Chapter 14

14

I woke justafter midnight with my head on Tyler’s shoulder. My neck was pinched at an angle, my bladder urgently swollen. I stretched off some of the sleep, then made my way to the bathroom. The hospital was darker and quieter than it had been earlier in the evening. No lights came on in the bathroom, so I peed in the dark, my eyes still drooping shut as I rested my elbows on my knees and cradled my chin in my hands. The scar at my throat was crawling again, begging to be scratched. I pressed my fingertip to the familiar ridge of scar tissue—and felt something move beneath my skin.

“Jesus, fuck,” I spat, lurching off the toilet seat, sending droplets of piss down my thighs, over the floor.

You imagined it, you imagined it.

I sat back down and finished peeing and cleaned myself up, my heart whipping an angry beat inside my chest. My whole body was fizzing.

You imagined it, you imagined it. Don’t touch it again.

I flushed and went to wash my hands with my head down, too afraid to look up at the mirror. What would I see at the base of my neck? The pale-fleshed bud of a carrion flower about to burst through my skin? Or something worse?

I looked up. The room was too dark to make out anything but the vague outline of my body, so I turned my phone flashlight on and rested it on a soap dispenser, the beam of light pointed in my direction. The light wasn’t kind to my features. It scrubbed the color from my complexion, carved any softness from my bones. I was a demon in this light. A monster. I couldn’t look myself in the eyes without feeling a snap of fear.

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look at her.

I leaned in. I looked. There was a small pustule erupting at one end of my scar, its head hard and shiny black. As I watched it, it moved again, the flicker of something beetle-dark and spindly beneath my skin.

A tear slipped down my cheek. What the fuck was happening to me?

I pressed the sharp edge of my fingernail into the lump, enough to break the skin and tear the head away, then waited and watched to see what was beneath.

Something unfurled. Tiny legs. A black body.

An ant.

It crawled out of the wound and made its way across my collarbone, tickling my skin. A second followed it, popping from the tiny bore hole in my flesh, and then a third, until the pustule was empty. Thoughts of Grey’s abandoned apartment filled my head. The line of ants and something dead and gruesome hidden beneath the wallpaper. I leaned in closer to the mirror, closer to the light, and gritted my teeth as I took out Grey’s knife and used the tip to open the wound wider. The hot pain made more tears skim down my cheeks. A bead of blood slipped between my breasts. I blotted it away with a paper towel.

There was something there, beneath my skin. Something smooth and pale.

“What the hell?” I whispered.

It was skin, I realized as I leaned in for a better look. More skin. A second layer of it beneath my own, just as there had been a second layer of wallpaper beneath the one we’d peeled away.

My phone slipped from the soap dispenser then and clattered to the floor, sending the bathroom strobing. The phone landed at my feet with a glassy clack and shot a beam of light at my face from below. For a second, it was not myself I saw in my reflection, but someone else. Something else.

I grabbed my phone and clambered back into the waiting room, madly swatting the ants from my body as I went. I thought I might vomit. I wanted to find one of the nurses, get them to rinse out my wound with alcohol and tell me I was imagining things, but there was no one around. Vivi was sprawled out on the floor, her head resting on her rolled-up jacket, her backpack tucked under one arm. Tyler slept sitting up. Apart from that, we were alone.

I hurried to the nurses’ station, where the medics who’d cared for us all afternoon and evening were nowhere to be found.

“Hello?” I said. A sandwich sat unwrapped and half-eaten on a stack of paperwork. A can of Coke had been knocked over and left to drip into a puddle on the floor.

I went from the waiting room to the corridor where Grey’s room was. The lights above me flickered. A clot of darkness swelled at the end of the hall where the ceiling lights had already been choked out. To my right, a doctor and a nurse squatted in an alcove, their bodies pressed together like soft fruit. Each took quiet, shallow breaths. They were holding hands, shaking, their eyes wide and wet. I looked down the corridor toward my sister’s room, then back at them. The nurse shook his head. Don’t go.

I went. I pushed into the stuttering dark, down the long corridor. Grey’s room was easy to identify. It was the one with a chair out in front. Except the chair was toppled on its side, and the police officer who was supposed to be guarding my sister was sprawled facedown on the ground. There was blood. Not a pool of it, but slashes.

