Chapter 17

17

I hobbled backto Agnes’s house in a daze, before the police arrived to arrest me. What could I say to explain myself? Well, you see, Officer, my sisters were kidnapped and taken to a mysterious limbo for unknown reasons. I suspect this is not the first time it’s happened.

I closed the front door behind me, then drew the curtains and turned off all but one light.

Tyler was alive. Agnes was not.

He sat on the kitchen floor next to her small, broken body, crying quietly. There were flowers teeming from her eye sockets, vines growing from her mouth, lichen colonizing her face and neck. I sat down on the other side of her and put my hand on Tyler’s bare shoulder. We sat like that for a while, both of us with tears running down our cheeks. Then I crossed Agnes’s arms over her chest. Her skin already felt desiccated, her joints creaky and dry. Carrion flowers grew from under her nail beds, cracking and peeling the fingernails to make way for their blooms. Ants and beetles had already made their home in the soft hollows of her face. The pungent stink of her made the warm kitchen air taste green, wild.

Tyler looked at me. One of his eyes was shot with red, a burst blood vessel. The cheekbone beneath it jutted awkwardly, broken and pressed painfully against the skin. His expression was one of searching. Asking.

I shook my head. “He took them,” I managed to rasp. “I couldn’t follow. I . . . I lost them . . . I lost them both.”

Tyler said nothing.

We burned Agnes’s body in the fireplace. It seemed wrong to leave her abandoned on the floor of an empty house, her death unnoticed and unmourned. When I lifted her, she was light and hollowed out, like a long-fallen tree. We burned her wrapped in her blankets and used the newspaper clippings she slept with as kindling. It didn’t take long. The pyre smelled not of flesh and hair, but of smoking greenery and forest fire.

I hoped that, wherever she ended up now, she was at peace.

“I suppose you have a plan,” Tyler said as he buttoned up his floral shirt. “You Hollows always seem to have a plan.”

I shook my head. “Grey’s the planner. Not me. I’m a follower. I didn’t even fight. I just . . . stood there while Agnes shot him. I let a kid defend me.”

“Well, not fighting it turned out to be a good idea,” Tyler said as he touched his fingertips to his broken cheekbone. “Look, you are Grey’s sister. You are as strong and smart and, frankly, as terrifying as she is. How do we follow them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know, because you’ve been there before. How do we follow them?”

I let out a frustrated exhale. “How do you get to the land of the dead?” I was certain that that’s where we were trying to go: a strange sliver of space between here and nothingness.

“I suppose dying would get you there, though that seems to be a very permanent solution.”

I locked eyes with him. “It wasn’t for you.”

“Yes, well. I’d rather not do that again.”

“That’s fine,” I said, already making my way toward the stairs. “I can go by myself. I’ll fill the bathtub, you can hold me under until I die, then give it a minute or so and do some CPR. I’ll find them.” Hadn’t I seen that in a movie or read it in a book? It had worked then—why wouldn’t it work now? I wanted Tyler to say yes before my adrenaline waned and I chickened out. My heart was beating so fast, I felt like I might vomit it up. I was already imagining the terrible moment my burning lungs sucked in a flood of water while he held me, thrashing, under the surface.

“Iris,” Tyler said, pulling me back. “I won’t drown you. Don’t ask me to do that.”

I snatched my hand away from his. “Do you want to save her or not?” I yelled, because I felt my courage breaking. Didn’t I always think I was willing to die for my sisters? Here was an opportunity—was I too weak to take it?

“We both have to go,” Tyler said. “Together.”

I sighed and softened. “Your eye looks terrible.”

“Well, I did take a right hook from a demon, bang in the socket. Frankly, it’s a miracle I’m not dead. My delicate bone structure was not built for physical combat.”

I grabbed an old bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer and threw them to him. We should both go to the hospital, but there was still a tinge of something otherworldly in the air. I thought, if we didn’t follow them tonight, we might not ever be able to follow. We would forget that impossible things were possible. It was now or never. It had to be.

I pulled back the curtain an inch and looked into the sloe-black Edinburgh night. Somewhere out there was a door to another place, a crack in the world into which girls and boys slipped, never to be seen again.

Well, almost never.

