Elly
THEN
There is pain – so much pain – but this feeling is more than that.
She has become mighty, more powerful than she has ever been, perhaps even in her hex form.
Her body rides the riptide of each contraction, following an ancient code it has understood all along.
Everything inside her works together to bear down, her teeth clamping so tightly she feels something at the back of her mouth crack.
The night hours are lost to her. She turns her focus inwards to the soft, quiet world behind her eyelids.
She already knows this time is sacred, that she will think of it every day for the rest of her life, and she wants to immerse herself in its truth and brutal beauty.
When she’s lucid, it’s only in snatches.
She stores up the small details that make themselves apparent: the red sisters singing their melancholy Gaelic songs; the brush of Margot’s curls against her cheek; the way the air smells like candlewax and damp.
Theo’s panicked voice, further away. Should it be taking this long?
A sprig of lavender held under her nose.
Haina’s face, those dark eyes, constellations of obsidian and cinnamon.
You clever, clever girl. The darkness fading, the sun coming up, milky and weak. Turn her over. That’s it, gently now.
Finally: a startled cry that doesn’t belong to her.
The baby. Her baby. A baby that has somehow, miraculously, come out of her body and is now in the room, breathing and crying and stretching out its tiny arms. The gloomy mid-morning is suddenly momentous and strange.
A sharp cracking, an erupting, pieces of dark brown shell littering the parlour floor.
A warm, slippery body placed on her chest, still attached to the cord.
You, she thinks, looking down at the perfect, swollen face. Of course it’s you.
She wants to be alone with him. She wants to use her body as a shield to protect him from view, because he is hers, hers alone.
Her love is enormous, almost too painful to hold in her body – she gives birth to that, too, and it bursts forth and floods the room.
Euphoria makes her shake. She looks down at the boy, her boy, Mine, and grips his tiny hand as hard as she dares.
She is crying, she realises. He is too precious to be born, too important to be at the mercy of the world.
The placenta is a violent purple when it slips from her body. It looks like a creature that should never see the light, like something pulled up from the bottom of the ocean, like something that has only ever known a life fumbling around in the deep dark.
The women swarm and chatter. They tend to her and the baby with so much tenderness, but Elly barely notices it. All she can see is him. She presses her nose to his forehead, inhales the scent of his skin. She wants to stay like that, the two of them tight together, always.
“I will be worthy of you,” she whispers. “I promise.”
* * *
Elly’s body feels different without the baby inside.
For days she is sore and limping; excavated, hollow, but before long the strength starts to return as her stomach muscles shrink inwards.
She thinks about the birth all the time, the wonder of it, the way it had made her feel close to something greater than herself.
It was not dissimilar, she realises, to how it feels to hex.
She begins to remember what it felt like, for her body to be her own.
Only, she is changed now. She’s a mother, but she is also something else, something the house has made.
Something she cannot name. Now her body no longer has a baby to grow, she feels the fullness of it – her every cell buzzes with strength, with potential.
Elly calls the baby Thomas, after her dad.
She sees shades of him in his tiny face: the bluntness of the nose, the darkness of his hair.
She looks for Ethan there, too, and is relieved not to find him.
There is an ache though, an urge she can’t ignore.
You have a son, she wants to tell him. Look what I did for us, look what I made, even when you were trying to slowly crush me.
Elly can’t be fully sure of the dates, but she thinks that Thomas has arrived early.
She hadn’t expected to give birth at the house, had always assumed that, somehow, she would be gone by then, although that seems faintly ridiculous now.
She hadn’t thought about how it would be practically, to bring a baby into the delicate orbit of Hex House, how the other guests would react.
But as the days go on, she feels more and more as though she is in a village of women, all of whom seem keen to help her every minute of the day or night.
Janine rubs Elly’s back at night while she nurses – that odd, wonderful sensation of the milk arriving and passing from her to him, a pearly thread connecting them, magically sustaining his little body.
Keiko brings her cinnamon tea and ice cubes for her cracked nipples.
