“No,” Elly murmurs. “I don’t know.”
“It must feel fucking insane,” Siobhan says, nodding, as if she understands completely. She unwraps her hair from the towel, letting it fall in dark tendrils around her face. When she looks back at Elly, it’s with a new focus. “Hey, what would you think about doing a couple of interviews to camera? I’d love to get your perspective. Why you came here, why you’ve stayed, how it feels to have people out there looking for you.”
“What? No.” The bathroom is hot and muggy. It feels as though blood is rushing too quickly through Elly’s veins. To be spotted moving around the house in the background, even to face the camera wordlessly, as she had in the hallway after her session with Haina – that was one thing. To be interviewed, to speak, to have to explain herself – that was something else entirely. “I’m sorry, I just can’t. What if they… what if they saw it? How could I possibly make them understand?”
Siobhan waves a hand, as if none of this really matters. “We could blur your face, change your voice, if you really wanted us to.” Her gaze wanders for a second then she looks back, eyes crackling. She reaches out to grip Elly’s upper arm, making her flinch. “No, wait. What if we did show them who you are? What if you used the documentary as a way to, you know, communicate with them? Let them know you’re okay, and that they can stop looking for you? You could tell them that you’re safe, but that you’re not going back.” Then, after a pause, “I guessyou’re never going back? I mean, howcouldyou?”
Elly feels the wooden doorway digging into her shoulder. It hurts, but she needs it to keep her standing.Isshe going back? She hasn’t let herself think that far ahead. She doesn’t know if Hex House is the kind of place you can stay forever, or if she’d even want to. But if she doesn’t go home, she can’t think of a single other place she might go.
“I think I saw your mum on one of the appeals, too,” Siobhan is saying, thoughtful now. “She looks a lot like you, doesn’t she? She seemed, I dunno, a bitbrokenby it all. The working theory is that you’ve been abducted or murdered or something.” Siobhan shrugs again, almost nonchalant. “I don’t know. I won’t tell you what to do. But if it wasmymum, I’d at least want to tell her I was okay.”
Elly thinks about her mum sitting alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by the offcuts from the bunting she’d made for Elly’s wedding. She pictures her leaving her phone on loud, constantly checking it and waiting for it to ring; lying in bed during the loneliest of hours, thinking the worst of things: Elly, beaten and broken in a ditch. Elly, face-down in the river. She screws her eyes shut. It’s useless, trying not to cry. It only ever makes it worse.
“Shit,” Siobhan says on an outbreath. “I really wasn’t trying to upset you. If you let us interview you, well, it could work for both of us, is all I’m saying. Just think about it.”
Elly wipes away the wetness on her cheeks and sighs, feeling heavy, feeling as though her bones are made of ancient stone, being dragged deep to the earth. “I’ll think about it,” she says.
***
The guests usually spend the downtime between lunch and dinner relaxing, and it’s often the time Elly feels that the house is at its fullest, in its most natural state. Some of the women play the piano in the parlour. Lakshmi, with her long, graceful fingers, is the most skilled, playing complicated melodies with an almost lazy ease. Some have their private sessions with Haina, while others mend holes in the communal clothing or knit things for the winter months: chunky scarves, patterned mittens, woolly hats. Elly likes to wander the gardens, lying out on the sun-soaked stretch of lawn or watching the bees from the rickety bench by the back door. Sometimes, she reads one of the battered paperbacks from the nook on the landing. Time can move slowly in these hours, and Elly finds herself wondering how she filled her afternoons before. But of course, in the before time, there had been a phone that was always pinging with messages, a job to go to, a Netflix account with new viral shows every week. There is next to no technology in the house, bar the old record player in the parlour, and Haina had told Elly on her first day that this was intentional.How do you heal from the world if it’s right here with you?she’d asked, almost confrontationally. Elly had felt flattened into her seat by Haina’s vigour.How can you expect yourself to evolve, in the midst of all that noise?She hadn’t understood it fully at the time, but after speaking to Siobhan, she thinks she can appreciate Haina’s approach a little more.
