Siobhan
NOW
The library feels larger and fuller than she remembers it, the bottom floor crammed with people studying and chatting in groups.
At the barriers she remembers that she doesn’t have a card and can’t get in.
It makes her feel prickly, like a fraud.
She asks at reception for the guest pass Zara has left for her, then makes her way up to the first floor.
It’s quieter up here, only a few headphoned students plugged into laptops, surrounded by empty coffee cups and crisp packets.
Off the main floor with its stacks and shelves is a slim corridor, home to a number of individual study rooms.
“Like I said last night,” Zara is saying, “we’ll just chat. There’s no pressure.”
Zara turns her attention to the camera. There’s a beeping sound, then Zara gives her a thumbs up. “Maybe we could start right at the beginning,” she says. “What did you know about Hex House, before you were offered the commission?”
“Not much,” Siobhan says. Her voice sounds dry and gravelly, so she clears her throat.
“Just rumours and silly stories. Kids at school used to talk about it like it was the Bermuda Triangle or something. A place to go missing. Some people said it was where women went to learn black magic and curses. I had a friend who was convinced girls turned into monsters there, monsters who hunted you if you told lies. I never believed in any of it. Not even as a kid.”
“Until?”
“Until that letter. Haina…” She stops, not quite able to believe that she’s just said Haina’s name out loud.
She digs her fingernails into her palms. “Haina told me she wanted someone to tell the house’s story.
Somehow, she knew about the film I made as part of my degree.
She said I would under stand what the house was, what it was trying to do.
She didn’t mention bringing Theo, but I wouldn’t have gone without him. ”
“I’ve seen your film, about the women’s shelter,” Zara says, “it’s very powerful. Very raw.” Siobhan feels a bristling under her skin, something she takes a while to recognise as a stirring of old pride. “Am I right in thinking that it’s a personal topic for you?”
Siobhan swallows. She hadn’t expected to talk about this, about Nora, about her dad. “I lived there for a year after my mum left my dad.”
“Where is he now?”
“Dead.” A beat of silence. “Drunk driving.”
Zara takes a sharp intake of breath. One hand rests softly on her chest. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not.”
“Are you happy to continue?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know why Haina wanted to make the documentary, at that point in time? It seems strange. A house, hidden away for decades, some even say centuries, cloistered in a forest where no one can find it. Then suddenly, Haina decides it should be all over Netflix. Did that strike you as odd?”
“She wanted to help more people,” Siobhan murmurs. “At least, that’s what she said.”
Something flickers in Zara’s eyes: a suspicion, a journalistic instinct.
But for whatever reason, she moves on. Her voice is tentative, tiptoeing.
“According to Willow, the woman who was at the centre of your documentary was the same one who went missing in the Borders on her wedding night. Elly Carmichael. She was all over the news a few years ago. Is that right?”
Siobhan nods, staring into the lens.
“Willow says that something happened to Elly while you were at the house. She says…” Zara trails off.
Siobhan closes her eyes, and Elly is waiting for her there in the blackness.
Elly’s fragile voice and spun-silk hair.
Elly, gentle as a lamb, baby in her belly.
Elly, who she has betrayed every day of her life since she left that house.
What does it mean, to speak her name into her air now?
What will it call into being? Siobhan’s skin creeps to think of it, but that’s why she’s here.
She’s here to finally look Elly’s ghost in the eye.
“Yes,” is all she can manage to say, her voice barely more than a croak.
“Can we talk about that now?”
Siobhan opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. She feels as though her tongue is bolted to her soft palate, writhing like a fish out of water.
“Don’t worry,” Zara says quickly. “We have plenty of time. Let’s move on.
” She flicks through a notebook in front of her, looking for something, pinning the page down with her finger when she finds it.
“Did you also know someone called Lakshmi Khan?” Siobhan nods again.
“Willow told me about her, too. That she fell.”
Siobhan scoffs, an empty, humourless sound. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”
“How would you put it, Siobhan?”
Siobhan meets her gaze now, maintains eye contact. Here they are, at the meaty centre of everything, at the crux of what Hex House is and what it does to the women who find themselves there. Can she really speak it? Should she?
