Elly #2
Elly runs her hands over the skin of her upper arms. A spear of glass had been heading straight towards her.
What would have happened, if Theo hadn’t shoved her to the side?
She looks at him now. There’s a deep scratch on his forearm.
Elly offers him a napkin from the table.
He hesitates then accepts, mopping up the beads of blood.
Every time someone moves, there’s the electric crunch of glass underfoot.
If Elly concentrates, she can still hear it: the low rumbling under the house’s foundations that had come before the shattered windows.
Siobhan is the first to speak. “What the fuck?” Her voice is hard and loud, cutting through the room.
No one responds. Haina is staring up at the shattered glass panes again.
She looks as though she might cry, or maybe scream.
Eventually, she says, “This house is very old.” She rubs a hand over her face, massaging the features.
“And it is very tired.” Siobhan opens her mouth to say something else, but before she can, Haina addresses the room.
“Let’s think of happier things. It’s time for the ceremony. We can clean all this up later.”
She picks her way across the debris towards the refectory door, and after a moment, the rest of the guests, still slow and bewildered, begin to follow her.
Elly is clammy all over, and there’s the strangest sensation inside her stomach, as if she’s been travelling too fast, but she’s unharmed. “You protected me,” she manages to say to Theo.
Theo looks away, uncomfortable. He doesn’t answer. Elly becomes aware of someone watching them from further back down the hallway. Siobhan. She isn’t smiling.
The lawn stretches between the pond at the back of the house to the treeline at the edge of the woods, a flat expanse of lush green grass framed by colourful borders.
Haina holds Grace’s arm gently, and together they stand near the treeline while the rest of the guests form a loose crowd around them.
At first, Elly can’t concentrate on what’s about to happen.
All she can think about is glass, the noise it made, the ragged holes in the refectory roof.
But then Haina starts to talk, and her uneasiness dissolves at the sound of her steady voice.
“My angels, we’re here tonight for Grace,” Haina says, “to show her how much we love her. And to decide whether or not she’s ready to leave us.”
Elly swallows thickly. She’s been so preoccupied by the particulars of the ceremony, she hadn’t paid much mind to what might happen afterwards. The thought of working in the kitchens every day without Grace’s calm presence, her tireless energy, her low, melodic voice – it makes her feel empty.
At the front of the crowd, Haina has taken Grace in her arms. The two women embrace, and even from this distance, Elly can see that Haina’s cheeks are glistening.
Grace’s expression doesn’t give much away.
She looks serious, resigned. Is she thinking of Lakshmi, the way she’d dropped from the sky?
Is she thinking of what’s waiting for her beyond the woods?
“You have the love of the whole house,” Haina says.
This time, Elly is ready to join in with the chorus of voices. May your hex protect you, they call into the night. May your hex protect you, Grace.
Grace gives a nod, and Haina steps aside.
The only light in the garden is the pale illumination of the moon.
The evening world is full of noise: buzzards scouring the forest for a meal, toads making their gasping croaks down by the pond.
Even so, Elly feels as though she can hear the breathing of every guest standing around her, could pick out their heartbeats by sound alone.
These heightened senses are new, she knows.
Close by, Theo’s pulse is quick but steady.
Without his camera, he seems incomplete, at a loss.
A few metres away, Siobhan’s irritation at not being able to film the ceremony seems to have dissolved into curiosity.
She watches Grace closely with her dark eyes.
“I’m ready,” Grace whispers, and the crowd begins to shout. Elly had almost forgotten how it felt to become tangled up in that net of cruel words: like being restrained by the kind of twine that cuts the skin.
“It was your fault she died.”
“She took her own life because of you.”
The words become louder, more insistent. Someone picks up a clod of earth from a nearby border and hurls it at Grace. Grace sees it coming and lets it pelt her full force in the chest. Haina looks on, smiling serenely.
“You’ll never be forgiven, no matter how much you hurt yourself.”
“Who would look at you now?”
“You should have saved her.”
