Cora looked out at the gray skies and rolling slate waters beyond. Her steaming cup of coffee sat untouched, and she still wore her mittens, though she'd folded and buttoned back the tops so her fingers were bare. She examined her nails, the deep black-red color on them, and sighed.
"Hey!" Brian slid into the booth across from her, removed his hat and let his dark blond hair spill out haphazardly. "I'm glad we're doing this. I miss you already."
"It hasn't even been two days."
"Yeah, well I was sort of getting used to you and your mom living downstairs."
"You didn't think it was awkward, having family dinners after we'd been making out wherever we could hide?"
He widened his dark eyes behind his glasses, smiled knowingly.
"Besides," Cora added, "you're moving out soon, anyway."
"I wish you'd move in with me." He turned to the waiter who'd arrived and asked for a coffee.
Cora waited for the man to walk away, then leaned forward, elbows on the table. "You're going to be close, just off the campus, right? I'll be over there all the time." Brian met her halfway and gave her a quick kiss above her cocoa, which she drew nearer herself when they parted. Turning the mug pensively, she added, "My mom needs me."
Brian sat back against the bench. "I know. I'm not really that selfish. You need to be with her." He hesitated, then asked, "How's she doing?"
"It's a process. Therapy is helping, but she's been about twenty years overdue for it, so it's going to take time. I mean, Brian, she's told me some, about my--about Paul--and it's so messed up. He basically abused her, and--" Cora closed her eyes, swallowed a sip of her cocoa more to encourage herself than to enjoy it. "I was so concerned about myself that I never saw her; I never saw who she was. I know: I was a kid, it wasn't my fault--I've got my own therapist. But I just feel . . . well, it's all so sad. I guess that's what I feel for her: sad. That she was dealing with him alone all this time. I wish she'd told me, so I could've been there for her."
"Hey, you were. You're the reason she kept going."
Cora sighed, unsure whether she agreed with Brian but knowing he was trying to help. "At least she's got John, too," she said. "He's been a good friend to her. Maybe someday . . . maybe she could know what it's like to have someone care about her the right way."
A silence settled between them, but it was a comfortable one. Cora contemplated the boy across from her, was grateful for him. She'd liked him since she'd met him, and he'd pulled her from a burning house, after all; that wasn't something one easily forgot.
Burning house . . .
He seemed to read her mind. "Are you sure you want to go back? I mean, you didn't want to go up there, the past several weeks you've stayed with me."
The girl chewed her bottom lip, absently turned the little poison ring on her finger, adjusted one of the clips holding back her newly-cropped hair. "It was different. I was too close, it's . . . I just feel like I need to. One time, and then I'll never go back."
An hour later, Cora sat in Brian's truck, her hands shaking imperceptibly in her lap. They were parked at the bottom of the hilltop, looking up at the space where the house used to be. The porch still stood, and the stairs leading up to it, and beyond that were some bits of wall and framework still standing forlorn, dusted in recent snowfall and splintered against the backdrop of leafless trees and white sky. The girl wasn't sure what she felt, being so close to it. Brian was right--she'd avoided it for the weeks she and her mother had lived with him and Alan before finding an apartment. She'd not felt drawn to look at it, had been too close. But now, knowing she wasn't going to return, and knowing, too, that it was going to be razed at some point in the near future, she had a compulsion to see it one last time.
"Are you ok?"
"Yes. Will you go with me?"
"I'd prefer it."
Cora wasn't able to smile her thanks, but her nod sufficed. She opened the passenger door and stepped out. Brian came around the front of the truck and together they climbed the little hill. The remains of the house lay in its self-made snowy grave, having collapsed into the basement. Part of the stone facade still stood, a corner of it, around what used to be her bedroom, and weirdly enough, Cora thought she could make out some of the doodles she'd drawn, smoke-stained scars on the random piece of wall. But the rest of it had crumbled. Nothing at all remained of the interior; there was just a massive jagged pile of blackened wire and glass and unidentifiable blanketed material. The two of them stood side by side, staring down into the wreck of what had a month and a half ago been an entirely average-looking house.
Brian let Cora think and feel whatever she needed to. He was glad she didn't want to try to walk through any part of the ruins. He didn't want to tell her what to do, but he would've had to if she'd insisted. The potential danger to her went beyond physical injury.
"You think my mom was right?"
"About what?"
"Niecey. That she saw some other old woman come up out of her cellar and go into our house, right before the fire started?"
She and Brian had overheard Cora's mom talking to John about it not long after it'd happened, but she'd clearly meant to keep it quiet.
"I don't know. And Niecey doesn't seem inclined to talk about it, or even to come out of her house, really. If she was hiding some other old lady in her basement, though, she must've been down there for years. I don't know how anyone could keep a secret so long."
