front door is far away; it and the tower are visible from the nursery, which is the big room at the end of the hallway; we will see it later today. It is’—and his voice was saddened—‘a masterpiece of architectural misdirection. The double stairway at Chambord——’

‘Then everything is a little bit off centre?’ Theodora asked uncertainly. ‘That’s why it all feels so disjointed?’

‘What happens when you go back to a real house?’ Eleanor asked. ‘I mean—a—well—a real house?’

‘It must be like coming off shipboard,’ Luke said. ‘After being here for a while your sense of balance could be so distorted that it would take you a while to lose your sea legs, or your Hill House legs. Could it be,’ he asked the doctor, ‘that what people have been assuming were supernatural manifestations were really only the result of a slight loss of balance in the people who live here? The inner ear,’ he told Theodora wisely.

‘It must certainly affect people in some way,’ the doctor said. ‘We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.’ He turned away. ‘We have marvels still before us,’ he said, and they came down from the stairway and followed him, walking gingerly, testing the floors as they moved. They went down the narrow passage to the little parlour where they had sat the night before, and from there, leaving doors propped open behind them, they moved into the outer circle of rooms, which looked out on to the verandah. They pulled heavy draperies away from windows and the light from outside came into Hill House. They passed through a music room where a harp stood sternly apart from them, with never a jangle of strings to mark their footfalls. A grand piano stood tightly shut, with a candelabra above, no candle ever touched by flame. A marble-topped table held wax flowers under glass, and the chairs were twig-thin and gilded. Beyond this was the conservatory, with tall glass doors showing them the rain outside, and ferns growing damply around and over wicker furniture. Here it was uncomfortably moist, and they left it quickly, to come through an arched doorway into the drawing-room and stand, aghast and incredulous.

‘It’s not there,’ Theodora said, weak and laughing. ‘I don’t believe it’s there.’ She shook her head. ‘Eleanor, do you see it too?’

‘How . . . ?’ Eleanor said helplessly.

‘I thought you would be pleased.’ The doctor was complacent.

One entire end of the drawing-room was in possession of a marble statuary piece; against the mauve stripes and flowered carpet it was huge and grotesque and somehow whitely naked; Eleanor put her hands over her eyes, and Theodora clung to her. ‘I thought it might be intended for Venus rising from the waves,’ the doctor said.

‘Not at all,’ said Luke, finding his voice, ‘it’s Saint Francis curing the lepers.’

‘No, no,’ Eleanor said. ‘One of them is a dragon.’

‘It’s none of that,’ said Theodora roundly; ‘it’s a family portrait, you sillies. Composite. Anyone would know it at once; that figure in the centre, that tall, undraped—good heavens!—masculine one, that’s old Hugh, patting himself on the back because he built Hill House, and his two attendant nymphs are his daughters. The one on the right who seems to be brandishing an ear of corn is actually telling about her lawsuit, and the other one, the little one on the end, is the companion, and the one on the other end——’

‘Is Mrs Dudley, done from life,’ Luke said.

‘And that grass stuff they’re all standing on is really supposed to be the dining-room carpet, grown up a little. Did anyone else notice that dining-room carpet? It looks like a field of hay, and you can feel it tickling your ankles. In the background, that kind of overspreading apple-tree kind of thing, that’s——’

‘A symbol of the protection of the house, surely,’ Dr Montague said.

I’d hate to think it might fall on us,’ Eleanor said. ‘Since the house is so unbalanced, Doctor, isn’t there some chance of that?’

‘I have read that the statue was carefully, and at great expense, constructed to offset the uncertainty of the floor on which it stands. It was put in, at any rate, when the house was built, and it has not fallen yet. It is possible, you know, that Hugh Crain admired it, even found it lovely.’

It is also possible that he used it to scare his children with,’ Theodora said. ‘What a pretty room this would be without it.’ She turned, swinging. ‘A dancing room,’ she said, ‘for ladies in full skirts, and room enough for a full country dance. Hugh Crain, will you take a turn with me?’ and she curtsied to the statue.

‘I believe he’s going to accept,’ Eleanor said, taking an involuntary step backward.

‘Don’t let him tread on your toes,’ the doctor said, and laughed. ‘Remember what happened to Don Juan.’

Theodora touched the statue timidly, putting her finger against the outstretched hand of one of the figures. ‘Marble is always a shock,’ she said. ‘It never feels like you think it’s going to. I suppose a lifesize statue looks enough like a real person to make you expect to feel skin.’ Then, turning again, and shimmering in the dim room, she waltzed alone, turning to bow to the statue.

‘At the end of the room,’ the doctor said to Eleanor and Luke, ‘under those draperies, are doors leading on to the verandah; when Theodora is heated from dancing she may step into the cooler air.’ He went the length of the room to pull aside the heavy blue draperies and opened the doors. Again the smell of the warm rain came in, and a burst of wind, so that a little breath seemed to move across the statue, and light touched the coloured walls.

