Elly #3
“I’m not Lakshmi,” she tells him, because she knows in her bones that the same thing won’t happen to her. She knows it in the same way that she knows the wind is blowing southward tonight; that it’ll rain all the way from midnight into the light hours.
“I’m so worried about something happening to you,” he tells her quietly. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
She knows that making him feel better isn’t up to her. And she doesn’t need to, because Siobhan is at his elbow now, looking only at Theo and not at Elly.
“She says she’s ready, Theo,” Siobhan says, and there’s a spikiness to her voice, a vague unpleasantness. She’s holding the camera. “It’s her choice.”
Haina and the rest of the guests are ready and waiting for her.
Margot takes Thomas, and he snuggles happily into her chest. Elly is quick to transform.
She doesn’t even need any provocation from the other guests; she doesn’t need their jostling or their cruel words or hand-crafted insults hurled like spears.
When her body changes shape, it does so quickly and with a sense of relief, as if it had simply been waiting for permission.
She can sense Theo’s eyes on her as he holds his breath.
“Fly, my angel,” Haina whispers in her ear. “Fly.”
Elly is running. She hurtles towards the edge of the roof, the wind a whistle in her ears.
A memory returns to her in the seconds before she reaches the wall: the night she found the house, running alone through the woods.
She’d been so weak then, so passive – the world and all its horrors happening to her.
Now, she carves her way through it like a blade.
Then she is airborne, and she doesn’t think of anything at all.
She can hear everything there is to hear: the shouting and cheering of the guests on the roof, the rapidity of their beating hearts, their hexes lurking inside them pleading, Let me out, let me join her.
She can hear the soft whirring of Theo’s camera.
She can hear the slow growing of roots far beneath the soil.
The quick, short breaths of her baby, the way they mirror her own, as if their lungs are connected, their bodies are still one entity, split in two.
She can hear the low rumble of Ethan’s voice, far, far away.
The treeline comes into sight. She could fly for miles, she knows – there is no need to turn back to the house just yet.
Instead, she wheels in the air, turning her feathered belly to the sky.
The outstretched branches of the trees caress her wings and her beak and her face.
Down there, on the floor of the forest, is a creature: something not long dead.
She wants it; she wants it feverishly. Folding her wings to her body, she dives straight downwards and scoops it up into her claws.
It is a bird, mauled by a fox, a fox spooked by Elly’s shadow looming long across the trees, a fox now hiding in the undergrowth and wondering what she might do with its kill.
Elly clutches the still-warm body of the bird then turns so that she’s heading back to the house, to the rooftop with all its noises and all its faces, so far from the steely serenity of the forest at night.
When she lands, she drops the bird at Haina’s feet.
“Clever girl,” Haina whispers. There are tears in her eyes. “My clever girl.” She picks up the bird, holds it tight to her chest, then takes it inside.
* * *
The days pass by in fevered glimpses. Elly feels more awake in her hex form than her human form. She practises with the other more advanced women on the rooftop at night, flying through the starry hours, returning exhausted and sweaty by morning. She kisses Theo deeply in dark corners.
She is becoming more attuned with the night world than she is with the house.
She knows the textures of the sky better than she knows the planes of her own face.
She used to think in Google search terms – how to prevent fruit flies, is cycling healthier than walking, how to make Genoise sponge – but now she thinks in moon cycles, in bird calls.
Sometimes, she lets herself wonder what it all might mean, if her time to leave might really be approaching.
Elly is still tethered enough, however, to realise that the other guests are beginning to worry about the house.
As autumn turns to winter, the house’s degradation seems to accelerate.
Slate tiles slip off the roof and shatter against the patio every morning.
The potatoes stocked in the kitchen cupboards sprout wart-like eyes in a matter of hours, turning green and putrid in their hands.
In the bathroom, the water comes out the colour and texture of sludge.
Whenever anyone plays the piano, the sound is ugly and discordant, no matter how many times they tune it.
The mournful notes ring through the house, day and night.
The wallpaper peels. The masonry cracks.
Elly feels the house’s lack in her bones.
Then there’s the smell. It rises up from under their feet: bitter, rotting. The smell of something dying.
There are also changes in Haina. She stoops as she walks now, as if her joints are aching.
She sits often and for long periods of time, rarely leaving the chair in her study.
Her skin seems grey, pallid. Her eyes are dull.
She speaks to Siobhan and Theo more than the rest of the guests, and she knows that they’re talking about the documentary, and that the documentary is important to Haina, and perhaps to the house itself, in ways that Elly can’t even begin to guess at.
Siobhan and Theo have been at the house for months now, and the documentary is almost finished. Soon, they’ll be leaving. Elly can’t decide how this makes her feel. She isn’t as sad as she expected to be.
Because I’ll be gone soon, too.