Chapter 11

11

Yulia Vasylyk was easy to track down online. With a hundred thousand Instagram followers, the once aspiring catwalk model had become a makeup artist and hairstylist of some renown. Tyler had even worked with her several times before he started dating Grey. When Yulia found out they were together, she refused to style him anymore, which is when Grey had told Tyler their odd backstory.

Tyler spent the morning calling contacts in the industry to find out where Yulia might be, without much luck: News of his impending arrest had spread quickly, and people were wary of handing over the whereabouts of another young woman, lest he was a budding serial killer hell-bent on murdering her too.

Cate messaged me around the time her shift usually ended to say she was staying late to cover for a sick colleague and did I maybe want to start thinking about going back to school after the weekend?

Routine helps,she wrote. Normalcy helps. I know you think I’m cold, but I’ve done this before, remember?

I didn’t message back.

Eventually, after Vivi and I had showered and changed and fed Sasha and eaten three breakfasts apiece, Tyler started pumping his fist in the air while he was on the phone.

“Yulia’s on a shoot at a warehouse in Spitalfields,” he said when he hung up. “Am I good or am I good?”

“Gee, Sherlock, it only took you two hours,” Vivi said, her voice still gravelly with hangover.

Tyler borrowed a big pair of sunglasses for the Uber ride to Spitalfields, though his “disguise” was so clearly an attempt to not look conspicuous that the driver spent most of the journey glancing at him in the rearview mirror. I held Vivi’s hand. My right leg jiggled up and down, animated by a new sense of hope. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A lead. It wasn’t over yet.

We found the shoot in a warehouse, right where Tyler’s contact had said it would be. It was an haute couture photo shoot with models wandering around in transparent raincoat ball gowns and jumpsuits made from netted rope, their faces glazed with bloodred eye shadow and neon-pink freckles. The three of us wandered in, our presence unquestioned because we looked like we belonged there.

“Why aren’t you in hair and makeup yet?” a woman with a clipboard snapped before looking at us closer and realizing, suddenly, who we looked like, who we were. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Then she hurried away into the next room and left us be.

We found Yulia at the back of the warehouse, painting the face of a man with blue permed hair. Yulia wore no makeup herself. Her dark hair was in a braid, and the clothes she wore beneath her tool belt were functional, sensible: She looked almost out of place in such extravagant surrounds.

“I don’t know where she is,” Yulia said when she looked up and saw us. “I haven’t talked to her since before I met you,” she said to Tyler. Then she turned and went back to her work.

“We’re not looking for Grey,” I said.

“We’re looking for you,” Tyler said.

“We know you lived with her,” Vivi said.

Yulia looked up at us again. “My parents owned the apartment. They let me live there when I was going to castings, but I needed roommates to help cover the rent. Hence, your sister. I’m not interested in answering any more questions.”

“Please,” Vivi said as she stepped forward and reached seductively for Yulia’s face.

“Don’t,” Yulia said, smacking Vivi’s hand away with a makeup brush. “Don’t you dare do that vile thing to me.”

“Ow, ow,” Vivi said, her hands up in surrender. “All right. Sorry.”

“You’re just like your sister,” Yulia snapped, stabbing the brush at us. “Manipulative. Now get out of my workplace before I call the cops.” Her gaze slid again to Tyler. “I’m sure they’d be very interested to know that you were here.”

“Hag,”I heard Tyler say under his breath.

“Please,” I said, trying to calm the situation. “Please. We promise we won’t come near you. We won’t touch you, we won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. We just want to find our sister.”

Yulia exhaled, then nodded and bent to whisper in the ear of the model. When he left, she picked up a pair of scissors and held them at her side. “Don’t come any closer,” she said. “I will defend myself.”

“Is that really necessary?” Vivi asked, nodding to the scissors.

“I know your sister. If you’re anything like her, then yes,” Yulia said. “Ask your questions.”

