Page 37 of Hex House
Siobhan opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. She feels as though her tongue is bolted to her soft palate, writhing like a fish out of water.
“Don’t worry,” Zara says quickly. “We have plenty of time. Let’s move on.” She flicks through a notebook in front of her, looking for something, pinning the page down with her finger when she finds it. “Did you also know someone called Lakshmi Khan?” Siobhan nods again. “Willow told me about her, too. That she fell.”
Siobhan scoffs, an empty, humourless sound. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”
“How would you put it, Siobhan?”
Siobhan meets her gaze now, maintains eye contact. Here they are, at the meaty centre of everything, at the crux of what Hex House is and what it does to the women who find themselves there. Can she really speak it? Should she?
Haina is dead. Haina is dead.
Once she starts, the words flow surprisingly easily. These words have been waiting, she realises, waiting all this time to rip a hole right through the silence. “The women change, at Hex House. They become something that isn’t quite a woman anymore. Something that’s both more and less. Haina makes them into something. She… transforms them.”
The words seem to pull the air from the room. They curl themselves around the table legs and climb up the grained wood, find Siobhan’s ribcage, the lean muscle of her neck. Start to squeeze. Zara is still looking at her blankly, and it dawns on Siobhan that she doesn’t understand, or maybe she doesn’t even believe her. How could she? What can Siobhan possibly say to make her see? What words could come close to the awful, incredible, terrifying creatures the women became?
“I’m not speaking metaphorically,” she says limply, and Zara narrows her eyes. “The women’s bodies. They change. They become monsters.”
“Monsters?”
Gnarled hands. Clawed feet. Wings that could crush a man. “I can show you,” she says eventually.
Is she doing this? Is shereallydoing this? No one has ever seen the footage apart from her and Theo, and even he doesn’t know she still has it. She thinks about gettingup and leaving, but her body won’t listen to her, is already unzipping her bag and bringing out her laptop. Zara watches her carefully as she places it on the table, opens it, clicks open the video player. There it is, the clip still paused from the night before. Siobhan can’t look at it. She turns the screen towards Zara, who hesitates, and then presses play.
Siobhan tries to tune it out: the sound of the women hollering insults as Lakshmi stands on the rooftop and begins to change. She watches Zara’s face, watches as it drains of colour, watches as her mouth grows slack and drops open. The beating of wings, women’s voices, cheering. Then, the screams. The silence that came after. The camera, Siobhan knows now, will be trained on Lakshmi’s broken body. Zara’s hand is covering her mouth, her eyes are wide and unblinking. She pushes the laptop away, as though it might infect her.
“No,” she says, breathless, “oh my god, no. Willow, she told me that the women, they change… but I never thought…”
The camera is still rolling, recording every second. Siobhan finds herself standing up and turning it off. For a long time, neither of them says a word. Siobhan digs her fingers so deeply into her scar that the pain takes her breath away. When she looks at Zara, at her face which has turned greenish, she almost feels guilty.Now you know, too, she thinks grimly.Now you’re in this with me. Zara doesn’t know it yet, but every day she lives with this knowledge it will exact a punishment from her, will take its pound of flesh.
Zara hasn’t looked directly at Siobhan since watchingthe clip. It’s only when Siobhan reaches over and shuts the laptop screen that she finally meets her eye.
“It’s real,” Zara whispers eventually. She looks a bit dazed, haunted, like she’s coming round from a nightmare. “Hex House. It’sreal.”
***
Later, back at the flat, Siobhan pauses in front of the bathroom mirror. She watches herself hiding behind the smears and toothpaste flecks. There’s a haziness to her, like she’s the ghost in a film. Sam inGhost. The Woman in Black.
Siobhan peels up the hem of her T-shirt to inspect her scar. Her clawing at it in the library has had an impact: the scabs are gone, replaced by a vivid red seam surrounded by just-dried blood. Not only that, but the scar is oozing something, a sickly yellow liquid, greasy and viscous. Siobhan wipes a little of it onto her finger and holds it to her nose. It smells putrid, like something that should never come out of a human body. Siobhan wipes haphazardly at the scar with some toilet tissue. When she can’t look at it any longer, she goes over to the sofa, where the takeaway cartons still litter the coffee table. Taking a bite of stone-cold chow mein, she opens her laptop again, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. She tells herself that each clip she watches will be the last, but still she clicks on thumbnail after thumbnail, powerless in the face of Hex House’s magnetism, even now. Many of the clips are hard to watch, but just as many are mundane, snippets of everyday life in the house: guests singing to each other inthe parlour, trying on clothes, eating together around the dinner table. These clips are comforting, somehow.
Siobhan has started to miss the house when she’s not inhabiting it through the screen, she realises, as much as she doesn’t want to admit it. Every second she isn’t immersed in its details, she wants to be. She needs to be. It feels more real than her reality, a richer and more textured world than the one she now inhabits. When had it started to pull her in again? To sink its teeth into her, so deep that she could never hope to pull them out?
The next clip in the list is of Elly. So many of them are. Theo and his camera seemed always to find her: Elly smiling shyly at breakfast, Elly lying on the bench in the sun like a cat, proud belly towards the sky. After Theo showed Siobhan the first interview he’d done with Elly, it became obvious to both of them that she would be the focus of the documentary, the heart of it, the story around which everything else would revolve. There was something so fragile about her – as if you could crush her beneath your thumb with the smallest amount of pressure – that made her compelling to watch. She also seemed to have some kind of intimate connection with the camera, to know exactly when to look and when to look away. So many of the other guests performed awkwardly for Theo’s gaze, but never Elly.
