Elly #2
Elly opens her mouth to protest, to ask questions, to scream – but there’s no point, because they’ve reached their destination now, and there’s nothing else to be done. Her legs buckle. She sinks to her knees, and Haina lets her.
“You can stay at the house forever, my angel,” Haina says, and she says it so desperately and thirstily, as if she’s been wandering the desert for days and has finally found water. “Isn’t that so beautiful?”
Before them is a great, yawning pit, the diameter larger than three men laid lengthways.
It’s the colour of blood, fleshy and bulging, rippling in constant motion.
The stench is incredible, putrid, and it seems to stick to every inch of Elly’s skin.
It burrows down deep under her fingernails.
It coats the back of her throat. It fights its way to the back of her eyeballs.
It claims her, complete and unwilling. There are flaps at the entrance to the pit – they open and close in a steady rhythm.
As if it’s living. As if it’s breathing.
And with every shuddering inhale, those flaps open, and they reveal a sour darkness inside.
The darkness isn’t complete – Elly can make out shapes inside it.
Gleaming eyes, reaching hands. Lastly, and with a sickening lurch that steals her breath, Elly recognises the once-graceful spray of wings, hundreds of wings, chewed up and mashed into a feathery pulp.
“You’re going to kill me,” Elly states simply.
Her body doesn’t feel like her own, as though there’s no life left in it, as though it simply wants to fold and fall, all the way down into the pit.
No, not a pit, she thinks. A mouth. “You’re going to feed me to the house.
” Like you do with all the sacrifices, and all the other women who don’t make it out.
Like you did with Lakshmi.
Haina is on her knees next to Elly, clutching her chin, pulling it upwards so that they’re eye to eye.
The whites of hers have turned gravestone grey.
“It is such an honourable thing,” she whispers, revealing a mouth gapped by missing teeth, “to sacrifice yourself so that this house might continue. It’s what you were always meant for, Elly.
Out there, there would always be someone who’d sniff out the weakness in you, who’d make it their mission to break you.
And they would get such satisfaction from the process.
In here, you will always be protected. Isn’t it wonderful, that you can save us all?
” There are tears in her eyes now, a manic euphoria to her voice.
“Elly, the house is so hungry. We are so, so hungry.”
Elly can’t get her thoughts to stay in a straight line.
They’re firing off in a hundred directions – she thinks of Ethan, gutted by his own cruelty.
She thinks of all the women upstairs, ignorant of this horrible crypt beneath their feet.
She thinks of Thomas. His bright eyes. His tiny lips.
She suddenly, fiercely, wants him away from here, as far from Hex House as he can possibly get.
“It’s wrong,” she manages to choke out. “It’s all so wrong.”
Haina recoils, as if Elly has slapped her.
“Wrong?” she spits. “Was it wrong when you discovered your hex in the room right above our heads? Was it wrong when you glided through the air, the whole world at your feet? Was it wrong when you saw what the house, what I do for these broken women, how we keep them safe in a sanctuary no one else can find? No, of course not. It is the house that has given you all those things, let you feed from its life force. No one ever stops to think where this house’s power comes from, they’re just so willing to take and take and take from it.
They never think about the price.” She pinches her fingers hard around Elly’s chin, then yanks it to the side so that she’s staring down into the awful, gaping hole at their feet.
“You see it now, don’t you? The price you have to pay. ”
The screams from inside the pit are so loud that neither Elly nor Haina hear the creaking of the ladder behind them, or the footsteps of two people approaching.
One is running, an arm outstretched, shouting something impossible to make out.
The other is following more slowly behind, holding a camera.
Theo and Siobhan are seconds too late to stop Haina from bringing her head close to Elly’s and whispering, “You have the love of the whole house.” They’re seconds too late to stop Haina’s other hand from finding the small of Elly’s back and pushing, lightly.
That gentle push sends Elly tumbling downwards into the black, into the house’s waiting, starving mouth.
For Elly, there is a long moment of nothingness, of silence, of respite from fear and noise.
Then, an all-over glow, a blissfulness, because she knows her wings are at her back, that her feet are now claws that can rip flesh, that her taut belly is rounded and feathered.
She feels it, when the house takes her, when it melts the flesh from her bones.
It isn’t horrible, it isn’t painful – it is euphoric.
She feels everything that she is, all her strength and her fear and her memories and her love and her anger and her passion.
It all leaks outwards into the walls around her, into the bricks and mortar, into the floor above her head, into Haina’s body.
She feels it fortify, give life, preserve the house for whoever might come next.
But it’s more than that. Her death will be important, she knows, for reasons she can’t even guess at. She can sense it though, and she has never felt so needed. She has never felt so strong.
Her last thought is of Thomas.
My boy, she thinks. I’m finally worthy of you.