Elly #2
“I think so. Wait a minute.” Theo concentrates on the screen.
While he searches, Lakshmi notices Elly in the doorway. “Elly, come and see. You’re in loads of these.”
Theo looks up at Elly, surprised. He gives a shy kind of laugh, as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
“Am I?” she finds herself asking. Does she want to be? She remembers coming out of Haina’s study, dazed, almost drunk with the possibilities of what she’d seen. She’d stared down the barrel of a lens, daring Theo to see her, to really see her. The memory makes her feel self-conscious now.
Theo hesitates, then shrugs. “You’re in some, yeah.”
“Haina won’t like this,” says Margot. She’s leaning away from the rest of them, not looking at the screen, her arms wrapped around her knees.
“That’s right,” a voice says from behind Elly, making her jump. She turns to see Haina standing in the doorway, watching them. Her face is severe. “That footage isn’t for your eyes, my angels.”
Margot has skin the colour of bone, but now it pales even further.
“Sorry, Haina,” she says, voice barely audible.
Janine and Lakshmi edge away from Theo, as if they’d never wanted to look at the laptop in the first place.
Theo blinks and rubs at his chin. For a long moment, no one says anything at all.
The air feels pulled taut. Elly marvels at it: Haina’s ability to change the mood in the room with one withering look, one vague warning.
“Theo,” Haina says eventually. “Will you join me in my study for a moment?”
Elly watches Theo’s face, and she knows that he feels it, too: Haina’s unignorable gravity. The impossibility of saying no to her. “Sure,” he says.
He looks back over his shoulder as he follows Haina out of the parlour, meeting Elly’s eye.
For a split second, he makes a face – pulling his lips to one side, frowning in exaggerated worry.
It’s so unexpected, so silly, such a welcome dose of relief dissolving the tension in the room, that Elly finds herself smiling.
* * *
That night, Haina announces to the guests that they will be gathering on the rooftop after dinner.
Elly has never been up to the roof before, and she feels nervous as she makes her way up the narrow, winding staircase from the attic with the other guests.
They emerge out onto a flat terrace built into the roof at the back of the house, only just big enough to fit all of them standing close together.
It looks out over the gardens and the woods beyond.
It’s a struggle to remember that somewhere over the treeline, the normal world still rolls on – a world that still believes Hex House is a fairytale and that Elly is a missing person.
The sky is the purple-streaked, powdery blue that comes just before dark.
Haina takes her place at the front of the crowd, closest to the stone wall separating the roof terrace from the sky and the drop below it.
Siobhan and Theo stand close to Haina, Theo holding the large camera on his shoulder, Siobhan just behind him, peering into the viewfinder.
She gives him constant direction, changing the angle, the height, the focus.
Elly stands near the back of the group with Grace and Margot, wondering what they’re all doing up here.
When everyone has assembled, Haina brings both hands to her chest to address them.
“My angels.” That feeling in Elly’s stomach again, like the fizzing of fireflies.
“This is a very special occasion indeed. It’s been a long time since we’ve been lucky enough to experience what you’re all about to witness.
” There’s something different in her voice tonight.
Elly senses anticipation, excitement. “But those of you who have been here for a while will remember seeing someone take their First Fly.”
Many of the guests look around blankly, but others – Grace, Margot – grin, gasp, clutch each other’s hands. Elly can feel something peculiar under her skin, like the blood’s broken free of the veins. First Fly?
“When a guest takes their First Fly successfully, it shows me that I’ve taught all I can teach.
It shows me that, soon, they’ll be ready to leave our sanctuary and take their place in the world again.
For some, it might only take a matter of months, but for most, like Lakshmi here, seven years is the time it takes to gain the courage to try. ”
Lakshmi steps forward from the crowd to stand beside Haina. She’s beaming with so much effervescence that she’s almost blinding to look at. She tightens her high, dark ponytail and straightens her cotton dress. Her hands are clearly shaking.
Haina turns to Theo and Siobhan. “I’ve battled with myself over whether to share this with you, and with the rest of the world,” she says.
“But if people out there are to know what Hex House truly is, to understand it, well, then you simply have to see. There’s no other way.
