CHAPTER 62

We all stared raptly at the screen, like it was an EKG reader in a hospital and not an audio app. “I’ve edited out our voices,” Stevie whispered. “This is what I got…”

I held my breath, listening. Static, then a soft whirring sound—wind, I thought in relief—followed by footsteps. Then more static, followed by an unknown man’s voice.

“Could there be a draft across that doorway?”

“A draft? In Hill House?” A young woman laughed, but not any of the three of us. “Not unless you could manage to make one of those doors stay open.”

“What the fuck—” murmured Nisa.

I grabbed her hand. “Shut up.”

“The very essence of the tomb.” Static momentarily drowned the man’s voice. “… the heart of the house.”

More static, a sound like heavy breathing and a different man’s voice, younger than the first. “When you stand where they can look at you, they freeze you.”

“Don’t leave us alone in here,” the woman said. “A fine place—”

The audio cut out. The four of us looked at each other.

“Play it again,” Amanda urged.

“Don’t!” cried Nisa. “Stevie, stop—”

“Shh,” I said, and joined her in the oversized armchair. “It’s okay, baby, it’s just—”

“Just what?” She looked at me wildly. “That’s not us.”

“It’s some glitch with the software, that’s all. Right, Stevie?”

I turned to Stevie, who’d already started to replay the recording.

“Could there be a draft across that doorway?”

“A draft? In Hill House?”

Nisa started to bolt from the chair, but I held on to her.

“Nisa, dear, calm down,” said Amanda. “It’s just voices on a laptop.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Well, whatever it is, you don’t want to be running around on your own in the dark.” Amanda’s tone grew brisk. “Stevie, what have you got there?”

“I don’t know.” He stuck the headphones back over his ears, tapping the trackpad as he listened intently. I scrutinized his face, trying to read his thoughts, but sensed only increasing dismay.

At last he removed the headphones, set them on the table, and closed his laptop. Nisa nestled deeper into my arms, and Amanda moved her chair until it was touching mine. “Well?” she said.

“I don’t know what it is,” Stevie admitted. “But it’s something. I thought maybe I’d inadvertently recorded over an existing file, or that this file somehow got corrupted. But it’s fine. I can restore everything else—our voices, me and Nisa walking down the hall and talking, both of you coming upstairs. I can hear all that. And when I edit that out, I hear those other voices. What I still can’t hear are those booms.”

He hesitated, gnawing on his finger. “The booms—I think they occurred at the same time as the voices. I mean, the voices come in at the moment when we heard the booms. See?”

He opened the laptop and pointed at a frozen sound wave. “Based on our reactions, that’s when we heard the first boom. It’s like it left a hole for the voices to enter, or…”

He raised his hands helplessly.

“Ghosts,” Nisa whispered, frightened. “Jesus—you’ve actually made a paranormal recording.”

“They’re not ghosts.” Stevie’s eyes gleamed oddly crimson in the firelight.

“Then what are they?” I looked at him, praying he had a reasonable explanation—any explanation for what we’d just heard.

“Jesus, Holly, how do I know?” He raked his hands through his hair. “Nisa and I didn’t hear them, or see them, when we were up there, and neither did you. Or Amanda.”

“But we all felt how cold it was in the nursery.” I felt Nisa shivering, and held her to me more tightly. “They were there, we just didn’t see them.”

“I don’t think so,” Stevie said, thinking it through. “Those other voices—I think those people were like us. They’d just entered the nursery, they felt the cold, they noticed that it came from the faces above the door. ‘When you stand where they can look at you, they freeze you.’ That’s exactly what I thought, too.”

He seemed to shrink into his seat—really shrink, the shadows engulfing him, an amoeba devouring an inconsequential microbe. “Those voices—I think they were more like echoes, or an auditory imprint. Have you ever seen the shadow print left by a leaf on a beach house deck? The leaf is gone, but the bright light makes a kind of photo of it—a sun print. I think these voices are like that.”

I shook my head, and Stevie smiled wryly. “What can I say? I’m a font of useless knowledge.”

He pointed at the laptop. “I don’t think these are ghosts. A ghost has some kind of agency, right? Usually they’re seeking retribution, or trying to tell you something about what happened to them. They interact with people on some level. I think these voices are echoes from a long time ago.”

“How can you know that?” demanded Nisa.

Stevie looked beseechingly at Amanda.

“I only heard the bangs,” she confessed. “I thought it sounded like firecrackers. Or a car accident, but inside the house.”

Stevie took a deep breath. “I think they were more like a recording,” he said. “I’ve been thinking, this place, it absorbs our energy. Like a battery, only it gets its charge from us. What if those people were here, too, at some point? Maybe the previous tenants?”

“That’s worse than ghosts.” Nisa sat up, wild-eyed. “God, doesn’t anyone else feel how messed up this is? If they were tenants, they were like us. But what if they’re still here?”

She turned to me, obviously hoping I’d refute this.

I avoided her gaze. I desperately wanted to pretend I hadn’t heard those voices, desperately wanted—needed—to bring our attention back to the script on the table beside me. But Stevie jumped back in before I could say a word.

“It’s the house.” He slammed his laptop closed, as though something might emerge from it. “Can’t you feel it? It hates us but it also wants us here. It wants us here because it—”

“That’s enough.” Amanda got to her feet. She pushed past Stevie’s chair to stand in front of the fireplace, blotting out the flames. “We can argue about this all day—you can, anyway. I’ll be back in a bit.”

I watched her in alarm. “Where are you going?”

“I want to talk to Evadne Morris about this house.”

“She had nothing to say!”

“She obviously had nothing to say to you.”

I bridled. “So why would she talk to you?”

“Did you see her house? The stone circle and the animal bones? I’ll tell Evadne I’m researching my part.”

“She won’t let you in,” I said. “She’s not friendly.”

“I have my little ways.” Amanda drew herself up and swept us all with a commanding look as she strode to the door. “I’ll be back.”