Cora's chest tightened a little, wondering how many secrets old and new had burned to ash with that house, how many questions would never be answered. "We've never really talked about what happened," she said, a breeze moving across her exposed neck, raising goosebumps.
Brian saw her shiver, moved in front of her and pulled her coat up closer around her before standing aside again. "I was just waiting until you wanted to. Didn't want to push."
Her eyes stayed on the wreckage, blank and distant. "I can't really explain a lot of it, what it was like in there. It was confusing and some of it was just . . . too close to me. All I can say is that I couldn't find my way out, until I heard you calling my name."
"It was weird, Cora. Do you remember me finding you?"
"Not really. Just smoke and fire."
Brian hesitated, looked out of the corners of his eyes at her. "You want me to tell you?"
She took a deep breath. "Yes."
Lacing his fingers through hers for reassurance, Brian obliged. "I started looking everywhere, to find you, and when I got to your room, there was something super off. It was like, everything was humming or vibrating, but really quietly. So I went straight to your closet and opened it. Inside . . . I don't know how to say what it was except that it was some kind of tunnel, but it was, like, skin or flesh or something, weird and kind of pinkish, and almost translucent, like some light was glowing behind it. I didn't understand--still don't--how it was possible. And I just started yelling for you. I went in a ways; it was like being in someone's intestine, so gross. And I just got nowhere, kept slipping out, but then all of a sudden there you were, and I just grabbed you and pulled you out."
He kicked at something nonexistent, and she squeezed his hand a little. "I don't know if I'd have found my way if it weren't for you. Not just the yelling, but the meds too."
"How? What made you think of it?"
Cora craned her neck a little. "Oh my god, Brian-- look! I swear that's one of Dottie's old cats in there."
They watched in awe as the ragged thing picked its way out of what used to be the bathroom, mewled irascibly at them, and pattered off toward the old woman's residence. Police tape still formed an X across her door. As far as Cora knew, Dottie hadn't returned. Her mother had told her that the old woman's health had only declined, and it was probably for the best that she hadn't come back anyway, after police had come across Ben's stepmom's body tucked away in one of the rooms. What exactly had happened couldn't be determined without Paul, but the police had assumed he'd killed her. Cora hadn't offered what information she had, especially after her mother had recognized the dead woman as someone she'd known long ago, back in high school. To law enforcement, Paul had been the one to cause all the trouble, trying to hurt Maeve and his daughter, setting the house on fire, and then disappearing in it. He was, as far as anyone was concerned, dead, and any mysteries connected to him had died with him.
"Whenever I dreamed," Cora answered Brian after the cat had vanished, "I was in the house. Not the real house, but what it actually was, I guess. What it wanted to be, maybe. And I . . . I sensed that at some point I'd really be there, so I wondered--if I was in the dream house and fell asleep, would I dream instead about being in the real house?"
"And . . . that worked?"
She shrugged. "I don't really understand it, but it must have. I just remember suddenly being in my real house, walking through its shadows toward your voice, and you were calling from the closet in my room. So I opened it and went inside, and then somehow you were pulling me out of the same closet into the room I thought I'd just left. It was totally mind-bending."
"Yeah . . . for sure."
They stood in silence for a few minutes, until Brian made some remark about Cora looking cold, and she confirmed that she was, and they returned to the truck. Brian started the engine, let it warm up. As she sat eyes locked on the hilltop, imagining she saw the house that used to be on it, Cora whispered a concern she'd had for some while:
"Do you think they're all like that?"
"What do you mean?"
She bit her lip. "Houses. Do you think they're all sort of . . . alive?"
Brian turned to her with an intensity she rarely saw in him. "No. Definitely not. That one was--wrong. I don't know how, but it was an abnormality." He looked back to the road, released the emergency break, put the car in drive, and began to pull away. "I'm sure it was just an abnormality."
Cora was somewhat reassured, and yet as they headed down to the narrow opening of the street, she recognized a faint yet definite pulling, a whisper across the back of her neck, an odd uneasiness in her stomach, as if something was calling for her, begging her to turn around. And she knew--she knew that no matter how far away she moved, some part of her would always remain in that house, wandering its corridors and ballrooms, its secret passageways and spiraling stairs, forever lost, forever captive, but never quite alone.
THE END
Author's Note: Thank you IMMENSELY if you read all the way to the end of my novel! I appreciate you so much. Please consider sharing Hilltop House with a friend if you enjoyed it. It is available for purchase at https://www.amazon.com/Hilltop-House-S-Q-McGrath/dp/B0BMXYM1TQ/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
I would also be happy to send you a free copy if you DM me.
Best, Sarah.