In the autumn of 1923, a man named Mercer Ashmore signed his name to a deed for the price of one dollar. For the rest of his life, he wished the price had been higher.
Mercer was a joiner and cabinet maker by trade, a tall man with broad, scarred hands. He had once owned a shop in the valley town, but a fire had taken it. A season of bad luck followed, and by that autumn, he had exactly $19 to his name, a wagon, and an old horse named Pard.
He came up into the hills above a place called Tarn Hollow, looking for work. The church was the largest building for nine miles, a plain stone box with a steeple that leaned a few degrees off true. The priest who kept it was a man named Father Emory Winterborn.
Father Winterborn had pale, restless eyes and a habit of pressing his thumb hard into his palm when he spoke. He told Mercer that the parish owned a house that had been left to the church by the last of the family that built it. The church had no use for 11 empty rooms and no money to keep them.
The priest said the house needed a man who knew his way around timber and joinery. He offered to sell it to Mercer for one dollar, deed and all, on the condition that he move in before the first snow. When Mercer asked why the price was so low, the priest said only that the house had a reputation in the hollow.
The house stood a mile and a half above the church at the end of a track that the forest was reclaiming. It was a fine house of gray stone and dark timber, with two stories, an attic, and a deep porch. The family that built it had been called Ravenscroft, and they had made their money in timber.
The last of the family, a man named Lucius Ravenscroft, had given the house to the church and then gone away. No one would say where.
The key turned hard in the lock, and the door swung inward onto a hall that smelled of dust and cold stone. Underneath that was a faint, sweet smell that Mercer could not place. The black walnut staircase rose in a slow curve, and the banister had been carved by someone who loved his work.
Mercer set his bag down at the foot of the stairs. Somewhere above him, in one of the 11 rooms, a door closed. Not slammed. Closed softly, the way you close a door when someone is sleeping.
He found every window on that floor closed and latched. He told himself the wind had found some other way in.
For the first few weeks, things were ordinary. Mercer rose at first light and worked until the light failed. He went down to the hollow twice a week for supplies and began to be tolerated by the people there.
The woman who kept the general store was named Varity Coldwell, a sharp-eyed widow of 44. She was the first person in the hollow to speak to him like he was a person. From her, in pieces, he learned what he had bought.
Lucius Ravenscroft had been the last of the great family. There had been a wife, she said, and then there had not been a wife. No one liked to ask Lucius about it. One autumn, Lucius had walked down out of the hills to the church in the middle of the night, soaked to the skin and shaking.
He spent four hours alone with the priest. In the morning, he signed the house over to the parish and walked out the church door. That was the last anyone ever saw of Lucius Ravenscroft.
Some folks believed Lucius had gone to the city. Other folks believed he had never left the hollow at all.
It was in the fifth week that the house stopped being ordinary. It began with the smell. The faint, sweet smell came back in the evenings after the light failed. It was the sweetness of something that has been sweet too long, like cut flowers on about the fourth day.
Mercer aired the house and scrubbed the floors. He went down into the cellar with a lamp to look for a dead animal in the walls. The cellar was colder than the season could account for. In the far corner, he found a place where the stone floor had been taken up and laid again, a rectangle of newer stone fitted neatly.
He told himself it was a drain or an old well capped over.
That night, he first heard the sound at three in the morning. It was not a scream. It was a voice. The sound of someone talking low and steady and reasonable in another room. The murmur of a man explaining something patiently, with small pauses where the other person would answer. Except there was never another voice in the pauses.
The voice was coming from downstairs, from the foot of the black walnut stairs. When Mercer went out into the upstairs hall, the murmuring stopped the instant his bare foot touched the top stair.
He went down. The hall was empty and colder than the rest of the house. The front doors were shut and latched as he had left them. He said aloud into the empty hall, "Who's there?"
The house did not answer. But somewhere above him, a door closed softly.
The next night, at three in the morning, he woke to the patient murmuring again. This time he lay still and listened. He understood two things. The first was that the voice was Lucius Ravenscroft's voice, though he had never heard Lucius Ravenscroft speak. The second was that the voice was explaining something, apologizing almost, going over it again and again, as though the right words might finally make it all come out differently.
Toward the end, just before the gray light came, he heard for the first time the other sound underneath it. A small, wet sound he could not name and did not want to name.
Mercer went to the priest. He came down out of the hills in the seventh week, unshaven, with red eyes from no sleep. He asked what Lucius Ravenscroft had told the priest that night.
Father Winterborn said he could not tell him that. Mercer asked what was under his cellar floor.
The priest set down the cloth he was holding. He looked at Mercer with something that looked very much like pity. He said, "I prayed someone would come who could not afford to ask."
