Siobhan
NOW
“Fine,” Zara says, then she shakes her head. “Another letter came from Willow yesterday. Now that I know it’s all real, I just…” She rubs her eyes. “It’s just so heavy. I don’t know what to do with all this knowing.”
“She says the house is falling down,” Zara says. “She keeps saying that it’s sick – that’s the word she uses, sick – and that she’s in danger, but she doesn’t know where else to go. I think she needs help.” Zara takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I think we need to help her.”
“What do you mean?”
Zara won’t meet Siobhan’s eye. “I think we need to try and find it again. The house.”
Siobhan stills. “That’s not possible,” she hears herself say. She tries to block out Theo’s voice.
I need you to go back to Hex House.
She wishes those words hadn’t made so much sense to her. She wishes they hadn’t pulled at something buried deep – a secret, a magnet, something burning.
“But you found it once before, didn’t you?” Zara says, leaning forward. Her words gush out, as if she’s been holding them in. “Maybe you could find it again. I think we need to, for the documentary. For Willow. And…” She hesitates before continuing. “And for Thomas.”
Siobhan stays silent. Tiny little Thomas with his round eyes and red cheeks. Thomas, clasped in Elly’s arms. “So he’s still at the house,” she manages to choke.
“Willow says so. She says she takes care of him. But I don’t know how safe it is there anymore, for either of them.”
It was never safe, Siobhan almost says, but doesn’t.
“We don’t have to decide anything now,” Zara says quickly. “I just wanted you to think about it, that’s all. Are you still up for doing an interview today?”
Siobhan nods. The words are already itching under her skin, making her squirm, trying to find an escape route through her pores.
Zara breathes deeply, then turns to the camera. “Okay.” She gives Siobhan a curt nod to let her know they’re recording.
“I want to ask you about the ceremonies.” Zara’s voice has already regained its cool confidence, its steadiness.
All emotion is gone. She is nothing but professional.
“In her last letter, Willow told me that the ceremonies were the final step in Haina’s ‘training’, so to speak.
That the women could only leave once they’d passed. ”
“That’s right.”
“Did you witness a ceremony, during your time in the house?”
“Two.”
“Can you talk a little bit about what they involved?”
Siobhan takes a long sip of her coffee. It’s cold, strong, bitter.
“The women had to prove that they had what it takes to survive on the outside. They had to…” She pauses, clears her throat, then continues more quietly.
“They had to transform into their hex. And then they had to bring back a sacrifice.”
“And when you say transform, you mean into…” Zara pauses, and Siobhan doesn’t miss the way she shudders.
She knows she’ll be thinking of the creature she saw Lakshmi become on film, a creature that shouldn’t exist. “They transform into birds?” The word sounds so surreal, so absurd, that Siobhan laughs.
Zara flinches, and Siobhan realises how she must look on camera: delirious, unhinged. “Sorry,” Zara says, “into hexes?”
Siobhan nods.
Zara’s face is blank, giving nothing away. She maintains eye contact from behind the camera. Siobhan is grateful for her practised calmness. It creates a net, a net she can pour it all into. “And by sacrifice,” Zara continues, “what do you mean?”
Siobhan feels her lungs expand and contract – once, twice, thrice. Funny how some breaths take so much more effort than others, how some you need to convince your body to take, if only to remind yourself, I am alive I am alive I am alive.
“A human sacrifice,” she says eventually.
“The hexes hunt people who have done harm, done horrible things. Things you can’t forgive, that’s what Haina said.
How she justified it, I suppose. These people have done things that need to be punished.
But they also had to find someone who wouldn’t be missed, see.
Rapists. Murderers, loners. They always seemed to know the right ones to take.
I don’t know how.” The words hang in the air.
Zara’s face blanches. “They rip them apart. Destroy them. Once they’ve made a sacrifice, they’ve completed their ceremony. Then they’re allowed to leave.”
Zara looks as though she’s going to be sick.
She lurches forward to pause the recording and spends a long few minutes with her head between her thighs, breathing deeply.
Siobhan stays where she is, staring at the table.
There is a faint buzzing between her ears.
