Playwright Holly Sherwin is close to her big break. Having received a grant to develop her new play, all she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. Then on a weekend away, she stumbles upon Hill House - an ornate if crumbling gothic mansion, near-hidden outside a small town.
Soon Holly's troupe of actors - each with ghosts of their own - arrive at Hill House for a creative retreat. But before long they find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself.
For something has been waiting patiently in Hill House all these years. Something no longer content to walk alone.
_______
'Evocative and unsettling, capturing the essence of the original whilst offering something brand new' CARLY REAGON
'A novel dripping in atmosphere and intrigue' JOANNE BURN
'As unnerving and disorienting as Hill House itself' LAURA SHEPPERSON
'A subtle and deeply unnerving ghost story' AMANDA MASON
'Creepy, tragic, and haunting. I tore through its pages' VICTOR LaVALLE
'Not a simple act of ventriloquism but a true marriage of minds' DAN CHAON
Release date:
October 3, 2023
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Print pages:
400
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I left the rental just as the sun poked its head above the nearby mountains, and golden light filled the broad stretch of river that ran alongside the little town. Nisa was still curled up in bed, breathing deeply, her dark curls stuck to her cheek. I brushed them aside but she never stirred. Nisa slept like a child. Unlike me, she was never troubled by nightmares or insomnia. It would be another hour or two before she woke. Longer, maybe. Probably.
I kissed her cheek, breathing in her scent—lilac-and-freesia perfume mingled with my own imported Jasmin et Tabac, one of my few luxuries—and ran my hand along her bare shoulder. I was tempted to crawl back into bed beside her, but I also felt an odd restlessness, a nagging sense that there was somewhere I needed to be. There wasn’t—we knew no one around here except for Theresa and Giorgio, and both would be at work in their home offices overlooking the river.
I kissed Nisa again: if she woke, I’d take it as a sign, and remain here. But she didn’t wake.
I scrawled a note on a piece of paper—Nisa often forgot to turn her notifications off, she’d be grumpy all morning if a text woke her. Going for a drive, back with provisions. Love you.
I dressed quickly, propelled by an anticipation I couldn’t explain. Being in a new place, perhaps, and out of New York City after such a long time.
The night before, we’d polished off a bottle of champagne in our rental, and that was after beers and celebratory shots of twelve-year-old Jura at the bar that Theresa had recommended as the best in this part of upstate. The rental had been Theresa’s idea, too. She and her husband, Giorgio, had bought a second home here years ago, but during the pandemic, they’d forsaken their Queens apartment and moved permanently. Ever since, they’d been on me and Nisa and their other friends still in the city to do the same.
“Seriously, Hols, you will love it,” Theresa had urged me the night before. “You should have done it years ago, you know that, right?”
“Right,” Nisa retorted. She thought Theresa and Giorgio were going insane with boredom, which was likely true. They came down to the city at least once or twice a month, couch-surfing because even for them short-term rentals had become too expensive, and they’d sublet their own beautiful two-bedroom in Sunnyside. “And I should have had a father who left me a million dollars when his ultralight crashed last time he was out at Torrey Pines. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Nisa smacked herself in the forehead. Theresa smiled ruefully, made a touché gesture, and ordered another round for all of us. She and her father had long been estranged. The inheritance was a surprise, and she liked to share her largesse.
Still, Theresa had a point. It was beautiful up here. The long winding journey along the river, the city’s sprawl giving way first to outer exurbia—apple orchards, pastures repurposed as solar farms, and warehouses, all those not-yet-gentrified, sketchy-seeming river towns, poisoned by brownfields and decades of poverty. Nisa and I had passed a lot of For Sale by Owner signs, in front of houses that seemed too derelict to merit anything but a teardown. And you’d still have to remediate soil made toxic by runoff from mass agriculture and factories that had been shuttered half a century ago.
But after several hours, the long drive had rewarded us with jeweled villages like this one. Little towns long since colonized by self-styled artists and artisans who are really just people rich enough to flee the city and call themselves whatever they want. Craft brewers, textile designers, glass artists specializing in bespoke bongs and neti pots. Dog chiropractors. Masons who would demolish a centuries-old fieldstone chimney, number each stone, and then rebuild it, piece by piece, in an adjoining room. People who distilled rare liqueurs from echinacea and comfrey, or made syrup out of white pine needles, or wove intricate rings and brooches from your own hair, charging what I earned as a teacher in a month. A very good month.
