What happens now? Elly wonders. What could possibly follow what she has just seen? How can time just continue to tumble on and on, now that she’s been irreversibly changed?
Haina places a hand on Grace’s quivering shoulder. “You’re free to go, my angel.”
Grace bows her head, looking at her bare feet in the grass, as if remembering that they belong to her and that she needs to use them now. Her gaze turns to the crowd. She gives the women a sad, final sort of smile.
“May your hex protect you,” she says as she turns. Still naked, she walks into the woods. They swallow her like they’re starving.
Some of the guests follow as far as the treeline, where they search the darkness for her. Elly keeps her eyes on the trees, expecting that at any moment, Grace will return, that she’ll have changed her mind, that the house won’t let her go. But the night remains still. The trees don’t move. Elly becomes aware of Haina, disappearing into the house and then re-emerging with a large canvas bag, into which she heaps the woman’s remains, humming to herself. Elly wonders what she might do with them, but finds that she doesn’t really care. She can only think about Grace. Inside her, the knowledge rings out: Grace is no longer part of the house. Elly knows that when Grace tries to find a main road, a place to take shelter, that she’ll find it. The house won’t draw her back. Not anymore.
It’s when she’s looking out at all that blackness, the hopeless infinity of it, that the first pains in Elly’s stomach start to make themselves known: the thrumming beginnings of labour.
NOW
Siobhan sits in the recording room with Zara, nursing a cooling coffee she’d picked up from the library café. She can’t remember the events of the night before too well, only that she’d stayed in Kelvingrove Park for hours alone, drinking. She’d only left when a man in a puffer jacket approached her and asked if he could sit down, then asked her why she didn’t want the company, then said,Right okay fuck off then, frigid bitch.
Somehow, she’d made it home on the train and into her own bed. She dreamed of Theo. She dreamed of the day the refectory roof caved in and he had the choice of protecting Elly or Siobhan, and had chosen Elly.
Zara seems spaced out this morning, too. It’s the first time Siobhan has seen her since she showed her the footage of Lakshmi. She doesn’t have any make-up on and looks paler than usual, less remarkable. She’s wearing black leggings and an orange jumper that drowns her. As she sets up her recording equipment with her usual meticulousness,Siobhan notices that her hands are shaking.
“Everything okay?” Siobhan asks.
“Fine,” Zara says, then she shakes her head. “Another letter came from Willow yesterday. Now that I know it’s all real, I just…” She rubs her eyes. “It’s just so heavy. I don’t know what to do with all this knowing.”
If Siobhan had to describe the feeling that had eaten away at her for the last four years, rotting her brain chemistry and gnawing at her nerves, she wouldn’t have been able to put it better than that.I don’t know what to do with all this knowing.
“She says the house is falling down,” Zara says. “She keeps saying that it’ssick– that’s the word she uses,sick– and that she’s in danger, but she doesn’t know where else to go. I think she needs help.” Zara takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I think we need to help her.”
“What do you mean?”
Zara won’t meet Siobhan’s eye. “I think we need to try and find it again. The house.”
Siobhan stills. “That’s not possible,” she hears herself say. She tries to block out Theo’s voice.
I need you to go back to Hex House.
She wishes those words hadn’t made so much sense to her. She wishes they hadn’t pulled at something buried deep – a secret, a magnet, something burning.
“But you found it once before, didn’t you?” Zara says, leaning forward. Her words gush out, as if she’s been holding them in. “Maybe you could find it again. I think we need to, for the documentary. For Willow. And…” She hesitates before continuing. “And for Thomas.”
Siobhan stays silent. Tiny little Thomas with his roundeyes and red cheeks. Thomas, clasped in Elly’s arms. “So he’s still at the house,” she manages to choke.
“Willow says so. She says she takes care of him. But I don’t know how safe it is there anymore, for either of them.”
It was never safe, Siobhan almost says, but doesn’t.
“We don’t have to decide anything now,” Zara says quickly. “I just wanted you to think about it, that’s all. Are you still up for doing an interview today?”
Siobhan nods. The words are already itching under her skin, making her squirm, trying to find an escape route through her pores.
Zara breathes deeply, then turns to the camera. “Okay.” She gives Siobhan a curt nod to let her know they’re recording.
“I want to ask you about the ceremonies.” Zara’s voice has already regained its cool confidence, its steadiness. All emotion is gone. She is nothing but professional. “In her last letter, Willow told me that the ceremonies were the final step in Haina’s ‘training’, so to speak. That the women could only leave once they’d passed.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you witness a ceremony, during your time in the house?”
“Two.”
