Elly
THEN
“I’m sorry, Haina,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
But Haina is shaking her head, holding up a hand to stop her talking. “Come and rest a while in my office,” she says slowly, as if each word costs her something. “Then we’ll talk about it.”
“Go back outside, Theo.”
Why does Haina’s voice sound like that? So harsh and clear, like cold Arctic water?
They exchange a few tense words Elly can’t make out, but then Theo is gone, the study door is closed, and Haina and Elly are alone.
The study is dim, lit only by a couple of candles on Haina’s desk, flickering low.
Haina has poured them both a cup of steaming cinnamon tea, but Elly doesn’t even have the strength in her body to sit up and drink it.
Haina sits next to her on the sofa, gently lifting Elly’s head so that it rests in her lap.
She fans her fingertips over Elly’s forehead, each touch light as a whisper.
It reminds her of her first night in the house, sitting in this very study, the way Haina’s comfort had felt like a warm blanket after a long night of stumbling through the cold.
Elly closes her eyes and pictures her mum.
Her dad. She thinks of Thomas, somewhere out there in the cold garden, being clutched to another woman’s chest.
“I tried, Haina,” she hears herself say. “I couldn’t do it.”
When Haina speaks, her voice is soft and velvety – honeyed, as it had been on the first night, when Haina asked if she would like to come inside. “Why not, my angel?”
Elly had thought about this on the long flight back to the house.
Because she had dreamed of hurting Ethan.
So much of her had wanted to. She’d fantasised about all the ways she could now inflict pain.
But seeing him there in the kitchen – tired and pale and defeated – none of it had seemed worth it anymore.
“I don’t think he deserved it,” she whispers.
Haina moves to the side so quickly that Elly’s head jerks, falling back against the sofa cushion.
Then Haina is kneeling on the floor, her face directly level with Elly’s.
Her eyes are alight and crackling. “Of course he deserved it,” she hisses.
Her face is so close to Elly’s that it appears she’s been split in two – that she is two heads coming from one body.
“After what he did to you? You had one chance to show him how strong you are. One chance to punish him, to bring him to us, and you just wasted it. And do you know what that makes me think, Elly? It makes me think that perhaps you aren’t strong enough after all.
That there’s nothing more I can teach you.
The day I let you go, even if you don’t go running back to Ethan – which you will – you’ll just let someone else break you all over again. ”
Elly lets the words wash over her, each one heavier than the last, as if they’re pushing her deeper and deeper, burying her under the waves. She wishes she had an ounce of energy to sit up, to speak, but there’s nothing left.
“Do you understand, Elly?” There are tears in Haina’s eyes now, fat tears that overspill her eyelids and stain her cheeks. “Do you understand why I can’t let you go?”
The room suddenly feels colder. Elly is shivering.
Haina stands, and at first, Elly thinks she is going to fetch the blanket from the armchair to drape over her.
But instead, she’s pulling at the heavy rug in the centre of the room, hauling it off to one side.
Underneath, built into the hardwood floor, is a small square outline with a metal handle. A trapdoor.
How many times has Elly sat in this room, in this very chair, never knowing that door was just beneath her feet?
“What are you doing?” She’s so delirious that she’s not even sure whether or not she’s spoken out loud. Either way, Haina isn’t listening. She loops a finger around the metal handle and pulls it open. She turns to Elly, her face expressionless, voice flat.
“Can you walk, Elly?” she asks. “I need you to walk now, my angel.”
Elly is about to say that no, sorry, she can’t walk, she barely has the energy to blink, but her body has different ideas. It hauls her up and off the sofa, as if Haina’s command brought it to life, and walks her into the centre of the room.
“Down,” Haina tells her, and Elly’s feet find the lip of the trapdoor, the first rung of a ladder that leads deep down into the darkness.
A smell rises up to meet her: dust, damp, something else, something awful: like decaying meat.
It’s the smell that’s been permeating the house in recent months, seeping into their clothes and climbing its way up through the plugholes.
She doesn’t know how her legs carry her, but somehow, they do – ten rungs down, twenty, thirty.