“You have absolutely no idea where she might be?” Tyler asked.

“Last I heard, you killed her. Next question.”

We needed a different angle. “What was she like when you knew her?” I asked.

That caught her off guard. Yulia paused before answering. “Beautiful,” she said finally. “That’s the first thing anyone notices about her, obviously. Also secretive. Quiet. Weird.”

“Weird how?” I asked.

“Most girls, when they get into modeling—they’re swept up in the scene. It’s the first time they’ve lived away from their parents. They drink, they party.”

“You’re telling me Grey Hollow didn’t party?” Tyler said. “Unlikely.”

“Not with us,” Yulia said. “We would go to clubs and she would stay behind. When we came home, she’d be gone, sometimes for days at a time.”

“Gone?” I asked.

“Yes,” Yulia replied. “Gone, as in conspicuously absent.”

“Where do you think she went?”

“Probably having sordid affairs, as is her custom,” Tyler said. Vivi glared at him.

“At first I thought a lover,” Yulia said. Tyler threw his hands up. “Then maybe a drug problem.”

Vivi scoffed. “Grey dabbled, but she would never have developed a habit.”

“What would you know?” Yulia snapped. She grasped the scissors harder. Her knuckles blanched white. There was an animal flash in her eyes, the look of something ready to fight for its life. What had Grey done to this woman? “Grey kept all sorts of secrets. No doubt she kept many from you. I didn’t even know she had sisters until she was famous. She never talked about either of you. She was a nightmare to live with. She had a lot of weird hobbies, but the taxidermy was the weirdest. How many teenage girls do you know who like to skin mice and birds and snakes and make them into weird Frankenstein monsters? That was how she paid her rent, in the first few months, before the modeling money started rolling in. Apparently, her taxidermy was so good that weirdos off the internet would reach out to her for freelance work. Great for her, really shitty for my kitchen table. I never got the stains out.”

“And then there was the week you took a little tumble off the face of the earth,” Tyler said. “What happened, peach? Where did you go?”

Yulia took a breath. “I was like most people. As soon as I saw Grey, I . . . I loved her. I was obsessed with her. Like a pet following a master. I can’t explain why, only that she was beautiful. I followed her around like a shadow. Then it happened. One day when Grey left to go wherever it was she went, I went after her. Trailed her. I wanted to know where she kept disappearing to. Grey came back. I didn’t.” She licked her lips. “My boyfriend at the time went to the police. Reported me missing and told them he thought Grey had done something to me, but they said girls like me went missing all the time. Nobody cared. Nobody even looked for me.”

“So . . . where did you go?” I asked.

“That’s the thing. I don’t remember,” Yulia said.

“Oh, Christ!” Tyler said. “You’re all bleeding useless!”

“You were nineteen,” Vivi said. “You must remember something.”

“I know what happened to me. I followed your sister somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go, and I paid the price. When I came back, I wasn’t . . . right. It ruined me. Now all I dream about is dead people. When I wake up, I can still hear them whispering to me.” Yulia glanced at her shaking hands, then looked past us, over our shoulders. The male model with the blue hair had gone to fetch the woman with the clipboard. They were both staring at us. The woman held a phone to her ear and was having a low, urgent conversation. “I have worked very hard to recover from meeting your sister. Now, you should probably go if you want to get out of here before the police arrive.”

I looked at Vivi. I could tell she wanted to keep pushing, to shove her fingers into Yulia Vasylyk’s mouth and get her drunk enough on the taste of her skin that she’d answer any question we asked. I put my hand on her arm and shook my head once.

“One last question,” I said before we left. “Where was the apartment you lived in together?” Grey had been practically MIA those first few months after she’d moved out. We’d never even been to that place, though we knew it was somewhere in Hackney.

“Near London Fields,” Yulia said. “Grey won’t be there, though, if that’s what you’re thinking. My parents own the place. No one lives there anymore.”

“It’s vacant?”

