Chapter 19

19

“No,” Tyler saidas he cupped Rosie’s small face in his hands. The last time he saw her, he would have been younger than her, smaller than her. Now he was a grown man and she was still a child. Her face fit in his palm like a piece of fruit. “No, no, no, no, no. Why are you here? Why are you here, Rose?”

Rosie mirrored Tyler’s gesture. She reached out to stroke his cheek, leaving a stripe of mud beneath his swollen eye. There seemed to be a flash of recognition behind her dead eyes, a moment of sadness and longing that crinkled her young brow. That was all it took. Tyler scooped her out of the mud and held her like a baby against his chest.

“What are you doing?” I whispered as he waded back into the water, in the direction of the next way marker.

“I’m bringing her with me.”

“You can’t bring her home.”

“Why not?” he snapped. “You came back. You got your sisters back. Why shouldn’t I get mine?”

“Because . . . she died, Tyler,” I said gently. “Rosie is dead. She can’t come back.”

“You said she wouldn’t be here!” he yelled. “You said she had no reason to be caught here! Why is she here, Iris? Why did you lie to me?”

“I thought—because she’s so young. What unfinished business does a kid have?”

“I left her once. I’m not leaving her again,” Tyler whispered, and then he was striding ahead through the water and mist, his dead sister clinging to him like an insect. “I can see something!” came his voice a few moments later.

Ahead of me, another house appeared from the vapor. It was a roofless stone structure built on a slip of island. Water lapped at the stone wall built around it. Like everything else in the Halfway, it was abandoned and tumbledown, overrun by a fever of flowers. Windows smashed, bits of it sliding into the water. A rudimentary gravestone had been erected on one side of the yard.

And there, fluttering on the twisted metal that passed for the front gate, was a strip of red tartan from my coat.

It was still dusk, the haze rolling across the swamp tinted the color of late evening. If it were not for the stink and the thousands of bodies floating in the marsh, the place might have been beautiful. We stood for a long time, watching and waiting in the stillness, and then we took a silent loop around the place, peering through the windows for signs of habitation. No shapes moved in the half-light. The house appeared empty.

As we stood in the water, I took out the journal and handful of drawings Vivi and I had saved from Grey’s apartment, back when I had understood less of our story. I shuffled through the pages. The fifth page was the one I was looking for: a sketch of a tumbledown house with broken windows and withered stone walls and a strip of tartan fluttering from the front gate.

I held it up next to the house Tyler and I stood before. It was a match.

We had been here before. Grey had been more than once, had come back to sketch the place.

Whatever had happened to us as children had happened here.

“I’ll go in,” I said, “and make sure it’s safe.”

“Do you want me—” Tyler began, but I stopped him.

“No. I want to do this alone.”

We walked up to the house together, out of the marsh onto drier ground. Tyler put Rosie down on a carpet of carrion flowers, where she resumed the cross-legged, dead-eyed position we’d found her in. “Call me if you need backup,” he said as he sat next to her.

I tried to steady my breath. My stomach squirmed the way it does when you’re watching someone watch someone else in a horror movie.

There wasn’t much to the house, if you could call it that: It was a single large room, with rusted pots and cracked stoneware collected around the hearth and broken wooden furniture scattered about the place. I kept waiting for a cascade of memory and understanding. Here, in this pile of fetid blankets—is this where we had curled up together, limb on limb, seeking shelter far from home? Here, by this fireplace—had we warmed our hands, dreaming of a way back to our parents?

I had spent so many years trying not to think about what had or hadn’t happened to my sisters and I in this room. Something that had changed us. Something that had sent us home with black irises and scars at our throats.

I knelt by the hearth and reached my hands out as if to warm them. Three dark-haired children by the fire, each wearing a different colored coat. Yes, that felt right. I swept ash and debris away from the pale hearth stone. There was dried blood here. Generous pools of it, like an animal had exsanguinated and its life force had soaked into the floor.

I took Grey’s knife out of my bra and unfolded it. Grey, with a knife in her hand, no fingerprints on the handle but her own. Yes, that felt right too. Do you think there is any terrible thing she wouldn’t do to save you? Agnes had said. Any line she wouldn’t cross? Any sacrifice she wouldn’t be willing to make?

