Elly #4
As if in response, the sounds around them seem to suddenly grow louder: the crackle and rasp of the fire, the muffled voices in the garden beyond the window, the omnipresent creaking of the house’s old bones as it settles deeper into the earth.
“Shall we start, my angel?” Haina asks, leaning back in her chair.
Elly wonders, not for the first time, whether she tripped and fell in the woods, whether she hit her head on a tree root and is lying inert in a hospital bed somewhere.
She wonders if she contracted hypothermia and her body is hooked up to a life support machine, surrounded by wires and being pumped full of drugs at every hour.
There are, after all, so many ways that the woods can kill you.
Perhaps Hex House is simply the last wild imagining of a brain in the final moments of its life.
And yet.
And yet, she digs her fingers into the soft velvet of the armchair; she breathes in the scent of burning wood and old paper. This morning’s orange juice is still furring her teeth. It is all so incredibly, undeniably real.
Inside her belly, the baby shifts and wriggles.
In a matter of months, or perhaps even weeks, whoever is growing inside her will exist on the other side of her skin.
A tiny person who knows nothing yet of her ineptitude, the multiple ways she’s already failed as a mother.
Before she leaves Hex House, she has a chance to make herself worthy of them.
“Okay,” Elly says. She clears her throat, then says a little more loudly, “Let’s start.”
Haina offers one of her disarming smiles. There’s not a hint of surprise in it. The light shifts a little outside the window; there’s a dimming as a cloud covers the sun. Elly shivers.
“Just when I was starting to think you were too much of a coward,” Haina says, so quietly that at first, Elly thinks she must have misheard. Haina is still smiling, as though they’re being watched without sound, as though she’s keeping up appearances.
“I’m… I’m sorry?”
“Elly Carmichael. Never says no. Never rocks the boat. Brought up on warm milk and compliments. It’s no wonder is it, really? About Ethan?”
Haina’s face has changed. The soft look in her eyes is gone, replaced by a cold steeliness that makes Elly’s stomach lurch. “Ethan loves me,” she hears herself say.
“Ethan broke you,” Haina sneers. “Because he could. Because you let him. You wear it all over, like a wounded puppy.”
Elly hates herself for the tears that sting the backs of her eyes. She hates the way she can’t stop her hands from shaking in her lap. “You told me… you told me you understood. I don’t—”
“God help that baby,” Haina spits, interrupting her. Each word is a poison arrow, burrowing deeper beneath her skin. “In this world? Having you for a mother?”
She gives Elly one last derisive glance, then spins back to her desk. She picks up the papers she’d been working on before as if Elly isn’t there and starts to shuffle them, quick and decisive.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “You can go.”
Elly’s vision is blurry. The patterns on the rug transform themselves into faces, hanks of hair, laughing mouths. She doesn’t know what just happened. She’s never been hit in the face but wonders whether it feels like this: the sudden, stinging shock of violence.
“You’re dismissed,” Haina says, voice brusque.
Elly can’t get her muscles to move. They’re gluey and heavy, like she hasn’t used them in months.
Haina is turned away from her as if she already knows everything Elly might say in her own defence, and has decided none of it is even worth listening to.
The way she’d looked at her, so confident that she was the one in control – it had reminded Elly of Ethan.
It’s unbearable to feel like that again, at the complete whim of another person, being told what to do, where to go.
She stares at the back of Haina’s head, the gloss of her impossibly black hair.
She’s aware of a new thought, unfurling itself like a creature from hibernation.
She wants to grab a chunk of that hair and rip it from Haina’s head.
“No,” she whispers, the word out of her mouth before she can stop it.
Slowly, Haina turns in her chair. The look in her eyes is withering. “Excuse me?”
“No,” Elly says again, louder now. “I am not dismissed. You’re going to explain to me what’s happening.”
For a moment, neither of them speaks, and there’s no sound in the study except the rustling of the fire.
Elly is warm all over, as though she’s burning.
Her hands itch. She watches every inch of Haina’s face for clues, noting the way her dark eyes flicker down to Elly’s lap and then back up.
She doesn’t expect the wide smile, the hushed anticipation in Haina’s voice when she speaks again.
“Elly,” she whispers. “Look.”
Elly glances down at the hands lying in her lap.
Only, they aren’t her hands anymore. Her arms are still her arms, her wrists are still her wrists, but there’s a lightening at her palms where the warm skin has become something soft, furred.
Where there had been fingers, there are now glossy fronds, intersecting like a fan.
It takes Elly a long second to see them for what they are.
Feathers. Five of them, white dappled with brown, like footprints through snow, long claws curling from the tips. When Elly screams, those feathers quiver and twitch, as if they’ve only just remem bered that they’re alive.