Elly #3
Elly forced her body to relax into his. She’d read in a women’s magazine once that the key to enjoying intimacy was just to tell yourself you’re enjoying it, even if you’re not.
The brain can trick the body into all sorts of things.
But his chest was too heavy and his mouth was too warm and all she could think about was him saying, Stay, stay, and how she’d just submitted, like a puppet.
What would her mum have said in that situation?
Suzanne, or even the woman in the bathroom?
It was mortifying to see herself through their eyes, pitiful and compliant.
With a light touch on his chest, Elly pushed Ethan away. “I want to go and get changed,” she said, with more conviction than she felt. “I don’t want to wear this dress anymore.”
She saw straight away what those words did to him, how they pulled his brows down and made his eyes darker. He looked at her for a long moment and Elly wished she could snatch the words back into her mouth. She already knew that they wouldn’t be worth whatever came next.
It happened quickly – the hand snaking around her throat, applying pressure. In one fluid movement, Ethan pulled her towards him then slammed the weight of her body backwards, so that her head snapped hard against the stone wall.
That sound. Dull, like distant thunder.
Elly’s vision fractured, as if it had never been made of anything more than glass. A high-pitched ringing exploded in her ears.
He hurt me, she thought, stumbling to one side.
That thought was the one bright spot in a world that had become dark.
He’s never actually hurt me before. Not like this.
She was aware of some boundary having been crossed, some invisible but unignorable pact having now been signed.
Ethan seemed to know it, too. He pulled away from her, as if her skin burned him.
“Oh god,” he whispered, not looking at her face, but at her stomach and then the wall behind her head. “Oh god, Elly. I didn’t mean to.”
She put her hand to the back of her head, and it came away wet.
Ethan disappeared into the bathroom, locking the door.
Elly stayed where she was, holding her stomach, getting smears of blood on her white dress.
The sound of a tap running came from the bathroom, filling the small cottage.
She felt as though she were underwater, swimming desperately upwards on the last of her breath. Upwards, towards the light.
Slowly, she smoothed down her dress, breathed in.
Later, Elly will wonder where the courage came from. She will wonder about the nature of conviction, the tangibility of it, how it fits inside the skeleton, hiding under muscle, dormant until it’s needed.
She slipped her feet back into her satin shoes.
She opened the front door and thanked it for not creaking.
The air met her with a cool kiss, creeping under her dress, pulling up goosebumps.
Stepping out of the cottage, she left the door wide open behind her, not wanting him to hear her close it.
She walked down the quiet lane and didn’t turn back.
The lane snaked through a park and then past a row of houses, their dark windows like watching eyes, before bringing her back into the heart of the village and onto the high street.
Elly walked with her head down beneath the glow of familiar streetlights, heels clicking on the pavement.
Past the village hall, the pharmacy where she used to pick up her dad’s prescriptions, the bakery where Suzanne would be in just a few short hours to start the ovens, creating a flash of fire and warmth in the loneliness of the early morning.
The streets seemed to recognise her, carrying her quickly, kindly, silently.
The back of her head throbbed. She placed her hands on her stomach to stop them from shaking and kept walking.
Down the street, past the church where she’d been married just this morning. Onto the path leading into the woods.
The house will find you.
Her thoughts chased each other around her head. What on earth was she doing? Why was she out here in the cold and dark? Was she mad?
She ignored them all and kept walking.
Elly had spent plenty of time in the tangle of woodland that edged the village, but she knew that the woods themselves went on for miles, an unknowable, sprawling mass on the map.
How long would she need to walk? Walk where?
She didn’t dare answer that question. Elly wished she could have someone to spill it all into.
She wished they’d understand her, believe her, without words.
She could go to her mum’s. Or Suzanne’s, just round the corner.
But she couldn’t face their questions or opinions, their concerned expressions and soft words.
She briefly considered a pub a few towns over, where no one would know her.
They’d still be open. She could drink something fizzy and a stranger with a kind face might say something like, You look lost, are you alright?
But she couldn’t do that in a wedding dress with bloody fingerprints on the bodice.
The hills rose up on her left, three of them in a row like a trio of sisters with their heads together, their unseen eyes watching her in the dark.
She’d grown up in their shadow, had known their moss-slicked and rock-scarred faces since she was a little girl.
She used to play hide and seek here with Suzanne, breath short in her throat, like something far worse than her friend were chasing her.
All those bored afternoons, giggling about Hex House and mad witches in the windows, all the while believing there was nothing there to find.
Elly felt it again, that awful tightening behind the knees, the prickling of the scalp – and stopped to look around.
But there was nothing there but the night-time world, barely disturbed by her presence.