The three of us had come back, somehow. We had found a way.

“Did Grey ever talk to you about what happened to us when we were children?” I asked Tyler as he pressed the vegetables to his face. The flames of Agnes’s body had simmered down to smoke and bone.

“Of course not. I would have immediately sold the story to the Daily Telegraph if she’d told me the truth.” When I glared at him, Tyler rolled his eyes. “I’m kidding. It was off-limits to even ask.”

“Did you ever wonder?”

“Oh, I wondered. I grew up reading the Reddit threads and watching the unsolved-crime specials the same as everyone else. Of course I wanted to know the answer. Sometimes when she was drunk, she talked about it in a vague way, like it was a thing that had happened to someone else. It was almost like . . . a dark fairy tale about three sisters who fell through a crack in the world and met a monster who did something terrible to them.”

“What did the monster do to them?”

Tyler stared at me, peas still pressed against his face. “I don’t know for sure, Little Hollow. But I can imagine. Can’t you?”

I went to pick up the shotgun from where Agnes had dropped it. I’d never held a gun before and it felt heavier and more lethal than I expected.

“So where are we going?” Tyler asked.

“Back to the beginning.”

“Stop speaking in riddles, for Christ’s sake. What does that mean?”

“Look, whatever happened to us happened here first, in Edinburgh. It happened in the Old Town, not far from here. There’s a door there. Or, at least, there used to be. A door that used to lead somewhere, but now leads somewhere else. We’re going back there. We’re going to find a way to follow them.”

I watched a YouTube video on how to load a shotgun while Tyler stuffed Vivi’s backpack full of some meager supplies scavenged from Agnes’s kitchen. We put on our coats—his ridiculous, mine functional—I slipped Grey’s knife into my pocket, and then we set off.

Outside, Edinburgh was steeped in predawn darkness. We headed toward Saint Giles’ Cathedral, in the direction of the narrow street I had disappeared from. We walked, shivering, through the Old Town’s warren of narrow lanes, retracing my steps from that night, though I knew them not from memory but from snatches of police reports and the witness statements of my parents.

Grey’s energy was here, though it was no stronger than a whisper. She had been here, though not recently. Years ago. I felt Vivi’s energy too, and my own. Yes, we had come this way.

And then we were there. The street. The stone walls were close on both sides, and I could see all the way to the end. I could understand why the police thought it impossible for three children to disappear from right under their parents’ noses: because it was impossible.

“I know this place,” I said quietly. “We were here visiting our grandparents for Christmas. We were walking down this street right as the fireworks were going off. My parents were just behind us.” I ran my hands over the bricks. Being here felt wrong, like we were disturbing the dead. “This one,” I whispered, looking up at a stone terrace. It was newer than the others. The brick was milk and bone, not yet covered by centuries of grime. “This is the one.”

There was a bronze plaque set into the cobblestones to the right of the front door. Here, on this spot in January 2011, sisters Grey, Vivi, and Iris Hollow were found alive and well after being missing for 31 days. Our names had been burnished gold, presumably from all the tourists who came to this place and rubbed the bronze for luck.

The memories I had were slippery; they kept sliding through my mind, slightly different each time. I was no longer sure which ones were mine and which ones had been stitched in from elsewhere to make a more complete picture. Did I remember walking down this street that night? Or did I only remember coming back?

“It had burned down a few weeks before the night we went missing,” I said. “It was just a shell back then.”

Tyler nodded. “Yes, we’ve all seen the pictures.”

“There are pictures?”

Tyler stared at me. “You haven’t stalked yourself online?”

“I try to avoid reading anything about the catastrophic disaster that destroyed my family, actually.”

Tyler sighed, pulled out his phone, and googled hollow sisters disappearance.

The picture he showed me had been posted to r/UnsolvedMysteries on Reddit and appeared under the title I was in Edinburgh the day the Hollow sisters vanished and have a bunch of pictures from the street they were on when it (supposedly) happened. Thoughts? The poster went on to state that there was no way, in his humble opinion, that our parents’ story could possibly be true. His charming theory was that our mother had sold us to sex traffickers and then panicked and repurchased us a month later when the heat from the media got to be too much. While the hypothesis was bunk, the pictures of the street from that day seemed real enough. I thumbed through them and then scrolled down to read some of the comments.

