Elly stiffened. The woman’s hand felt cold even through her dress. She flinched away from the touch, realising, suddenly and intensely, how strange the situation was. The thought of this woman knowing the truth about Ethan made her want to protect him, to divert the conversation in another direction. Turning, she asked, “Who did you say you were again?”
The woman smiled, but there was no warmth to it, just a tired kind of knowing. “Only a messenger.”
“Amessenger,” Elly repeated.
“I know somewhere. Somewhere you could go.”
Elly felt it straight away: an electricity in the room, the fizzing current of something changing and rewiring. Possibilities emerging. “What?” She still felt defensive, but her voice came out as a squeak.
The woman glanced to the bathroom door then back again. “Have you ever heard of Hex House?”
The tiny hope that had bloomed in Elly’s stomachwithered. Hex House. It was a thing of teenage Ouija board sessions, of whispered stories around campfires, of truth and dare.I dare you to find Hex House and come back with your head still attached. She and Suzanne had gotten lost in the woods more than once trying to find it as children. When was the first time she’d heard the story of that old house, supposedly hidden somewhere amongst the trees, home only to mad women and monsters? She couldn’t remember, it had just always been there, tucked away in her mind next to werewolves and witches. A local legend in a place where nothing really happens, that’s all Hex House was. It wasn’treal. This woman was talking about a myth and offering it as a solution.
Elly started to laugh, but the woman’s face remained still, impassive. “It’s just a story,” Elly said. “No one’s ever actually been there.”
A beat of silence. “I have,” the woman said, and her voice was trembling, spilling over with so much unsaid meaning that it made coldness creep across Elly’s scalp. She searched the woman’s expression for any trace of humour or deceit, but found none. Was she insane? The baby wriggled in Elly’s stomach, jabbing an elbow into the space between her ribs and making her wince, as if warning her to move. Elly swallowed thickly. She needed to go and sit down, to rejoin the party before she was missed, but she couldn’t seem to get her legs to obey her.
“The house saved my life,” the woman was saying. “It’s saved many lives, too many to count, so now I spend my time looking for other women who might need it. I’ve been keeping an eye on you for… quite a while.”
Elly shifted on her feet, feeling as though she’d beenset a test that she was rapidly failing. Something about the woman’s intensity, the way her eyes shifted quickly from left to right, made Elly question how stable she was. Perhaps there was something seriously wrong with her – maybe she needed help. That thought made Elly feel cornered. It made her want to run. “I need to get back to my wedding,” she said. “And I think maybe you should leave.”
“Listen to me,” the woman said, her voice deeper now. “You can only find Hex House if you need it. That’s why no one knows where it is. Why no one believes it’s real.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I can’t explain it all to you now, Elly.” With a shiver Elly thought,She knows my name. “But if you look for it, I promise you’ll find it. You’ll be safe.She’llprotect you.” The woman swallowed and Elly watched the muscles in her throat contract, relax. Something about that movement was too fluid. It didn’t look quite right. “He will never find you there.”
“But he’s my husband,” said Elly.
The woman clicked her tongue, a slight shudder rippling through her body. It reminded Elly of something wet shaking out its feathers. The woman might have said something else, but at that second the door to the toilets opened, making them both spin around. One of Elly’s little cousins came stumbling in with cake smeared around her face. “I feel sick,” she proclaimed, and disappeared into one of the cubicles.
The woman turned back to Elly, a hotness to her now, an urgency. “It’s the woods you need.” Her voice was almost a hiss. “Just keep going and don’t stop. The house will find you.”
She gave Elly’s arm a final squeeze and then left, leaving Elly standing alone and shivering, listening to the sound of retching from the toilet cubicle.
***
Later, Elly and Ethan departed for the cottage he’d rented for the occasion, on the outskirts of the village. He carried her over the threshold, performing the ritual with a tight-lipped glee. The cottage itself was small, brickwork dripping with light from candle sconces. The fireplace was stacked with fresh wood. Ethan would start a fire and soon things would start burning, moving onwards with uncontrollable momentum. Elly was still in her long, white dress and she ran her fingers over the fine lace at her wrists. At the altar, Ethan had pressed that lace so hard that it made a net of her skin. That grip had felt like a warning, a claiming.
It’s the woods you need.
Just keep going and don’t stop.
Elly had looked for the woman for the rest of the reception but couldn’t find her. When she asked Suzanne if she’d seen a woman in an orange dress, she’d shaken her head. And then it had been time to leave.
To distract herself, Elly clicked on the old Roberts radio. It started playing Eva Cassidy’s ‘Fields of Gold’, one of her dad’s favourites, a song she’d listened to on repeat in the long months after he died. The sound was quiet and tinny but it was still enough to make her eyes burn, until Ethan reappeared behind her and clicked off the radio.
“Do we really need to listen to that tonight? It’s so depressing.”
Was that the moment she decided? Elly considers it now as she reaches a wide clearing in the woods, cold air harsh in her lungs. Was that the loose brick that brought the whole house toppling down?
“But I love that song,” she’d said. “You know I love that song.” Maybe Ethan didn’t like the way she said it, because he gripped the tops of both her arms and pushed her down so that she was forced to sit on the bed. She blinked up at him. “Stay,” he whispered, with a wilting kind of smile. This was a game he liked to play, as though it were fun for them both. He kissed her in the place where her forehead met her nose. “God, I love you so much.”
He went to bring in their cases and Elly sat in the silence, picking at her hem, which had started to fray. She’d still been hopeful when she’d picked this dress. It had reminded her of the sepia photo of her parents on their own wedding day, beaming in the same church doorway, squinting into the sun. Her mum had worn a similar style: high-necked, demure, traditional. In the photo, her father held her mother’s arm like she was a prize he couldn’t believe he’d just won.
Elly shifted on the thick floral bedspread. She was a married woman now. Married.He’s my husband, she’d told the woman in the bathroom, and it had felt like the truest thing in the world, and the most inescapable. Of course Ethan was her husband. From the first day, standing in the bakery and looking at his hair dusted with snow, he was always going to be – if only because he’d decided, and because Ethan was very good at following through on things he’d decided. The cottage seemed to grow smaller around her, candles burning low. Resting her hand on theswell of her stomach, Elly could almost convince herself that this really was the best thing for everyone, and that the meeting with the woman in the bathroom had never happened. She and Ethan were a solid unit now; they shared a last name. Being married was an invisible act of binding that would make them new. It would strip away all their stains and make her worthy. It would make him love her better. It had to.
Elly turned to the window. The world outside was soaked in twilight, but she still knew it by heart. She’d been living with Ethan in Edinburgh for the last six months, and coming back home for the wedding, nostalgia had settled on her like a coat of dust. The village’s quaint houses and fallow fields were as familiar as the landscape of her own body. Its quiet streets were peppered with significance: the wooden bench on the Green where she and Suzanne drank smuggled vodka from a thermos as teenagers, the little bakery on the high street where she’d worked since she was sixteen. To the north were the woods, then the hills: silent monoliths standing in the background of her every memory.