“No one will rent it, and my parents haven’t been able to sell it ever since Grey moved out. Whenever prospective buyers or tenants walk through, they say they feel sick. There’s something wrong with it. My parents checked for carbon monoxide leaks and black mold, but I think . . .”

“You think what?” Vivi asked.

“I think your sister cursed it somehow.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “Thank you for helping us.”

“Hey,” Yulia called as we turned to go.

“Yeah?”

“They left something out of the news reports,” she said. “When they found me in the street, I was naked except for the bloody runes written on my body. The blood was Grey’s.”

---

Vivi, Tyler, and I caught an Uber and had it drop us close to the south end of London Fields, then walked through Broadway Market toward the park. It was packed, as it was every Saturday, with people buying sourdough bread and artisanal doughnuts and bunches of flowers and vintage Barbour waxed jackets. Along the way, we bought fresh coffee and half a dozen croissants, which barely made a dent in the well of hunger still crawling inside me.

“Like a pair of bears preparing for the winter,” Tyler said as he watched us eat. He stuck to unsweetened black coffee.

“Why do you think we’re hungry all the time?” I asked Vivi as I licked my fingers after my third croissant.

“We are blessed with fast metabolisms,” she said.

“Inhumanly fast, some might say,” I said.

“Bearlike, some might go so far as to suggest,” Tyler said.

My stomach growled. “I need more food.”

We stopped again for goat cheese and honey and two sourdough baguettes, then continued to stuff our faces until, finally, after consuming approximately ten thousand calories before lunch, I was something close to satisfied.

“What do you make of what Yulia said?” I asked as we left the market and entered London Fields. It was my favorite park in the summertime, when the grass grew thick with red and yellow wildflowers and hundreds of Londoners flocked to the shade of trees to drink Aperol spritzes in the afternoon warmth. Now, in late winter, the midday sun felt diluted, far away. The trees were a scraggy mess of naked branches, and the cold was too caustic to allow anyone to linger for too long.

“That this whole situation is way above our pay grade,” Vivi said between mouthfuls of bread. “The bloody runes, though. That is something else.”

“Both of the men in Grey’s apartment had runes on them, written in blood,” I said. “That is not a coincidence.”

“Just so we’re all on the same page here,” Tyler said, “this is definitely some Satanic cult thing, right? Like some freaky sex cult with blood and human sacrifices. That’s where we’re all landing at the moment, yeah?”

As soon as we reached the north end of London Fields, we caught Grey’s trail. It came to me as a tingle in my fingertips and a taste on my tongue, an inexplicable certainty that my sister had been here. The area was thick with her energy, though her presence here felt old and faded now. We walked on in silence until we saw a squat row of houses pressed close to the train tracks. Vivi pointed to one and said, “That one.” I knew she was right. Grey’s energy had nested there, tight and twisted, and it lingered on even years after her departure.

“How could you possibly know that?” Tyler asked.

An ominous feeling crawled over me. “It doesn’t feel right,” I said.

“Yeah, no shit, because you have no evidence this is the right place,” Tyler said.

“It is the right place. Grey was unhappy here,” Vivi said. “What she left behind is . . . ugly.”

“Ugh, the pair of you are as bad as your sister,” Tyler said as he strode ahead of us toward the building. “It’s always energy and demons and whatnot. Ridiculous!”

The Vasylyks had struggled to sell this flat. Cate had tried and failed to sell our family home after our father had died too. I thought it was probably because of the suicide, that people either found out about it or could feel the unsettling energy it left behind. But maybe . . . not. Maybe it was because of us. Maybe our strangeness had seeped into the walls and made the space feel haunted.

We buzzed the four flats in the building but all went unanswered. Eventually we slipped inside behind a man with a bag of groceries, then followed Grey’s trail to the door on the second floor. Vivi rattled the handle—locked—but the wood was old and thin, the door beginning to curl at the edges like a wet book. She only had to throw her weight against it once for it to pop open with a dry crunch. Then there we were, inside another of Grey’s apartments, with more questions than we’d ever have answers for.

