A bristling at her fingertips. Feathers are waiting under neath, waiting to spring forth and consume her skin. Siobhan screws her knuckles into fists and closes her eyes. How many times, during those long, meandering conversations, had Haina told Siobhan how important she was for the house? How she wasmeantto be there. Back then, Siobhan had assumed she’d been talking about the documentary.
“Please, Siobhan,” Zara begs. “You have to help me find Margot. You need to help me find Hex House.”
Siobhan tries to block it out, to ignore it, but it’s so strong now that she can feel it tugging at her bones: the siren song of Hex House, calling her home.
***
Two hours later, Siobhan and Zara stand in Edinburgh Waverley train station. It’s 5 p.m. on a Thursday, rush hour, and the station concourse is bustling with people and suitcases, announcements and platform changes ringing out every few seconds from the Tannoy. It’s almost laughable to Siobhan that she was supposed to be at work today, but that instead of sitting behind the box office with its smeared glass and ancient till, she’s here, on her way to the one place she said she’d never go back.
Zara is quiet and pale as they make their way to the platform. She grips her bag of recording equipment with white knuckles.
“Do you really think we’ll be able to find it?” she asks, as their small train rumbles into Waverley. “The house?”
Siobhan breathes deeply, feeling the air push at the outlines of her lungs. She hasn’t had a drink in twelve hours now, and a damp sweat is plastering her hair to her forehead. She feels shaky, unreal, can’t stop herself from seeing Owen’s face in the seconds before she let him fall. Her hex, releasing his body to the night – the part of the house that never left her. “I’m sure,” she says.
Their train is busy with commuters talking on their phones, standing guard next to their Brompton bikes and eating bags of Pret crisps, but with each station that takes them away from Edinburgh and deeper into thecountryside, it gets quieter and quieter. Zara and Siobhan sit at a table, looking out of the window.
“Tell me about her,” Siobhan says eventually. “Tell me about Margot.”
Zara smiles. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you want to tell me.” The Margot that Siobhan remembers always had a strange, haunted quality. She’d seemed brooding and immature but also somehow nurturing – Siobhan could never figure out whether she was a lost child looking for a mother, or a mother looking for a lost child.
“Margot had a bad childhood,” Zara is saying. She keeps staring out of the window, at the fields and farms passing by, rather than at Siobhan. “I guess we both did. Our parents were pious. Strict. Physical with their punishments. I look back on it now and think,Fuck, but we just didn’t know any different. I could have tolerated it my whole life, I suppose – I didn’t have much imagination. Margot, though…” Zara makes a little noise in the back of her throat. “Ever since she was tiny, she just couldn’t pretend, like the rest of us could. She didn’t know how to be like everyone else. She asked questions and she was loud and she broke rules. My parents were ashamed of that, I think, the way she saw colour while everyone else only saw black and white. They’d hide her away. Forbid her from doing things. It was probably the worst thing they could have done.”
The train stops and the last passengers from their carriage disembark, leaving them in the quiet.
Zara shrugs. “She was so stifled and unstimulated that it should have surprised no one when she got pregnant.Some local boy, I still don’t know who. She was fifteen, and she was bored, so I didn’t blame her for any of it. I blamed myself. It was my job to look after her and I failed. I failed her so badly, Siobhan.”
The ticket officer arrives to check their tickets and Zara stops abruptly, her words hanging in the air. She waits until he’s left the carriage to continue.
“I knew Mum and Dad would make her have the baby, but she just wasn’t ready, you know, in her mind, and our parents would have made her life hell. I just wanted to do what I could for her. So, we ran away together, we came to Scotland. It was all my idea. At first, we were only going to come so we could figure out what to do. But we loved it here. I was eighteen, so I got a job to provide for us both. Our parents didn’t even look for us. I found out from a friend that they told the community they’d sent us away on a charitable mission. It made me realise that maybe their strictness wasn’t because they cared about us, like I’d always thought. It was only about how we made them look. And the longer time went on, the more obvious it became that Margot was going to keep the baby. I think she’d gotten the idea of it in her head by that point. Being a mother. We felt free, for a while. We were happy.”
Siobhan remembers the picture of Margot and Zara standing in front of the castle, Margot heavily pregnant, her eyes twinkling. “She never mentioned a baby,” Siobhan says.
Zara shakes her head. She looks down and Siobhan pretends not to see the tear she wipes away with her sleeve. “We called her Willow. You should have seen her. God, she was so beautiful. And we were okay for a while. We were.But being a mother – it was all too much for Margot. She was so young, and Willow wasn’t an easy baby. She’d cry for days on end, she wouldn’t eat. We never slept. One day, Margot disappeared with Willow and when she came back she was alone. I screamed at her and shook her but she’d never tell me where she’d taken her. And she was never the same after that. Not really.”
Siobhan thinks about the Margot she’d met at the house, her intense fractiousness, her roving eye. It had felt as though something were always simmering under the surface of her skin, about to boil over.
Zara rubs roughly at her cheek. “She couldn’t cope with what she’d done, I don’t think. But she’d never talk about Willow. She never wanted to speak to me at all. She started coming home less and less. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for days on end. She started hanging out with a group of guys she’d met down the local pub. Horrible guys. It was them that got her hooked on it.”
Siobhan doesn’t ask on what. It barely matters.
“Of course she couldn’t afford it. We barely had anything. Everything I made she stole to pay them, until there was no money left to steal.” Zara takes a deep, trembling breath. “That’s why they took her eye. Payment. Punishment.”
Siobhan feels cold suddenly. She wraps her arms around herself as Zara continues.
“I should have tried harder to keep her in line. I was her sister, for god’s sake, I was the one who’d brought her up here and then everything just went to shit. But you’ve got to know, Siobhan, she was sodifficult.” Zara leans over the table, her eyes crackling with something fierce. “She didn’tmake anything easy. She’d hiss at me like a cat and bite me so hard she broke the skin. She’d set fire to things and leave them in my bed while I was sleeping. She’d take every pill in the cupboard just to see what it felt like. At first, when she went missing, I was relieved. I’m not even ashamed to say it anymore. I was.” She holds Siobhan’s gaze for a moment before looking away. “I only started looking for her when it had been two weeks. Obviously, the police didn’t want to know. She’d turned eighteen by that time, so she was legally an adult, and she’d run away plenty of times before. The police already knew her, because of the drugs. They started an investigation but it was half-arsed and there were no leads. They didn’t give a shit. It feels like no one has ever given a shit about Margot. They told me she’d turn up.” Zara grimaces. “I guess, eventually, she did.”
“How is she getting those letters to you?” Siobhan asks. “From inside the house?”
Zara is staring into the middle distance. “She told me about a kind of network of women, on the outside. She’d memorised my address, and when things started getting… bad, with Haina, she wrote letters and left them at the treeline. When they started disappearing, she just had to hope one of the women was collecting them, that they were getting to me. She just kept writing and writing. Of course, I can’t write back to her, so for all she knows, I never got any of them. She won’t know I’m coming for her.”
There’s a strange feeling in the pit of Siobhan’s stomach, tossing and tumultuous. She pictures the treeline, where the manicured gardens of Hex House give way to the darkness of the woods. The invisible threshold there, the boundary between one world and another.
“I have to bring her home,” Zara says. “She isn’t safe, I know that much. Haina intercepted the letters.” She pauses, swallows. “I pushed the documentary so hard because I thought it was my only way to find Margot. But it turns outyouwere, Siobhan.”
“What do you mean?” Siobhan asks flatly. She needs a drink so badly that her stomach is churning, her hands shaking.
