Zara keeps her level gaze fixed on Siobhan. “When she found out about those letters, Haina must have been so happy. They gave her all the information she needed: that Margot was my sister, that I was in Edinburgh, that I was a journalist. Margot was Haina’s way to get to me. And I was her way to get toyou.”
The view changes again, becoming a long stretch of lush countryside as the train rumbles on.
“She could have gotten to me herself, if she’d wanted to,” Siobhan says, almost too quietly for Zara to hear. “Sent her women after me. Made me come back.”
Zara leans forward. Siobhan hadn’t noticed the purple rings around her eyes until now. “But that’s just what I’ve been trying to tell you, Siobhan,” she hisses. “She isn’t the same Haina she was when you left. The women on the outside don’t listen to her, not anymore.”
When they finally terminate, they are amongst the only ones left on the train. The station they pull into is small, old, sleepy. Without looking back, Siobhan heads away from the empty car park and towards the overgrown path that runs alongside the track. It’s lined with dead brambles.
“Is this the right way?” Zara asks, tripping over a half-empty beer can. It’s almost completely dark now. There arehooded figures on the path up ahead, smoking – teenage boys that stop their conversation as the women approach and only continue again once they’ve passed. “How do you know where to go?”
“It’s the woods you need,” Siobhan hears herself say. “Just keep going and don’t stop.”
Before long, they find the woods, or the woods find them, and the darkness is almost absolute. They can just about see the outline of the three hills, silhouetted against the completeness of the sky. There’s a waxing moon, pale and sad, helping to light their way.
“Can we stop for a while?” Zara asks after they’ve been walking for a couple of hours.
Siobhan shakes her head. She isn’t sure how she knows, but this time is different to the last, when she’d been invited to the house by Haina. They’ll only find the house when they’re starving and desperate, when they’re freezing and falling asleep on their feet. But with every step she feels it getting closer – feels something inside her calming, quelling.
So, they walk. Blisters bloom and burst inside her trainers. Zara keeps pace with her, silent, every so often peering through the trees for a sight of golden windows and smoking chimneys. At one point she brings out a camera and turns it on herself. The sight makes Siobhan giddy. She’d held a camera in these woods herself all those years ago, trying to find the house. It feels faintly ridiculous now.
“It’s almost midnight, and the temperature is below zero,” Zara says, her exhales forming clouds of mist as she speaks. “I think we might be lost.”
Siobhan wonders if they are, in fact, lost. It’s true that she has no idea where they are, and yet, she knows they’re going in the right direction. And when, half-dead with tiredness, she trips over a root and stumbles forward, when a nearby tree twists and falls, revealing a house behind it, a house of honey stone with pink roses climbing improbably up the walls around its door, she doesn’t feel frightened, and she isn’t tired anymore.
All she can think is,Finally.
THEN
From the moment Elly lands back in the garden at Hex House, her powerful claws clutching at nothing but air, she knows what it means. She has failed her ceremony, and she won’t be permitted to leave the house. The thought doesn’t bother her – she hadn’t felt ready to leave, relishes the idea of having more time – but she knows that, somehow, her failure means much more than that. By failing her ceremony, she has also failed Haina. She has failed the whole house in a way that she can’t yet understand or put into words. As she changes back, her hex dissolving into her exhausted, aching woman form, and as Theo rushes forward to wrap her naked body in his jacket, she feels a crushing sense of sadness that’s echoed in the faces of all the women around her. They are downcast, pale – some are even crying. Haina herself stands immovable, so still that she looks like a photograph. The transformation and the flight have taken everything out of Elly. She can barely stand.
“I’m sorry, Haina,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
But Haina is shaking her head, holding up a hand to stop her talking. “Come and rest a while in my office,” she says slowly, as if each word costs her something. “Then we’ll talk about it.”
Elly tries to follow her inside but her every muscle is lead. She falls to the floor, on her knees in the wet grass. Her vision is blurring, fracturing. She’s aware of arms around her body, lifting her, carrying her inside. Theo’s face is above her, smiling in a way that’s both reassuring and worrying. He lays her down on the sofa in Haina’s study, where she sinks down deep into the cushions, barely aware of the boundary between the fabric and her body. “I can stay with her,” she hears Theo say to Haina. “I’d like to stay with her.”
“Go back outside, Theo.”
Why does Haina’s voice sound like that? So harsh and clear, like cold Arctic water?
They exchange a few tense words Elly can’t make out, but then Theo is gone, the study door is closed, and Haina and Elly are alone.
The study is dim, lit only by a couple of candles on Haina’s desk, flickering low. Haina has poured them both a cup of steaming cinnamon tea, but Elly doesn’t even have the strength in her body to sit up and drink it. Haina sits next to her on the sofa, gently lifting Elly’s head so that it rests in her lap. She fans her fingertips over Elly’s forehead, each touch light as a whisper. It reminds her of her first night in the house, sitting in this very study, the way Haina’s comfort had felt like a warm blanket after a long night of stumbling through the cold. Elly closes her eyesand pictures her mum. Her dad. She thinks of Thomas, somewhere out there in the cold garden, being clutched to another woman’s chest.
“I tried, Haina,” she hears herself say. “I couldn’t do it.”
When Haina speaks, her voice is soft and velvety – honeyed, as it had been on the first night, when Haina asked if she would like to come inside. “Why not, my angel?”
Elly had thought about this on the long flight back to the house. Because she haddreamedof hurting Ethan. So much of her had wanted to. She’d fantasised about all the ways she could now inflict pain. But seeing him there in the kitchen – tired and pale and defeated – none of it had seemed worth it anymore. “I don’t think he deserved it,” she whispers.
Haina moves to the side so quickly that Elly’s head jerks, falling back against the sofa cushion. Then Haina is kneeling on the floor, her face directly level with Elly’s. Her eyes are alight and crackling. “Of course hedeservedit,” she hisses. Her face is so close to Elly’s that it appears she’s been split in two – that she is two heads coming from one body. “After what he did to you? You hadonechance to show him how strong you are. One chance to punish him, to bring him to us, and you just wasted it. And do you know what that makes me think, Elly? It makes me think that perhaps you aren’t strong enough after all. That there’s nothing more I can teach you. The day I let you go, even if you don’t go running back to Ethan – which you will – you’ll just let someone else break you all over again.”
Elly lets the words wash over her, each one heavier than the last, as if they’re pushing her deeper and deeper, burying her under the waves. She wishes she had an ounce of energy to sit up, to speak, but there’s nothing left.
“Do you understand, Elly?” There are tears in Haina’s eyes now, fat tears that overspill her eyelids and stain her cheeks. “Do you understand why I can’t let you go?”
The room suddenly feels colder. Elly is shivering. Haina stands, and at first, Elly thinks she is going to fetch the blanket from the armchair to drape over her. But instead, she’s pulling at the heavy rug in the centre of the room, hauling it off to one side. Underneath, built into the hardwood floor, is a small square outline with a metal handle. A trapdoor.
