Many of the guests look around blankly, but others – Grace, Margot – grin, gasp, clutch each other’s hands. Elly can feel something peculiar under her skin, like the blood’s broken free of the veins. FirstFly?
“When a guest takes their First Fly successfully, it shows me that I’ve taught all I can teach. It shows me that, soon, they’ll be ready to leave our sanctuary and take their place in the world again. For some, it might only take amatter of months, but for most, like Lakshmi here, seven years is the time it takes to gain the courage to try.”
Lakshmi steps forward from the crowd to stand beside Haina. She’s beaming with so much effervescence that she’s almost blinding to look at. She tightens her high, dark ponytail and straightens her cotton dress. Her hands are clearly shaking.
Haina turns to Theo and Siobhan. “I’ve battled with myself over whether to share this with you, and with the rest of the world,” she says. “But if people out there are to know what Hex House truly is, tounderstandit, well, then you simply have to see. There’s no other way.” Her smile becomes smaller as she says, in a lower voice now, “Whatever happens, keep the camera rolling.”
Theo nods gravely. Elly wonders what Haina told him in her study, whether she would have reprimanded him for letting the women use the laptop. But then, Theo isn’t a guest. What would be the consequences of him not listening to her? Elly doesn’t know exactly what they would be for her, either, only that there would be some. Next to him, Siobhan’s smile is so wide it makes her look almost feral. She says something to Theo, and he steps closer to Lakshmi, carefully lining up the shot. Elly can glimpse it through the viewfinder: Lakshmi’s glittering eyes, the open, darkening sky behind her, the stretching yawn of the woods and their gloom.
Haina turns to Lakshmi. “Do you want to take your First Fly tonight?”
“Yes,” Lakshmi says, loud enough for the crowd to hear. “I want to do it tonight.”
Haina smiles at her and retreats into the crowd,leaving Lakshmi standing alone by the stone wall. She looks vulnerable suddenly, set against all that open space.First Fly, Elly thinks distantly,surely can’t mean what I think it means.
“I am so proud of you, my angel,” Haina is saying to Lakshmi now. Then, to the rest of the guests, “She has the love of the whole house, doesn’t she? Show her that she does.”
Elly doesn’t expect what happens next: the group responding in unison, a chorus of voices calling out the same words once then repeating them, over and over, until they start to lose their meaning.
May your hex protect you.
Then, quiet. Elly can hear the thumping of her heart. She whispers it to herself.May your hex protect you, Lakshmi. The baby wriggles in her belly, restless, as if it, too, knows that something is about to happen. She feels Margot’s hand slip into hers and squeeze tight.
“Are you ready?” Haina asks Lakshmi. Lakshmi nods. Her hands are balled into fists at her sides. Haina turns and gives the crowd a slow nod. At first, Elly doesn’t know what this means, but into the silence that follows, the other guests start to hurl new words: these ones loud, pointed, cruel.
“You’re disgusting, Lakshmi.”
“What did your father used to call you?”
“The runt?”
One of the guests throws something round and hard at Lakshmi. Is it fruit? Who brought fruit? Whatever it is hits her squarely on the jaw, causing her head to snap back.
“You’re filth.”
“Not worth the dirt on our shoes.”
Someone spits. Someone else starts to boo. There’shissing coming from the back. The crowd has taken on the character of a mob, teetering on the edge of fever.
“You made it so easy for him to hurt you.”
“You’re nothing. You’re less than nothing. You’re pointless.”
Elly is so busy looking around, searching the crowd for the thrower of each insult, that she’s stopped watching Lakshmi. It’s only when the crowd grows quiet again, their silence arriving as quickly and unexpectedly as their fury, that Elly realises what’s happening, what it is that they’ve done.
Lakshmi has started to change.
Her shoulders are rounded forward, hiding her face, her whole body quivering. From the hunched summit of her back, two blade-like bones explode outwards. The sound is like rocks hitting water from a height. They curve inwards like whalebones, growing first a layer of fleshy gristle, then a covering of obsidian feathers. Impossibly smooth; liquid velvet. Elly wants to reach out and touch them, until she sees the sharp talons erupt from their ends, and from Lakshmi’s toenails, tearing through the leather of her shoes.What could they do to a person?Elly wonders.What could they do to soft, human skin?Her dress rips at the seams as the flesh on her legs and abdomen warps, settling finally into a rippling silken down, its sheen a furious violet. Then, her face. God – that face. A hooked nose of shining black, the mouth a howling hole, sharp teeth embedded in soft, pink flesh. Her eyes are still Lakshmi’s, but they are burning with vigour; they are awful and searing and furious and Elly can barely stand to look at them, but she knows nothing on earth could make her look away.
Is this what’s waiting for her? Is this monstrosity what she can expect to find on the other side of her anger? Elly feels dizzy, staggers back a little. It’s only Margot’s hand in hers, squeezing tightly, that keeps her rooted in the moment, standing upright.
“Holy shit,” she hears someone say. A man’s voice. Theo is staring open-mouthed at Lakshmi, the camera lowered from his shoulder, dangling impotently by his hip. “What the hell is happening?”
Beside him, Siobhan appears shaken, too, but she recovers more quickly. “Keep filming, Theo,” she hisses, hauling the camera back up to his shoulder. “Keep fucking filming.”
Elly can once again see the shot through the viewfinder. She can see Lakshmi, or what was Lakshmi, standing in the centre of the frame, her eyes shining in the dull twilight. It’s through the camera that she watches Lakshmi tilt that awful head back and let out a scream that feels as if it pierces every organ and bursts every blood vessel in her body. She sends it hurtling upwards into all that sky, and in response, birds erupt from the surrounding trees, flapping rapidly away as though they’re being chased by a predator. All the while, Haina looks on, proud as a mentor, protective as a mother.
Lakshmi shakes out her enormous wings –Because of course that’s what they are, Elly thinks,wings– and turns to the stone wall. She climbs atop it, her claws wrapping them selves around the ridge. Elly feels her stomach drop, a sickness brewing in her gut. There is nothing left now between Lakshmi and the hard ground below. Nothing but air.