I tried not to think about that as I eased my old Camry along Main Street, craning my neck to see if the café was open yet. Nisa and I had chatted with the owner the day before—he was from Queens, too. He’d only been here for six months, but he told us that there were lines outside the café every morning when he arrived to unlock the door.
Apparently, he still kept city hours—it was six a.m., and the place was closed. But the parking lot at the Cup and Saucer, on the outskirts of town, was packed, pickups and SUVs sprawled across the cracked asphalt. I pulled in alongside a tractor-trailer rig and stepped inside, past three guys who stood by the door, talking.
“Morning,” one said. He caught my gaze and held it long enough that I felt obligated to smile, though he hadn’t.
I grabbed a to-go coffee, heavy on the half-and-half, glanced at the donuts on the counter. I decided to hold off and get some croissants at the café when I returned. They’d cost twice as much but Nisa didn’t like donuts. Too bad, since these were homemade and the real deal, fried in lard.
I headed back to the car and for a few minutes sat, sipping my coffee as I debated what to do with my restless energy. I didn’t want to return and wake Nisa, not without croissants and lattes. But in the past two days, we’d already combed through the village. I remembered that Theresa and Giorgio had also given us ample suggestions for other well-heeled towns nearby.
“Just don’t bother with Hillsdale.” Giorgio had flicked his fingers, as though Hillsdale were a mosquito buzzing by. “It’s a dump.”
Theresa had nodded. “There must be a problem with the water supply or something. That whole town’s been depressed for as long as we’ve been coming here. You’d think they’d be happy to expand their tax base, but they really, really hate outsiders.”
This seemed odd—that one small town would remain blighted, when surrounded by so many places that had benefited from the real estate boom. But it also suggested that Hillsdale might be someplace where Nisa and I could afford to buy a fixer-upper someday. I decided to do a quick bit of recon. If Hillsdale seemed interesting, we could both head out later to investigate. I finished my coffee, rolled down the window, and drove out of town. I didn’t bother to check my phone for directions. Route 9K was the only real road here, and I was on it.
The air had the intoxicating bite of early autumn: goldenrod and dry sedge and the first fallen leaves, cut with the river’s scent of fish and mud. With the road straight before me, my mind began to wander. Some people hate summer’s end, but I always loved it, the same way I always loved the beginning of the school year as a kid.
That had changed once I started working at a private school in Queens, a job I fell into by chance nearly two decades ago and had never learned to love. I’d had no teaching degree, I wasn’t certified, but you don’t need that to teach at a private school. Not the one that employed me, anyhow. The pay wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible, and the school covered half my health insurance. For years I’d told myself it was only temporary, I’d find theater work again soon.
That had never happened. If I ever complained, Nisa pointed out that I was lucky to have a job even marginally related to my interests. Who wants to employ an unsuccessful playwright? I taught English, and as time passed, I’d at least been able to incorporate plays for the eighth graders, starting with heavily stripped-down versions of Shakespeare—Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, even Hamlet.
The students read the scripts I adapted aloud in class, and sometimes performed them in the small gymnasium that doubled as an events space, for an audience of parents, siblings, and the few teaching colleagues I could guilt into attending, and filled with the overwhelming scents of Axe, Victoria’s Secret cologne, and fruity lip gloss, like a Walgreens had exploded. It was all light-years away from what I’d set out to do with my life after I got a BFA in playwriting from a top drama school.
And yet those afternoons with the students did, sometimes, ease my despair. Running lines with them; watching them slowly gain confidence; witnessing the magic that never failed to take over, when they finally put on costumes and makeup and looked at themselves in amazement, realizing they had become someone, something, new and wonderful and strange. For those few hours, I could imagine that it wasn’t too late. That I, too, might still be transformed.
Delighted parents, learning of my background, would ask why I didn’t write something for the kids to perform. I always begged off, politely. I was terrified to see my work performed, even by kids. I knew this made me seem standoffish, and I never developed any real relationships among my fellow teachers. Instead, I kept up with a few close friends in the theater world. And while I hadn’t had a play produced since everything blew up all those years ago, I continued to write. More recently, I’d even begun to apply for grants and fellowships.
