Page 10 of Hex House
Elly doesn’t go straight to Haina’s study. She needs to wander for a moment or two, settle her nerves. She leaves the kitchen and follows the hallway towards the large, curved staircase. Like the rest of the house, it’s grand but fading: the stair runner threadbare in places and secured by tarnished brass rods, the thick banister crafted from worn cherry wood. She emerges out onto the landing, the dormitory in front of her and the bathroom at the far end on the left. There’s another staircase, which Margot told her leads up to a couple of attic rooms and the roof terrace, but Elly turns right instead. She follows the landing to where it ends at a large, circular window with a stained-glass trim. With the midday light streaming through it, the panels cast the carpet in shimmering jewel tones: the aquamarine of tropical pools, sparkling yellow like the inside of a lemon. There’s a window seat built into the sill, upholstered in soft fabric. Elly climbs up onto it, feelinginstant relief in her lower back and pelvis. She is still getting used to the way the baby presses down on her from the inside, as if it would prefer that she always lie down, bones to the earth. There’s a little shelf built into the wall next to the seat, topped with an empty mug and a stack of pulpy paperbacks. They all have yellowing pages and faded covers, sensational titles likeLake TerrorandDarkwater Canyon. The cover art mostly shows red-lipped women screaming at unseen things in the shadows. It’s a strange thing, to see books here. Do the women on the outside bring them? Theflock? Elly flicks through one and notices that someone has underlined words and sentences, added their own notes in the margins.I have never been the kind of girl boys write songs about, she reads. She traces the words with a fingertip, wondering about the hand that wrote them, wondering if that woman had once felt as she does: adrift in a strange sea.
Elly replaces the books on the shelf and looks out of the window, which offers a view of the front of the house, the winding path that leads from the woods to its front door. The woods – they don’t look as dark and impenetrable as they had the night she arrived here. What would happen, Elly wonders, if she just walked out of the front door and back into those woods? What would happen if she just kept walking? Surely, that’s what she should do. You can’t just up and leave your life – she has responsibilities. She has a husband. But as hard as she tries, she just can’t imagine it: walking back into the village. Slipping her hand back into Ethan’s. She tries to play the scenes in her mind but it’s like she’s watching a film, a film where the main character has no face. At the very least, she needs to meet with Hainafirst, understand what Hex House is, why she’s here. With effort, she swings her legs off from the window seat and makes her way downstairs.
Haina’s study is a large room off the main hallway, immediately to the left of the entranceway. Elly knocks gently on the door.
“Come in,” Haina calls through the wood.
The study looks different in the daytime. The night she’d arrived, it had felt so comforting she could cry, all soft surfaces and dark warmth, red as a heart’s chamber. Now, it’s filled with afternoon light that picks out the carmine and gold of the Persian rug in the centre of the room, illuminates long, deep grooves in the floor. Elly wonders what could have made them, what kind of animal, but she can’t dwell on it, because Haina has turned from her large mahogany desk.
“Come and sit down,” she says.
Elly does as she’s told, crossing the room to take a seat in the velvet armchair positioned across from Haina’s. She rests her hands over her belly, feeling the baby turn inside her stomach. Haina smiles warmly. Her hair is pure black, even with the sunlight shining directly on it. The rest of the guests wear a rotating selection of secondhand clothing from the communal bin in the dorm – faded slogan T-shirts, jeans with holes at the knees, American collegiate sweaters – but Elly hasn’t seen Haina in anything but loose-fitting linen dresses in shades of orange: umber, vermillion, marigold. She thinks distantly that the cut of them looks expensive. Haina leans forward in her chair and laces her hands underneath her chin.
“So, Elly,” she says, her voice low and rich. “Thesesessions are a time for us to get to know each other. For you to learn a little more about what we do here at Hex House, and for me to learn more about you, and what you might need.”
What do I need?Elly asks herself, eyes on the swirls of the rug at her feet.I need to understand why Ethan wanted to hurt me so badly. What it was about me that meant he couldn’t stop himself.
I need to find my way back to him.
“Some sessions we’ll spend just talking,” Haina continues. “Others will be more… practical in nature.”
“Practical?”
Haina waves a hand. “It’ll all make more sense as we go, the longer you’re with us.”
Elly’s throat grows dry. She clears it painfully then looks down at her hands. “And what happens if I…” She trails off. She’s hyper-aware of Haina’s eyes on her forehead, unblinking. She imagines them burning two perfectly symmetrical holes into the skin.
“If you want to leave?” Haina offers, after a silence that stretches on a second too long. Elly nods, still not meeting her eye. “I understand that impulse, Elly. I do. Almost all the women feel it, at some point. Perfectly natural. But I suppose what I would say to you is,” she pauses and leans so far forward that Elly can see the flecks of gold in her eyes, “why are you so keen to return to the thing that broke you?”
Despite the warmth of the day, despite the heat of the fire against her skin, Elly goes suddenly and completely cold.
“Hex House is foryou,” Haina continues. “It’s a place to rest, to heal. To rediscover yourself – yourtrueself.By the time you’re ready to leave, you’ll be stronger. More resilient.” Haina lowers her voice to a whisper. “No one will ever be able to make you feel small ever again.”
There’s a tightness in Elly’s chest, and she realises she’s been holding her breath. How would it feel, to be the kind of person Ethan couldn’t bully? Someone with whom he’d always be the care-free, self-deprecating person he’d seemed to be when she’d first met him?
Someone he would never tell tostayand know without question would obey him?
There’s another question she wants to ask Haina, one sheneedsto ask.But Icanleave, if I want to?The words are there, poised on her lips and ready to drop, but she can’t put breath behind them. Doing so would feel too much like receiving a generous gift, an unlikely chance, something from nothing, and throwing it back in Haina’s face.
“Sometimes during these sessions,” says Haina, “things might get…difficult. Challenging, perhaps. You don’t get any stronger by having your hand held, and so you can expect to be confronted with some harsh truths. Growing can hurt. But no matter what happens next, there’s one thing I need you to remember.”
Elly feels the skin on the underside of her thighs prickle, the tiny hairs rising.
“We all love you,” Haina says gently. “You have the love of the whole house.”
As if in response, the sounds around them seem to suddenly grow louder: the crackle and rasp of the fire, the muffled voices in the garden beyond the window, the omnipresent creaking of the house’s old bones as it settles deeper into the earth.
“Shall we start, my angel?” Haina asks, leaning back in her chair.
Elly wonders, not for the first time, whether she tripped and fell in the woods, whether she hit her head on a tree root and is lying inert in a hospital bed somewhere. She wonders if she contracted hypothermia and her body is hooked up to a life support machine, surrounded by wires and being pumped full of drugs at every hour. There are, after all, so many ways that the woods can kill you. Perhaps Hex House is simply the last wild imagining of a brain in the final moments of its life.
And yet.
And yet, she digs her fingers into the soft velvet of the armchair; she breathes in the scent of burning wood and old paper. This morning’s orange juice is still furring her teeth. It is all so incredibly, undeniably real.
Inside her belly, the baby shifts and wriggles. In a matter of months, or perhaps even weeks, whoever is growing inside her will exist on the other side of her skin. A tiny person who knows nothing yet of her ineptitude, the multiple ways she’s already failed as a mother. Before she leaves Hex House, she has a chance to make herself worthy of them.
“Okay,” Elly says. She clears her throat, then says a little more loudly, “Let’s start.”