‘Nothing in this house moves,’ Eleanor said, ‘until you look away, and then you just catch something from the corner of your eye. Look at the little figurines on the shelves; when we all had our backs turned they were dancing with Theodora.’

‘I move,’ Theodora said, circling towards them.

‘Flowers under glass,’ Luke said. ‘Tassels. I am beginning to fancy this house.’

Theodora pulled at Eleanor’s hair. ‘Race you around the verandah,’ she said and darted for the doors. Eleanor, with no time for hesitation or thought, followed, and they ran out on to the verandah. Eleanor, running and laughing, came around a curve of the verandah to find Theodora going in through another door, and stopped, breathless. They had come to the kitchen, and Mrs Dudley, turning away from the sink, watched them silently.

‘Mrs Dudley,’ Theodora said politely, ‘we’ve been exploring the house.’

Mrs Dudley’s eyes moved to the clock on the shelf over the stove. ‘It is half-past eleven,’ she said. ‘I——’

‘—set lunch on at one,’ Theodora said. ‘We’d like to look over the kitchen, if we may. We’ve seen all the other downstairs rooms, I think.’

Mrs Dudley was still for a minute and then, moving her head acquiescently, turned and walked deliberately across the kitchen to a farther doorway. When she opened it they could see the back stairs beyond, and Mrs Dudley turned and closed the door behind her before she started up. Theodora cocked her head at the doorway and waited a minute before she said, ‘I wonder if Mrs Dudley has a soft spot in her heart for me, I really do.’

‘I suppose she’s gone up to hang herself from the turret,’ Eleanor said. ‘Let’s see what’s for lunch while we’re here.’

‘Don’t joggle anything,’ Theodora said. ‘You know perfectly well that the dishes belong on the shelves. Do you think that woman really means to make us a soufflé? Here is certainly a soufflé dish, and eggs and cheese——’

‘It’s a nice kitchen,’ Eleanor said. ‘In my mother’s house the kitchen was dark and narrow, and nothing you cooked there ever had any taste or colour.’

‘What about your own kitchen?’ Theodora asked absently. ‘In your little apartment? Eleanor, look at the doors.’

‘I can’t make a soufflé,’ Eleanor said.

‘Look, Eleanor. There’s the door on to the verandah, and another that opens on to steps going down;—to the cellar, I guess—and another over there going on to the verandah again, and the one she used to go upstairs, and another one over there——’

‘To the verandah again,’ Eleanor said, opening it. ‘Three doors going out on to the verandah from one kitchen.’

‘And the door to the butler’s pantry and on into the dining-room. Our good Mrs Dudley likes doors, doesn’t she? She can certainly’—and their eyes met—‘get out fast in any direction if she wants to.’

Eleanor turned abruptly and went back to the verandah. ‘I wonder if she had Dudley cut extra doors for her. I wonder how she likes working in a kitchen where a door behind her might open without her knowing it. I wonder, actually, just what Mrs Dudley is in the habit of meeting in her kitchen so that she wants to make sure that she’ll find a way out no matter which direction she runs. I wonder——’

‘Shut up,’ Theodora said amiably. ‘A nervous cook can’t make a good soufflé, anyone knows that, and she’s probably listening on the stairs. Let us choose one of her doors and leave it open behind us.’

Luke and the doctor were standing on the verandah, looking out over the lawn; the front door was oddly close, beyond them. Behind the house, seeming almost overhead, the great hills were muted and dull in the rain. Eleanor wandered along the verandah, thinking that she had never before known a house so completely surrounded. Like a very tight belt, she thought; would the house fly apart if the verandah came off? She went what she thought must be the greater part of the circle around the house, and then she saw the tower. It rose up before her suddenly, almost without warning, as she came around the curve of the verandah. It was made of grey stone, grotesquely solid, jammed hard against the wooden side of the house, with the insistent verandah holding it there. Hideous, she thought, and then thought that if the house burned away some day the tower would still stand, grey and forbidding over the ruins, warning people away from what was left of Hill House, with perhaps a stone fallen here and there, so owls and bats might fly in and out and nest among the books below. Half-way up windows began, thin angled slits in the stone, and she wondered what it would be like, looking down from them, and wondered that she had not been able to enter the tower. I will never look down from those windows, she thought, and tried to imagine the narrow iron stairway going up and around inside. High on top was a conical wooden roof, topped by a wooden spire. It must have been laughable in any other house, but here in Hill House it belonged, gleeful and expectant, awaiting perhaps a slight creature creeping out from the little window on to the slanted roof, reaching up to the spire, knotting a rope. . . .

‘You’ll fall,’ Luke said, and Eleanor gasped; she brought her eyes down with an effort and found that she was gripping the verandah rail tightly and leaning far backward. ‘Don’t trust your balance in my charming Hill House,’ Luke said, and Eleanor breathed deeply, dizzy, and staggered. He caught her and held her while she tried to steady herself in the rocking world where the trees and the lawn seemed somehow tilted sideways and the sky turned and swung.

