CHAPTER 72

As the door closed after Melissa, Amanda said, “My, that wasn’t upsetting at all.”

Nisa laughed shakily as I walked to the window and stared out. The sense of triumph I’d felt at standing up to Melissa slid away from me, replaced by unease.

Too late.

Had she been threatening me? I remembered how I’d felt after Macy-Lee’s accusations, that sense of her trying to wrest away something that was mine by rights.

Ours, this time, I reminded myself. My play’s success depended on the others, too. I needed to remain calm, keep them on the rails.

“It’s cold enough that we can just put all the food outside if we lose power,” I said, pushing away my disquiet. I walked to the front door and bolted it. “There’re plenty of flashlights. And candles, and matches.”

“I saw some water jugs in the pantry,” Nisa piped up.

“And we have lots of wine,” added Amanda. “All the major food groups.”

“So we won’t end up like the Donner Party,” said Nisa.

“More the Dishonor Party,” said Amanda.

I turned toward them, smiling, and froze.

A huge black hare stood upright in the kitchen doorway—far bigger than the ones I’d seen before. Its front legs were crooked like those of a praying mantis, its lips drawn back to reveal long white teeth and a red tongue. It stared at me fixedly, its coppery eyes twin suns in eclipse.

“Holly?” Nisa asked in a small voice.

Before I could say anything, she too turned, then screamed.

“What is it?” cried Amanda. Whirling, she clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh my god.”

Nisa ran to the stairway as Amanda dashed in the other direction. I remained where I was, too dumbfounded to move. The hare leaned back slightly, as if considering, then sprang toward me.

It struck my chest, knocking me down, and I cried out as my head hit the floor. Yet when I tried to push it from me, I couldn’t get hold of its fur—my hands ripped through it like wet newsprint. No matter how I fought, there was only moist warmth, something gelatinous smearing my cheek as I rolled onto my stomach and covered my head with my hands, its weight pressing me down. It grew heavier, far more so than a creature that size should be, and I felt something else moving inside it, something—

A blast of cold air hit me, nearly as shocking as the hare.

“Get out!” Amanda shouted. “Get out!”

The weight pressing into my back lifted as the hare bounded from me to the floor, landing with a loud thump and scurrying off. I pushed myself up to see Amanda brandishing a broom. She must have also flung the front door open. Snow gusted in. Within the blue-white doorway, the hare paused to stare at me, its silhouette as precise as though cut from black paper, before it turned and vaulted into the night.

“Holly! Are you all right?”

I saw Amanda standing above me, her hair wild, still clutching the broom.

“I think so,” I replied, shaken, my elbows aching as I got to my feet. Amanda closed the front door and took my arm as Nisa rushed to join us.

“Holly! Holly, are you—”

I stumbled past her to sit on the bottom step of the central stairway. I wiped my hands on my jeans, shuddering as I thought of the hare’s horrible moist touch. I drew a hand to my cheek, expecting to find some slimy residue. But my skin felt dry, cool from the blast of cold outside air. When I looked at my hands, and where I’d rubbed them on my jeans, I saw nothing.

Stevie’s fetch, I thought, sickened.

Nisa sank onto the step next to me and took my hand in both of hers. “Are you sure you’re all right? Holy fuck. How the hell did it get in?”

“The kitchen.” Amanda used the broom to point across the hall. “When I ran in there to get this, the back door was open. She opened it—Melissa.”

Nisa looked up. “I wondered what the hell she was doing.”

“Letting the hare in.” Amanda strode to the front door, closed and locked it.

“But why?”

“Because she’s a witch,” said Amanda. “They all are. Inside Evadne’s house, she had some kind of altar. She told me we need to leave Hill House. Ordered me, actually. She and Ainsley and Melissa, they’re up to something. Those rings…”

She looked at me, as realization dawned. “You were there, Holly. You talked to her. What if Hill House is their coven house, or whatever it is witches have? That’s why they don’t want us here. They’re trying to scare us off.”

“Well, it’s working,” said Nisa, stroking my hair.

“No.” I forced a smile. The simple act of sitting here, feeling the sturdy steps beneath and behind me, strengthened my will. I was damned if I was going to let Evadne and her creatures—hare, fetch, whatever they were—keep me from the play. “I’m okay—it just knocked the breath out of me. But Amanda, I think you’re right. Evadne, Ainsley, I guess Melissa, too—they have been trying to scare us.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Nisa. “Ainsley rented Hill House to you.”