Grey’s door was locked. I jiggled the handle, then pressed my face against the glass to see inside. It was soaked in shadow. The curtain was drawn around her bed. There was no movement.

Just as I was about to bang on the door, to try and wake her, a bloody hand closed hard over my mouth and yanked me back. I tried to scream, tried to thrash against my captor as they dragged me into the room opposite Grey’s, but they were stronger than me.

“Stop,” ordered a low voice as they pushed me roughly against a wall. “Stop. It’s me.”

Grey lifted her hand from my lips and pressed a blood-slick finger to her own.

My sister was a caricature of a madwoman in a red-spattered hospital gown. Her eyes and hair were wild, her lower jaw shaking. In her bloody hands she held a scalpel. What remained of her restraints hung loose and tattered at her wrists. A spark of déjà vu: Grey with a blade in her hand, and then gone, the familiar image there and then already fading from my mind like white spots left after a flash.

“What’s going on?” I whispered, horrified.

“He’s coming here,” she said. “To take me.”

“Grey,” I whispered. I spat onto my sleeve and scrubbed the blood from my lips, then took my sister’s face in my hands and tried to get her to look at me. She was skinnier now than when I’d last seen her, her collarbones pushing through her skin, and her hair had been lopped off above her shoulders. “Grey, look at me.”

She did, eventually. She was calmer now than this afternoon, no longer rabid. I let the joy of her being alive, alive, alive flood me again. I wrapped my arms around her wasp waist and squeezed her close, my head on her shoulder. Grey was rigid for a moment, and then she melted into the hug.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said as she pulled back and trailed her fingertips over a soft bruise along my jaw. “I was scared.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’re okay. Where were you? What happened?”

Grey’s eyes welled and she pressed her lips together. “He took me. That bastard. I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Who . . . who do you think is coming for you?”

“Wait,” she said. “Watch.”

I glanced at the floor, where arterial blood dripped from the tip of the scalpel, the tips of Grey’s fingers. Another smack of déjà vu. Why did this scene feel familiar? “Did you . . . did you hurt the policeman, Grey?”

Grey’s eyes went to his body, then back to her ward door. “He was not what he seemed.”

I swallowed my horror and took Grey’s free, bloody hand in my own. What would this mean for her? A lifetime in prison for his murder? Or would they go easy on her because of her mental state? Not guilty by reason of insanity, the rest of her twenties spent in a mental institution? Both options were grim, life-destroying, but she had done something gruesome to an innocent man whose only crime was trying to protect her.

We waited together. We watched together.

In the minutes that passed, my sister stood unmoving and unblinking by the glass panel, her eyes bolted to the door of her hospital room across the corridor. I thought about what the doctor had said earlier in the evening, that Grey was in the grip of psychosis. It ran in our family, this predisposition to derangement. It had happened to our father, after all.

The day he killed himself, Gabe Hollow woke us in the early hours of the morning and bundled us into the family car. Cate was still asleep. We went quietly, without complaint. We could sense the danger in him—he handled us roughly, slammed the car doors, screeched out of the driveway—but what could we do? How could we fight? We were only little girls.

Gabe drove erratically. He was muttering to himself, crying, screaming that he was going to drive the car off a cliff and kill us all if we didn’t tell him the truth.

Where were his children?

What had we done to them?

Who were we?

What were we?

Vivi and I bawled our eyes out in the back seat, but it was Grey, sitting in the passenger seat up front, who talked him down.

“Please, Papa,” she whispered.

“Don’t call me that!” he said with a sob, knuckles stone-white on the steering wheel.

Grey put her tiny hand on his arm. “Take us home.” Her morning breath smelled strange, both syrupy and sour at once. It wasn’t until a year later, when I saw her kiss the woman who broke in, that I began to suspect Grey had compelled our father—and probably saved our lives in doing so.

Gabe took us home and killed himself later that day, while we were at school. We found him when we returned, hanging from the banister in the entranceway. Vivi and I screamed, but Grey didn’t. She dragged a chair over to his body, patted him down, took the note he’d folded in his pocket, read it, and then tore it up into small pieces and threw it out the window. I spent the afternoon in the garden, collecting all the scattered scraps in my pocket, while Cate called relatives and made arrangements for his funeral. It was late spring, an unusually hot day in London, the afternoon temperature climbing past thirty degrees Celsius. I sat in my room and taped all the pieces of his note back together with sweaty hands.