In this clip, she is looking at herself in the dormitory’s full-length mirror. She smooths her dress down over her bump so that she can feel the size of it, and then turns to the side to appreciate it from different angles. She doesn’t seem to know that Theo and his camera are there until she catches the glint of the lens in the mirror. She turns, grinning.
In the next clip, Elly is in the kitchen. When Siobhan thinks of her, she is always in the kitchen, in the warmth, standing at the wooden countertop with dough under her fingers. Theo zooms in on her hands, pale and fine-boned, as they sweep flour across the surface. By this point, she isn’t wearing her wedding ring. Keiko and Grace are in the background having a quiet conversation the camera can’t quite pick up. Haina enters the shot, a sudden flare of orange. She embraces each of the women in turn, dances with them around the kitchen to an old song on the radio. She grips Elly close, laughing with an open mouth, spinning her round and round. Whenever Haina entered a room, it seemed to bloom into technicolour. In the clip, Haina releases Elly, who looks back at the camera with flushed cheeks and a heaving chest. She smiles at Theo in a way that makes Siobhan’s heart constrict.
The bond between Elly and Theo – when did it start? Maybe it was that first interview, while Siobhan was stalking the gardens after their argument, trying to make sense of what had happened to Lakshmi and why her first instinct had been to commit as much of the girl’s broken body to camera as she could. Or maybe it had started before that. It seems so obvious now, watching the clips, how they felt about each other. But Siobhan had been less tuned in to it at the time. Or, she simply couldn’t have cared less. Elly had been a subject, fodder for the camera, her story nothing more than a way to add depth and dimension to the documentary. Watching the footage now, Elly so vital and shimmering, it’s easy to forget what happened next.
Siobhan shuts the laptop again. Some unreachable place inside her is itching. The only thing that’ll help, sheknows, is a drink. She checks the fridge but it’s empty, and so she shrugs on a denim jacket and shoves her feet into trainers, leaving the warmth of the flat for the cool Edinburgh evening. She wanders down the Mile without really knowing where she’s going, only that she needs to move. She finds herself down on the Cowgate, the long, dark street lurking under George IV Bridge. It used to be the road farmers would use to bring their cows to market, a thick highway of dung and noise. Now, it’s home to a strip of bars and basement clubs. Everything in Edinburgh is coated in layers of existence like this: everything restless and changing and unfinished, like skin that constantly regenerates. She walks into a nondescript bar without bothering to read the name. The floor is dark and sticky; it smells of cheap beer and urine. It’s only ten thirty, but it’s already getting busy. From the floor beneath comes the thump of techno music. At the bar, Siobhan orders a vodka tonic, drinks it quickly, then orders another. The drinks don’t work as fast as she’d like – she’s fidgety as she sits alone with her elbows on the bar. A skinny man with a moustache peers at her and asks to buy her a drink. She lets him. He tries to start up a conversation about the music downstairs but Siobhan ignores him. Still, he buys her another drink, a shot.
By this time, the alcohol has finally started to work its magic. Siobhan feels it hit against her senses, like a hammer into metal, transforming them into a more manageable shape. Hex House and its details fall away. Elly’s clear eyes and quiet laugh recede into the blackness. Maybe Siobhan drinks something else, or maybe she just imagines that she does, and then she’s being led by theskinny man down a steep set of stairs into the basement club. The music is so loud it rattles her teeth, the tangle of bodies so tight that she has to push in between them to find a space on the dance floor, every inch of her body seeming to connect with every inch of theirs. She can barely make out anything but bass, it’s so loud. Siobhan lets it move her bones. The skinny man tries to push himself against her but it’s easy enough to push him away, to reclaim the space he took as her own, to sway and move until her feet ache and her scar starts to throb. If only she could always feel like this, this far away and detached from everything real. She’d be okay, then, she thinks. She’d really be okay.
When she can barely breathe for the closeness of the club, she stumbles back out into the main bar, and then out onto the Cowgate. It’s busier now, clouds of smokers standing outside the clubs, spitting and shouting and shoving each other. She makes her way back to the Mile, looking for a reason not to have to go straight home. She can’t bear to be alone in the flat again. That’s why Sylvie seems almost god-sent when she appears, walking quickly from the direction of the Parliament. She’s so tall that she stands out wherever she is, legs long and graceful, back slender. Tonight, she walks quickly and with purpose. Siobhan has rarely seen her outside of the Showroom, and realises just how stylish she is, how put-together in her fitted black coat and silk dress the colour of red wine. Sylvie hasn’t seen Siobhan yet. She wonders what she must look like, sweat-slicked from the club, drinks spilled down her old hoodie. She falls back a little into the crowd and follows Sylvie from a short distance away as she takes a shortcut down Fleshmarket Close. Siobhan wills herselfinvisible as she sticks to the shadows twenty steps behind, but Sylvie is wearing large headphones, and she doesn’t turn around.
You should be more careful, Sylvie, Siobhan thinks.Pretty girl like you. You never know who might be following you.
Sylvie crosses onto Princes Street. It’s easier to hide here, the crowds thicker and more fast-moving. She keeps on walking through town to George Street, with its wide pavements and upscale restaurants. Of course, this is where Sylvie would come. Of course, this would be her natural habitat. Siobhan hangs back and watches Sylvie go inside Melody Blossom, a sleek cocktail bar with an elaborate floral arch curling around the door. It has large windows, so Siobhan has a good view inside. She watches as Sylvie removes her headphones and greets someone at the bar, a young woman wearing a pristine camel blazer and high boots. She wonders what cocktails they might order, what obscure ingredients they’ll contain, how much they might cost.
