How many times has Elly sat in this room, in this very chair, never knowing that door was just beneath her feet?
“What are you doing?” She’s so delirious that she’s not even sure whether or not she’s spoken out loud. Either way, Haina isn’t listening. She loops a finger around the metal handle and pulls it open. She turns to Elly, her face expressionless, voice flat.
“Can you walk, Elly?” she asks. “I need you to walk now, my angel.”
Elly is about to say that no, sorry, she can’t walk, she barely has the energy to blink, but her body has different ideas. It hauls her up and off the sofa, as if Haina’s command brought it to life, and walks her into the centre of the room.
“Down,” Haina tells her, and Elly’s feet find the lip of the trapdoor, the first rung of a ladder that leads deep down into the darkness. A smell rises up to meet her: dust, damp, something else, something awful: like decaying meat. It’s the smell that’s been permeating the house in recent months, seeping into their clothes and climbing its way up through the plugholes. She doesn’t know how herlegs carry her, but somehow, they do – ten rungs down, twenty, thirty. Haina is up ahead of her, pulling the trapdoor shut above their heads and plunging them into blackness. Elly freezes, her body pressed so close to the ladder that her lips touch the wooden rung.
“Keep going,” Haina instructs. One of her boots comes down onto Elly’s fingers.
Elly screams and wrenches them away, keeps on climbing down, powerless to resist. After fifty-five rungs, her feet hit a solid stone floor. Her heart is a mean fist against her chest cavity.
It is cold down here, so cold. The air feels old and undisturbed. All around her, above and below, is darkness. She can barely see her hand in front of her face.
What is this place? And why is she down here? She registers, distantly, that she might be in some kind of danger, real danger, but she can’t make herself care. She is too tired to feel anything at all. She thinks of Thomas, of his tiny fists balling and relaxing in sleep, and her heartbeat begins to slow. But even Thomas feels far away now, like a thought she can just watch go by.
Haina has appeared beside her. She has a hand on Elly’s shoulder. “I hope you can understand,” she says in a voice that makes Elly shiver, “that this is the only way it can be. I tried, Elly. But you just wouldn’t listen.”
A scratch, a flare, a match held out into the dark, and the scene around them carves itself into life.
They stand inside a cavernous underground chamber. The ceiling is vaulted by a network of stone arches, stretching further away than the light from the match will let her see, creating a network of segmented little rooms.It looks like honeycomb, or a rotten apple filled with wormholes. And those arches, there’s something strange about them – as Elly peers closer, she sees that they are more detailed than she’d first thought. The stone is covered with little ridges and grooves, and that’s when Elly realises that they’re not stone at all.
They’re bone.
Close to the bottom of the pillars, she can make out elegant, swooping femurs and two-pronged tibias, long, thin ulnas and pelvises stretched open like flowers, tiny toe bones filling in all the gaps. As the columns climb, they’re replaced by thick shoulder blades, sternums and undulating clavicles. Finally, when she looks properly at the central arch that sweeps left to right directly over their heads, she realises that it’s made of skulls. Thousands and thousands of skulls, their grinning teeth and empty eye sockets looking down on her.
Elly vomits then, and the sickness is violent and tugging, as if she’s trying to escape this awful room from the inside of herself. Everything about it feels wrong: the darkness, the smell, like something long rotted, the feeling of being so far underground. It is the opposite of being in the sky, of being free, and everything inside her is recoiling. She wants to turn back to the ladder and scramble up towards the light. She wants to fly, she wants to forget about this place – this place lurking underneath the beautiful house and the bountiful gardens, this place that has existed unbeknownst beneath her feet ever since she entered the house and who knows how many centuries before that – but she can’t. Haina’s hand is on her shoulder, urging her forward, and all she can do is obey.
“Why are we down here?” she manages to whisper. The stench in the air is growing stronger, thicker. There’s a presence here, a deep presence she understands now that she has always sensed, the pulsing of something living, something that exists at the root of everything the house is. She feels it more strongly with every step. It drags her towards it, hungry, insatiable.