I didn’t want this, it had said. Four words to sum up a whole life.

I wondered if the same thing was happening to Grey right now. I wondered, for a few brief moments, if Tyler was right, if Grey’s hysteria was catching. How much of what we had seen was real? Had there really been a dead body in Grey’s ceiling? It had happened quickly and I had no physical proof of the strangeness, only scent and blood and memory. No one but Vivi and I had seen it. We had not been sleeping well, had been fueled by caffeine and adrenaline. The edge of our reality had begun to twist and burr as it brushed up against something else.

There was a hitch in Grey’s breathing. She closed her fingers around the door handle, still holding the scalpel, still staring at her room across the hall. “Take off your shoes,” she said.

“What?” I looked down at Grey’s own bare feet. The nail beds were blackened, her ankles rubbed raw from restraints. “Why?”

“Do it. He’s here,” she said. The flickering lights went out, and darkness dropped over the hallway like a stone. I scuffed out of my shoes and held them in one hand.

Then he was there, just as she said he would be. I knew him from his silhouette, even if I couldn’t see his face: the man from Grey’s burned-out apartment. Tall and thin, the skull of a dead bull worn over his face. The stench of him palmed my face, driving splinters of rot and damp and smoke into my nose. A flicker of broken memories skipped across the surface of my thoughts: a decomposing forest, a hand with a knife, three children warming themselves by a fireplace. Three little girls with dark hair and blue eyes. Us. Whose house were we at?

I was crying, though I didn’t understand why. We were not safe here. Whoever he was, he had found us, again. Found Grey. Come to take her away from me. I wanted to run, I wanted my feet to move as fast as my heart was beating, but my sister tightened her grip on my hand. Not yet.

The man knelt by the body of the police officer and turned him over—except he was not wearing a police uniform. A thicket of white flowers was bursting from the dead man’s eyes, his nostrils, his mouth, their petals waxy in the low light. Something was happening to him, something I’d seen before. Hair-thin vines grew from the roots of the flowers in his mouth, twisting their way across the skin of his face. There was the smell of blood, yes, but also something green and sour. I covered my mouth to keep from gagging.

He was not what he seemed,Grey had said. Not the police officer who’d been tasked with guarding her door. Someone else.

The man tried the handle to Grey’s hospital door. When he found it locked, he used his elbow to break the glass, then put his arm through and unlocked it from the other side. He slipped into Grey’s room and shut the door behind him.

“We have to go now,” Grey whispered. “Follow me.” She opened the door and padded quietly into the hall, her feet bare, tiny drops of blood slipping from her hand as she moved. My own blood was thundering rapids, but my footfalls were silent as I followed her, also barefoot, crouching low as we moved past her room, careful not to step on any glass as we moved under the broken window.

“You have to hide,” Grey whispered to the doctor as we crept back past her. The nurse had already disappeared, but the doctor was now an empty shell, gone from her body. There was a crash from Grey’s room, an animal growl: He’d found her bed empty. The doctor looked that way and swallowed but didn’t move. Grey knelt by the woman’s side, tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, and then leaned in to press her lips against hers. It had been a long time since I’d seen Grey do this thing, and for a moment I wondered if it would still work, but then whatever sweet potion we carried on our breath, our lips, every inch of our skin worked its way into the doctor’s bloodstream, and I saw her melt beneath my sister’s touch. When Grey pulled back from the kiss, the woman’s pupils were saucers, and she looked at Grey like a bride walking down the aisle on her wedding day. Awed. Overwhelmed. The most in love she’d ever been. “Hide now,” Grey said. The doctor smiled, punch-drunk and dazed, and slipped into the room behind her.

My pulse was a flurry. “Come,” I whispered urgently. We ran then, hard but silent, toward where Vivi and Tyler slept, rounding the corner as Grey’s door slammed open, sending more broken glass jittering across the floor. The noise made Tyler jump awake. Grey pressed her palm over his mouth and shook her head. Tyler swallowed. I woke Vivi with a finger against her lips. Her eyelids lurched open, but she was quiet as I pulled her to her feet and motioned for her to take her shoes off, carry them in her hand. Grey removed her hand from Tyler’s face and knelt to help him pull his shoes off.

