Elly #2
When the door is locked behind them and Elly is seated once more on the velvet armchair, running her hands the wrong way along its surface, Haina says, “One moment.” She’s writing some notes on her pad, seemingly in no rush.
Outside the window, birds trill in the bushes and the women’s chatter is a low hum as they prune, plant and water.
Elly can hear Margot, squealing over the colour of a dahlia.
After a minute or two, Haina turns to Elly and says, “I imagine you have some questions about what happened in our last session?”
Elly almost laughs. Some questions. “I’ve been struggling to understand…” she says eventually, “what happened to me. What it means.”
Haina’s expression doesn’t change. “What do you think happened to you? What did it feel like?”
Shifting. Shedding. Body getting lighter and thoughts quieter, a feeling pure and hot in her veins. “I don’t know. I felt… annoyed, I think.” Annoyed at you, she almost adds. At the way you spoke to me like I was nothing.
Haina smiles. “I think you were more than annoyed. I think you were angry.”
Elly shifts in her seat. “Maybe.”
“Do you often get angry, my angel?”
“In what way?”
“Well, in any way. In your day-to-day life, do you tend to feel angry? Or does that seem like something you’re not allowed to feel?”
Elly bites at her nail. Anger doesn’t feel like something that’s particularly relevant to her.
In an argument, she’s much more likely to cry than to shout.
If she had ever become angry with Ethan, in the way that he did with her, so often and so effortlessly, what would have happened?
The thought makes her shrink into herself, back pressing into the armchair.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“Because I don’t think I’m doing this right.”
Haina pauses, then braces both hands on her knees, leaning forward towards Elly.
“You’re doing it perfectly. Last time, I tapped into your anger to get you to respond.
And do you know something? It takes most guests two, three, even four sessions for their hex to start to appear.
Yours appeared in your first session. Do you know what that tells me? ”
Elly shakes her head.
“That you’re a lot angrier than you think you are, Elly.” Haina says this with such conviction that it makes the hairs on Elly’s arms stand on end. “I think anger sits right under your skin. I didn’t have to go deep to find the seam, and that seam is rich. It’s fruitful. We can work with it.”
Elly swallows. Her throat is itchy, dry.
Is she angry? She searches for the feeling within her body, chasing it through her veins, trying to pin it down.
She doesn’t find it but becomes aware instead of a pressure – a vibration that, now she thinks about it, is constant, a thing that’s with her always.
It gets louder when she thinks about her dad dying.
It’s almost deafening when she thinks about Ethan and their wedding day, the softness of his voice as he told her to stay.
If she concentrates, she can feel the expression on her own face changing, her jaw setting, her body sitting up straight. There’s a new clarity to her vision.
“We can use that anger,” Haina is saying now. She stares squarely at Elly, eyes burning, and Elly forces herself not to look away. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s not an ugly thing. It can be beautiful, if you let it.”
Elly bites at her inner lip. There’s a sore there that she’s been agitating for days now, feeling it get bigger and more swollen.
The room is quiet, bar the fire and the soft ticking of the grand father clock in the corner.
She risks a glance down at her hands, which are still her own.
“Can everyone in the house change in the same way as me?”
Haina nods, but she looks disappointed by the question, as if she’d been expecting Elly to say something else, something more interesting. “Well, their own version of it, anyway. Everyone’s hex is slightly different.”
“And when they eventually leave the house, do they… stay that way?” She remembers the woman in the bathroom at her wedding, the way she’d seemed almost supernaturally graceful. “Can they always change into their… hex?”
Haina shakes her head. “No, not usually. It’s the house that gives them the power to do so.
By the time they leave, they don’t need their hex anymore, and they don’t often feel the need to speak of it.
You’ll understand all that soon enough.” Haina smiles and Elly’s pulse flutters.
She senses layers of meaning underneath the words that she can’t begin to guess at yet.
“There are some that carry the house with them. They choose to stay part of our flock, to help us, and so they can always find the house. And, yes, there have been very, very few who choose to stay in their hex form always. When there’s nothing else left for them otherwise.
” She pauses, as if wondering whether to go on.
Whatever she finds in Elly’s face seems to give her permission.
“There was Violet. A long time ago now. I shouldn’t have favourites, my angel, and really I don’t.
But some of my guests are very special. Violet’s hex was…
” She trails off, looking at the sky out of the window.
“She was spectacular. There was just no question she would stay that way.”
Elly wants to ask more questions about that, but Haina has closed the journal on her desk, seemingly ready to move on. “Shall we see if we can wake yours up again today?”
Elly thinks about saying no. Every instinct insists that she should.
The word is hanging from her lips. She could shut the door on whatever unknown thing has started to lurk at the edges of her consciousness, its shape unseen and unknowable, that hot feeling in her veins Haina has told her is anger.
It’s so tempting to stay on the path, not to stray into these particular woods, to tell herself that she hasn’t a hope of surviving if she did.
When she really thinks about it, she knows this is the thing she’s afraid of, the thing that keeps her small: the belief that she is somehow weaker, less adequate than everyone else.
Since she can remember, she’s felt as though she’s missing some key component, some internal scaffolding that makes things just a little bit simpler for other people, helps them move through the world with a fraction more ease.
That suspicion makes it easy to think that to be controlled is to be taken care of, and to be taken care of is what someone like her needs.
That she’s too inept to survive without it.
She could stay on that path. Or she could choose to tip forward and fall wildly into whatever this is, into whatever Haina is offering her, into whatever forced itself upwards and outwards from her skin the last time she was sitting in this study.
She could choose to keep going through the woods, and into the dark.
“What do we need to do?” Elly asks quietly.
If Haina is pleased with her response, she doesn’t show it. She smooths out a wrinkle in her linen dress, which is the colour of terracotta tiles. It sits above strong-looking knees pockmarked with scars. She clasps her hands together and lays them in her lap, formal.
