Elly
THEN
Lakshmi.
Haina. Haina.
But Haina wasn’t there, and a few minutes later, they heard the door to her study slam. It was left to the women to pour whisky into Lakshmi’s open mouth, to press wet flannels into her wounds and whisper soft words into her hair.
“We have to take her to the hospital,” Elly said to no one in particular.
Grace had shot her a cold look. “She stays here,” is all she said.
Now, above her head, Siobhan and Theo have gone quiet.
There’s another voice. Haina. What could she possibly be telling them about what happened tonight?
And what will the filmmakers do with the footage they captured?
Theo had looked terrified, but Siobhan… there’d been something else entirely written into her face.
Something like fascination. Something like hunger.
Elly rolls over in bed so that she’s facing Margot, who’s also awake, wide-eyed and staring at the ceiling, the cover pulled up to her chin. In the dim light, she looks tiny and child-like.
“Margot,” Elly whispers, and Margot turns to face her. “What happened tonight? Why did she fall?”
Margot’s mouth is downturned, as though she’s about to cry.
“She failed her First Fly, Little Mouse. She isn’t ready to leave yet, see?
She didn’t have full control of her hex, or she wouldn’t have fallen.
” She turns back to the ceiling and lets out a long, sad breath.
“But didn’t she look so beautiful,” she says dreamily, “didn’t she look so beautiful when she flew? ”
* * *
Neither the filmmakers nor Haina appear at breakfast the next day, and the door to the study remains closed.
Lakshmi, still laid out on the sofa in the parlour, is quiet now.
Her breathing is shallow. One of the women always stays with her, dressing her wounds and keeping them clean, while the rest of the guests attempt to go on as normal.
Hospital, Elly keeps thinking, ever more distantly, she needs to go to the hospital, but she knows it’s useless.
How would they even get her there? Would they ever make their way out of the woods, or would the house just keep reappearing, again and again, like it had the last time she tried to leave?
Every time she sees Lakshmi’s inert body, crumpled and rattling with broken breaths, she knows that to move her would be to kill her.
And so, like the rest of them, she carries on with life at Hex House.
The mood in the kitchens is strained as Elly, Grace and Keiko prepare that night’s dinner.
Elly chops carrots and leeks, fries them with butter, trying to find solace in the repetitive tasks.
But by dinner, she still hasn’t seen Haina, Siobhan or Theo, and it makes her stomach clench.
Once she’s finished eating, she fills a plate with cuts of meat and bread and takes it up to the attic.
There’s not much up there apart from boxes and dustsheets covering broken bits of old furniture.
Elly eyes the rickety iron staircase that leads up to the roof and turns in the opposite direction, towards the small door leading to a room in the eaves.
She can’t hear anything from inside, so she knocks gently.
“Come in.” Theo’s voice is raspy, as if he hasn’t spoken in a while.
Elly pushes the door open. The room is small, but efforts have been made – by Haina, Elly assumes – to make it comfortable, even luxurious.
The drapes at the window are velvet and the bedsheets are made of vermillion silk.
The only light comes from a computer monitor positioned on the desk in between the two beds.
Every other available surface is covered with equipment: cameras, microphones, laptops, charging packs, hard drives.
It all looks so incongruous against the ancient beams and wooden floor that Elly pauses abruptly, almost spilling the contents of the plate.
“Oh, hey,” says Theo, jumping up from where he’d been lying on the bed to switch on the lamp. He seems surprised to see her. He looks down at the plate in her hands, and says, “You brought me food?”
But Elly isn’t really listening to him, because her eyes have snagged on the monitor. It’s open on the video player, paused mid-clip. Lakshmi, in the final seconds before she fell, her mouth twisted open in a scream.
“Shit, let me close that.” Theo leans his long body over the computer and makes a series of quick clicks. Lakshmi disappears. “I just can’t stop watching it. I can’t… I can’t get it out of my head. Sorry.”
Elly blinks, trying to rid herself of the image. “Where’s Siobhan?” she asks.
Theo runs a hand over his unruly curls. “Needed to blow off some steam. We had a bit of a disagreement last night.”
“I heard.”
“Shit. Sorry.”
