Siobhan #2
“What about Theo?” she asked Haina in a small voice. “Why did you bring him here, if it’s me you want?”
“Well.” A wry flickering across Haina’s face. If she was still in her human form, Siobhan would have called it a smile. “I’ve always wanted a pet to play with.”
Then her claw tightened around the camera in Siobhan’s hand, squeezing until the plastic cracked, until the metal innards showed.
“It was fun, for a while, watching you make your little film. But surely you knew I’d never let you leave with that footage?
” As the broken pieces of camera fell to the ground, Haina brought her mouth down to Siobhan’s ear.
“I will keep this house standing for you until you’re ready to come home.
And you will keep its secrets. You will make sure he does, too.
If you don’t, I’ll find him. I’ll gut him and leave him for the crows.
” Siobhan felt an intense pressure below her belly button, a ripping open, a gushing of blood as Haina dragged her claw against the skin. “Don’t forget.”
Then she released her, and Siobhan was scrambling up the ladder, desperately striving towards the light, screaming in pain. In the seconds before she reached the study, before she took Theo’s outstretched hand, she heard Haina’s voice a final time beneath her.
“You’ll come home soon, my angel.” A musical sound, almost like laughter, echoing off all the old stone. “You need this house now, and it needs you, more than anyone. You’ll see.”
Then Theo and Siobhan were running. Through the house, past the open-mouthed guests, through the gardens.
He kept trying to turn back, but Siobhan pulled Theo towards the treeline, grabbing at him, covering him with her blood.
Agony was rippling from her abdomen but she knew that they had to keep running.
They ran until their legs were plastered with mud, until they could barely breathe, until there was no choice but to fall down in the dirt.
When Siobhan looked at Theo, she realised he was crying.
“We have to go back,” he sobbed quietly, when he could breathe again. “My god, we have to get help. Elly, she…”
Siobhan screwed her eyes shut, trying to understand what she’d seen.
Elly, sacrificed to keep the house standing, to feed it, to allow it to continue being a safe sanctuary for all the women under its roof.
The other women who needed the house, who had nothing else.
She’d seen it for months, the way it transformed broken people into something else entirely, something powerful, something unnameable.
She’d felt it herself – the tempting tease of strength, power, in her veins.
She didn’t know what she was about to say until she said it, her voice trembling.
“We can’t go back, Theo. And we can never tell anyone about Elly, about what we’ve seen. ”
“What?” Theo was incredulous, on his feet now, challenging her. “Are you insane?”
“You’ve seen what it does for them. The women. We can’t take that away from them. The house… it has to keep going. Women have to keep finding it.” And I can’t lose you, she thinks. I can’t let her take you from me.
“Siobhan. You were there. She killed Elly, she…” His voice broke. They stood in thick silence, a horrible stalemate.
“Elly sacrificed herself,” Siobhan heard herself say, hating herself for it, hating herself more than she ever had.
But there was no other way. Theo wouldn’t care about Haina’s threat.
She had to find another way to keep him quiet.
“Elly did it for the good of the house. For Thomas. She wasn’t strong enough to leave. ”
Theo was shaking his head. He looked young, defeated, and tired. So tired. “You don’t believe that, Shiv. You saw what happened. You filmed it.” At that moment, he seemed to realise the absence of the camera in Siobhan’s hand.
“It’s all gone,” she said dully. “The camera – she crushed it. All the other footage is back at the house.”
“Then we have to go back.”
“No, Theo,” Siobhan growled, and he flinched away from her.
Haina’s words rung in her ears, haunting her.
You will keep this house’s secrets. You will make sure he does, too.
If you don’t, I’ll find him. I’ll gut him and leave him for the crows.
“Please. We just have to walk away from here. We have to forget. You can’t take the house away from those women.
” And you can’t take the house away from me, a second, smaller voice inside her chimed.
She smothered it, pushed it down deep. “Besides,” she whispered.
“It’s too late. We’ve already left. Do you really think we’ll ever find it again? ”
Theo had looked defeated then, his whole body sagging inwards. “I’m going to the police,” he said weakly.
Siobhan wiped a single tear from her cheek. “And what do you think they’ll do?” Her words hung in the quiet. “Nothing. Besides maybe lock you up.”
Theo sank to his knees in the dirt, and Siobhan knew she’d won.
Still, she remembers now that it took her hours to get him to agree to the deal that’s been in place ever since: that Theo would stay silent, but he would never speak to her again, the deal that was a lightning strike through the centre of their relationship.
She knows that when he walked away from her, he spent hours, maybe days, trying to find the house again.
So did she, but it was no longer theirs to find.
Not yet. It was only when she stumbled out onto a quiet country lane, only when she thrust a hand into her pocket to find money or anything she might use to get her home, that she found the memory stick.
The memory stick onto which she’d downloaded all of their footage a couple of days before, just in case.
The memory stick she would never, and could never, tell Theo about.
Now, she stands alone in front of Haina’s study. Behind her, one of the ancient oak beams falls from the ceiling and crashes into the floorboards, barely missing her. She doesn’t even flinch. Siobhan turns the handle, and steps inside.
Like the rest of the house, the study is in disarray, a nightmarish, twisted version of the room Siobhan had known.
The torn curtains are drawn, papers strewn around the room, dirty and ripped.
Siobhan’s eyes land on names she knows, Keiko, Janine, Isla, notes about their hexes, their progress.
The fire is not lit, the window is smashed.
It is deathly cold. The rug in the centre of the study has been left rolled up, the trapdoor underneath open and gaping.
There are stains on the woodwork surrounding the door – dark, blotchy.