Haina is dead. Haina is dead.
Once she starts, the words flow surprisingly easily.
These words have been waiting, she realises, waiting all this time to rip a hole right through the silence.
“The women change, at Hex House. They become something that isn’t quite a woman anymore.
Something that’s both more and less. Haina makes them into something. She… transforms them.”
The words seem to pull the air from the room.
They curl themselves around the table legs and climb up the grained wood, find Siobhan’s ribcage, the lean muscle of her neck.
Start to squeeze. Zara is still looking at her blankly, and it dawns on Siobhan that she doesn’t understand, or maybe she doesn’t even believe her.
How could she? What can Siobhan possibly say to make her see?
What words could come close to the awful, incredible, terrifying creatures the women became?
“I’m not speaking metaphorically,” she says limply, and Zara narrows her eyes. “The women’s bodies. They change. They become monsters.”
“Monsters?”
Gnarled hands. Clawed feet. Wings that could crush a man. “I can show you,” she says eventually.
Is she doing this? Is she really doing this?
No one has ever seen the footage apart from her and Theo, and even he doesn’t know she still has it.
She thinks about getting up and leaving, but her body won’t listen to her, is already unzipping her bag and bringing out her laptop.
Zara watches her carefully as she places it on the table, opens it, clicks open the video player.
There it is, the clip still paused from the night before.
Siobhan can’t look at it. She turns the screen towards Zara, who hesitates, and then presses play.
Siobhan tries to tune it out: the sound of the women hollering insults as Lakshmi stands on the rooftop and begins to change.
She watches Zara’s face, watches as it drains of colour, watches as her mouth grows slack and drops open.
The beating of wings, women’s voices, cheering.
Then, the screams. The silence that came after.
The camera, Siobhan knows now, will be trained on Lakshmi’s broken body.
Zara’s hand is covering her mouth, her eyes are wide and unblinking.
She pushes the laptop away, as though it might infect her.
“No,” she says, breathless, “oh my god, no. Willow, she told me that the women, they change… but I never thought…”
The camera is still rolling, recording every second.
Siobhan finds herself standing up and turning it off.
For a long time, neither of them says a word.
Siobhan digs her fingers so deeply into her scar that the pain takes her breath away.
When she looks at Zara, at her face which has turned greenish, she almost feels guilty.
Now you know, too, she thinks grimly. Now you’re in this with me.
Zara doesn’t know it yet, but every day she lives with this knowledge it will exact a punishment from her, will take its pound of flesh.
Zara hasn’t looked directly at Siobhan since watching the clip. It’s only when Siobhan reaches over and shuts the laptop screen that she finally meets her eye.
“It’s real,” Zara whispers eventually. She looks a bit dazed, haunted, like she’s coming round from a nightmare. “Hex House. It’s real.”
* * *
Later, back at the flat, Siobhan pauses in front of the bathroom mirror. She watches herself hiding behind the smears and toothpaste flecks. There’s a haziness to her, like she’s the ghost in a film. Sam in Ghost. The Woman in Black.
Siobhan peels up the hem of her T-shirt to inspect her scar.
Her clawing at it in the library has had an impact: the scabs are gone, replaced by a vivid red seam surrounded by just-dried blood.
Not only that, but the scar is oozing something, a sickly yellow liquid, greasy and viscous.
Siobhan wipes a little of it onto her finger and holds it to her nose.
It smells putrid, like something that should never come out of a human body.
Siobhan wipes haphazardly at the scar with some toilet tissue.
When she can’t look at it any longer, she goes over to the sofa, where the takeaway cartons still litter the coffee table.
Taking a bite of stone-cold chow mein, she opens her laptop again, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t.
She tells herself that each clip she watches will be the last, but still she clicks on thumbnail after thumbnail, powerless in the face of Hex House’s magnetism, even now.
Many of the clips are hard to watch, but just as many are mundane, snippets of everyday life in the house: guests singing to each other in the parlour, trying on clothes, eating together around the dinner table. These clips are comforting, somehow.