I’m sorry, but there is just no way—NO FUCKING WAY—that three kids could disappear from this street if their parents were actually there watching them. I don’t know what they stood to gain or how they hid their daughters from police for a month, but Cate and Gabe Hollow were absolutely in on it.

I’m willing to bet you don’t have children of your own. You can be actively watching your kids and then, poof, nothing. They are sneaky little bastards. Case in point: I have a three-year-old son. Yesterday, I was following behind him in the grocery store. (He likes to point at stuff on the bottom shelves and guess what it is. “Is this pasta? Is this pasta? What about this, is this pasta?” Newsflash, kid: Unless you’re in the pasta aisle, it’s usually not pasta. Hours of fun.) Anyway, he turns a corner into the next aisle, so I follow him—except he’s not there when I get there, or in the next aisle, or in the next aisle. I found him ten minutes later on a bench in the parking lot, waiting with a nice old lady. His disappearing act immediately made me think of the Hollow sisters and has honestly changed my mind about the case. My theory: The girls walked ahead of their parents, took a wrong turn, got lost, then got found by an opportunistic predator who got cold feet a month later.

Yeah but there aren’t even any corners on this street. It’s not like they ran ahead and turned a corner and then they weren’t there. Cate Hollow has maintained that they disappeared from this street while she was on it. Two seconds, she says. For two seconds she turned her head to kiss her husband, and in that time, her three daughters vanished without so much as a peep? I’ll say it again. NO FUCKING WAY.

“I don’t need to read conspiracy theories about my parents,” I said as I handed Tyler’s phone back to him. “I can tell you right now: They weren’t involved.”

“Keep reading, would you?” Tyler insisted.

I scrolled down to the next comment thread.

Okay, the freestanding door is creepy af. How have I not seen this before?

Reminds me of the search-and-rescue guy who posted about random staircases deep in the woods. Cate Hollow said the three girls were playing right near the burned-out house the last time she saw them. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

I can’t remember where the folklore is from exactly, but I’ve heard stories of people (mostly children) disappearing after walking through freestanding doors they found in the forest. There were ruins near my grandparents’ house growing up that we were banned from going near because three kids had disappeared from there over the years. Kids being kids, we went to investigate once and found nothing but a door just like the one in Edinburgh. We were so creeped out, we ran all the way home and didn’t go back.

Reminder that this is a thread for genuine theories, not fairy tales. Let’s not let this devolve into a thread about alien abduction (again).

Sure, sure. That being said . . . Anyone brave enough to try walking through it?

Alas, it’s not there anymore. It was demolished a few weeks after the girls came back and has since been rebuilt. But yes, obviously, lots and lots of people walked through it in the month that the Hollow sisters were missing: police, volunteers, forensics, etc. Again, it’s not a door to Narnia.

Damn it! My dreams of making sweet, sweet love to Mr. Tumnus are once again dashed!

I scrolled back up to the photograph the original poster had included. It was a low-quality image taken a decade ago on a crappy camera phone, grainy and strangely cropped. It depicted the blackened remains of a stone house, taped off, some bricks gagging onto the sidewalk. The freestanding doorway was creepy. It emanated wrongness. I, too, had heard stories about abandoned staircases in the woods and how people had been warned not to go near them for whatever reason. I’d seen pictures of some of them; they felt out of place and otherworldly. The burned-out door had the same effect.

I couldn’t remember the night we disappeared very well, but I remembered the night we came back. I remembered standing in this exact spot, naked and shuddering between my sisters. I remembered Grey whispering something to me, whispering something to Vivi, tucking a strand of hair behind each of our ears. I remembered how the cold made my skin tight and numb, made it feel like it belonged to someone else. I remembered how we stood stock-still, not speaking, as we waited. I remembered a young woman turning down the street and screaming and dropping the bottle of wine she held when she saw us in the dark. I remembered her running to us, draping her heavy coat over my shoulders, yelling for the neighbors to call the police as she struggled out of her sweatshirt and gave it to Vivi. I remembered red and blue flashing lights reflecting off the slick cobblestones. I remembered the ambulance ride to the hospital, the three of us sitting pressed together on a stretcher, draped in aluminum blankets and harsh light. I remembered how Grey refused to let the nurses take her blood and how, when they tried to convince her, she’d freaked out and they’d backed off, whispering things like “Haven’t they been through enough already?” I remembered the way Gabe held Vivi’s little face in his hands after he scooped her up, his expression going from elated to searching and then to confused, like he already believed in that moment that we weren’t quite right.

