Elly #2
Elly shifted on her feet, feeling as though she’d been set a test that she was rapidly failing.
Something about the woman’s intensity, the way her eyes shifted quickly from left to right, made Elly question how stable she was.
Perhaps there was something seriously wrong with her – maybe she needed help.
That thought made Elly feel cornered. It made her want to run.
“I need to get back to my wedding,” she said. “And I think maybe you should leave.”
“Listen to me,” the woman said, her voice deeper now. “You can only find Hex House if you need it. That’s why no one knows where it is. Why no one believes it’s real.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I can’t explain it all to you now, Elly.
” With a shiver Elly thought, She knows my name.
“But if you look for it, I promise you’ll find it.
You’ll be safe. She’ll protect you.” The woman swallowed and Elly watched the muscles in her throat contract, relax.
Something about that movement was too fluid.
It didn’t look quite right. “He will never find you there.”
“But he’s my husband,” said Elly.
The woman clicked her tongue, a slight shudder rippling through her body.
It reminded Elly of something wet shaking out its feathers.
The woman might have said something else, but at that second the door to the toilets opened, making them both spin around.
One of Elly’s little cousins came stumbling in with cake smeared around her face.
“I feel sick,” she proclaimed, and disappeared into one of the cubicles.
The woman turned back to Elly, a hotness to her now, an urgency. “It’s the woods you need.” Her voice was almost a hiss. “Just keep going and don’t stop. The house will find you.”
She gave Elly’s arm a final squeeze and then left, leaving Elly standing alone and shivering, listening to the sound of retching from the toilet cubicle.
* * *
Later, Elly and Ethan departed for the cottage he’d rented for the occasion, on the outskirts of the village.
He carried her over the threshold, performing the ritual with a tight-lipped glee.
The cottage itself was small, brickwork dripping with light from candle sconces.
The fireplace was stacked with fresh wood.
Ethan would start a fire and soon things would start burning, moving onwards with uncontrollable momentum.
Elly was still in her long, white dress and she ran her fingers over the fine lace at her wrists.
At the altar, Ethan had pressed that lace so hard that it made a net of her skin.
That grip had felt like a warning, a claiming.
It’s the woods you need.
Just keep going and don’t stop.
Elly had looked for the woman for the rest of the reception but couldn’t find her. When she asked Suzanne if she’d seen a woman in an orange dress, she’d shaken her head. And then it had been time to leave.
To distract herself, Elly clicked on the old Roberts radio.
It started playing Eva Cassidy’s ‘Fields of Gold’, one of her dad’s favourites, a song she’d listened to on repeat in the long months after he died.
The sound was quiet and tinny but it was still enough to make her eyes burn, until Ethan reappeared behind her and clicked off the radio.
“Do we really need to listen to that tonight? It’s so depressing.”
Was that the moment she decided? Elly considers it now as she reaches a wide clearing in the woods, cold air harsh in her lungs. Was that the loose brick that brought the whole house toppling down?
“But I love that song,” she’d said. “You know I love that song.” Maybe Ethan didn’t like the way she said it, because he gripped the tops of both her arms and pushed her down so that she was forced to sit on the bed.
She blinked up at him. “Stay,” he whispered, with a wilting kind of smile.
This was a game he liked to play, as though it were fun for them both.
He kissed her in the place where her forehead met her nose. “God, I love you so much.”
He went to bring in their cases and Elly sat in the silence, picking at her hem, which had started to fray.
She’d still been hopeful when she’d picked this dress.
It had reminded her of the sepia photo of her parents on their own wedding day, beaming in the same church doorway, squinting into the sun.
Her mum had worn a similar style: high-necked, demure, traditional.
In the photo, her father held her mother’s arm like she was a prize he couldn’t believe he’d just won.
Elly shifted on the thick floral bedspread.
She was a married woman now. Married. He’s my husband, she’d told the woman in the bathroom, and it had felt like the truest thing in the world, and the most inescapable.