Theo takes the plate from her and places it on the side table. He sits on the edge of the bed and gestures for her to do the same. Elly hadn’t realised how tired she felt, how aching her legs and her hips were, until she sinks down onto the mattress.
“What happened last night,” Theo is saying, not looking directly at her, “Jesus. That was so insane. I just don’t understand it – any of it.”
“Me neither,” Elly admits.
“What is happening here, Elly?” Theo asks quietly, looking around at the walls as if there might be hidden eyes there, watching him.
“This place is fucking dangerous, right? That poor girl, I don’t even know if…
” He covers his face with his hands before carrying on.
“I told Siobhan we’ve got to leave. We’ve got to warn someone about what’s happening here. It’s not right.”
Elly listens to him voice all the thoughts that have run through her mind since Lakshmi fell, even since she arrived at Hex House.
She knows how reasonable they all are, how true.
And yet, although she doesn’t know why, and although it doesn’t make any sense at all, she feels a tiny kernel of resistance.
There’s a tiny part of her that wants to say, But didn’t she look so beautiful?
Didn’t she look so beautiful when she flew?
“Siobhan says we have to stay. She wants to finish the documentary. Says it’s important that we show people what this place is and what it does.
” Theo laughs suddenly, and it’s a sharp, cool sound.
“I thought there was no way that Haina would let us use that footage, but it’s like she wants it to get out.
It’s almost like she’s proud of it. She…
” He swallows, hard. “She scares me sometimes.”
Elly sits still, listening. She thinks of Haina’s gentle hands and deep voice. There’s nothing to be scared of, she almost says, but doesn’t.
“I don’t know though,” Theo is saying. “Surely, I have to tell the police? Rather than just staying here and filming everything? We could be in danger. All of us.”
“The police could never find us,” Elly says before she can stop herself. She doesn’t know where the words come from, only that they’re true. Theo seems to know it, too, because his expression is different now. He looks tired, defeated. She imagines that Haina has told him the same thing.
“Do you think you’ll stay?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says on an exhale. “Maybe Siobhan will. I’m not sure… I’m not sure if I can.”
There’s an unexpected spasm of panic in Elly’s belly at that thought, that Theo might leave.
She wants, she discovers, for his camera to see her again, to feel strange and powerful in the face of its gaze.
She has never felt as solid or as real as when she was standing in front of the lens, letting him see her, really see her.
“What if I did the interviews?” she asks, and he looks up.
“What interviews?”
“Siobhan asked me if I’d do some interviews to camera. Would you…” She stumbles, feeling foolish, clumsy. Theo is staring at her, waiting for her to continue, so she forces the words out of her mouth. “Would you stay to interview me?”
The words feel heavier than they should, as if they’re soaked in water. Elly lets them hang in the air. Eventually, Theo says, very quietly, “Would you like me to?”
Fifteen minutes later, they’re in the refectory.
It’s empty of guests, but with the disruption of Haina’s absence and caring for Lakshmi, no one has cleared the plates.
Theo sets up his camera amongst the debris, the chunks of half-eaten bread and meat gristle, glasses smeared with the imprints of lips.
The candles are still burning, making it feel warm.
Elly fidgets in her seat while Theo lines up the shot, checking the lighting, moving candles closer and then further away again.
She only relaxes when he peers through the viewfinder and she feels herself being observed, appraised, appreciated.
“Okay, we’re ready,” he tells her eventually, looking up. He looks more nervous than she’s seen him before, not meeting her eye. “Is there anything in particular you’d like to share? Or shall we just start, and see how we go?”
Elly bites the inside of her lip. She hadn’t really thought this through, hadn’t thought beyond the fact of Theo and his camera on one side of a room, her on the other. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know if I can talk about her. About Lakshmi.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “We’ll go slowly.
You’ll have to be patient with me – usually Siobhan does all the interviews, but I’ll do my best.” He clicks a few buttons on the camera and then gives her a nod.
There’s a short beeping sound, and then the light directly above the lens glows red.
Elly feels it immediately – that sensation of a thousand eyes crawling all over her body, eyes from the future, eyes that know what happens tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.
It makes her pulse buzz, but she can’t tell whether it’s with excitement or dread.
“Okay, Elly,” Theo says. He sounds hesitant, though he’s smiling. “Let’s talk a bit about what brought you here, to the house.”