I remembered that Cate carried Grey out of the hospital the next day, her little legs wrapped tightly around our mother’s hips.

I remembered Grey looking back at me over our mother’s shoulder as we headed into the light, safe in the comfort of her arms.

I remembered the way my sister held eye contact with me for a moment, the spark of a grin at the corner of her lips.

I remembered that she winked.

I could remember so much, but I couldn’t remember where we had been only minutes before the woman found us on the street.

That part was gone. Everything before it was a black abyss.

“The door,” I said. I zoomed in on the picture. Even though it was slightly out of focus, I could make out white flowers growing at the base of the stone. “It’s still the place, even though it’s changed,” I told Tyler. “I can still feel her. I can feel all of us.” I put my hand on the glossy black door of the rebuilt house. “We passed through here. We came this way.”

I could feel it. I felt Grey’s pulse in the wood, weak as a bird’s heart.

I took a deep breath and swallowed my revulsion. I had spent much of the last ten years trying to forget this place. I had poured my studies like cement over the radioactive thing that had happened to me here in my childhood and that continued to poison me. I had ached to be older. To be finished with university, to have a career, to be preoccupied with the small stresses of daily life that adults were always complaining about. Bills. Taxes. Health insurance. The dentist. I wanted the years to fill and stretch and stack, to put as much time between myself and this place as possible.

And now here I was, back again, trying to follow my sisters wherever they had gone, to the place I had sworn to never return to.

“It has to work,” I whispered to myself, staring at the door. “It has to work, it has to work, it has to work.”

I turned the handle. It was unlocked. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

“Hollow,”Tyler growled. “You can’t just go wandering into strange houses! Get back here.”

“No,” I said. I was too far into the hall for him to drag me out. “I’m not leaving until I find them.”

My jaw was quaking. I pressed my lips together.

“They’re obviously not here,” Tyler said. “This is just a house!”

My throat was thick. I knew he was right because I could feel it. Grey and Vivi weren’t here and hadn’t been here for a very long time. The energy they’d left behind was ten years old, crumbled to dust. The thing that linked me to them felt thin and weak, but it was all I had. I pressed forward into the dark hall.

“I will leave you here,”Tyler whispered, but his feet were moving forward to follow me. The hall smelled sour, of milk with base notes of urine. I knew that smell from the handful of babysitting gigs I’d done. A boiler was on somewhere. It congealed the baby odor into something oily and solid. The warm air cocooned me, felt too heavy after the February cold. Sweat prickled under my arms, on my palms. My cheeks were hot coins.

“There are whispers of us here,” I said as I made my way down the hall, fingers trailing the wall. “In the foundations. We were here. This place remembers us.”

The hall opened onto a softly lit kitchen and living area. A redheaded woman was sitting on a couch, breastfeeding a baby with her eyes closed.

I still had my palm on the wall, feeling the pulse of the stone. Tyler was tugging at the back of my coat, trying to get me to leave. The woman opened her eyes. Saw us. Tightened her grip around the baby, then stood and started to scream.

I crossed the floor in three strides and hooked a finger into the woman’s mouth. The effect was instantaneous; I might as well have plunged heroin into her veins. The woman’s muscles relaxed, and she folded into me like she was lovesick, her head nestled on my shoulder, the baby pressed between us.

I was breathing hard. I had not done this thing for a long time. Not since the photographer. I had never done this thing intentionally. It had always been a cursed power, far out of my control. A thing that made me weak, like Grey said.

I wasn’t sure what had changed, except that I was furious, a barb of rage twisting at the center of me. My stomach was filled with blood, my mouth slick with venom. The other two times that I had compelled people, I had been vulnerable and unsure, and my attackers had fed on that.

Now, this time, I was the one who would feast.

“What’s your name?” I asked the woman.

