CHAPTER 38

Amanda headed down the drive, past three cars—hers, Holly’s, and an unfamiliar white pickup. Maybe that woman who was the housekeeper, Melissa, or her husband? They must have come in the back door.

She decided she’d walk in the woods. If she took the road, she’d run the risk of having Melissa drive past on her way back to town. Amanda didn’t feel like making small talk if Melissa stopped to greet her, and, based on her attitude yesterday, Melissa wasn’t going to answer the one question Amanda really wanted to know: Why don’t you and your husband stay here after dark?

And there was also the risk that Amanda might run into that other woman, the one the others had described, with the knife and the mobile home. People were so condescending about mobile homes; Amanda would have thought Holly and her friends would be more tolerant. Or at least mindful that a double-wide probably went for three or four hundred K in the current market.

Still, Amanda didn’t want to antagonize the locals. She knew from her own small town that creatives like herself had to do a delicate dance to stay in the good graces of those who cleaned their houses, plowed their driveways, repaired their cars, delivered their firewood. Amanda sometimes hired people from a few towns over, just to avoid the awkwardness of dealing with people she had absolutely nothing in common with. Rude mechanicals, like in Shakespeare.

She walked until she saw a break in the trees and what looked like a path, clambered over a pile of rocks that might once have been a wall, and wandered into the forest. Crows shouted after her as she kicked at drifts of brown leaves, lifting her face to the sun. The air had the winey tang of late autumn. Goldenrod stalks nodded in the wind, flowers faded to brown.

After about ten minutes, she stopped to look back. She thought she’d come a good distance, but she clearly saw Hill House through a thin curtain of dying leaves and bare branches, so close it seemed to loom above her. The upper windows caught the light in a way that gave its facade a wide-eyed, deranged appearance. Amanda once worked with a younger actress who had that same look; she used to hear her crying into the pay phone during rehearsal breaks. Amanda was tempted to whisper “Grow up!” but the girl turned in a great performance, so score another point for the Method.

It is evil, Amanda thought, staring up at Hill House. You can’t fool me, I have magic eyes and I see you. I played Medea, and Clytemnestra—the fall of another house, the House of Atreus! So there.

She turned, nearly lost her balance as she was buffeted by a sudden gust, not cold like the autumn morning but hot with the carious reek of rotting gums and tongue.

I see you too, it whispered.