EPILOGUE

For a long time, over a year, Stevie and I avoided each other. Nisa’s disappearance cast ripples into our small circle, ripples that, as the months passed, extended out, into the realm of podcasts and Reddit and arcane websites.

I extended my leave of absence from teaching. Nisa was officially a missing person. But only a cursory investigation took place, and her body was never found. Even the state police were reluctant to probe too deeply into whatever might have occurred at Hill House.

Ainsley had refunded the money I’d given her, with a terse note appended to her email, signed not just by herself, but by Melissa and Evadne as well.

We warned you.

She had—but she had also allowed us in Hill House. Why? Perhaps Ainsley, in a way, was as much its victim as Nisa.

Giorgio had gone back, with Ainsley, to get our things. When I asked him if Hill House appeared badly damaged, he looked confused.

“No. It seemed fine. Like no one had ever been there.”

I gave up the apartment I’d shared with Nisa and moved into Giorgio and Theresa’s two-bedroom in Sunnyside. The whole time, I felt insulated by shock. The police told me Nisa had simply run away. Stevie, Amanda, and I knew that wasn’t true.

Still, the year did pass. I’d offered to return my grant money, but the arts director had gently refused. “Take some time, Holly,” she said on the phone. “You may yet be able to make something of your play. Or write a new one. Right now, you need to grieve, and not worry about the money.”

Slowly, as another year wound down, I started writing again. About the same time, Stevie appeared at my door one night, unannounced.

“Here,” he said, pushing past me as he held up his laptop bag. His unwashed hair hung below his shoulders, and he hadn’t shaved for weeks. “I want you to listen to these.”

It was a stash of recordings he’d made of Nisa singing—old open mic performances, recordings of when she was working out early versions of the ballads for the play. Even the voices he’d discovered on his laptop on that fateful day when he’d explored the nursery. I almost couldn’t bear to listen to them, but as Stevie sat beside me and held me, I began to sob uncontrollably, thinking of Nisa and also of Macy-Lee, and how their voices had been silenced, except for these eerie traces that Stevie had managed to retain.

“This is what we have, Holly,” he said when the recording at last ended, and I could finally breathe again. “We should use it. You should use it.”

I did, hours spent at my laptop, writing new material and revising what I’d already done. Witching Night became a palimpsest—Elizabeth Sawyer’s story, Macy-Lee’s, Nisa’s, my own, shuffled and reshuffled like a deck of tarot cards. The Witch. The Muse. The Singer. The Ghost Child. The Lover. The Balladeer. The Dog.

Death.

Now when I cried, I felt like different nerves were firing in my head.

Stevie joined me in working feverishly on the project. He tracked down demos that Nisa had made, from clubs and friends, and added them to what we already had.

Amanda had kept her distance from us, but she’d never stopped working. One morning, I called her to ask if she’d consider getting on board with the revamped play. I gave her the details and projected dates, holding my breath when she said nothing.

“You’re too busy,” I finally said, not bothering to hide my distress. “I’ll see if I can find someone else.”

“Do that and I’ll sabotage your opening,” she retorted.

Another year passed. As October approached, we finally had the downtown showcase ready, reframed as a two-hander for Stevie and Amanda Greer, with Nisa’s ethereal voice echoing through the shoebox theater. Within days, I had an offer to bring the show to a prestigious experimental venue in DUMBO.

The unsolved disappearance of a beautiful young person always makes good box office.

None of us ever told anyone else what happened at Hill House. Sometimes—often—I dream of it, and of Nisa. Not as I’d last seen her, trapped within the nursery, but singing “Hares on the Mountain” in a forest clearing. Three fluid black shapes circle her, their dark forms gradually shimmering into columns of light, figures that rise into the night sky, silver rings bright as stars.

Stevie had the same dream, he told me once, and Amanda, too.

Only Hill House neither sleeps nor dreams. Shrouded within its overgrown lawns and sprawling woodlands, the long shadows of mountains and ancient oaks, Hill House only watches. Hill House waits.