There were a few pieces of furniture stacked in one corner of the living room, but apart from that, the space was empty. The carpet was creamy peach, pilled with age, the walls covered with sun-faded wallpaper. The kitchen was all wood, a fashion statement left over from the seventies. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, one bedroom. It was tiny, dark, grim. Grey had lived here with three other girls, all of them packed on top of each other like rats in a nest.

It didn’t feel welcoming. It felt watchful and dangerous in a way I couldn’t place. Shadows stretched long. A line of ants crawled up the wall in the bedroom, into a tiny pock hole of rot near the ceiling. I could feel why they’d had trouble selling or even renting it. It was haunted by our sister, by the sadness and worry she had left in the walls. She had not been Grey Hollow, supermodel, when she’d lived here; she had been a scared seventeen-year-old girl with no money and nowhere else to go.

“Well, this is grim,” Tyler said as he opened a window that looked directly onto a neighboring brick wall.

We performed what had become our usual routine. We ran our fingers over the baseboard, looking for hidden compartments. We opened all the kitchen cupboards and pulled out all the drawers. We searched under the bathroom sink, inside the cistern, in the creepy crawl space beneath the bathtub. We unscrewed the curtain rods to look for rolled-up scraps of paper and held the curtains up to the light to search for hidden embroidery. We turned over the few pieces of furniture and looked for words scratched into the wood.

I caught flashes of her life here, those first few months of freedom away from the burden of high school and two younger sisters. I pictured her coming home from bars, a little tipsy, giddy and grinning because a cute boy had asked for her number. I pictured her in the kitchen in her pajamas, cooking what she cooked for us every Sunday morning: waffles, scrambled eggs, freshly squeezed orange juice. I pictured the way the bedroom had looked when it had been partly hers, her bunk bed draped with all the trinkets and treasures she’d taken with her when she left home.

“There’s nothing left of her here,” Vivi said after blowing on all the windows to search for messages written in breath—and yet there was. There was the unsettling energy. Something malevolent, below the surface. I kept coming back to one wall in the bedroom, the wall Grey must have slept against, because I could feel her most strongly here. I trailed my hands over it. There was nothing outwardly strange about it. No bumps or lumps or hidden compartments. Nothing anomalous at all except the line of ants.

“You feel it too,” Vivi said as she came to stand next to me. We both stared at the wall. A tangled web of wrongness hummed beneath.

“The wallpaper here is slightly different,” I said. It had been bugging me since we arrived, but I’d only just put my finger on it.

“Is it?” Vivi said. She looked from one wall to the next and back again several times. “You’re right.”

“It’s newer.” I ran my hand over it again. Yes, it was smoother and less faded than the wallpaper in the rest of the apartment. “They papered over this wall, but only this one.”

Tyler was pacing behind us. “You two are supposed to be exonerating me, not critiquing hideous decor choices.”

“Well, we already busted down the front door,” Vivi said. “What’s a peeled wall after that?”

Vivi brought in a chair from the pile of furniture in the living room. I climbed up on it and started in the top right-hand corner where the ants were, fiddling with the paper until an edge came loose enough for me to pull. It was cheap, hastily applied. It came away from the wall in thick sheets, leaving tacky marks on the paint beneath.

“Ugh,” Tyler said, gagging as I let a sheet fall to the floor. “The wall is rotting.”

“It’s not rot,” Vivi said. We both leaned in to get a closer look. “It’s something else.”

Vivi placed her palm against the wall. It was spongy beneath her touch, steeped with moisture. With a little more pressure, her hand sank right through the sodden plaster. The smell exploded out of the dark, a foul, green stench.

“Oh, something’s dead,” Tyler said, dry heaving.

