Page 20 of Hex House
Siobhan’s breath catches like an animal in a trap when she hears her own voice on the film, just out of shot. Her blurry finger appears in the right of the frame, pointing to one of the windows. “Quick, zoom in.” She can hear the feverish excitement in her voice. It makes her queasy.
The camera obeys, finding the second window from the left on the bottom floor of the house. Behind the glass is a pale face that hardly looks like a face at all. In the place of a mouth is something long and distended, and there’s a mottled coating over the skin, dark, textured. From behind the lens, Theo whispers, “Fuck.” In the next second, the face disappears, leaving only the black mouth of the window. The clip ends abruptly.
Siobhan slams the laptop shut. Her cheeks are wet, and there’s an awful feeling in her gut: a stirring, a revolt. She barely makes it to the bathroom before she vomits, clutching at the toilet bowl as her stomach scrapes itself clean. Her eyes are screwed shut as she slowly gets her breath back, the regurgitated wine bitter on her tongue. She already knows she’ll dream of it tonight: that face in the window, pale and strange. Maybe in her dreams at least, she’ll turn around. She won’t go inside.
If she could have that moment again, she’d tell Theo to drop the camera. She’d tell him to run.
THEN
Since she tried to leave the house, Elly has lived in a constant state of numbness, of liminality. She feels as though she’s trapped inside the walls of Hex House, but at the same time, she no longer has any desire to escape them. It feels almost like inhabiting a body that’s unwell. Uncomfortable, but inevitable, like there’s simply nothing to be done.
The events that took place in Haina’s study – the grotesque transformation of her hands, the impossible becoming possible in one snatch of breath – seem softer and more palatable as the days go on. The urgent fear becomes replaced by a sort of enquiring, the stirrings of curiosity. What happened is no less strange, after all, than a sanctuary in the woods that no one can find unless they need it. She lies awake in the dormitory at night, listening to the women murmuring in their sleep, staring at the branches just visible from the window, and thinks about what Haina told her: that she’d seen the first glimpse of herhex, of her true potential. She compiles a list of questions to ask Haina over breakfast, or when she sees her around the house, but the opportunity never seems to present itself. Haina is always in conversation with another guest, walking quickly somewhere with an espresso cup in her hand, a blur of orange linen, or locked behind the door of her study. Elly is surprised to find that she is looking forward to her next session. She prickles with the idea of it, but as much as she watches the goosebumps speckling her forearms, the skin there never changes.
Grace furrows her eyebrows when Elly asks her one morning in the kitchen what it all means. Whether the transformation could possibly be real, or whether it’s only in her head. She looks at Elly as if she should know better than to ask, setting down the knife she’s using to remove the head from a fish. “For god’s sake, why do you think we’re all here?” She wipes her hands down her apron, leaving wet, pinkish streaks. “You’re not special. Just get on with it.”
“But why does it happen?” Elly can’t help but ask. “Are we still…us?”
Grace looks at her plainly. Her eyes are set deep in her face but still manage to look fiercely blue in every light. “I am sixty-two years old, Elly,” she says, “I have been at this house for four years. I have never felt more like myself in all my life.”
She refuses to answer any more questions and shoos Elly away to make the stock for the lunchtime soup. When Elly asks Keiko, she just shrugs and looks down into the flour she’s spread out on the countertops, glossy black hair covering her face. She puts her forefinger into the flourand starts to drag it around, forming a rough shape. Elly watches, a hard lump in her throat, as the shape clarifies itself into the pointed tips of wings.
“You ask too many questions, Little Mouse,” Margot tells her one night at the dinner table. She chews on a piece of liver and pulls out a knob of gristle from between her teeth. “Trust yourself. Trust Haina.”
Ellywantsto trust Haina. She wants this wise, confident woman to be the answer to everything, to fix it for her, to help her save herself. She just doesn’t know what that looks like yet. She doesn’t know what she might have the potential to become if she stays here, and the thought makes her feel almost dangerously buoyant, as though the slightest gust of wind might carry her far, far away.
***
The first time Elly hears the filmmakers’ voices, she’s in the kitchen, sifting flour into a bowl to make shortcrust pastry. It falls like snow from the sieve. It’s hot in the kitchen and she sweats under her apron, but the work gives her purpose, keeps her thoughts from straying too far. As long as she’s in the kitchen, being useful, nothing can be too strange or wrong. Her pelvis aches as she works. Every day it’s as though there’s less space for her to exist inside her own body. The baby is pushing her stomach up into her chest, forcing her hips outwards. The kicks are getting more frequent, and sometimes they’re so strong they take her breath away. She finds herself wondering if the baby can break her ribs, shatter her pelvis, break her from the inside out. It would be worth it, she reasons, if the babywould survive. She’d give up her body a hundred times for that. These are new thoughts. As the baby becomes bigger, it becomes more real.I am more of a mother every day, she thinks to herself.Somehow, I have to make myself worthy of this life inside me. She’s concentrating hard and so is barely aware of the front door clicking open, of Haina saying something in her low timbre as she approaches down the hallway, getting louder.
