Elly #3
Grace shakes out her ruffled feathers, throws her head back.
The noise she lets out is so loud, so high and deafening, that Elly’s legs give out beneath her and she drops to the ground.
The noise seemed to gut her from the inside out – she feels void, as though she’s been vomiting.
She’s shaking. But there’s another feeling, too: the satisfying cleave of comprehension.
She’d understood Grace’s cry.
It wasn’t a linear thing like a sentence, or even complete, like an image. Instead, it was a jangling bag of shards, of broken words and meanings.
child killer under the bridge cruel cruel hands and horrible knowledge
only did it because she could
they begged and begged but
she’d do it again
no one will miss the child killer
Haina takes a step towards Grace and holds out a hand so that it brushes the matted softness at her cheek. “You’ve done well, my angel,” she says in a voice so tender it makes something in Elly’s stomach loosen. “You deserve your prize.”
Grace lets out another sound – shorter and sharper this time.
On the ground, the unknown woman twitches and her eyelids flicker.
Bile rises in the back of Elly’s throat.
Because she knows, doesn’t she? She knows what is about to happen.
A variation of this moment has happened in her dreams every night since her last session with Haina.
She recognises the desperation in Grace’s face now, the way her claws outstretch in anticipation, her pupils widening with the finally of it all.
So when Grace descends on the unconscious woman, when she uses those talons to rip open what’s left of her stomach and pull out the intestine like a long, bloodied rope, when she pokes the claws into the eyes to spear them out and pulls the flesh away from the thighs, discarding it on the grass, Elly doesn’t take a step back.
Instead, she steps forward. There’s something dragging her towards the body, meaning she’s ripping at it, too, now – she and the rest of the guests.
A noise in the back of her throat: she’s screaming.
A guttural, seething howl. She’s screaming, not in fear, but in something closer to ecstasy.
Grace grins up at her, and she has never looked so alive.
They dissemble and destroy, they disconnect and dislocate. Elly doesn’t know how long it takes, but when the night is at its thickest, there is nothing left of the woman but a single word spelled out on the stained grass, a word made up of skin and muscles and bone.
Hex.
The women all stagger backwards to admire their creation, exhausted and dazed.
Grace is still in her hex form, clumsy but somehow luminous, an orb of light in the centre of the garden.
The bloody word seems to pulse, to beat.
Elly feels as though she has been waiting to look at that word, to understand what it means, all her life.
As the commotion dies down, Grace begins to transform again.
Her feathers shrink back into the landscape of her skin, long hair grows from her scalp.
She is getting smaller. She becomes the original Grace, the Grace who now seems so defenceless compared to the might of her hex.
There is blood on her face, down her chest and collarbone, covering her bare breasts down to her navel, but she has never looked so clean, so new.
She looks to Haina with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Well done, Grace,” Haina whispers.
What happens now? Elly wonders. What could possibly follow what she has just seen? How can time just continue to tumble on and on, now that she’s been irreversibly changed?
Haina places a hand on Grace’s quivering shoulder. “You’re free to go, my angel.”
Grace bows her head, looking at her bare feet in the grass, as if remembering that they belong to her and that she needs to use them now. Her gaze turns to the crowd. She gives the women a sad, final sort of smile.
“May your hex protect you,” she says as she turns. Still naked, she walks into the woods. They swallow her like they’re starving.
Some of the guests follow as far as the treeline, where they search the darkness for her.
Elly keeps her eyes on the trees, expecting that at any moment, Grace will return, that she’ll have changed her mind, that the house won’t let her go.
But the night remains still. The trees don’t move.
Elly becomes aware of Haina, disappearing into the house and then re-emerging with a large canvas bag, into which she heaps the woman’s remains, humming to herself.
Elly wonders what she might do with them, but finds that she doesn’t really care.
She can only think about Grace. Inside her, the knowledge rings out: Grace is no longer part of the house.
Elly knows that when Grace tries to find a main road, a place to take shelter, that she’ll find it.
The house won’t draw her back. Not anymore.
It’s when she’s looking out at all that blackness, the hopeless infinity of it, that the first pains in Elly’s stomach start to make themselves known: the thrumming beginnings of labour.