Vivi pulled away a chunk of wall, and then some more, big clops of it falling to the floor like mud. The plaster was gelatinous, barely even solid anymore. “No. Something’s alive,” she said as she held a piece of the wall up to me. It reeked—but one side of it was covered in little white flowers.

The same flowers that had been growing in Vivi. The same flowers Grey stitched in lace to her gowns.

“Carrion flowers,” Vivi said as she picked a bloom and twirled it in her fingertips. “The punkest thing I learned in high school science. They smell like rotting flesh to attract flies and bugs.”

We pulled more of the wall down, excavating a hole big enough to look through. There was about a foot of soft marrow behind it, and every inch of it was carpeted with corpse blooms and the things that liked to live in them: ants, beetles, creepy-crawlies.

“I’ve seen these flowers before,” Vivi said as she leaned her head into the wall, her phone flashlight revealing more of the wet space. “Growing on the dead dude who fell out of the ceiling.”

“They’re the same flowers they found in our hair when we came back,” I said. “The police tried to identify them but they couldn’t. I saw it in a file. They’re hybrids, pyrophytes.”

“Pyro-whats?” Tyler asked.

“Plants that have adapted to tolerate fire. Some of them even need fire to flourish.” I thought of the charred shell of the house in Edinburgh, the blaze so hot it left only the frame of the front door standing. The gunpowder heat of the bullet that grazed Vivi’s arm. The flames that engulfed Grey’s apartment. Heat and flame. Blood and fire. Was there a link?

Vivi pulled her head out of the wall and started rummaging in her backpack. “Here,” she said as she held out Grey’s journal, the one we’d found in her hidden apartment. We hadn’t handed these things over to the police. They felt too sacred, too personal. “The last photo and all of the sketches.”

I flicked to the middle of the journal, to the Polaroid photograph of a doorway in a ruined stone wall. It was covered in a carpet of white flowers.

Vivi pointed to the picture. “A door that used to lead somewhere,” she said as she turned the pages of the book, revealing page after page after page of sketches, each one of a different doorway, “but now leads somewhere else.”

The words felt like poetry, something I’d once known by heart but had long since forgotten. “How do I know that saying?” I asked. “What’s it from?”

“In Grey’s fairy tale, that was how you got to the . . . in-between place. The Halfway. Limbo. The land of the dead. Whatever. You walked through a door that used to lead somewhere else. A broken door.”

My memory reached for something. Yes, a story Grey had told us when we were younger. The place she spoke of was strange, broken. Time and space got snagged there, caught in snarls. “You don’t actually think that . . . she’s, what, somewhere . . . else?”

“What if the stories she told us when we were little were true?” I laughed and looked at Vivi, but she was serious. “It was a liminal world,” she said, her face close to the photograph from Bromley-by-Bow, studying the ruin. “A kind of accidental gutter. Like . . . the gap at the back of the couch that crumbs and coins fall into.” Vivi looked at me, her eyes hard as lead. “What if she’s there? What if she found a way back?”

“Vivi. Come on.”

“Yeah, I’m with . . .” Tyler glanced sideways at me. “The youngest Hollow . . . on this one.”

“Oh my God.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You don’t even know my name!”

“We were never formally introduced!”

“It’s Iris. You dick.”

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance. You harpy.”

Vivi was ignoring us. “Do you remember what Grey used to say about missing people?” she said. “Some people go missing because they want to; some go missing because they’re taken. And then there are the others—those who go missing because they fall through a gap somewhere and can’t claw their way back.”

“The Halfway was a story,” I said.

“I know. That doesn’t mean it can’t be true.” Vivi shoved the journal back into her bag, then pulled out the brass key to Grey’s burned flat. “Something happened to us when we were kids, Iris. Something no one has been able to explain. I’m starting to think we fell through.”

“Fell through what?” I asked, but she was already striding away, toward the front door. “Vivi, fell through what?”

My sister turned and took me by the shoulders, a half-mad smile on her face. “A crack in the world.”