“Because she really needs the money.” I stared at the front door, glad that Amanda had turned the deadbolt.

“It could be a scam,” Nisa said thoughtfully. “It’s not like this place has any online reviews. No one ever stays here long. So she just takes their money and banks it?”

Amanda thumped the broom on the floor, calling us to attention. She waited for Nisa and me to look up before she continued, in the powerful voice I recalled from The Stronger, her eyes flashing as though she stood on a stage and not in the hallway, hair and makeup in disarray from the storm.

“Didn’t you hear me? They’re witches—real witches. Like I said, this is where they meet, their coven or whatever. And yes, Ainsley needs the money, but the others don’t like that she rents it out. It’s dangerous, that’s what Evadne told me. That’s why Melissa keeps an eye on us while we’re here, as Evadne tries to scare us off.

“You can’t deny it,” she said curtly when I opened my mouth to argue. “Every single one of us has witnessed something strange, even supernatural. What if it has all been real? The three of them are in some ongoing power struggle, and we’re simply collateral.”

Amanda fell silent, head thrown back like she was waiting for applause. After a moment, she looked down at us where we sat. “Well?”

“Okay,” I said, “but still—what do we do? I’m not leaving.”

“Me neither.” I turned in surprise at Nisa’s decisive tone. “This place—it does bring something out in us. Even Stevie in the parlor—that was weird, but you were right, Holly. He finally came up with a really scary bit of business for the play. For us.

“You’ll see, Amanda,” she went on. “That scene with Tomasin and Elizabeth? I read for you while you were out. And Stevie nailed it. Almost nailed me,” she added. “And okay, it was scary. But this is like one of those spaces Stevie always talks about with his pagan friends—a thin place, where you can access things you can’t, normally. I think that’s what inspired Stevie. And me. That’s why Evadne and the others don’t want us at Hill House—they don’t want to share it, and they’re trying to frighten us so we leave.” She tightened her hold on my hand. “But I’m not going. My voice sounds better here than it ever has.”

Nisa’s face had gone pale, but her eyes gleamed as she lifted her head and sang.

“If all those old women were like hares on the mountain

Then all us young maids would get scythes and go hunting…”

My neck prickled: she’d changed the words. Her voice, too, sounded altered—much deeper, almost like it had been looped through Stevie’s music software.

Her expression was one I’d never seen before.

I whispered, “Stop, Nisa.”

“It’s just a song,” Nisa murmured as the words died in the soaring shadows above us. She withdrew her hand from mine.

“It sounds more like a spell,” said Amanda. “Which I’m all for, by the way.” Still holding the broom, she looked like a witch herself. “Fight fire with fire. We’re here to workshop Holly’s play—a play about a witch,” she went on. “It’s like rehearsing Hamlet in an actual castle. The publicity will be fabulous. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I don’t think you’re wrong.” I chose my words carefully. Nisa’s singing, the shock of the hare, Amanda’s admission that she thought witches were real—I was starting to feel like I’d been drugged. Like I could no longer trust my own senses.

But this thought receded quickly, drowned out by another. Louder, stronger. Insisting that nothing was more important than being here, now, with my friends and this play. The two warring sensations ricocheted inside me, sickening me.

I took a long breath and pushed myself up from the step, taking in the hall around us. The outside light had leaked away from the windows. The dark, empty room seemed cavernous. Streaks of black seeped from beneath countless closed doors, and the side halls looked like train tunnels, impossibly long and leading only into an even greater darkness. The casements rattled as the wind whined outside, snow and sleet pattering against the glass.

I walked to a window and gazed out. Several inches of snow already covered the veranda. My car and Amanda’s resembled large white animals crouched in the driveway. I peered past them to the woods, stiffened.

A silvery, shifting column of light moved within the trees, rotating, a great spindle being turned by huge invisible hands. The same spinning apparition I’d watched earlier.

I started to cry out, pointing for the others to see. But as I raised my hand, the column shattered into myriad flecks of light, which dissolved like sparks into the darkness, indistinguishable now from the storm.