Chapter 8

8

I might already be dead.

We were in an Uber on our way to the address Grey had given us. The words from her letter were stinging through my nerves, pricking tears at the corners of my eyes. Vivi was silent, her forehead pressed against the window, her jaw set so tight I worried her teeth might crack.

I turned the knife over in my hands. Opened it, closed it again. The staghorn handle had a patina and the blade was pocked with age, but it looked slip-through-your-skin-like-butter sharp. It was the same knife we’d been found with as children, the one police had taken from Grey the night we came back. For a while they’d thought it was an important piece of evidence, but the only fingerprints they ever lifted off it belonged to my sister. I wondered how she’d retrieved it from evidence, considering our case was still open, then dropped back into the pool of my terrible imagination.

A world without Grey was impossible. Both of my sisters were the great loves of my life. I couldn’t live without them. I didn’t want to.

The Uber pulled up outside a pub in a narrow graffiti-lined street. It was late afternoon and there were a handful of Londoners huddled in the honey glow of the bar, drinking pints. The address Grey had given us was for the flat the next floor up. Vivi and I guessed the passcode to the building—162911, the same as all our phone passcodes—then walked up the winding staircase to the second floor. Grey’s door was beetle green, the handle brass to match the key.

Vivi put her hand on the paint and shook her head. “She isn’t here either.” I knew it too, I realized. I knew what Grey felt like, the way her energy settled in a room. Old memories were coming back to me. How I could follow the trails of her through our house when we were children, retrace the footsteps of where she’d been five, six, seven hours before. What books she’d read, which pieces of fruit she had picked up, inspected, put back. It wasn’t like I could see threads trailing behind her, or smell the scent of her skin. It was a sense of general rightness. Yes, she had been here. Yes, she had done this. I could do it with Vivi too, though that held less fascination for me. Grey was my obsession. Grey was who I wanted to be.

One long, lazy summer in France, the first one without our father, I spent two months living an hour behind Grey. She was fourteen and just coming to understand the exhilarating power of her beauty. I was ten. Too skinny, too tall, still shy and awkward. To me, back then, Grey was a goddess. She wore white flowing dresses and wreaths of wild lavender woven into her hair. I copied everything she did, living in the liminal world she left in her wake. I didn’t have to see her all day to know where she’d been, what she’d done. Sunbathing on the roof. A midday swim in the river. Nectarines and hard cheese for lunch. A kiss with a local boy in the pews of the medieval church (I improvised and used my hand—still, the priest was not pleased when he found me).

Wait.

A strange memory tugged at the side of my thoughts. Something lost and then found. Another church, this one ruined and half-devoured by the woods. We came across it on our first day there, down by the river. Cate warned us not to go near it. It was derelict. But . . . Grey went. Yes. Went somewhere I couldn’t follow. Not because I was afraid, but because her trail just . . . stopped. Because she stepped through a door and wasn’t there on the other side. I’d wandered around the old church for hours, trying to figure out where she went. Eventually, Grey was there again, whole and solid. She smelled of burning and had flowers caught in the tangles of her hair.

Find the door,Grey’s note had said.

Vivi put the key in the lock and turned. We stepped inside.

The smell hit us first. The wet, heavy stench of fermented shit undercut with a cloying sweetness. We both gagged at the same time and scrambled back into the hall, dry heaving. Vivi looked at me, wide-eyed and knowing. We had smelled a dead body once before. A few years ago, in the week after Grey left but before Vivi packed her own bags, the man in the house next to ours had slipped in his bathtub. It had been eight days before anyone found him. By then, his body had begun to liquefy, and the smell of it had seeped through walls and ceilings and floors. When the paramedics came for him and opened the front door, the stench exploded out onto the street, soaking the air. It hung from the branches of trees like necklaces and took weeks to fade.

The words from Grey’s note nipped at my lungs. If you’re reading this, I might already be dead.

“A dead animal,” Vivi said, determined. “Not Grey.” Then she pressed inside, breathing through her mouth. I did the same, though I could still taste the dead thing on my tongue, fat and lingering.

We moved through Grey’s clandestine apartment together, half looking for the source of the stench, half consumed by the magnificent size of this treasure trove. All our young lives, we had subsisted on morsels of Grey Hollow’s secrets. Diary pages read by flashlight after she had snuck out, thimblefuls of sweet wine stolen from the bottle she kept hidden under her bed. And now here was her soul laid bare for the taking. A feast for the starving.

