Free Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan

the closet door,
     and the two girls let themselves out into the night.
    The path from the kitchen door led around the corner of the house and into the garden. There was a three-quarter moon hanging
     high over the trees, sending long bands of silver out across the lawn. The garden path was aglow with moonlight, and a faint,
     sweet smell rose from the bushes, as though in remembrance of recent summer flowers. Below the lawn the pond lay black and
     still with the moonlight making a silver path across its surface. The night air was cold and pure, tinged with the scent of
     trees. The woods rose in a dark frame around the silver garden and shining pond.
    “It’s so nice out,” Kit said softly. “I’m glad you wanted to come outside. It’s even more beautiful at night than it is in
     the daytime.”
    “I had to come,” Sandy said. “If I’d stayed cooped up inside those walls any longer I think I would have suffocated. Kit,
     am I crazy? What is happening to me?”
    “You mean, your dream?” Kit tried to sound reassuring. “I talked with Jules about that, and what he said made a lot of sense.
     You’re away from home for the first time, adjusting to new things—”
    “That’s not it,” Sandy interrupted. “It really isn’t, I’m sure of it. It’s this place—Blackwood itself. There’s something
     creepy about Blackwood. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it too. I know you have.”
    “Well, yes,” Kit found her thoughts swept back to that first day as she and her mother and Dan saw the mansion standing before
     them, huge and imposing with the late afternoon sunlight glancing off the windows to make the whole place seem aflame from
     within.
    “Can’t you feel it?” she had cried to her mother. “There’s something about the place—”
    “Yes,” she said to Sandy now, shivering a little despite the wool sweater. “I did say that, and I do know what you mean. But
     how can it be the place itself? A place doesn’t have a personality.”
    “What was the first word that came to your mind when you saw it?”
    “I—I don’t remember,” Kit stammered.
    “You do. You just don’t want to remember. There was a particular word, and it jumped right into your mind. It was ‘evil.’ ”
    “You’re right.” Kit turned to her incredulously. “How could you know that? I never told you. I never told anybody.”
    “I know it because the word was there . I felt it too. It was as much a part of the first view of this place as the peaked roof. Professor Farley picked me up at
     the bus stop in the village, and we drove up here through the beautiful morning with the sunlight streaming down through the
     trees and the sky so blue and clear. We came through the gate and started up the driveway, and it was as though a black shadow
     fell in front of us. An invisible force. The closer we got to the house, the darker it got—the kind of darkness you can feel
     and not see—and when I got out of the car and walked through that front door, I almost turned and ran back out again.”
    “But we don’t feel it now,” Kit said. “Not all the time. At night along the hall we do, with it all so black, and in our dreams,
     but there are lots of times when we laugh and study and go to class and it’s all so nice and normal—”
    “Because we’re part of it now,” Sandy said. “Don’t you see, Kit? We’re part of the shadow. We’ve been living in it for weeks and we’re adjusting to it. That’s why I wanted to come outside tonight,
     to stand back from Blackwood and be able to look at it and feel the difference.”
    “It does feel different from out here,” Kit admitted. Standing there in the moonlight, she could look at Blackwood, at the
     great building with the pointed roof, towering against the paler darkness of the sky, as though it were a picture in a child’s
     storybook. Lynda’s second-floor room was dark. A light shone in Ruth’s; evidently she had already begun her evening studying.