I didn’t tell Nisa. Instead, over the last few years I’d collected dozens of rejections in secret.
Part of this was superstition—I didn’t want to jinx my possible success. Most of it had to do with the fact that Nisa’s own career was taking off. She’d always had a small but intense following as a singer-songwriter. As the pandemic faded, she’d begun auditioning for acting jobs as well. No one had cast her yet, but she’d had some callbacks. Obviously I wanted my girlfriend to succeed. But I wanted to succeed, too.
And now, at last, it seemed like I had. In the early summer, I’d received a grant for a new play: the first sign of hope in decades, which made it seem like, at last, things really would be different. Ten thousand dollars, to be used however I wanted to further my work. I’d immediately arranged for a leave of absence from teaching for the fall semester. It wasn’t enough money to quit my job (if only!), but it bought me a few months of freedom.
That summer was a wonderful time for me and Nisa, celebrating my good luck with our friends, culminating in this long weekend upstate and this beautiful drive. After all those years of teaching, autumn again felt like possibility—a chance to be someone else, not who I’d been just weeks earlier. A shift in attitude and wardrobe. New shoes; a new career. Being out of the city now, following the river north, made me feel like wonderful things were about to happen. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to dream, to imagine a life that could conceivably align with the one I’d anticipated, twenty years ago, before everything got derailed by Macy-Lee Barton’s death.
So here I was, driving aimlessly upstate in early September—too early for leaf-peeping season, too late for the summer people. Second-home owners were still in the city, recovering from Labor Day parties before their kids started school. As I headed toward Hillsdale, there wasn’t much traffic. Pickups rushing out to job sites, a few electric vehicles with out-of-state plates.
The morning sun set the river ablaze, igniting the windows of raised ranches that had been turned into Craftsman homes, and a new Tudor-style mansion on a modest lot where the dirt still bore an outline of a double-wide trailer. Behind security gates, expensive subdivisions had sprung up on former farmland. I noticed a sign for a PYO orchard and thought I’d bring Nisa back later. Nisa loved pie.
I sped on, only slowing when the speed limit dropped. A crooked sign stuck out into the road like a hitchhiker’s thumb.
ENTERING HILLSDALE
Immediately the road surface deteriorated into chunks of blacktop and frost heaves. A sign flapped in front of a burned-out gas station: UNLEADED .99. I passed a boarded-up dollar store, its vacant parking lot glittering with broken glass. You know your town has hit bottom when even the dollar store has closed.
Hillsdale had no sidewalks. One-story houses with cinder-block steps and bug-pocked siding slumped a few yards from the street, separated by patches of putty-colored grass. Children trudged by on their way to school, heads bowed over phones. At one corner, I rolled to a stop and honked at a skinny gray mutt sprawled in the middle of the road, gnawing its front paw. The dog remained where it was, not even looking up as I edged past.
Giorgio and Theresa were right: Hillsdale was a freaking dump. The thought of slipping back into bed beside Nisa with croissants grew more enticing. I looked in vain for a place to turn around without driving onto somebody’s front yard.
But after the next block, things improved. I reached what passed for a downtown. No cross street, though here at least was a sidewalk. And shops, including some that seemed to still be in business. A diner and a real estate agent, a thrift shop, a dingy convenience store that sold lottery tickets and cigarettes.
At the end of the street, an old church missing its steeple stood on a corner. A sign was perched in front of it.
I ATE THIS CHURCH
—SATAN
I frowned, then realized a letter was missing. I HATE THIS CHURCH—SATAN.
I laughed. Nisa would like that. But then I again recalled Macy-Lee Barton, with her talk of ghosts and demon babies, and felt a pinch of unease. I should get back, I thought. It was inconceivable there was anything else in Hillsdale worth seeing. And I didn’t need to fall back down that dark rabbit hole, not now.
Still, I didn’t turn around. I felt light-headed—I should have grabbed one of those donuts at the Cup and Saucer after all—but also oddly unmoored, a compass needle wavering as it seeks north. I lifted my foot from the gas pedal and let the car drift for a few seconds, waiting to see where it took me.
Across from the church stood another gas station, modern pumps incongruous with its ramshackle office. Immediately past that, a dirt road veered off to the left. I glanced at my phone. It had been only half an hour since I’d left the Airbnb. Nina hadn’t texted or called. She’d sleep for another hour and a half if I wasn’t there to wake her.