Of course Ethan was her husband. From the first day, standing in the bakery and looking at his hair dusted with snow, he was always going to be – if only because he’d decided, and because Ethan was very good at following through on things he’d decided.
The cottage seemed to grow smaller around her, candles burning low.
Resting her hand on the swell of her stomach, Elly could almost convince herself that this really was the best thing for everyone, and that the meeting with the woman in the bathroom had never happened.
She and Ethan were a solid unit now; they shared a last name.
Being married was an invisible act of binding that would make them new.
It would strip away all their stains and make her worthy.
It would make him love her better. It had to.
Elly turned to the window. The world outside was soaked in twilight, but she still knew it by heart.
She’d been living with Ethan in Edinburgh for the last six months, and coming back home for the wedding, nostalgia had settled on her like a coat of dust. The village’s quaint houses and fallow fields were as familiar as the landscape of her own body.
Its quiet streets were peppered with significance: the wooden bench on the Green where she and Suzanne drank smuggled vodka from a thermos as teenagers, the little bakery on the high street where she’d worked since she was sixteen.
To the north were the woods, then the hills: silent monoliths standing in the background of her every memory.
Ethan returned with the bags. The cottage walls felt thick and too close.
Elly’s mum would be at home now, tucked up in bed, falling asleep soundly in the belief that her only child was happily married.
It seemed impossible that Elly could be just a stone’s throw from her, and yet still feel this loneliness that seemed too big to hold inside her body.
Suzanne and the others might have gotten a taxi into Edinburgh, to a bar with 2-4-1 cocktails.
Maybe they would toast Elly and talk about how much they missed her, how they hoped they’d find partners as witty and charismatic as Ethan one day.
Elly reached for her clutch bag and pulled out her phone but couldn’t think of one person to call.
It’s your wedding night, she imagined whoever picked up saying, why on earth are you calling me?
She wouldn’t have an answer. She could never find the words.
“Isn’t this nice?” Ethan said, sitting beside her on the bed. “Just us, finally?”
Elly leaned her head on his shoulder, tried to make herself relax. His smell was so familiar. This is nice, she told herself. This is nice.
“You looked so beautiful today,” he said, kissing the top of her head. He murmured the words into her hair. “You’ve never looked so lovely.”
She let herself melt into him, closing her eyes.
Had she really felt afraid of him, just a few minutes ago?
Had she really cried in the bathroom at her own wedding?
It was dizzying, sometimes, how quickly things could seem one way, and then shift to become something else entirely, like the turning of a kaleidoscope.
Her dress was starting to itch against her skin, the material straining uncomfortably across her belly.
“I’ll go and get changed,” Elly said. She made to stand up, but Ethan’s hand clasped at her wrist, an anchor snagging her in the rocks, bringing her back down.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay?”
A quick, cold feeling – everywhere, like an ice sheet forming across the skin.
“It’s just a bit tight.”
“But I want to look at you wearing it a while longer,” he said. “So you can wait.”
Another turn of the kaleidoscope, a new reality grinding into shape.
He hadn’t always been like this. And this wasn’t what he was always like. This was just a facet, a layer – but it was a layer that seemed to find the sunlight more and more.
Elly sensed Ethan’s hands move. She was always hyper-aware of his movements in these moments, the rest of the world dulled and only him turned up in intensity.
He raised his left hand to her mouth, his thumb on one side of her jaw and his fingers on the other.
She thought he might caress her. Instead, he squeezed, pressing her cheeks into her teeth and forcing her lips open.
His right hand found the back of her head, lacing through the hair and gripping it so that he could tilt her head back.
Elly watched him with wide eyes, wishing she knew what any of this meant, wishing she was the kind of person who wouldn’t accept it, that she was the kind of person he would never even think of doing this to.
Ethan got to his feet, bringing her up with him.
Not forcefully, but without compromise. He walked into her, so that she had to step clumsily backwards.
Her back found the stone wall. Still squeezing her face, he kissed her hard on the mouth.
“I’ve wanted to do this all day,” he said when he pulled away. “It’s all I’ve thought about.”