It’s the man’s voice that gets her attention, makes her freeze. Every part of her is on alert. “We saw something when we were outside,” he says. His voice is young, cloaked in a soft Scottish accent. He sounds polite but there’s a wariness there, too, some grit mixed into the silt, textured as a coastline. Elly senses the other women’s bodies stiffen at the sound. She can hear their thoughts buzzing in the air, a sudden swarm.A man a man a man. Perhaps it has been years since they last heard a man speak. “Some kind of… animal? In one of the windows?”
The hairs on Elly’s forearms rise, like they’ve been summoned by electricity.Some kind of animal. She doesn’t hear Haina’s reply, only the tone of it, and it’s a tone she’s never heard her use before: light, breezy, almost coquettish. Then they appear in the open kitchen doorway: Haina first, leading the way, followed by the man – lean, boyish, a bulky camera propped on his shoulder. Behind them is a tall, skinny woman with messy hair and keen eyes that cast all around as though everything she can see belongs to her. They pause by the doorframe and Haina says, “These are our kitchens. You’ll meet our guests later. For now, let’s continue your tour.”
The man peers briefly inside, his eyes landing on Elly’sfor half a second. She doesn’t look away. Then the three of them are gone again, heading back down the hall.
Grace is motionless, staring at the now-empty doorway. It is one of the only times Elly has seen her still, not busying her hands with a task. Keiko pauses with her knife poised above a scarlet tomato. The blade shakes slightly.
“The filmmakers,” Elly hears herself whisper. No one replies. Grace gives her a stern look, as if she’s broken a rule by stating the fact out loud, then returns to her chopping board.
Into the silence comes the woman’s voice from further down the hall, louder than the man’s, more confident. “Fuck,” she says. “This place is like stepping back in time. Theo, are you getting all this?”
They hear the door to the gardens open, close. The house is quiet again. Something has already changed, Elly can tell. Some delicate balance is being recalibrated with every second that passes.
***
The filmmakers are seated in the refectory when the rest of the guests enter for dinner that evening. They sit at the head of the table, flanking Haina. The light outside the windows is waning. Someone has lit all the candles, and their reflections dance in the windowpanes. Elly, Grace and Keiko spent the afternoon preparing rich beef pies, the joint cooked long and slow so the meat was falling off the bone. They bring them to the table now in heavy cast-iron pots, serve them alongside fresh bread and tiny potatoes swimming in butter.
The women keep their distance from the filmmakers,and the refectory feels much quieter than normal. There’s only the clearing of throats, the scraping of chairs along the wooden floor. Elly sits beside Margot at the opposite end of the table to the newcomers, taking in their details with surreptitious glances. The woman seems the younger of the two, but perhaps only by a couple of years. She looks to be in her early twenties, likely around Elly’s own age. She and the man have the same olive skin and dark eyes, the same sharp, watchful features. The man wears glasses and rounds his shoulders in his seat, as if he’s trying to make himself smaller. Perhaps he feels all their eyes on him, hears the thoughts the women don’t need to speak.
You are a man. What are you doing here?
The camera sits on the table in front of him, vaguely threatening, like a dog no one is quite sure won’t bite. The woman seems less self-conscious, or just less aware, of the atmosphere in the room. She engages in fluid conversation with Haina, her voice a little too loud. She meets the eyes of the women as they enter, not smiling exactly, but something close to it. Every now and again, she says something to the man, and he responds by nodding and jotting something down in his notebook. To Elly, she looks like the kind of person who would think nothing of cutting into a queue; the kind of person who would be able to talk herself out of any resulting reprimand.
No one touches the food. When everyone has taken their seats, Haina gets to her feet, clasping her hands in front of her heart in the way she does before she addresses the group.
“My angels,” she says. There’s a warm, unspooling sensation in Elly’s stomach whenever Haina calls themthat.My angels. At first it had felt jarring, but now it makes her feel as though she is part of something. “Let me introduce Siobhan and Theo. They’ll be spending the next few months with us to make their film.”
“Documentary,” the woman named Siobhan corrects her. Margot scoffs. Elly’s pulse stutters. She has never heard anyone correct Haina.