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw no other cars. That stupid mutt hadn’t moved. Ahead of me, Route 9K was empty, save where the breeze kicked up a dust devil or dead leaves. To the left, the dirt road wound steeply up through a stretch of birch trees, fallen yellow leaves covering its rough surface until it curved and was lost to sight.
What lay beyond? I looked for a street sign but saw nothing. My strange drifty feeling vanished as the anticipation I’d felt earlier returned, just as the sun broke through the trees so that the dirt road gleamed, gold and bronze. I glanced at the dash—plenty of gas—and turned off Route 9K.
It was more a winding mountain trail than a proper road. Barely wide enough for a single vehicle, with ruts so narrow and deep they might have been made by horse-drawn carriages, not cars. Branches scraped my Camry, and I kept having to steer around large rocks exposed by flooding. Old-growth forest, unmaintained road—it didn’t look like anyone lived up here.
But I was wrong. After a few miles, the road made a forty-five-degree turn, so unexpectedly that I nearly lost control of the car before I straightened out. After that, the road widened. To my right, the forest had been cleared, the ground graded and leveled. A single-wide mobile home sat surrounded by weedy undergrowth, dotted with clumps of hostas and goldenrod, purple asters, Queen Anne’s lace. White birch trees reared protectively around a battered Subaru, and curls of their bark fetched up at the base of the trailer like old newspaper. Something darted out from beneath the Subaru—a cat, I thought.
I slowed, worried it might run across the road, and realized it wasn’t a cat but an enormous rabbit. Much too big for a cottontail, bigger even than the white snowshoe hare I’d once glimpsed while skiing in Vermont. But it wasn’t a snowshoe hare—it wasn’t brown or white but glossy black, with ears long and pointed as garden shears, and copper-colored eyes. For a few seconds we gazed at each other, before it bounded into the trees. I’d started once more to drive, when I realized someone was watching me.
A woman stood in front of the trailer. I hadn’t seen the door open—she must have come from out back. In her late fifties or early sixties, long ash-brown hair flecked with gray. Strongly built, with that weathered skin you get from a lifetime outdoors. She wore beat-up jeans and a too-big plaid flannel shirt beneath a dark blue hoodie.
I lifted a finger in a wave and smiled tentatively. The woman opened her mouth, too, only she was baring her teeth like a dog. She raised her hand, which held a knife with a long blade. Not a kitchen knife but a hunting knife. Without a sound, she began to run toward my car, her eyes wide with fury.
Shocked, I hit the gas and the car lurched forward. What the hell? I veered around another sharp curve, and for a terrifying moment thought I’d drive straight into the trees. But I sped on, the Camry heaving over rocks and potholes. In the rearview mirror, the clearing disappeared behind me, though not before I caught a last glimpse of the woman standing in the road, face contorted, shouting something I couldn’t hear.
“Jesus,” I whispered. The locals really didn’t like outsiders.
A safe distance up the road, still shaken, I noticed movement in the bushes. I slowed the car again to peer out the side window. Another black hare crouched in the undergrowth. Or was it the same one I’d just seen? I couldn’t be sure, but as I stared, the hare raised itself onto its hind legs. And then it kept rising. Its body extended, growing longer and longer and thinner and thinner, as though made of some substance other than flesh and fur and bone, until it seemed like it might snap like a piece of Silly Putty stretched too far. If it had stood beside me, the tips of its ears would have brushed my chin. It gazed back at me with unblinking eyes the color of a new penny, and then it sprang into the forest.
When you’re confronted with something deeply strange or obviously implausible in a book or movie or painting, you know it means something. It’s a symbol, a clue. A warning.
But in real life, that’s not necessarily how it works. I stared into the woods, trying to see where the animal had gone. Rabbit, hare: whatever it was, it had vanished. I took a deep breath. That unnatural stretching I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, had surely been a trick of light and shadow. Right now, everything seemed calm, the breeze stirring my hair as sunlight slanted down through the evergreens.
I glanced at my phone. I had one service bar, so that was good. No message from Nisa. It was still only forty-five minutes since I’d left her asleep in the Airbnb. Which seemed crazy, yet there it was: 6:47.