Haina’s voice is a low hum, as if it’s vibrating, and it echoes around the corners of the underground room. She’s walking behind Elly, so she can’t see her face. “Do you understand why I can’t let you go, my angel? Do you understand that you’ve proven that you’re not strong enough to face the world and all its teeth, despite the lessons I’ve given you? Despite thegiftof your hex?”
They walk further and further into the darkness. Elly’s legs feel numb beneath her, but still, they keep on carrying her onwards.
“I’ll try again,” she finds herself pleading now. Anything to make Haina stop pushing her forward, anything that might make Haina allow her to turn back, anything to forget all about this terrible subterranean world and what it might mean. Because she’s started to hear sounds now, awful sounds, the cries of dying birds, the screams of women in deep, unending pain. “I’ll do better next time. I promise.”
“But it’s too late for that, Elly,” Haina tells her. “Yours is a different fate, and I promise you it’s no less worthwhile. You’re not fit to survive out there. You’ve shown us all that. No –yourpurpose is to make sure that this house stays standing, so that it can do for other women what it so almost did for you.”
Elly opens her mouth to protest, to ask questions, to scream – but there’s no point, because they’ve reached their destination now, and there’s nothing else to be done. Her legs buckle. She sinks to her knees, and Haina lets her.
“You can stay at the house forever, my angel,” Haina says, and she says it so desperately and thirstily, as if she’s been wandering the desert for days and has finally found water. “Isn’t that so beautiful?”
Before them is a great, yawning pit, the diameter larger than three men laid lengthways. It’s the colour of blood, fleshy and bulging, rippling in constant motion. The stench is incredible, putrid, and it seems to stick to every inch of Elly’s skin. It burrows down deep under her fingernails. It coats the back of her throat. It fights its way to the back of her eyeballs. It claims her, complete and unwilling. There are flaps at the entrance to the pit – they open and close in a steady rhythm. As if it’s living. As if it’sbreathing. And with every shuddering inhale, those flaps open, and they reveal a sour darkness inside. The darkness isn’t complete – Elly can make out shapes inside it. Gleaming eyes, reaching hands. Lastly, and with a sickening lurch that steals her breath, Elly recognises the once-graceful spray of wings, hundreds of wings, chewed up and mashed into a feathery pulp.
“You’re going to kill me,” Elly states simply. Her body doesn’t feel like her own, as though there’s no life left in it, as though it simply wants to fold and fall, all the way down into the pit. No, not a pit, she thinks. Amouth. “You’re going to feed me to the house.”Like you do with all the sacrifices, and all the other women who don’t make it out.
Like you did with Lakshmi.
Haina is on her knees next to Elly, clutching her chin,pulling it upwards so that they’re eye to eye. The whites of hers have turned gravestone grey. “It is such an honourable thing,” she whispers, revealing a mouth gapped by missing teeth, “to sacrifice yourself so that this house might continue. It’s what you were always meant for, Elly.Out there, there would always be someone who’d sniff out the weakness in you, who’d make it their mission to break you. And they would get such satisfaction from the process. In here, you will always be protected. Isn’t it wonderful, that you can save us all?” There are tears in her eyes now, a manic euphoria to her voice. “Elly, the house is so hungry. We are so, so hungry.”
Elly can’t get her thoughts to stay in a straight line. They’re firing off in a hundred directions – she thinks of Ethan, gutted by his own cruelty. She thinks of all the women upstairs, ignorant of this horrible crypt beneath their feet. She thinks of Thomas. His bright eyes. His tiny lips. She suddenly, fiercely, wants him away from here, as far from Hex House as he can possibly get.
“It’s wrong,” she manages to choke out. “It’s all so wrong.”
Haina recoils, as if Elly has slapped her.
“Wrong?” she spits. “Was itwrongwhen you discovered your hex in the room right above our heads? Was it wrong when you glided through the air, the whole world at your feet? Was it wrong when you saw what the house, whatIdo for these broken women, how we keep them safe in a sanctuary no one else can find? No, of course not. It is the house that has given you all those things, let you feed from its life force. No one ever stops to think where this house’s power comes from, they’re just sowilling to take and take and take from it. They never think about the price.” She pinches her fingers hard around Elly’s chin, then yanks it to the side so that she’s staring down into the awful, gaping hole at their feet. “You see it now, don’t you? The price you have to pay.”