“Claire,” she answered.

“Tell me where my sisters are, Claire.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want,” Claire whispered softly. Lovingly. She kissed my collarbone, but tears were streaming down her face. There was fear in her eyes, but her lips betrayed her. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

“Tell me where Grey is. Tell me where Vivi is.”

“Gray,” the woman said. “Gray is . . . the color of stones and the sky during a storm.”

“Tell me where she is!”

“Bloody hell, Iris!” Tyler snapped. “She doesn’t know!”

Tyler pulled me back from the woman, who reached out to touch my face even though her lip was trembling. I shook Tyler off.

“Three little girls went missing from right outside your house ten years ago. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Claire said. “Of course. Everybody knows that.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No.”

“Shit!”

Claire’s baby started screaming. “When it happened,” Claire said as she slipped her nipple into the baby’s mouth, “my grandmother kept me close for weeks. A little girl had gone missing when she was growing up, and my grandmother thought the same thing had happened to those sisters. ‘Stay away from Saint Anthony’s Chapel,’ she said. ‘Stay away from the door, or you will end up like Agnes Young. You will end up like the Hollow sisters.’ So I did. I stayed away.”

A chill rolled over me. “Don’t remember this,” I ordered her. “Forget that we were here.”

“Of course,” Claire said as she stroked my cheek, the baby snuffling as it suckled at her chest. “Of course.”

Tyler yanked my jacket again, and this time I let him drag me back into the hall.

Out on the street, we saw Claire watching us from her front window, her baby crying again as she juggled it over her shoulder, trying to soothe it. The spell had broken as soon as she could no longer smell me, and she stared at me now in the dark with a look of confusion, as though she was experiencing intense déjà vu. I knew the feeling of that look; it was something I regularly suffered myself. The feeling of knowing you had memories about something but were unable to access them.

I shuffled off Vivi’s backpack and flicked through Grey’s journal with shaking fingers, looking for something I was sure I’d seen before. And then, there it was—a detailed sketch of a freestanding stone wall, into which was set three windows and a door. Beneath it read Saint Anthony’s Chapel, Edinburgh—July 2019. The same door Agnes had fallen through.

I typed Saint Anthony’s Chapel into Google Maps and set off into the dark, Tyler swearing after me that I was reckless, stupid, just like Grey. Yet just like he had followed Grey, he followed me. I felt the power in that. We hurried through the Old Town, along Cowgate and Holyrood Road toward Arthur’s Seat. The dawn was coffin-cold, the streets wisely abandoned in favor of warm beds and sleep.

My hands were numb and my breath short by the time we arrived. The ruins of the chapel sat on a squat hill overlooking a small loch in Holyrood Park. Beyond that, the lights of the city dotted the land toward the sea. The ruins were two stories tall; only the corner of the chapel remained now, the walls rendered in rough stone in some century long passed.

Saint Anthony’s Chapel was now nothing but a single wall, the north side of a ruined church. There were windows, but most importantly, there was a door. It used to lead somewhere, but now—maybe—it would take us somewhere else.

Tyler and I stood panting, staring through the doorway, both knowing how crazy this was. We were far too old to still believe in fairy tales, and yet here we were.

We’d come this far; no matter how insane it was, we had to know. We had to try.

I checked the weather app on my phone for the exact moment of sunrise: 7:21 a.m. The veil between the realms of the living and the dead was thinnest at dusk and dawn, when the world was on the edge of day and night.

We waited in the winter cold until the sky began to lighten at the edges and then we held hands, both knowing that if this didn’t work, we had nothing. There were no more clues to follow.

The air around us was bitter enough to make our teeth chatter, but it in the minutes leading up to sunrise, it smelled strangely burnt. At 7:20 a.m. we stepped closer to the door.

“Wait,” I said to Tyler. “Are you sure about this? I don’t know how it works. There’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get back. Even if we do, once it gets inside you, you can’t get rid of it. It will change you.”

“I’m coming,” Tyler said. “I’m sure.”

The sky was lightening quickly then. The first sliver of sunlight would fall over us in under a minute, and then it would be too late.

“Please work,” I said. I squeezed Tyler’s hand, took a deep breath, and stepped over the threshold with him.