She has carried it all for so long, and almost feels too light without it, as if she might simply drift away.
She watches as Zara rights herself, wipes the sweat from her forehead and clicks the camera on again.
“I want to talk to you a little bit about Elly Carmichael,” she says, voice steady once more. It’s impressive, really, how she’s able to control herself. “Do you feel ready to talk about her?”
Siobhan’s throat is already dry and constricted. But she’d known this moment was coming, so she forces herself to say, “Okay.”
“Were you at the house when she gave birth to Thomas?”
Siobhan nods.
“Can you tell us a little bit about that?”
Siobhan can remember it all so clearly, the way they’d all lingered out on the grass after Grace’s ceremony.
Siobhan had run back to the room to get the camera.
With Grace gone, there was no one to stop her recording.
The camera panned around the euphoric faces of the guests as they sang together and hollered at the top of their voices, sending swinging cries far out into the night.
Siobhan had felt numb to everything she’d witnessed: the writhing woman on the ground, already bleeding out, the dark-eyed guests crowding around her, the way they’d spelled out that word in the grass, the word that seemed to pull everything into its orbit.
Hex. She’d expected to be disgusted, but instead, she’d felt the release of something in her belly – something uncurling, something responding.
She would ask Haina about that, the next time they were alone.
When the camera found Theo, he was staring straight back at her, pale and grim-faced.
There was vomit on the side of his mouth.
He started to shake his head, to say her name, but another sound interrupted him: a high keening, animal and strange.
She’d spun the camera to the source and found Elly on all fours in the grass, one hand clutching at her stomach.
Somebody shouted, The baby, and Haina was the first to move.
She picked Elly up as if she weighed nothing at all and carried her into the house.
Strong Haina. Capable Haina. Surely nothing bad could happen to Elly, not while Haina was there holding her.
On a night she can’t quite pinpoint in the loose landscape of the last week, Siobhan had found the footage of the birth.
She watched it and then replayed it again, starting with the shaky moment she’d followed Haina and Elly into the parlour, where someone had already laid out clean towels and sheets.
Siobhan propped the camera up on the table before rushing to help.
Later, she would tell Theo that she’d forgotten the camera was rolling, but that was a lie.
Even while she held a wet flannel to Elly’s forehead, all she could think, with a shocking amount of clarity, was, This is going to make for great footage.
She left it running all night and only switched it off when the baby arrived, pink and mewling, just before noon.
All around its fleshy body had been cracked pieces of shell.
“I haven’t seen many newborn babies, but I knew Thomas was beautiful,” she tells Zara now.
“How did Haina react? When he was born?”
Siobhan remembers Haina’s face – jubilant, sweaty. “She looked at him like he belonged to her,” she says. Isn’t it wonderful, Haina had said to Siobhan later that day, isn’t it wonderful to have some fresh blood in the house? “Like he belonged to all of us.”
* * *
Later, in the bath at Owen’s house, Siobhan listens to the sounds of him cooking for her in the kitchen: the soft clatter of utensils, the turning on of the extractor fan, the slight resistance of the seal as the fridge is opened and closed again.
Like everything in Owen’s flat, the bathroom is clean and simple, all white metro tiles on the walls, a thick glass panel bisecting the room to create a shower, a roll-top bath with brass feet.
Siobhan’s dark hair floats all around her, slightly reddish and mermaid-like.
She combs her fingers through it, looking down at her body: her small chest and nipples the colour of conkers, her lean stomach, the way her pelvic bone arches up against the skin like the walls of a cathedral.
The colour of her scar has changed again: the skin around it is sallow now.
Greenish. She knows it’s infected, that the infection will be causing the queasiness and her headaches and the clamminess at the back of her neck.
What she needs is a doctor’s appointment and a prescription and a little foil packet of oblong pills to be taken with food three times a day.
But it all just feels like too big of an ask: the calling up and making an appointment, the sitting in a waiting room looking at the floor, the pointed questions in a room that smells of antiseptic.
And how did you say you got this? they’ll ask, and she’ll say, I can’t tell you, I don’t know anymore.
It’s her body, she’ll let it rot if it wants to.