Still, I should head back. By the time I got to town, the café would be open. But there wasn’t enough room here to turn the car, not without running into a tree. And I would have been leery of trying to back down an unfamiliar road, anyway. Not to mention that armed woman, standing guard below. No thanks. I opened my map app to see where the road led.
The app wouldn’t load. After a minute, I began to drive, creeping along at five miles an hour while I stared at the screen in my hand. Finally I gave up and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. I’d keep going, and hope the road continued down the other side of the mountain, or hill, or whatever this was.
I hadn’t bothered to clock the odometer when I started up here, but I guessed I’d gone about five miles. It seemed farther. Everything about this morning had taken on a strange tone—distance, time, even the sunlight, which now looked more like sunset than sunrise, a continuous crimson flicker through the branches of centuries-old trees.
The entrance appeared so suddenly I nearly drove into it: a pair of massive wrought-iron gates, set into a stone wall. The wall was well maintained, its once-white paint faded to lichen gray and covered with grapevines. The orange berries of bittersweet glowed like embers against the stones. The gates were open, a length of heavy chain dangling from one side. As with the road, I saw no name. Dead leaves had pitched up at the base of the pillars—this autumn’s leaves, not the black mulch from last year.
So maybe someone lived here? Maybe that’s who the woman was, some kind of caretaker?
I scanned the surroundings for a No Trespassing sign, evidence of CCTV or other surveillance. Again, nothing. Which didn’t mean the place wasn’t being watched. If nothing else, that woman had seen me drive up here.
But she hadn’t chased after me. And she didn’t seem to have called the police, not yet, at any rate. I sat in the car for another minute, waiting to see if anyone might come down the drive.
What the hell, I thought, and drove on through the open gates.
The driveway wound through stands of oaks and towering pines, interspersed with impenetrable thickets of rhododendrons. I didn’t know rhododendrons could grow to this size—tall as a house, with gnarled trunks and knotted limbs like rats’ tails. Once, I thought I glimpsed something pale in the shadow of the trees, a scrap of newspaper or a plastic bag or perhaps a face. But when I slowed, whatever it was melted into the leaves.
It all should have seemed ominous. Yet I felt a peculiar, almost perverse, exhilaration, the way I used to feel when I’d sit down at my laptop to write. Something is going to happen. I am going to make something happen.
I’d been climbing steadily since passing that woman’s trailer. Now the treetops parted to reveal wide swathes of sky, no longer sunset-tinged but palest blue. I rolled down the window and inhaled the smell of dying leaves, crushed acorns, earth not yet frozen but cold enough to hold its secrets: secrets that might only be shared, come spring, with the right person.
Something is going to happen…
The echo of a woman’s voice startled me. I glanced at my face in the rearview mirror. Nisa told me I talked in my sleep sometimes. Had I spoken aloud?
Of course not. I would have realized.
Besides, all writers talk to themselves. Especially playwrights. It’s an occupational hazard. With all those voices in your head, you long to hear the words. For me, that was the most magical moment in theater—the first instant during a reading when an actor disappears and your character takes their place. That moment of transformation had always felt like ecstasy, like a ritual of transubstantiation.
“Or possession,” my friend Stevie Liddell had retorted, when I’d tried to explain the sensation to him. “Like you’re not giving any agency to the actor. Like it’s some woo-woo thing that you make happen.”
I thought that was rich, coming from someone who once mixed the husks of venomous caterpillars with belladonna in a ritual to ensure that a rival didn’t get a part in a regional production of Urinetown. The weird thing was, it had worked, so I couldn’t even lord it over him.
Still, I knew I hadn’t spoken aloud as I drove through the rhododendron grove. I felt a flicker of disquiet. That word of Stevie’s, “possession,” had made me think again of Macy-Lee Barton. Nothing that had happened had been my fault, despite what some people believed. Occasionally, very late at night, I might feel otherwise, but sunlight and caffeine would dispel those dark thoughts. I kept my eyes on the road ahead of me, determined not to let anything puncture the ballooning joy I’d begun to feel, more and more powerfully, as I drove on.
It’s the play, I thought, it’s my new play. Everything is different now. I’m finally getting another chance.
I’d come across The Witch of Edmonton the summer before the pandemic, during a weekend stay with friends in Putnam County. We’d spent the morning scouring tag sales and antique shops, thumbing through old books and magazines. By midafternoon my hands were ink-stained and coated with a . . .
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