“Haina,” Siobhan hears herself say. The sound of her voice sends birds flapping from the tree outside the window in fright. “I’m here. I’ve come back to you, just like you said I would.”
She peers down into the blackness beneath her feet. Haina is down there, in the crypt, Siobhan knows. Down in that awful place where she feeds the house what it needs to be what it is. She stands next to the opening, but she can’t make herself go down there, not again.
She doesn’t have to. There’s a noise coming from below now, getting louder with every second. Someone – something – is making its way up the ladder.
Siobhan hears Haina before she sees her, hears that harrowing gasping sound, a hoarse, struggling wheeze, the noise of something dying.
Then, a single hand, pale and impossibly bony, appearing out of the darkness and bracing itself on the floorboards.
Siobhan staggers back wards as Haina, or what was once Haina, emerges: her body covered with skin that hangs from the bones, like a loose sack.
Her eyelids sag beneath her eyeballs, making it seem as if her eyes might, at any second, finally give up and fall to the floor.
She has little hair left – only a few straggling grey strands on a bald scalp.
It seems to take everything she has to haul herself from the top rung of the ladder and onto the floor of the study, where she trembles on all fours, a spindly, wretched creature.
As if in response, the walls around them cry out and a thick section of plaster crumbles and falls, sending up plumes of dust. Siobhan meets Haina’s eyes.
Despite her physical ruin, they are still unmistakably Haina’s, dark and burning and fierce.
To Siobhan’s surprise, she holds out one of those wasted hands.
In a rattling voice, she says, “Help me. Please help me.”
Siobhan freezes, but then holds out her hand to Haina’s, half-carrying her broken body over to the armchairs by the desk.
They sit down, and if Siobhan closes her eyes, she could almost be back in this study four years ago, sitting across from Haina, her own hex only just beginning to simmer in her blood.
She hadn’t known it then, what was happening – that something was waking up in her.
She didn’t know that it would never sleep again.
Siobhan and Haina stay silent for a long moment, looking at each other.
“Knew. You’d. Return,” Haina says finally, sadly, each word a struggle.
One of the candles on the desk gutters and goes out. Siobhan shivers. “How many of them did you kill, to keep this house alive? To keep yourself alive?”
“Wrong question,” Haina splutters, and Siobhan thinks the strange twist to her thin lips might be a smile. “How many did I help?” Another wracking cough. “Broken women. Nowhere else to go.”
“It wasn’t your choice to make,” Siobhan whispers, voice shaking, “to take their lives away.”
“All gone now, anyway,” Haina whispers. “After… everything. But you.” She meets Siobhan’s eye, and there’s still something bright in the ruined socket, something furious and alive.
“My angel. Knew you wouldn’t abandon me.
” She stares closer at Siobhan, so close that Siobhan can see the fine rings of yellow around Haina’s pupils. “Do you see it now? Do you understand?”
The room is so cold that Siobhan can’t feel the tips of her fingers. A tremor threads its way all the way through her, because yes, finally, she understands.
Haina’s smile is wide, revealing a mouth of black gums, missing teeth. With great effort, she stands, holding her arms out towards Siobhan. Siobhan stands, too. She allows Haina to embrace her, to pull her into a body that’s barely anything but bone.
Siobhan can feel her every synapse sizzling and burning, the locked part of her brain waking up, the furious part, the part she’s forever trying to drown with wine and whisky and sex and anything else that numbs it just for a second.
Anger – an anger that’s lived inside of her since she can remember, watching her mum cower from every touch and flinch at the sound of a phone ringing.
Now, it takes over, it spreads out over the skin like water, it claims her completely, rippling out from the scar on her stomach.
Siobhan’s eyes snap open. When she looks down at herself, she already knows what she will see.
Feather. Claw. Pimpled bird flesh. Feathers, the colour of deepest night.
There is no hesitation this time, no pain.
Here is her hex, in all of its horrible, incredible glory. She feels as though she could scream the sky down.
Haina pulls away, just slightly, so she can look at Siobhan.
“My angel,” she whispers. “How beautiful you are.”
Siobhan breathes raggedly. She is angry. She is so, so angry.
“It’s yours now,” hisses Haina. “All of it.”
Siobhan has been angry all of her life. It’s finally time for her to unleash it.
When she slices her beak into Haina’s neck, Haina doesn’t resist. She doesn’t fight back. She lets Siobhan tear into her, she lets her separate muscle from skeleton, she lets her pull out each sickly, failing organ. She smiles, and then she begins to laugh.
The house is rumbling, shaking. Around them, the plaster falls away from the walls, as if it were only ever a facade, hiding the house’s true nature. Underneath is tightly woven straw, pieces of twig and branch, dry, rotting leaves. The foundations of a nest.
“You have the love of the whole house,” Haina screams.
Siobhan feels Haina’s spine snap under her fingertips, falls with her to the ground.
“May your hex protect you,” Haina whispers in her ear, and then Siobhan pulls her heart out of her chest. She watches it until it stops throbbing in her hands.
Finally, Siobhan is calm. She is sated; her fury is satisfied.
The house is quiet for only a moment before it begins to fall, with a sigh, as if it has been waiting to do so for a very long time.
The bricks dissolve to dust, the wood buckles and splinters, the windows shatter.
As the rubble comes down, threatening to bury her, Siobhan thinks of Zara, standing safe beyond the treeline, filming it all.
She thinks of how the camera will see it: the way the house seemed to be nothing more than straw and mulch when it fell.
The way it left nothing behind, no clues as to what it once was, no beds, no furniture, no bodies.
The way that, in the very last second before the final pieces hit the floor, it had looked almost like something were taking flight into the sky above it.
In the smoke, the fanned outline of wings.