Haina is up ahead of her, pulling the trapdoor shut above their heads and plunging them into blackness.
Elly freezes, her body pressed so close to the ladder that her lips touch the wooden rung.
“Keep going,” Haina instructs. One of her boots comes down onto Elly’s fingers.
Elly screams and wrenches them away, keeps on climbing down, powerless to resist. After fifty-five rungs, her feet hit a solid stone floor. Her heart is a mean fist against her chest cavity.
It is cold down here, so cold. The air feels old and undisturbed. All around her, above and below, is darkness. She can barely see her hand in front of her face.
What is this place? And why is she down here?
She registers, distantly, that she might be in some kind of danger, real danger, but she can’t make herself care.
She is too tired to feel anything at all.
She thinks of Thomas, of his tiny fists balling and relaxing in sleep, and her heartbeat begins to slow.
But even Thomas feels far away now, like a thought she can just watch go by.
Haina has appeared beside her. She has a hand on Elly’s shoulder. “I hope you can understand,” she says in a voice that makes Elly shiver, “that this is the only way it can be. I tried, Elly. But you just wouldn’t listen.”
A scratch, a flare, a match held out into the dark, and the scene around them carves itself into life.
They stand inside a cavernous underground chamber.
The ceiling is vaulted by a network of stone arches, stretching further away than the light from the match will let her see, creating a network of segmented little rooms. It looks like honeycomb, or a rotten apple filled with wormholes.
And those arches, there’s something strange about them – as Elly peers closer, she sees that they are more detailed than she’d first thought.
The stone is covered with little ridges and grooves, and that’s when Elly realises that they’re not stone at all.
They’re bone.
Close to the bottom of the pillars, she can make out elegant, swooping femurs and two-pronged tibias, long, thin ulnas and pelvises stretched open like flowers, tiny toe bones filling in all the gaps.
As the columns climb, they’re replaced by thick shoulder blades, sternums and undulating clavicles.
Finally, when she looks properly at the central arch that sweeps left to right directly over their heads, she realises that it’s made of skulls.
Thousands and thousands of skulls, their grinning teeth and empty eye sockets looking down on her.
Elly vomits then, and the sickness is violent and tugging, as if she’s trying to escape this awful room from the inside of herself.
Everything about it feels wrong: the darkness, the smell, like something long rotted, the feeling of being so far underground.
It is the opposite of being in the sky, of being free, and everything inside her is recoiling.
She wants to turn back to the ladder and scramble up towards the light.
She wants to fly, she wants to forget about this place – this place lurking underneath the beautiful house and the bountiful gardens, this place that has existed unbeknownst beneath her feet ever since she entered the house and who knows how many centuries before that – but she can’t.
Haina’s hand is on her shoulder, urging her forward, and all she can do is obey.
“Why are we down here?” she manages to whisper.
The stench in the air is growing stronger, thicker.
There’s a presence here, a deep presence she understands now that she has always sensed, the pulsing of something living, something that exists at the root of everything the house is.
She feels it more strongly with every step.
It drags her towards it, hungry, insatiable.
Haina’s voice is a low hum, as if it’s vibrating, and it echoes around the corners of the underground room.
She’s walking behind Elly, so she can’t see her face.
“Do you understand why I can’t let you go, my angel?
Do you understand that you’ve proven that you’re not strong enough to face the world and all its teeth, despite the lessons I’ve given you? Despite the gift of your hex?”
They walk further and further into the darkness. Elly’s legs feel numb beneath her, but still, they keep on carrying her onwards.
“I’ll try again,” she finds herself pleading now.
Anything to make Haina stop pushing her forward, anything that might make Haina allow her to turn back, anything to forget all about this terrible subterranean world and what it might mean.
Because she’s started to hear sounds now, awful sounds, the cries of dying birds, the screams of women in deep, unending pain. “I’ll do better next time. I promise.”
“But it’s too late for that, Elly,” Haina tells her.
“Yours is a different fate, and I promise you it’s no less worthwhile.
You’re not fit to survive out there. You’ve shown us all that.
No – your purpose is to make sure that this house stays standing, so that it can do for other women what it so almost did for you. ”