CHAPTER 37

Amanda woke early, with no trace of a hangover. She knew the others thought she’d been royally drunk the night before, but she’d only had half a bottle of wine.

Well, maybe a bit more, she’d lost count—hadn’t they been celebrating? Young people now were such puritans. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

And she never drank in the morning, unless she was in bed with someone, ideally in a foreign city. That hadn’t occurred in such a long time that she sometimes wondered if it had ever truly happened, or if she was conflating real life with a scene in a movie she’d appeared in.

It was a shame about that tablecloth but honestly, who used white linen tablecloths these days? White was just asking for trouble. Red absorbed or hid a variety of sins. Wine, spaghetti sauce, blood.

She’d slept soundly, waking once or twice to hear Holly and Nisa murmuring in their room. It must have been two or three a.m., much too late for sleepover chatter between adults. That kind of low sniggering laugh mean girls always had, though one of them almost sounded like a man. Stevie might have snuck in, the three of them gossiping about Amanda while she slept. Old hag, typecast as Elizabeth Sawyer! Amanda had been tempted to rap on their door or text them—I CAN HEAR YOU—but fell asleep before she could.

Now she got out of bed, listened at the door to the shared bathroom before tiptoeing in. She washed up and put on her makeup, just enough to strike the balance between looking like she wasn’t wearing any makeup and making it clear to the world that she still cared, she hadn’t given up, that this was the face she’d been born with, minus peels every few months and the occasional Botox.

When she finished, she returned to her room and dressed, then locked the door between her bedroom and the bathroom. She didn’t want them snooping around. They wouldn’t dare sneak in from the hall but it would be easy from the bathroom. Little slinky sneaks, stirring things up. Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot. She pulled on her walking shoes, grabbed her jacket, and left.

Outside her room, she paused. Something scrabbled behind the wainscoting, tiny claws scratching at the plaster and lath. Not so tiny, actually—could be a rat. The noise faded as whatever it was scurried off. She’d wait to mention it at dinner. Rats! That would cause some excitement.

Downstairs, no one else was awake. The deserted stairway and main hall had an expectant air, like a theater on opening night. She gazed around at the main hall’s polished woodwork, the worn but expensive carpeting that still bore the marks of a vacuum cleaner in its nap. It seemed like a lot of effort to go through, to maintain a place this old and customarily vacant.

Ainsley said Hill House isn’t haunted, Stevie had said last night.

Yet surely haunting was just a matter of perspective and perception. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper to glimpse ghosts gliding between the lines. Bats heard things that humans couldn’t. If she had a bat’s ears, she might be able to hear what was really going on around her. She knew that others thought she was a bit crazy—batty!

But Shakespeare knew that words were also spells, designed to intoxicate and enthrall the senses. Amanda had spent hours alone at her isolated house, listening to the night speak, getting to know its creatures. Training herself to hear the cries of bats, supposedly too high-pitched for humans to detect, but she could. House shrews were so blind and deaf that she could crouch beside them and they wouldn’t move. They relied on their sense of smell. Amanda could bring her face to within an inch of their tiny snouts and poppyseed eyes, until she smelled the odor of the shrews themselves, like a spent match. Sulfurous. That souls of animals infuse themselves / Into the trunks of men.

Possibly Amanda herself would have been burned as a witch.

She peered into the kitchen, wrinkling her nose at the sight of the wadded-up tablecloth in the sink, like something from a crime scene. That stain would never come out. She should have just stuffed it in a trash bag. She’d do it now but the others would notice and probably complain.

She walked over to the counter and inspected the coffee machine, filters and a bag of coffee set out for whoever rose first to prepare. She’d leave it for someone else. Stevie, he seemed like the needy sort who’d do things so people would like him.

She stepped back into the hall. Were those voices? She cocked her head, listening, felt a sudden draft at her neck. Was someone else awake? She glanced upstairs but didn’t see anyone. The voices had fallen silent.

The hall seemed darker than it had minutes ago, the walls closer and the ceiling lower, though that was just the light, or lack of it. The house had been horribly designed, if indeed it had been designed and not just constructed piecemeal, its corridors and doors and rooms like the aimless tunnels made by worms in the dirt.

Even worse was the thought that it had been designed this way on purpose. The ugly moldings and dark wainscoting, the ceiling height that changed in the corridors—in some spots, high above her head, in others so low she could graze it with her fingertips. She did that once. The ceiling felt moist and slightly yielding, and she snatched her hand back in disgust.

She shivered, zipping up her jacket, and hurried out the front door. The cold air stung her cheeks as she raced down the steps, momentarily blinded by sunlight and blue sky.