Hill is subtly playing with the reader’s senses through her description.
Hill also uses Spider the dog’s behaviour to create a sense of unease; ‘every hair of her body was on end, her ears pricked, her tail erect…’
Later on in the chapter Spider ‘… began to whine, a thin, pitiful, frightened moan…‘ This behaviour seems to make Kipps very worried because dogs are supposed to be able to sense things that humans can’t.
Hill abruptly changes the atmosphere with one line so the direction of the story does a complete about turn. She says ’… and of what suddenly seemed a different kind of silence, ominous and dreadful.’
Hill is subtly bringing back events of what happened the first time Kipps tried to stay over at the house. She then, just as quickly, changes it back leaving Kipps and the readers confused asking themselves, ‘What just happened?’
After that dreadfully draining night when Kipps wakes up the weather has changed to a horrible, dreary, uniform grey ‘… not a day calculated to raise the spirits.’ Hill is slowly sucking the energy out of Kipps, breaking him down, making him more prone to disastrous events.
On the second day Kipps decides that he must confront the happenings at Eel Marsh House and gathers supplies from the town for that end. Hill writes, ‘Then I recalled my decision to seek out the ghosts of Eel Marsh House and confront them… that the harder I ran away from the things, the worse they would taunt me.’ Kipps grows in confidence determined to settle this thing. He tries to break down the door to the locked room because he thinks that is the centre of all the activity. His confidence is completely smashed down when he hears a pony and trap losing its way in the marshes and drowning a small child. He begins to think that in the past a dreadful accident has happened here and is now being repeated over and over. Kipps is terrified, ‘I was more distressed than I could bear.’
All the strange apparitions have worn Kipps down into a state of tiredness, ‘… leaving me like something thrown up on a calm beach at the end of a storm.’ I think that Kipps just wants to be left to rest and recuperate from his horrible experiences.
All in all chapter nine is one of the most important and effective in the novel because at the end of the chapter Arthur Kipps has changed significantly, especially his attitude, the direction of the novel has turned and the truth is slowly being unveiled leaving the bigger picture of what actually happened to Eel Marsh House, Jennet Humfrye and the Woman in Black.