Ahead, the trees grew thick and wild in the foothills, creating a long throat into the blackness, carving out places to hide.
Elly didn’t give herself time to think. She let the woods swallow her up, and then she started to run.
* * *
It’s only now, after running so far and for so long, lungs throbbing and surrounded by tall birches and beeches, that Elly begins to panic.
How did Ethan react when he realised she’d gone?
The fear floods in quickly, like the sudden shock of waking up.
She can’t understand why she’s out here, when her new husband is at the charming cottage he’s rented for them, worrying about her.
He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Of course he hadn’t.
He’d looked horrified and guilty and now she’ll have made him feel even worse.
Running away – it’s what children do. She’s married now. Married women stay.
The footpath has long since disappeared.
Something squelches in Elly’s shoe, and she knows it’s blood.
She’s come too far. She’s always lived in the countryside, in the rugged borders between places of note, but only now thinks how there is so much wilderness that she’s never even seen, wilderness that’s always been here while she lived a life of pavements and wine and engines turning over.
She starts to hear things: pursuers, things with hunt in their heads.
A woman in the woods alone is never the beginning of a story. It’s usually the end.
Just keep going and don’t stop, the woman had said, but how much further?
Elly forces the thought down somewhere deep.
Of course, she isn’t really looking for Hex House – that would mean she’s losing her mind, surely.
She wonders for the first time whether Ethan has seriously hurt her, if it’s a hospital she really needs.
The baby, she thinks. I need to think about the baby.
As if in response, there’s a fluttering in her abdomen.
She’s still getting used to this, the soft susurration of another body twisting inside her own.
Elly tries to steady her breath and keeps walking.
After a couple of minutes, she stumbles over a tree root and curses.
She’s getting tired, clumsy. The truth is that she doesn’t know where she’s going, only that the things the woman in the bathroom said – You’re fightened of the man you just married.
I think you’re right to be – changed something in her.
Ethan smashing her head backwards into the cottage wall changed something in her.
Now, she doesn’t know how to change back.
The landscape no longer looks familiar. It’s getting colder.
This is madness – she should turn around.
Maybe it would be fine. She could tell Ethan that she’d needed some air after all the festivities, that was all.
She could apologise and hope that he would accept it.
She’d make cheese scones for breakfast in the morning, top them with salty slithers of bacon.
They’d laugh about this tomorrow, golden butter dripping from their chins.
Elly turns and starts to walk back in the direction she’s come from, but she’s tired, so tired, and eventually she sits down on a patch of moss to rest. The woods seem to hold their breath, waiting to see what she might do next.
She twists the wedding ring on her finger but doesn’t take it off.
Her dress glows white in the gloom, creating a halo around her.
She tries to think of it as a circle of protection, but it feels more like a beacon, making her vulnerable.
Palms atop her belly, she wonders if she’s already a bad mother.
Nearby, things rustle and squirm. Raptors, toads, nightjars. The woods are never still. Elly can see her own breath making shapes in the twilight, a secret language. She eases off each heel and abandons them to the undergrowth, imagines them being swallowed up by the soil, then keeps walking.
How long does she walk? An hour, maybe two. She can’t stop thinking about cheese scones, about lemon meringue tarts. Surely, she’ll stumble onto a road soon. She shouldn’t hitchhike but maybe she would, just this once.
But no roads appear. There are only the woods – cold, dark, endless.
Just as she starts to feel desperate – really, truly, desperate – Elly becomes aware of a different sound, like air being sucked out of the hills.
It’s all around her, inside her. Her heart beats hard in her chest, as though it’s trying to escape her body.
Then, a soft tinkling noise, like silver bells beckoning, and something moving in the canopy overhead.
She staggers backwards, breathless, her hands on her stomach.
When the tree falls it is sudden, but also slow – graceful, like a woman fainting. Breath hot in her throat, Elly watches it settle into the ground, its new resting place, gently rocking. Her eyes are drawn to what’s behind it, to something that wasn’t there before.
There’s a house.
It’s very large, and very old, its grand style somewhere between a farmhouse and a country manor.
It’s surrounded by lush gardens of roses and wildflowers.
Purple wisteria grows up its honey-stone walls, crowding around the leaded windows as if trying to find a way inside.
The house has an irregular shape, the building folding and protruding like complicated origami, pocked with little terraces and clusters of chimney pots.
It has a pointed gabled roof, and the front door is wide open, leaking light all over the path. It is incredible. It is impossible.
Elly watches and waits, shivering, her arms still wrapped around her belly. She has the curious feeling she’s being watched. She waits until a woman appears, as Elly had somehow known she would. The woman smiles and raises a hand.
“Would you like to come inside?” she asks.