All was silent. Then came the crunch of heavy boots on glass. The footfalls were headed in our direction, following the line of blood drops Grey had left on the floor. Vivi put her backpack on. Grey pulled Tyler out of his seat and wiped her hands on her dress, and then the four of us moved softly, swiftly toward the next hallway, making it around the corner a moment after the man stepped into the waiting room, the shadow concealing our retreat. I watched his diluted reflection in a panel of glass. There were three fresh runes written down his chest in blood. He crouched and placed his palm where I had been sitting. He picked up Vivi’s rolled-up jacket from the floor and pressed it to the stripped-bare bones of his mask, inhaling deeply. He nudged Tyler’s shoes with his toe.

From the back of his waistband, he pulled his gun and started in our direction. We peeled away from the wall we’d been pressed against and ran soft-footed down the corridor, as quickly and quietly as we could manage.

As we rounded the next corner, Grey slammed into a body. A green aura of stink exploded in my head.

“He—” breathed the figure (a woman, I could see now, in the half-light), but Grey drove the scalpel up under her chin and cut off her cry when it was still no more than a breath. Grey yanked the scalpel out of her head and held the woman tightly against her as she lowered her, gushing blood, to the floor. The blood was full of clots and smelled of decay.

We kept running in the dark then, turning corners, backtracking when figures appeared at the end of a hall or when a wall of smoke and rot stench hit us. Grey was doused in blood—but was it blood? In the half-light, the stain down her front seemed to twitch across her like shadow.

“We need to get off this floor,” Grey whispered. “Out of this hospital.”

“There,” I said, pointing to a door at the end of the corridor. EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY, it read. ALARM WILL SOUND WHEN DOOR IS OPENED.

“Do it,” Grey said. “Run, and don’t stop running.”

We ran. Vivi reached the door first, slammed into it at the same moment the alarm split my teeth open. I followed her, and Grey came up behind me. Tyler hurled himself through the door last. When I looked back, the man was coming straight for us, the bone of his mask catching shards of light as he charged in our direction.

“Go, go, go, fucking go!” Grey screamed as Tyler pulled the door closed, the man hitting it three seconds behind us, popping it from its hinges like a craft Popsicle stick. We flew down the stairs, taking them three at a time, our feet slapping the concrete, our lungs sucking hard. The man was fast and agile. As we tore down the stairwell, gripping the handrails to swing around corners faster, we heard him gaining on us. Then we smelled him gaining on us. Then we felt him gaining on us, the wet hotness of his breath, flecks of sweat from his arms and chest flicking the back of my neck. Tyler screamed. I turned. The man held him by the collar and had him pressed up against a wall. Grey was already there. She plunged the scalpel into the creature’s chest and fell back. The gun went clattering down the stairwell, lost somewhere below us. The surgical implement looked comically small lodged in his flesh, a toothpick stabbed into a watermelon. He dropped Tyler, who scrambled toward us, choking. We backed away, down the stairs, as he plucked the scalpel from his chest like a splinter and flicked it to the ground, where it made a pretty twinkling sound.

“Run,” Grey said. We turned and hurled ourselves downward again, out the door at the bottom of the stairs and into the cool night. After the shrill alarm of the stairwell and the thick stink of the horned man, the night felt crisp and quiet. We’d been spat out at the back of the hospital.

The man burst out of the stairwell behind us, clipping the horns of his mask on the doorway.

Grey was the fastest out in the open and she ran hard through the gap between hospital buildings until she reached the street, where she flung herself in front of a passing car. It screamed to a stop, curls of rubber smoke rising from the asphalt beneath it. The driver wound down his window and started yelling obscenities. Grey pitched herself through the window and planted a desperate kiss on his lips. The man went quiet as she spoke in his ear, quickly, urgently, as we all piled into the car. Then Grey folded into the back seat, and the man shoved the car into first and smoked the tires again before we’d all even closed our doors—and not a moment too soon.

The man landed a fist on the back bumper, making the car fishtail as we sped away. Then he ran alongside us, almost keeping pace for a second or two, before we finally pulled ahead and left him in the middle of the road, doused in the faded red of our lights.