It’s the lack of technology that makes it so incongruous when she hears it – the tinny whine of recorded voices. It reaches her as she passes the parlour on her way out to the gardens after lunch. The day is warm but not as oppressive as the ones before it, the leaves on the trees starting to hintat their decay, only just beginning to turn warm shades of gold and orange. Elly craves the fresh air, the breeze, but the noises coming from the parlour make her pause. Theo is sitting on the sofa with his laptop, surrounded by a small group of women: Lakshmi, Margot and Janine. Elly hears Haina’s voice from the computer. He must be playing them some of the clips he’s recorded around the house.
“There’s me!” Lakshmi squeals, jabbing her finger at the screen. Her dark ponytail swings wildly. “Wait, pause it. Do I really stand like that? I look so… hunched.”
“You look fine,” says Theo. Elly doesn’t miss the way those words make Lakshmi look away, colour seeping into her cheeks.
“Do you have any of me?” Janine asks, reaching over Lakshmi to take control of the keypad.
“I think so. Wait a minute.” Theo concentrates on the screen.
While he searches, Lakshmi notices Elly in the doorway. “Elly, come and see. You’re in loads of these.”
Theo looks up at Elly, surprised. He gives a shy kind of laugh, as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
“Am I?” she finds herself asking. Does she want to be? She remembers coming out of Haina’s study, dazed, almost drunk with the possibilities of what she’d seen. She’d stared down the barrel of a lens, daring Theo to see her, to really see her. The memory makes her feel self-conscious now.
Theo hesitates, then shrugs. “You’re in some, yeah.”
“Haina won’t like this,” says Margot. She’s leaning away from the rest of them, not looking at the screen, her arms wrapped around her knees.
“That’s right,” a voice says from behind Elly, makingher jump. She turns to see Haina standing in the doorway, watching them. Her face is severe. “That footage isn’t for your eyes, my angels.”
Margot has skin the colour of bone, but now it pales even further. “Sorry, Haina,” she says, voice barely audible. Janine and Lakshmi edge away from Theo, as if they’d never wanted to look at the laptop in the first place. Theo blinks and rubs at his chin. For a long moment, no one says anything at all. The air feels pulled taut. Elly marvels at it: Haina’s ability to change the mood in the room with one withering look, one vague warning.
“Theo,” Haina says eventually. “Will you join me in my study for a moment?”
Elly watches Theo’s face, and she knows that he feels it, too: Haina’s unignorable gravity. The impossibility of saying no to her. “Sure,” he says.
He looks back over his shoulder as he follows Haina out of the parlour, meeting Elly’s eye. For a split second, he makes a face – pulling his lips to one side, frowning in exaggerated worry. It’s so unexpected, so silly, such a welcome dose of relief dissolving the tension in the room, that Elly finds herself smiling.
***
That night, Haina announces to the guests that they will be gathering on the rooftop after dinner. Elly has never been up to the roof before, and she feels nervous as she makes her way up the narrow, winding staircase from the attic with the other guests. They emerge out onto a flat terrace built into the roof at the back of the house, onlyjust big enough to fit all of them standing close together. It looks out over the gardens and the woods beyond. It’s a struggle to remember that somewhere over the treeline, the normal world still rolls on – a world that still believes Hex House is a fairytale and that Elly is a missing person.
The sky is the purple-streaked, powdery blue that comes just before dark. Haina takes her place at the front of the crowd, closest to the stone wall separating the roof terrace from the sky and the drop below it. Siobhan and Theo stand close to Haina, Theo holding the large camera on his shoulder, Siobhan just behind him, peering into the viewfinder. She gives him constant direction, changing the angle, the height, the focus. Elly stands near the back of the group with Grace and Margot, wondering what they’re all doing up here. When everyone has assembled, Haina brings both hands to her chest to address them.
“My angels.” That feeling in Elly’s stomach again, like the fizzing of fireflies. “This is a very special occasion indeed. It’s been a long time since we’ve been lucky enough to experience what you’re all about to witness.” There’s something different in her voice tonight. Elly senses anticipation, excitement. “But those of you who have been here for a while will remember seeing someone take their First Fly.”