” Her smile becomes smaller as she says, in a lower voice now, “Whatever happens, keep the camera rolling.”
Theo nods gravely. Elly wonders what Haina told him in her study, whether she would have reprimanded him for letting the women use the laptop.
But then, Theo isn’t a guest. What would be the consequences of him not listening to her?
Elly doesn’t know exactly what they would be for her, either, only that there would be some.
Next to him, Siobhan’s smile is so wide it makes her look almost feral.
She says something to Theo, and he steps closer to Lakshmi, carefully lining up the shot.
Elly can glimpse it through the viewfinder: Lakshmi’s glittering eyes, the open, darkening sky behind her, the stretching yawn of the woods and their gloom.
Haina turns to Lakshmi. “Do you want to take your First Fly tonight?”
“Yes,” Lakshmi says, loud enough for the crowd to hear. “I want to do it tonight.”
Haina smiles at her and retreats into the crowd, leaving Lakshmi standing alone by the stone wall. She looks vulnerable suddenly, set against all that open space. First Fly, Elly thinks distantly, surely can’t mean what I think it means.
“I am so proud of you, my angel,” Haina is saying to Lakshmi now. Then, to the rest of the guests, “She has the love of the whole house, doesn’t she? Show her that she does.”
Elly doesn’t expect what happens next: the group responding in unison, a chorus of voices calling out the same words once then repeating them, over and over, until they start to lose their meaning.
May your hex protect you.
Then, quiet. Elly can hear the thumping of her heart. She whispers it to herself. May your hex protect you, Lakshmi. The baby wriggles in her belly, restless, as if it, too, knows that something is about to happen. She feels Margot’s hand slip into hers and squeeze tight.
“Are you ready?” Haina asks Lakshmi. Lakshmi nods. Her hands are balled into fists at her sides. Haina turns and gives the crowd a slow nod. At first, Elly doesn’t know what this means, but into the silence that follows, the other guests start to hurl new words: these ones loud, pointed, cruel.
“You’re disgusting, Lakshmi.”
“What did your father used to call you?”
“The runt?”
One of the guests throws something round and hard at Lakshmi. Is it fruit? Who brought fruit? Whatever it is hits her squarely on the jaw, causing her head to snap back.
“You’re filth.”
“Not worth the dirt on our shoes.”
Someone spits. Someone else starts to boo. There’s hissing coming from the back. The crowd has taken on the character of a mob, teetering on the edge of fever.
“You made it so easy for him to hurt you.”
“You’re nothing. You’re less than nothing. You’re pointless.”
Elly is so busy looking around, searching the crowd for the thrower of each insult, that she’s stopped watching Lakshmi. It’s only when the crowd grows quiet again, their silence arriving as quickly and unexpectedly as their fury, that Elly realises what’s happening, what it is that they’ve done.
Lakshmi has started to change.
Her shoulders are rounded forward, hiding her face, her whole body quivering.
From the hunched summit of her back, two blade-like bones explode outwards.
The sound is like rocks hitting water from a height.
They curve inwards like whalebones, growing first a layer of fleshy gristle, then a covering of obsidian feathers.
Impossibly smooth; liquid velvet. Elly wants to reach out and touch them, until she sees the sharp talons erupt from their ends, and from Lakshmi’s toenails, tearing through the leather of her shoes.
What could they do to a person? Elly wonders.
What could they do to soft, human skin? Her dress rips at the seams as the flesh on her legs and abdomen warps, settling finally into a rippling silken down, its sheen a furious violet.
Then, her face. God – that face. A hooked nose of shining black, the mouth a howling hole, sharp teeth embedded in soft, pink flesh.
Her eyes are still Lakshmi’s, but they are burning with vigour; they are awful and searing and furious and Elly can barely stand to look at them, but she knows nothing on earth could make her look away.
Is this what’s waiting for her? Is this monstrosity what she can expect to find on the other side of her anger? Elly feels dizzy, staggers back a little. It’s only Margot’s hand in hers, squeezing tightly, that keeps her rooted in the moment, standing upright.
“Holy shit,” she hears someone say. A man’s voice. Theo is staring open-mouthed at Lakshmi, the camera lowered from his shoulder, dangling impotently by his hip. “What the hell is happening?”