Elly gasps at the realisation that this last cruelty has come from her own mouth. She doesn’t know how she knows the cruellest thing it would be possible to shout, but she does; she feels like she can inhabit every inch of Grace’s story. Somehow, she knows what will hurt the most.
The ugly words keep flying through the night air, and it doesn’t take Grace’s body long to respond.
Elly had seen Grace’s hex at her First Fly, but it shocks her anew now: the lush eider that rashes over every visible inch of Grace’s skin, the iridescent specks of gold in her spread wings, the way her fair hair disappears from her head, leaving behind a pate of slicked feathers.
The skin around her breasts and stomach remains almost bare, as though it’s been pecked.
It looks fleshy and pink, raw to the elements.
When Grace’s transformation is complete, Elly feels a consuming sense of calm to look at her. She looks almost more like herself in this form, truer to the essence and core of what Elly considers to be Grace: the kind, impatient, sturdy heart of her.
Grace’s wings begin to beat. Elly feels it on her face: the mighty gust of air, bringing with it the smell of earth, the smell of nests filled with newborn chicks.
All at once, the guests grow silent. Her muscular legs take a few, powerful strides forward, as if she’s going to run straight into the crowd.
All the women fall back together, but there’s no need, because Grace never reaches them.
Instead, she is suddenly airborne, she is above their heads, she is beyond them and away.
The guests begin to cheer as Grace’s silhouette grows higher and smaller.
From this distance, Elly thinks, she could be an eagle.
Anyone looking into the sky now would see nothing more than the large shadow of a night predator.
Maybe they would think, What an impressive-looking thing, but they probably wouldn’t look up long enough to notice.
When all grows silent again, some of the women settle themselves down in the grass. It’s a cold night and the lawn crunches with the first suggestions of frost, but they don’t seem to mind. They stretch out their limbs, scars shining in the moonlight, backs to the earth and faces to the sky.
“What’s happening?” Elly asks Margot. “What are we waiting for?”
Margot had been bobbing up and down on her heels, but now she plops down so that she’s cross-legged, as flexible and nimble as a child. “You’ll see,” she says.
Elly joins her on the grass, tilting onto her side to avoid the uncomfortable pressure on her swollen belly.
It’s been painful all day, her ribs aching, a low pulsing in her lower abdomen.
She wonders why they’re out here on the grass rather than on the roof, although part of her is relieved to not be up there again.
She can’t stand there without thinking of Lakshmi, how she’d given Elly her lipstick on her first day in the house, the way she’d squeezed Elly’s hand the night she died.
Siobhan and Theo are the last to sit. Only Haina remains standing.
She keeps her unreadable face turned to the stars.
How long does it take for them to hear that swooping sound again?
One hour, maybe two? Elly is shivering, the wetness from the earth seeping upwards into her clothes and the gaps between muscles, but she forgets all about the discomfort when she looks up at the sky.
There is a shape looming, approaching them at speed – lower and faster, lower and faster.
It doesn’t look like Grace; it’s too large, too misshapen, seeming to be composed of two entirely different parts.
The guests scramble to their feet. Many are already cheering, stretching their arms high above their heads, as if they might touch the creature carving its way through the night air towards them.
Elly can’t make sense of the picture until Grace has landed back on the grass.
Her feathers are rain-soaked. They bring with them the scent of elsewhere.
Her black eyes are wild and roving. She uncurls and reveals what she has brought with her in her enormous claws, her carrion: the limp body of a woman.
Elly staggers backwards, the blood draining from her face.
The woman is middle-aged, hair streaked with grey, her body thin and wiry.
There are oozing lacerations in her stomach from where Grace’s claws have gripped her.
She has been carried here from who knows where.
Her wounds leak darkly onto the grass at their feet.
Haina’s eyes are electric, her skin glowing and vital. She seems to have grown taller and broader in a matter of minutes. “My angel,” she says, and her voice is unstable, a train teetering on a track, about to plunge down the mountain side and into rapture, “who have you brought us?”