“How do you feel about pain?” she asks eventually.
Elly blinks. “Pain?”
“When you’re in pain, where does your mind go?”
“I… I’m not sure.”
Haina nods, her mouth an unreadable line. “I think we should find out.”
She reaches down, turns the key in the desk, then slides out a drawer and pulls out a knife. It is unremarkable, with a worn plastic handle, but the blade looks sharp. The metal catches the light when Haina places it in her lap. Elly doesn’t take her eyes from it, even as Haina starts to speak.
“When we’re in pain,” she’s saying, softly now, cautious, as if trying to coax a frightened animal into movement, “we can respond in one of two ways. We can let the fear take over, retreat inward to protect ourselves. Try and find the fastest way to get the pain to stop.”
Elly watches as Haina picks up the knife and lifts the hem of her dress so that it reveals an inch of golden thigh. Without hesitation, she places the edge against the skin there, presses down hard, and drags it cleanly across. Blood rises quickly to the site of the cut, keen and hot.
“What are you…” Elly starts to say, but Haina holds up a hand to silence her.
Watching the cut, watching it redden and start to ooze, Elly’s mouth goes dry.
Suddenly, she doesn’t want to be in the same room as Haina, someone who uses a knife as softly as they’d use a feather.
It makes everything feel unsafe, uneven, in flux.
Still, she forces herself to stay in the chair, to watch.
Haina’s chest is rising and falling more rapidly now, and there is a dampness spreading out from under her armpits, staining the linen.
Her rich complexion is drained of colour.
“If we respond to pain like this, with fear, then we respond with weakness,” she says, and her voice is hitching and high, like Elly has never heard it before.
Her wound is bleeding quickly in response to her increased heart rate.
“If someone hurts us and we’re afraid, then we’ve already lost, my angel.
They own your fear. They own you. But if we respond to pain in a different way, if we replace that fear with anger, well,” her eyes sparkle, a smile on her lips, “we can get an altogether different result.”
Elly watches as Haina’s breathing begins to slow, to resume its steady rhythm.
Her eyes lose their wideness, so the whites are no longer as visible, just the cool, steely black.
There’s an energy in the room: cold, still.
When the flesh of Haina’s forearms starts to quiver and rupture, Elly finds that she isn’t, in fact, afraid. She’s barely even surprised.
Yes, she finds herself thinking instead. Yes, show me.
The skin on Haina’s arms begins to break apart, creating hundreds of tiny holes.
From inside each one sprouts something dark and soft.
Once free of the boundary of Haina’s skin, the buds elongate into feathers, long and silken, the colour of amber.
Every time Haina breathes, they bristle, like each one is filled with a thousand nerve endings, like each one is linked to her heartbeat by intricate and ancient wiring.
The room smells like the deepest part of the forest, mulch and rot and carrion.
Elly looks at the cut on Haina’s leg, which is barely more than a red line now, hardly bleeding.
It isn’t possible, but she almost thinks that it’s healing, stitching itself back together.
When Haina speaks again, her voice is a sheet of ice. “Do you see? Do you understand?”
Elly nods. Haina grins. The immediacy and intensity of that grin makes Elly breathless.
Haina’s arms are changing again now, the feathers retreating underneath her skin, the animal smell fading, everything resuming its usual form and shape.
Haina cracks her neck from one side to the next, then blinks a few times, rapidly, as though she’s almost surprised to find herself in her study.
She picks up the knife again. This time, she grips the blade in her fist and holds the handle out to Elly.
“Your turn,” she whispers.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Elly emerges from the study.
Her muscles don’t feel like her own – they’re too loose, barely contained by her skin.
Standing on the other side of the closed door, she runs her fingertips over her wrists, remembering how they had looked just minutes ago: sleek, avian.
It had felt so different from the first time.
She’d still been afraid when she saw herself changing, had still felt as though she’d somehow fallen outside of the natural way of things.
But this time, she’d felt something else, too.
A lack of resistance. She’d felt able to push open the door a crack, and to welcome it in – a thin trickle of fury.
I’m so angry, Elly had whispered, and Haina had said back, Good, my angel. You should be.
There is a white bandage wound around the crook of her right elbow.
The blood is blooming through. Elly is so busy studying the pattern it makes, like the tiny handprint of a newborn, that she doesn’t realise she isn’t alone in the hallway.
It isn’t until she hears a quiet beep, so incongruous in the quiet of the shady hall, that she looks up to see Theo standing over by the staircase.
He is holding a small camera in one hand, held up to his face, pointed in her direction.
Elly looks directly into the black eye of the lens, into the nothingness there, and then at the single eye of his that she can see.
It is wide and green and questioning. He doesn’t lower the camera.
She doesn’t look away. The feeling of being watched, of being recorded – the idea that this image of her is being preserved and that it might be watched in a different time, in a different life, makes her skin tingle all over.
It isn’t an unpleasant feeling. She wants to be seen like this, she realises.
She no longer cares who might see her. She simply wants to be witnessed in this rare moment of strength.
Elly looks back into the lens as she slowly unwraps the bandage from her elbow.
It falls away, reveals the wound underneath, already smaller than it was in the study.
Theo takes a step closer to her and then adjusts a dial on the side of the camera.
It makes a whirring sound as it zooms in.
Elly stands still, offering up her bloodied skin.
She feels fiercely seen, acknowledged. Neither of them speak.
She can hear Theo breathing, the quickness of it, the slight hitch.
Elly fights it, the sudden urge she has to remove the rest of her clothing, too, piece by piece – to let his camera drink her in for what she is.
After a moment, she rewraps her arm and walks away from him.
There’s a beep, soft as a sigh, as the recording stops.