“Are you ready, my angel?” Haina whispers in her ear.
Elly thinks about what it would mean to leave, tonight. To wander naked through the forest with Thomas, back towards the life she knew. Only, she won’t go back to the village, or Edinburgh – that thought is already forming in her mind. When she tries to picture where she will go, she can’t quite see it, can’t see herself anywhere else in the world. She remembers what the woman had told her, all those months ago in the bathroom at her wedding.It’s the woods you need. Just keep going and don’t stop. She can only hope that the woods will come through for her a second time, that they’ll show her the way forward again.
“I’m ready,” she tells Haina, who pulls away from her. She feels very lonely, all of a sudden, standing solitary in front of the waiting crowd.
“You have the love of the whole house,” Haina says. Her thin voice is barely loud enough to hear.
“May your hex protect you,” the crowd responds, their words a warm balm on her skin.
Elly knows what comes next, and she steels herself for the barbs and the cruelty, the insults designed to accelerate her change. She doesn’t need them, but it’s part of the ceremony, she knows, and they don’t hurt any less when they do come.
“You’re weak.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“You made it so easy for him to break you.”
“Thomas is better off without you as a mother.”
It’s the last one that tips her over the edge, that makes her shoulder blades burn, the skin screaming as the feathers break free. That precise cloud of vision takes over once more, sharpening her focus, dialling up her hunger. Only, this time feels different to all the others; there’s an extremity to it. A finality.
The crowd is cheering now. She can’t make out any individual faces but Theo’s, which is frowning, concerned, afraid. As her hex, she doesn’t care. She wants to leave them all behind. Haina gives her a nod, and already something about her has changed, something has woken up to replenish her waxy complexion. Elly holds her eye for a long second, then she starts to run. It only takes two or three strides for her to build up enough momentum to jump up and tuck her legs beneath her, to let the air and the wind propel her forward, towards the trees, towards the forest.
Everything is so much calmer up here, away from the others with their noise and their feelings. The sky is swirled purple, huge and swallowing. She forgets that it’s her ceremony. For a blissful minute or two, Elly simply glides.
But then there is the thing she’s barely let herself think about: what she needs to do to complete her ceremony, to walk free. And she craves it; she craves it in a way that’s unignorable and deadly.
There are a thousand scents on the air, more – the creatures living and breathing and sleeping and procreating in the world beneath her. She can smell them now: all those who mean harm, who plan to spend their nights inflicting pain. The desperate, lonely souls with no one left. Shecould take any of these back to the house, she knows, and pass. But she isn’t interested in them. There is one scent that picks itself out amongst all the rest, drawing her closer.
Soon, the woods give way to quiet country roads, the occasional car spearing the darkness with twin headlights the colour of cat’s eyes. She follows them through clusters of tiny towns. She’s above her own village – look, there’s the church with the toppled gravestones on the lawn – then she’s heading towards the brighter lights of the city, towards Edinburgh Castle, looming like a sentinel over the Old Town, the buried tunnels and worlds beneath. Now, here she is in the New Town with its immaculate buildings and expensive flats. Quiet, empty streets mean she can hover nearer the ground. She is so close to him now that his scent brings tears to her eyes.
Ethan’s flat – not hers anymore, if it ever had been – is on the ground floor. Elly lands in the alley between his building and the next. When she touches earth, she is herself again – her vision has regained its full colour, and she feels the cold, wet earth through the skin of her feet, not her claws. She is naked and shivering, but no one can see her down here. She has a few minutes, at least, to peer into the kitchen window. It’s a jolt, to see it all again – the pristine marble countertops, the stainless-steel fridge, the empty fruit bowl. She used to think this flat was incredible, modern and expensive-looking, so different from the little cottage she’d grown up in. Now, it only seems cold. It’s like putting on an old jacket, only to find it no longer fits, and that it never actually suited you. The kitchen is empty, but the lights are on. Ethan must be home. Of course he’s home – she’d smelled him, fifty miles away.