‘Eleanor?’ Theodora said near by, and she heard the sound of the doctor’s feet running along the verandah. ‘This damnable house,’ Luke said. ‘You have to watch it every minute.’

‘Eleanor?’ said the doctor.

‘I’m all right,’ Eleanor said, shaking her head and standing unsteadily by herself. ‘I was leaning back to see the top of the tower and I got dizzy.’

‘She was standing almost sideways when I caught her,’ Luke said.

‘I’ve had that feeling once or twice this morning,’ Theodora said, ‘as though I was walking up the wall.’

‘Bring her back inside,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s not so bad when you’re inside the house.’

‘I’m really all right,’ Eleanor said, very much embarrassed, and she walked with deliberate steps along the verandah to the front door, which was closed. ‘I thought we left it open,’ she said with a little shake in her voice, and the doctor came past her and pushed the heavy door open again. Inside, the hall had returned to itself; all the doors they had left open were neatly closed. When the doctor opened the door into the game room they could see beyond him that the doors to the dining-room were closed, and the little stool they had used to prop one door open was neatly back in its place against the wall. In the boudoir and the drawing-room, the parlour and the conservatory, the doors and windows were closed, the draperies pulled together, and the darkness back again.

‘It’s Mrs Dudley,’ Theodora said, trailing after the doctor and Luke, who moved quickly from one room to the next, pushing doors wide open again and propping them, sweeping drapes away from windows and letting in the warm, wet air. ‘Mrs Dudley did it yesterday, as soon as Eleanor and I were out of the way, because she’d rather shut them herself than come along and find them shut by themselves because the doors belong shut and the windows belong shut and the dishes belong——’ She began to laugh foolishly, and the doctor turned and frowned at her with irritation.

‘Mrs Dudley had better learn her place,’ he said. ‘I will nail these doors open if I have to.’ He turned down the passageway to their little parlour and sent the door swinging open with a crash. ‘Losing my temper will not help,’ he said, and gave the door a vicious kick.

‘Sherry in the parlour before lunch,’ Luke said amiably. ‘Ladies, enter.’

‘Mrs Dudley,’ the doctor said, putting down his fork, ‘an admirable soufflé.’

Mrs Dudley turned to regard him briefly and went into the kitchen with an empty dish.

The doctor sighed and moved his shoulders tiredly. ‘After my vigil last night, I feel the need for a rest this afternoon, and you,’ he said to Eleanor, ‘would do well to lie down for an hour. Perhaps a regular afternoon rest might be more comfortable for all of us.’

‘I see,’ said Theodora, amused. ‘I must take an afternoon nap. It may look funny when I go home again, but I can always tell them that it was part of my schedule at Hill House.’

‘Perhaps we will have trouble sleeping at night,’ the doctor said, and a little chill went around the table, darkening the light of the silver and the bright colours of the china, a little cloud that drifted through the dining-room and brought Mrs Dudley after it.

‘It’s five minutes to two,’ Mrs Dudley said.

Eleanor did not sleep during the afternoon, although she would have liked to; instead, she lay on Theodora’s bed in the green room and watched Theodora do her nails, chatting lazily, unwilling to let herself perceive that she had followed Theodora into the green room because she had not dared to be alone.

‘I love decorating myself,’ Theodora said, regarding her hand affectionately. ‘I’d like to paint myself all over.’

Eleanor moved comfortably. ‘Gold paint,’ she suggested, hardly thinking. With her eyes almost closed she could see Theodora only as a mass of colour sitting on the floor.

‘Nail polish and perfume and bath salts,’ Theodora said, as one telling the cities of the Nile. ‘Mascara. You don’t think half enough of such things, Eleanor.’

Eleanor laughed and closed her eyes altogether. ‘No time,’ she said.

‘Well,’ Theodora said with determination, ‘by the time I’m through with you, you will be a different person; I dislike being with women of no colour.’ She laughed to show that she was teasing, and then went on, ‘I think I will put red polish on your toes.’

Eleanor laughed too and held out her bare foot. After a minute, nearly asleep, she felt the odd cold little touch of the brush on her toes, and shivered.

‘Surely a famous courtesan like yourself is accustomed to the ministrations of handmaidens,’ Theodora said. ‘Your feet are dirty.’

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 toe-nails 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 and 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 some day, 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 staunchly. ‘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 draught across that doorway?’

‘A draught? 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 grey 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 draught,’ 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 for ever in distorted laughter, met and locked at the point of the hall where the vicious cold centred. ‘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 realised all at once how much darker it had become, and Theodora said restlessly, ‘Let’s get downstairs to our parlour; 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 parlour. 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 realise 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 parlour 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 parlour 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 ear-ring 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 while 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 defence, 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.’

‘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 door-knob; 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 door-frame, small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door, trying to sneak a way in. The door-knob 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 door-frame 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 at the 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?’