Page 33 of Hex House
“It would make me happy. Really happy.”
She can see how powerful those words are. They tighten everything about him. “If I offer Sylvie a tutorial,” he says carefully, “can I take you out for dinner next week?”
“Sure,” she says.
Owen hesitates. “Fine,” he eventually concedes, holding both his hands up as if Siobhan is aiming a gun at him.“There can’t be any harm in it.” He swivels back to his desk, writes a two-line email and clicks send. The computer emits a quiet little ‘whoosh’ as the email is fired into the ether. “Happy?” he asks, when he turns back to her.
“Very,” says Siobhan.
THEN
Elly lies in bed, not sleeping. The house won’t let her. Screams from the parlour below rip their way into the dorm like stray bullets, making the women bolt upright in their beds. Then, silence, which is almost worse. Occasionally, she can make out the soothing voice of whichever woman whose turn it is to watch her. A few beds over, Elly can hear Janine whimpering, her hands clamped over her ears.May your hex protect you, she whispers, over and over, in a voice like stretched elastic.
From the tiny attic room above their heads, snatches of Theo’s and Siobhan’s raised voices trickle down through the floorboards. Elly only catches the occasional word.Help. Documentary.
Lakshmi.
It had all happened so quickly. One second Lakshmi was there, airborne and mighty and unstoppable, and then the next she was gone, wrenched from the sky back down to earth. Elly remembers what happened next in feveredsnatches: Siobhan, peering over the side of the wall with the camera, zooming in. Haina, not moving, Theo screaming. Grace, Janine and a couple of the others sprinting towards the staircase, thundering back down into the house, out of the doors, onto the lawn. Elly had made it downstairs in time to watch Lakshmi being carried inside and laid out on a blanket in the parlour. The whole room filled with a sour smell, like old meat, like a body turned inside out.
Every time she closed her eyes, she could still see it: the single dribble of blood from the corner of Lakshmi’s mouth, the way the hard ground had torn up the skin and muscle of her leg and torso and made them into something new, something awful. Just hours beforehand, Lakshmi had giggled at the sight of herself on Theo’s computer screen, told Elly,You’re in loads of these, like they were teenage girls flicking through a photo album. Through the crowd that was gathered in the dark parlour, Elly could hear Lakshmi gargling something.
Haina. Haina.
But Haina wasn’t there, and a few minutes later, they heard the door to her study slam. It was left to the women to pour whisky into Lakshmi’s open mouth, to press wet flannels into her wounds and whisper soft words into her hair.
“We have to take her to the hospital,” Elly said to no one in particular.
Grace had shot her a cold look. “She stays here,” is all she said.
Now, above her head, Siobhan and Theo have gone quiet. There’s another voice. Haina. What could she possibly be telling them about what happened tonight?And what will the filmmakers do with the footage they captured? Theo had looked terrified, but Siobhan… there’d been something else entirely written into her face. Something like fascination. Something likehunger.
Elly rolls over in bed so that she’s facing Margot, who’s also awake, wide-eyed and staring at the ceiling, the cover pulled up to her chin. In the dim light, she looks tiny and child-like.
“Margot,” Elly whispers, and Margot turns to face her. “What happened tonight? Why did she fall?”
Margot’s mouth is downturned, as though she’s about to cry. “She failed her First Fly, Little Mouse. She isn’t ready to leave yet, see? She didn’t have full control of her hex, or she wouldn’t have fallen.” She turns back to the ceiling and lets out a long, sad breath. “But didn’t she look so beautiful,” she says dreamily, “didn’t she look so beautiful when she flew?”
***
Neither the filmmakers nor Haina appear at breakfast the next day, and the door to the study remains closed. Lakshmi, still laid out on the sofa in the parlour, is quiet now. Her breathing is shallow. One of the women always stays with her, dressing her wounds and keeping them clean, while the rest of the guests attempt to go on as normal.Hospital, Elly keeps thinking, ever more distantly,she needs to go to the hospital, but she knows it’s useless. How would they even get her there? Would they ever make their way out of the woods, or would the house just keep reappearing, again and again, like it had the last time she tried to leave? Every time she sees Lakshmi’s inert body,crumpled and rattling with broken breaths, she knows that to move her would be to kill her. And so, like the rest of them, she carries on with life at Hex House.
The mood in the kitchens is strained as Elly, Grace and Keiko prepare that night’s dinner. Elly chops carrots and leeks, fries them with butter, trying to find solace in the repetitive tasks. But by dinner, she still hasn’t seen Haina, Siobhan or Theo, and it makes her stomach clench. Once she’s finished eating, she fills a plate with cuts of meat and bread and takes it up to the attic. There’s not much up there apart from boxes and dustsheets covering broken bits of old furniture. Elly eyes the rickety iron staircase that leads up to the roof and turns in the opposite direction, towards the small door leading to a room in the eaves. She can’t hear anything from inside, so she knocks gently.
“Come in.” Theo’s voice is raspy, as if he hasn’t spoken in a while. Elly pushes the door open. The room is small, but efforts have been made – by Haina, Elly assumes – to make it comfortable, even luxurious. The drapes at the window are velvet and the bedsheets are made of vermillion silk. The only light comes from a computer monitor positioned on the desk in between the two beds. Every other available surface is covered with equipment: cameras, microphones, laptops, charging packs, hard drives. It all looks so incongruous against the ancient beams and wooden floor that Elly pauses abruptly, almost spilling the contents of the plate.
“Oh, hey,” says Theo, jumping up from where he’d been lying on the bed to switch on the lamp. He seems surprised to see her. He looks down at the plate in her hands, and says, “You brought me food?”
But Elly isn’t really listening to him, because her eyes have snagged on the monitor. It’s open on the video player, paused mid-clip. Lakshmi, in the final seconds before she fell, her mouth twisted open in a scream.
“Shit, let me close that.” Theo leans his long body over the computer and makes a series of quick clicks. Lakshmi disappears. “I just can’t stop watching it. I can’t… I can’t get it out of my head. Sorry.”
Elly blinks, trying to rid herself of the image. “Where’s Siobhan?” she asks.
Theo runs a hand over his unruly curls. “Needed to blow off some steam. We had a bit of a disagreement last night.”
“I heard.”
“Shit. Sorry.”
