Elly
THEN
Well, she’s running now. Now, when it’s too late. The muscles in her thighs feel like liquid, but she presses on.
I’m just so pleased you’re going to take care of her now.
I’m sorry I’m so sorry but I honestly don’t think I can do this I know how much this means to you after Dad and you think Ethan’s funny and charming and clever and yes he is all those things and I love him but I don’t understand him and sometimes I think he does things just to hurt me and I’m worried it’s going to get worse and at the altar he held my hands too tight and I know it sounds silly and I know I really ought to be happier but—
Instead, she smiled and said, I’ll be okay now, Mum. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.
Elly stops in the woods to catch her breath, one hand on her stomach. The baby is still. Everything has started to look the same in this light. All around her, the night is the colour of bled ink and smoke. She keeps moving. She just has to keep moving.
As the reception wore on, she’d found herself not wanting to leave, to stay with family, in safe company.
Most of the guests were hers. Elly looked around at her friends and tried to remember when she’d last spent proper time with any of them, the last time Ethan hadn’t given her some reason why she shouldn’t.
They smiled at her from across the village hall, far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to hear her if she said something.
Their politeness was unbearable – the way they’d dressed up nicely, said congratulations, and were waiting until it was an acceptable time to leave.
Smiling back at them felt like standing in a dark room, grasping towards the light.
She willed them to notice, to see her, to take her into the corner and say the right combination of words that would have made it all right for her to confess how she was feeling, but what would those words even have been?
She was marooned in a place beyond language now, a place she could no longer be reached.
It was difficult to breathe suddenly, difficult to swallow.
Elly stood up without knowing where she was going, only that she needed to be away from the loud music and the dancing bodies, from the smiles that kept flashing up in front of her, belonging to people who seemed to expect one in return.
She found herself in the toilets, which were quiet, cool and empty.
Bracing a hand on either side of the sink, she studied her reflection in the mirror and tried to see a bride on her wedding day.
All the pieces were there, but they seemed to add up to a different whole.
Her white dress and veil felt sterile and seeped of colour; the blush on her cheeks made them look freshly slapped rather than rosy.
Her face didn’t look like her own. How had she let it come to this?
It had all seemed so inevitable – events rolling on with a fierce momentum towards a foregone conclusion – that she sometimes thought she couldn’t have stopped it at all.
But that was just an excuse, she knew. That was just her being weak.
Elly started to cry, wondering if she needed saving, wondering if it was too late for that now.
The door to the toilets opened and a woman in an orange dress entered.
Elly straightened, wiping her face. The woman didn’t go into a cubicle but instead approached the sinks and started running the tap, her long fingers flexing and curling under the water.
Elly sniffed in a way she hoped was discreet, rubbing at a smudge of mascara on her cheek and watching the woman from the corner of her eye.
Could she tell that Elly had been crying?
The thought of it getting back to Ethan made her breathing quicken.
Whenever she’d cried in front of him, he’d always comforted her, but she’d sensed a flicker of something else behind his concern.
She wished it was as simple as irritation or impatience, embarrassment even.
But there was a tightness in his jaw, a heavy-liddedness to his gaze, which made it feel more like a thirst he didn’t know what to do with.
Like he wanted to hold her in his palms and close his fingers around her.
As Elly watched the woman in the mirror, she realised she didn’t recognise her.
She couldn’t remember seeing her during either the ceremony or reception, and yet there was something familiar about her face, something she couldn’t place.
Perhaps she was a relative of Ethan’s, someone she’d once seen in the background of a photograph.
The woman met Elly’s eye in the mirror, and her expression was so careful and serious that it made the hairs on Elly’s forearms prickle.
She had dark skin that looked weathered, lived-in, yet smooth.
Her black hair was cropped in a nest close to her head, the curls shining like the surface of a pond at night.
The woman kept on looking at Elly for longer than was polite, eyes moving from her tear-stained face to her wrists, where the sleeves had ridden up to expose a newly forming bracelet of bruises.