When she’d first moved in, Ethan had encouraged Elly to use the kitchen for her baking. He proudly showed her a drawer and a cupboard he’d kept clear for all her equipment. And so, Elly had spent nights dusting the countertops with flour and rolling out her dough, making loaves of rye studded with seeds for breakfast, creamy pear and ginger tarts for dessert. After a month, Ethan started commenting on the mess. After two months, Elly packed her baking things away and never got them out again.
Here he is now, Ethan, walking into the kitchen with an empty wine glass in his hand. All the air leaves Elly’s body, and she leans against the cold stonework for support. This is a different Ethan to the one she’d imagined when prompted by Haina. This Ethan looks as if the last months have sliced at the core of him, leaving him scarred. He’s put on noticeable weight, mostly around his chin and stomach, which protrudes slightly over his leather belt. His eyes have a sunkenness about them, like they’re retreating further back into his face, and his hair is longer, more unkempt. He’s still wearing his wedding ring. He plays with it now, rotating it absent-mindedly.
Elly had always thought that she was a thing Ethan could pick up and set down whenever he wished, that nothing about her actually broke the surface of him. But looking at him now, she can see the clear consequences of herself and what she’s done. All the ways she’s unravelled him.
If she went back to him, would it be different? Now that he’s had a chance to miss her, to see clearly all the ways he’d been cruel? She could put Thomas in his arms and say,Look at all the good we did together. He wouldgrin and kiss her and they would still be married, and maybe then they could carry on, they could have a life together. But there’s a hollowness to the scene, and she can’t get herself to picture his eyes – she can’t picture them looking relieved or grateful. Everything would change, but nothing would.
Elly watches Ethan lean against the countertop and pinch the bridge of his nose between his fingers. He looks up at the wall opposite, and when she cranes her neck, she can see that the wall-mounted TV is on, turned to the news channel. It’s uncanny at first, to see Ethan’s face on the screen as well as in front of her. The doubling makes her dizzy. She can’t hear the TV, but she can see the words underneath the news reporter, who speaks grim-faced into the camera.
Elly Carmichael – husband admits to physical altercation on night of disappearance
Elly’s hand reflexively touches the back of her head, the slight ridge that’s formed where her head made contact with the cottage wall all those many nights ago. She can still see Ethan’s eyes in the seconds after, the fear there, the intensity of his regret. Ethan is crying now, his shoulders sagged forward. He looks like a frightened little boy. She wonders what broke him, what made him admit to the violence in the cottage – or whether the facts were just too heavy for him to carry any longer. Maybe he even thinks he killed her, that he hit her head harder than he thought, that she’d wandered out of the cottage and bled out in some lonely, forgotten place.
Elly moves an inch closer to the window and touches her fingers lightly to the glass. If only she could touch him,rest her head on the broad expanse of his chest like she used to, the place that used to feel like the safest in the world. She wants to tell him that she forgives him, because she no longer fears him, no longer needs him. She only wants him to turn and look at her, to see her framed in the window, naked and cold but so, so strong.
Why has she come here tonight? Maybe at one point she believed she could do it, what she knows Haina expects of her, but she knows now that she won’t. The man she’s looking at is suffering in a way she could never inflict with physical pain.
When she turns her back to the window, there’s a stillness in her belly that’s something like peace. And when she returns to Hex House, she returns empty-handed.
NOW
Siobhan is walking quickly towards the New Town, barely breathing, buoyed along by fear. Her backpack is heavy – she’d stuffed her laptop inside before leaving the flat and not bothered to lock the door. Her phone is still dead in her pocket. She couldn’t bring herself to charge it.
When she reaches Owen’s street, it isn’t a surprise to see the police cordon, the vans parked around the front of his building, the uniformed officers peering down at the pavement then up again to the open window, high above. She sees it all and her body responds with a heavy kind of knowing. Of course she did it. She was going to do it from the day she met him. It had all been inevitable, because she’s never been as far from Hex House as she thought. It had stayed right there in her bones, waiting. The seeds had been planted a long time ago, and now they’re sprouting their ugly heads above the soil. All those afternoons in the study with Haina.