Beside him, Siobhan appears shaken, too, but she recovers more quickly. “Keep filming, Theo,” she hisses, hauling the camera back up to his shoulder. “Keep fucking filming.”
Elly can once again see the shot through the viewfinder.
She can see Lakshmi, or what was Lakshmi, standing in the centre of the frame, her eyes shining in the dull twilight.
It’s through the camera that she watches Lakshmi tilt that awful head back and let out a scream that feels as if it pierces every organ and bursts every blood vessel in her body.
She sends it hurtling upwards into all that sky, and in response, birds erupt from the surrounding trees, flapping rapidly away as though they’re being chased by a predator.
All the while, Haina looks on, proud as a mentor, protective as a mother.
Lakshmi shakes out her enormous wings – Because of course that’s what they are, Elly thinks, wings – and turns to the stone wall.
She climbs atop it, her claws wrapping them selves around the ridge.
Elly feels her stomach drop, a sickness brewing in her gut.
There is nothing left now between Lakshmi and the hard ground below. Nothing but air.
“May your hex protect you!” the guests shout, the words running into each other and overlapping, until it becomes one bellowing voice that feels loud enough to tear down the sky.
They cheer, holler, clap their hands above their heads.
They watch Lakshmi with something like awe, like she is a wonder.
It gives Elly whiplash, the way their mood has morphed from derision to reverence. “May your hex protect you!”
It happens quickly, what comes next – though Elly will always think later that there should have been a way for her to stop it.
When Lakshmi leaps from the roof, Elly feels as if she has jumped, too: every muscle in her body contracts, and she bites down on her tongue so hard that her mouth fills with blood.
There’s a whooshing sound as the air hits against the veiny undersides of Lakshmi’s outstretched wings, and then she disappears beneath their sight line.
A moment of awful, hushed quiet – then she appears again, wings beating, sending her higher, higher, higher.
She can barely make herself believe it, but of course, Lakshmi is flying.
She doesn’t look like a bird, but she doesn’t look like a woman either – she’s a creature in between, clawed, lithe, powerful, tearing through the sky as though it belongs to her alone.
It appears almost like she’s dancing rather than flying, using her feet to propel her forward, turning her body over in sweeping arcs.
The crowd is frenzied, wild, their stamping feet a hurricane.
Beside Elly, Margot’s cheeks are wet with tears, her single eye is wide and staring; she is laughing.
It’s almost dark now, but Elly can still make out Lakshmi’s form as she nears the treeline, turns, and begins to arc back towards the house.
“Lakshmi!” the women shout in broken and beautiful voices, more bursting with hope than any voice Elly has ever heard. “May your hex protect you!”
Elly looks to Theo’s viewfinder again. The shot is somehow even more unreal than what’s unfolding before her eyes: the sky a more violent blue, Lakshmi’s shape even more stark and impossible.
Theo zooms in so that he has a clearer image, and so it’s through the viewfinder that Elly sees Lakshmi first start to struggle.
It’s because she’s watching through the camera that she is one of the first to notice.
With every few beats of her wings, Lakshmi sags a little, as though she’s weakening.
Theo pans upwards slightly to her face: the white of her eyes and her wide-open mouth.
He starts to say something to Siobhan, but Elly can’t hear him over the racket, and Siobhan barely seems to be listening to him.
Lakshmi tilts dangerously to one side, falling two or three feet before righting herself again.
“Wait,” Elly says, to no one in particular. “There’s something wrong.”
But no one hears her. Everyone is half-mad with their cheering and screaming.
No one else seems to realise what’s happening, no one but Theo.
He’s trying to put the camera down but Siobhan won’t let him – she keeps it upright and pointing straight at Lakshmi.
She’s shouting something at him, jabbing her finger repeatedly at the viewfinder.
Theo’s eyes search the crowd, landing on Elly.
He must recognise the panic in her expression because she sees, rather than hears, her name on his lips.
She opens then closes her mouth uselessly, and they both turn their heads back to Lakshmi.
They look back in time to see her falter, to let out a horrible, nightmare-haunting screech and then fall from their view, plummeting to the earth below.