Elly looked down at them, too, thinking about the altar and the strength in Ethan’s fingers as they’d pressed into her skin, then shoved her sleeves back down.
She thought about making some kind of excuse for it all, but the frankness of the woman’s gaze stopped her.
She sees me, Elly thought, with a sudden clarity and something close to relief.
Maybe she sees all of it. Maybe I don’t have to explain.
“You probably feel like it’s too late now,” was the first thing the woman said. Her voice echoed off the bathroom tiles. It had a soft, melodic quality, like the call of a bird heard in the seconds before sleep. “But it isn’t.”
Elly wiped her nose, suddenly aware of how pathetic she must look, eyes bleary and mascara smeared. “Sorry, what was your name?” she asked, still facing the mirror. “Today has been a bit of a whirlwind.”
“You’re frightened of that man,” the woman said, ignoring Elly’s question, nodding towards the bathroom door.
The sounds of the wedding reached them from underneath it, persistent as smoke: the thumping bass of a pop song, the delighted shriek of a running child.
“You’re frightened of the man you just married. I think you’re right to be.”
Elly’s pulse fluttered, a startled creature, her eyes flickering down to her wedding ring.
It was shiny and tight around her finger.
“I’m married,” she said simply. It felt like the only thing that mattered.
The weight of those two words pressed down on her shoulders like a pair of hands, keeping her rooted to the spot.
“I… I don’t really know what you mean. Why would I be frightened of Ethan? Everything’s fine.”
The woman inhaled, the lines around her eyes deepening.
She looked to be around Elly’s mum’s age, maybe older.
“Maybe everything is fine. Maybe it isn’t.
” One of her hands found the small of Elly’s back, pressing gently.
She lowered her voice to a whisper, leaned in close. “Do you want to wait and find out?”
Elly stiffened. The woman’s hand felt cold even through her dress.
She flinched away from the touch, realising, suddenly and intensely, how strange the situation was.
The thought of this woman knowing the truth about Ethan made her want to protect him, to divert the conversation in another direction.
Turning, she asked, “Who did you say you were again?”
The woman smiled, but there was no warmth to it, just a tired kind of knowing. “Only a messenger.”
“A messenger,” Elly repeated.
“I know somewhere. Somewhere you could go.”
Elly felt it straight away: an electricity in the room, the fizzing current of something changing and rewiring. Possibilities emerging. “What?” She still felt defensive, but her voice came out as a squeak.
The woman glanced to the bathroom door then back again. “Have you ever heard of Hex House?”
The tiny hope that had bloomed in Elly’s stomach withered.
Hex House. It was a thing of teenage Ouija board sessions, of whispered stories around campfires, of truth and dare.
I dare you to find Hex House and come back with your head still attached.
She and Suzanne had gotten lost in the woods more than once trying to find it as children.
When was the first time she’d heard the story of that old house, supposedly hidden somewhere amongst the trees, home only to mad women and monsters?
She couldn’t remember, it had just always been there, tucked away in her mind next to werewolves and witches.
A local legend in a place where nothing really happens, that’s all Hex House was.
It wasn’t real. This woman was talking about a myth and offering it as a solution.
Elly started to laugh, but the woman’s face remained still, impassive. “It’s just a story,” Elly said. “No one’s ever actually been there.”
A beat of silence. “I have,” the woman said, and her voice was trembling, spilling over with so much unsaid meaning that it made coldness creep across Elly’s scalp.
She searched the woman’s expression for any trace of humour or deceit, but found none.
Was she insane? The baby wriggled in Elly’s stomach, jabbing an elbow into the space between her ribs and making her wince, as if warning her to move.
Elly swallowed thickly. She needed to go and sit down, to rejoin the party before she was missed, but she couldn’t seem to get her legs to obey her.
“The house saved my life,” the woman was saying. “It’s saved many lives, too many to count, so now I spend my time looking for other women who might need it. I’ve been keeping an eye on you for… quite a while.”