The priest told him that the church could not keep the house and could not sell it for what it was. He said he had told himself that a man living in it, a good man, a working man, might be enough. He said, "I was wrong to do it. I knew I was wrong when I watched you sign."
Lucius Ravenscroft had loved his wife the way a careful man loves completely and quietly. In the last years, when the timber gave out, something had happened in that house. The priest would not say what. He said only that Lucius believed it was his doing.
There had been a wife, and then there had not been a wife. There had been work done in the cellar by a careful man's hands one terrible night. Stone taken up and laid again.
Lucius had tried to leave. He signed the house away and walked out the door, meaning never to return. He got as far as the foot of the track. Then he turned around and went back up to the house.
The priest said, "I buried an empty coffin with his name on it 11 years ago. He has never left that house. He is in it still, going over and over what he did, trying to say it right. And I think, God help us both, that he is no longer alone in there."
Mercer rode back up the mountain in the rain. He could not sell the house. He could not afford to leave it. And some animal part of him did not want to leave it.
The change in Mercer happened slowly. He came down to the hollow less and less. When he came, he was gray and thin, and he flinched at sounds. He had taken to talking to himself, low and steady under his breath.
Varity Coldwell asked him straight out if he was well. Mercer looked at her with eyes that did not seem quite to focus and said, "He just wants me to understand. That was all. He just wants me to understand."
Night after night, he lay in the dark and listened to the patient voice. He stopped being afraid of it. He began to feel for it. One night, lying there in the dark, Mercer Ashmore answered.
He spoke into the dark to the voice in the hall below. He said, "I understand. It's all right. I understand."
The voice stopped. The whole house went silent. Then slowly, the murmuring started up again. But it was different now. It was not rehearsing anymore. It was answering.
There were two voices in the hall now. The patient murmur and Mercer's own, going back and forth in the dark. When the gray light came, Mercer was standing at the foot of the black walnut stairs in his bare feet, frozen through, with no memory of coming down. His own voice was still going, low and steady and reasonable, explaining something to no one at all.
Six months almost to the day after a man signed his name for the price of one dollar, the screaming started.
By the deep of that winter, the people in the hollow had begun to talk. A hunter crossing the high ground above the house swore he had heard two men arguing inside, shouting. A man hauling timber down the track at dusk said he had seen Mercer standing in an upstairs window with a lamp. Standing close behind Mercer, with one hand on his shoulder, was a second figure.
Every night now, from the house at the end of the track, a sound carried down the frozen air. Some said it was a man screaming. Some said it was two men screaming, one over the top of the other.
Varity Coldwell heard it from her own back porch one still cold night. She said it did not sound like fear to her. It sounded like grief. Like a man screaming because he has finally understood something, and the understanding is worse than not knowing ever was.
They did not go up there. Every one of them, down to the last, had grown up knowing what kind of place the Ravenscroft house was. There are some doors you do not knock on, no matter what you hear behind them.
It was Father Winterborn who went in the end. The priest who had handed Mercer the deed and watched him sign. He went up the track on the worst night of that winter, alone on foot through snow to his knees.
What Father Winterborn found in that house he never fully told. He came down off the mountain at dawn. The people of the hollow who saw him said his hair, which had been white only at the temples, had gone white all through in a single night.
He would not speak for three days. When at last he spoke, it was only to a few and only in pieces.
He said the front doors had been standing open onto the snow when he reached the house, though no man's tracks led in or out. The sweet smell was so thick he had to stop on the threshold. The house was silent. The screaming had stopped the moment he set foot on the porch.
He found the cellar door open and a lamp burning at the bottom of the stairs. The rectangle of newer stone in the far corner had been taken up. The careful work of a careful man had been undone.
The priest stood at the top of the cellar stairs and looked down at what the lamp showed him. He did not go down. He 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. The neighbors were quite firm about that part. The house stood open and empty and freezing, and the man who had bought it for a dollar was simply gone. Gone, but not gone, the way 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 sealed the cellar himself. He had the stone door bricked up by a mason from another county who was paid well and asked no questions. Over the new brick, he said a thing he made with his own hands. It was meant to keep something in rather than to keep anyone out.
He left the parish that spring. The church above Tarn Hollow stood empty after him for a long while.
The Ravenscroft house stood empty, too. No one would have it. Not for a dollar, not for nothing. It stands there yet, at the end of a track the forest has very nearly taken back. Four chimneys and a steep black roof rising out of the mist.
The people in the hollow, what few are left of them, will tell you that on the worst nights of winter, when the air is still and frozen, you can stand on the right back porch and hear, very faint, from the house at the end of the track, a voice. Low and steady and reasonable. The murmur of a man explaining something patiently, going over it and over it, 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, still trying, still not getting it right.