I followed the blood across the floor. It was faded now, hardly more than a shadow—and then I saw something out of place. A tuft of wine-colored fur, caught on a nail in the floorboards. It came loose when I tugged it. I rolled it between my fingertips. It felt synthetic. It felt like it could have come from the Bordeaux faux-fur jacket Grey had been wearing the night we disappeared.

The nail it had been wrapped around wiggled like a baby tooth. I pulled it out of the floor with my fingertips and used Grey’s knife to pry the board up. The hole beneath it was deep, dark. I put my arm in up to the elbow and felt nothing but cool air. Thoughts of needle-sharp teeth sinking into my flesh made me snatch my hand back. Gingerly, I tried again, up to my shoulder this time, until my fingertips brushed against something furry. I yelped and scurried back from the hole. Nothing moaned. Nothing came crawling out after me.

“Everything okay?” Tyler called from outside.

“I’m fine,” I answered. “I think I’ve found something.”

I put my hand in again, twisted my fingers around the fibers, and lifted. I pulled them out one by one: a child-size green tweed duffle. A small Bordeaux faux-fur jacket. What remained of a little red tartan coat with gold buttons. Each was stiff with dried blood. A gruesome amount of dried blood, what must have been cups and cups of it soaked through and gone dark and moldy with age.

The police had never found these items of clothing, despite extensive searches for them.

I knelt back on my haunches and held the stiff garments in my arms like children, searching, searching, searching my memory for what they meant.

Something terrible had happened to us here—and someone had gone to the effort of trying to hide it.

Grey, with a knife in her hand, its sharp edge dripping blood.

Grey, forehead scrunched as she concentrated on stitching the wound at my throat.

Grey, holding my hand as she led me through the forest to a door.

Grey, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear on a freezing street in Edinburgh and leaning in to whisper, “Forget this.”

Forget this.

Forget what?

Forget what, forget what, forget what?

My mind dipped over and over again into the black depths of missing memory, each time coming back empty-handed.

I stood with the garments still in my hands and went back to the front door, my blood warm and crackling in my veins. Rosie was where we’d left her, but Tyler knelt by the gravestone, an odd expression on his face.

“I think you need to see this,” he said.

I joined him in front of the overgrown grave marker by the side of the house. I used Grey’s knife to cut away the lichen and vines and flowers growing rabid over the names, already suspecting what I would find there.

The first name had been scratched roughly into the stone.

GREY

“No,” I said, frantically cutting more greenery away. “No.”

A second name appeared beneath the first.

VIVI

I scrambled back across the muddy yard, a low moan coming from somewhere deep inside me, the kind of keen you make when you’re trying to wake from a nightmare but can’t.

“We’re too late,” I sobbed. “We’re too late.”

“That makes no sense,” Tyler said. “These are old. They’ve been gone for a day at most.”

“Time moves strangely here. It gets snagged. We must have . . . missed them somehow.”

Tyler frowned at the grave and bent to pull more greenery from the headstone. There, beneath the names of my sisters, was a third name I hadn’t noticed in my panic.

IRIS

“Unless you’re a remarkably solid ghost, it seems there’s been some kind of clerical error,” Tyler said.

I crawled forward and started digging up the soil with my bare hands. “I need to know,” I said. “I need to know who’s buried here.”

“Look,” Tyler said as he knelt beside me. “What you need is some sleep.” I knew he was right, but I ignored him and kept digging. “Can’t you do the magic thing?” he asked. “The energy thing where you’re like, ‘Oh, she’s definitely been here, I feel it in my bones.’ Try that.”

I put my hand on the earth and reached out for the thread that bound me to my sisters. “They’re not here,” I said. I could feel them, closer now than when we first came through the door, but still some distance away. “It’s not them.”

“Then maybe,” Tyler said gently as he pulled me up from the dirt, “this is a mystery that can wait until after you’ve had a kip. There is really only space for one person on this team to freak out at a time, so I’m going to need you to pull yourself together. Okay, Little Hollow?”

“Okay.”

Whoever was beneath the gravestone bearing our names, it wasn’t Grey and it wasn’t Vivi and it wasn’t me.

So who was it?