In the autumn of 1923, a cabinet maker named Mercer Ashmore signed a deed for a house that cost him exactly one dollar. He would spend the rest of his life wishing the price had been higher. Ashmore, 39, had come to the mountain hollow hoping for work. He had $19 to his name, a wagon, and a horse older than the wagon.
A fire had destroyed his shop, and a season of bad luck had followed. When a priest named Father Emory Winterborn offered him an 11-room house for a single coin, Ashmore should have walked away. Instead, he signed. The house belonged to the parish.
It had been left to the church by the last member of the Ravenscroft family, a man named Lucius Ravenscroft, who had signed it over one rainy autumn night and then disappeared. Father Winterborn told Ashmore the house had a reputation in the hollow, but said a sensible man from the valley would pay no mind to mountain talk. He gave no further explanation, only the deed and a pen. The house stood a mile and a half above the town, a dignified structure of gray stone and dark timber with a staircase carved from black walnut.
Ashmore found the place in better repair than its history suggested. He began to work, cleaning and mending, and for the first time in two bad years, he felt something close to hope. Then the house began to change. The first sign was a faint, sweet smell that came in the evenings, strongest at the foot of the stairs.
It was the smell of fruit left too long in a bowl. He searched the cellar for a dead animal and found instead a rectangle of newer stone in the floor, fitted neatly into the older flagstones. The work of a careful man. Soon after, at three in the morning, he heard a voice.
It was not a scream. It was the low, steady murmur of a man explaining something patiently in another room, pausing as if waiting for a reply that never came. When Ashmore stepped onto the top stair, the voice stopped. Above him, a door closed softly.
The voice returned every night. Ashmore understood two things, though he had no way of knowing them. The voice was Lucius Ravenscroft’s, and the dead man was rehearsing a confession, going over the words again and again, trying to get them right. Beneath the voice, Ashmore heard another sound, a small, wet sound he could not name.
He went to Father Winterborn and demanded to know what Ravenscroft had told him the night he came down from the hills. The priest refused to repeat the confession. But he did admit that he had prayed for someone who could not afford to ask questions. He had sold the house for a dollar because the church could not keep it, could not sell it for what it was, and could not simply leave it standing empty, because a thing left empty in that house did not stay empty.
The priest told Ashmore that Lucius Ravenscroft had loved his wife deeply and quietly. In the last years, after the timber gave out and the family money went, something had happened in the house. Lucius believed it was his doing. One terrible night, a careful man’s hands had worked in the cellar.
Stone had been taken up and laid again. Lucius had walked down to the church, signed the house away, and started to leave. He had turned around at the foot of the track and gone back up to the house, because something in it would not let him go. The priest said he had buried an empty coffin with Lucius’s name on it eleven years earlier.
Lucius, he said, had never left the house. He was still there, going over what he had done. And the priest believed he was no longer alone. Ashmore rode back up the mountain in the rain.
He could not sell the house. He could not afford to leave it. And some part of him did not want to leave. The house began to work on him.
He came down to the hollow less often. When he did, he was gray and thin, and he flinched at sounds. He had taken to talking to himself, low and steady under his breath. The shopkeeper, Varity Coldwell, asked him once if he was well.
He looked at her with unfocused eyes and said, “He just wants me to understand. ”
One night, lying in the dark, Ashmore answered the voice. He said, “I understand. It’s all right.
I understand. ”
The voice stopped. Then it began again, but it was different now. It was answering.
For hours, two voices went back and forth in the dark. Ashmore could not later remember a word of what was said. When gray light came, he was standing at the foot of the black walnut stairs in his bare feet, frozen, with no memory of coming down. His own voice was still going, explaining something to no one at all.
By midwinter, the people in the hollow had begun to talk. A hunter swore he heard two men arguing inside the house. A timber hauler said he saw Ashmore standing in an upstairs window with a second figure close behind him. Then the screaming began.
Every night, a sound carried down the frozen air. Some said it was one man screaming. Some said it was two. Varity Coldwell, who heard it from her own back porch, said it did not sound like fear.
It sounded, she said, like grief, like a man screaming because he had finally understood something, and understanding was worse than not knowing. No one went up the track. The people in the hollow had grown up knowing what kind of place the Ravenscroft house was, and there were some doors no one would knock on. In the end, it was Father Winterborn who went, alone, on foot, through snow to his knees.
He was the one who had made it possible, and the priest believed a man must answer for what he makes possible. What Father Winterborn found in that house he never fully told. When he came down at dawn, his hair, which had been white only at the temples, had gone white all through. He did not speak for three days.
When he did, he said only this: the front doors had been standing open onto the snow, though no tracks led in or out. The house was silent. The cellar door was open, and a lamp burned at the bottom of the stairs. The rectangle of newer stone had been taken up.
The priest would not say what he had seen. The only words he ever spoke about that corner of the cellar were that there was room in it now for two of Mercer Ashmore. There was no body. Ashmore was simply gone, the way Lucius Ravenscroft had gone.
The house took what it took. They found his boots at the foot of the black walnut stairs, set neatly side by side, the laces still tied. The way a man leaves his boots when he is going somewhere he does not need them. The priest had the cellar bricked up by a mason from another county, and over the new brick he placed something he had made with his own hands.
He never said what it was, only that it was meant to keep something in rather than to keep anyone out. He left the parish that spring. The church stood empty after him, its steeple leaning a few degrees off true against the gray sky. The Ravenscroft house stood empty too.
No one would have it, not for a dollar, not for nothing. It remains at the end of a track the forest has nearly reclaimed, four chimneys and a steep black roof rising out of the mist. The people left in the hollow say that on the worst nights of winter, when the air is still and carries sound a long way, you can hear from the house a voice, low and steady and reasonable, the murmur of a man explaining something patiently, going over it again and again, trying to get the words in order. And in the pauses where another man would answer, there is a second voice now.
Two of them, up there in the dark, no longer alone.