It’s Margot who seems to love Thomas the most. She takes him so that Elly can sleep, shower, or have her sessions with Haina.
She stares down into his tiny face with such intensity that it’s as though he’s somehow communicating with her, only her.
Sometimes, after a nap, Elly looks out of the dormitory window to see Thomas with the sun on his face, surrounded by all the women who already love him like he’s their own.
Seeing him so well cared for, her thoughts wander often to her sessions with Haina.
In between each, she anticipates the next.
She notices things about the house that she didn’t before, things that hadn’t made sense but now crystallise into perfect clarity.
She recognises the deep grooves in the wooden floor of Haina’s study as claw marks.
She knows the sound of scratching on the roof is the women practising with Haina, wheeling in the air around the house until the sun rises.
In some of the women who are almost ready for their ceremony, she senses a new kind of hunger, a restlessness they can’t sate.
Elly advances quickly in Haina’s sessions.
She can find her hex form with barely any prompting, and she knows the shape she is taking is closer and closer to her final hex.
One afternoon, Haina brings out a mirror so that she can regard herself and her hex form for the first time.
What she sees makes her hold her breath until she’s lightheaded.
She is double her normal height; she takes up so much space with her layered wings, the colour of fresh snow.
Even with her pointed beak and wide-set eyes, always scanning the room, always watching, she looks more like herself than she has ever known.
She can feel the power in her clawed feet.
She feels how they could crush something, someone, with no effort, no effort at all.
* * *
And then there’s Theo. Theo, who has been avoiding Elly since before the birth.
Whereas before it had made her feel ashamed that she’d so evidently read the situation wrongly, now she no longer feels able to let him ignore her.
All her passivity has evaporated, and in its place is nothing but strength, nothing but want.
She watches him moving around the house, capable hands hoisting his camera onto his shoulder, the veins in his forearms, the pulse in his neck, and she desires him so much that it’s as though her skin is on fire.
She has never known lust like it. Now that her body is her own again, she wants to truly inhabit it, to let it not only desire but, finally, have.
One afternoon, Elly feeds Thomas in the dorm. His eyes have been opening more and more, starting to focus on her. He reaches up a searching hand for her face and she presses it to her lips. “Hello, beautiful boy,” she whispers.
Margot comes into the dorm, sitting next to Elly and looking down at Thomas.
“Shall I put him down for a nap, Little Mouse?”
Elly nudges into her shoulder. “What would I do without you, Margot?”
Margot beams as Elly passes her Thomas’s warm, sleepy body, holding him tightly to her chest. “I don’t want him to ever have a nightmare,” she whispers to Elly. “I don’t want him to ever stub his toe, or feel embarrassed, or be spoken unkindly about. It makes me feel like my heart’s breaking.”
“I know. Me too.”
Margot strokes Thomas’s head, where reddish blonde hair has started to grow over the cradle cap. She sings a lullaby in her soft, high voice.
Elly heads downstairs, listening to Margot’s singing and Thomas’s contented gargling until they’re out of earshot, then goes to look for Theo.
She finds him by the wooden bench around the side of the house, the south-facing side that gets the light long into the afternoon.
He’s filming crisp leaves falling from one of the oak trees fringing the woods.
When the gaze of his camera finds her, Elly knows her light knitted dress, the shade of winter berries, will be a shock of colour against all that gentle brown.
The days are colder now, but Elly feels warm as he pulls his face away from the camera to look at her.
“I want you to interview me,” she says, after a pause.
She senses Theo’s hesitation, the way his eyes look everywhere but her, the way he takes a couple of steps away, towards the door. “I think we’ve got everything,” he says coolly. “We shouldn’t need any more interviews.”
Elly watches him, searching his expression for an explanation.
She finds only uncertainty, discomfort. She steps forward and takes the camera from him, placing it on the bench.
She makes sure it’s recording, and then holds Theo’s hand, pulling him backwards so that they’re in the shot, then settles herself down in the grass.
Theo stutters something incomprehensible, looking from the camera to Elly and then back again.