All the curtains were drawn, and the space felt woody and cool. The darkness was tight, damp, the undergrowth of a forest. Vivi turned on a lamp. It was nothing like the first apartment. Here, the walls were painted dark canker green. The floors were bleached herringbone parquet. There were terrariums filled with carnivorous plants and trays full of assorted crystals and delicate animal bones. Vases of feathers and jars of little creatures suspended in formaldehyde. Stacked boxes of balsam fir and red cedar incense. Bottles of gin and absinthe. Books on botany and taxidermy and how to commune with the dead. Pencil sketches were pinned to almost every available surface; Grey’s couture creations, but other images too, of strange creatures and ruined houses. Dried bouquets of flowers and fall leaves hung from the ceiling. And perhaps strangest of all was the taxidermy: a snake bursting from the mouth of a rat, a fox emerging from the skin of a rabbit.

The space was thick with Grey’s energy, trails of her crisscrossing the hall and rooms in tight webs. She’d been here more recently than she’d been to her other apartment.

The first room off the hall was the kitchen. I paused when I saw it, something hard settling into my stomach. The floor was black and white marble squares, and the opposite wall was entirely covered in shelves bursting with books.

My chessboard floor. Vivi’s library. The exact details we’d wanted when we’d dreamed of running away together. Why hadn’t Grey shared it with us already?

“Come on,” Vivi said. “Keep moving. Let’s find what she wants us to find and get the hell out of here.”

There were two more doors at the end of the hall. We took one each. I opened the handle and peered into Grey’s bedroom. The smell was strongest here, so acrid it stung my eyes and almost physically pushed me back. Some ancient part of my brain begged me not to get any closer, the part that knew the smell of death was a warning. Stay away.

“Vivi,” I said quietly. “There’s blood in here.”

I felt my older sister at my shoulder. We surveyed the damage together from the doorway, unwilling to take a step into the room. It was trashed. It was the nightmare scene I’d been afraid of finding at Grey’s first flat: Hitchcockian blood splatter on the walls, furniture knocked over, a lamp in shards, a gruesome patchwork of dried brown pools on the rumpled bedsheets. There were boot prints on the wall and holes kicked into the plasterboard and slippery bare footprints in the blood on the floor.

Someone had been attacked in this room. Someone had fought back in this room. Judging by the amount of blood that had been spilled, someone had died in this room.

I might already be dead.

I was crying as Vivi pushed past me into the stinking mess and found Grey’s iPhone, the screen shattered, on her bedside table, along with her passport. They were both sitting atop a copy of A Practical Guide to the Runes: Their Uses in Divination and Magick by Lisa Peschel. I couldn’t see Vivi’s face, but I could see her chest heaving.

“I will kill anyone who’s touched her,” she said, her voice harsh and low. I believed her. I would join her.

“What’s that sound?” There was a low background hum. An angry buzzing, coming from the closet. I went into the room, careful to avoid stepping in any blood. Vivi opened the closet door and switched on the light.

There was a ceiling access panel in the walk-in closet. A dozen flies whirred beneath it. Black liquid dripped from one corner. It pooled on the parquet floor, where it had turned the wood into a soft fen of decay. Vivi grabbed the pull cord.

“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to see this. I can’t see this.” Not if it was Grey. Seeing her rotting corpse would destroy me.

Vivi ignored me. “It’s not her,” she said—a wish, more than anything. “It won’t be her.” Then she pulled the cord. The hatch gagged open and heaved out a body. We both screamed and clutched at each other as it tumbled to the floor and landed with a wet squelch at our feet. It was definitely a human, not an animal.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Vivi yelped. And then: “It’s not her.” Not a wish this time: a statement of fact.

I had somehow scrambled from the closet to the other side of the room and was now crouched next to the bloody bed, though I couldn’t recall how I’d gotten there so quickly.

“Um . . . Iris, you should see this,” Vivi said as she squatted to inspect the body.

I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t think my stomach could handle it.

I opened a window and took a breath of winter air before I went over to where the body had fallen. It was bruised and bloated but clearly not Grey. It belonged to a man. Young, muscular, naked save for three runes written down his chest in dried blood. The cause of his death was clear: His throat had been slashed.

Yet the fact that he was dead and covered in runes and hidden in our sister’s ceiling was not the strangest thing about him.

“What is happening to him?” Vivi said. There were waxy white flowers sprouting from his mouth, his nose, the softening remains of his eyeballs. Flowers growing rabid from the gash in his skin, their roots red-black with dead blood. Something moved at the back of his throat, behind his broken teeth. Something alive in the greenery.

“Do we call the cops now?” I asked.

“As soon as we call the police, this will be a crime scene, and we won’t be able to find what Grey wants us to find. Look around. Look through everything. There’s something here that only we would be able to find.”

It was a breeze that saved us. It trilled through the bedroom window and down the hall, where it slammed the front door closed. The door that I’d shut behind me only minutes before.

A fresh sprig of fear twisted up my spine. Not for Grey this time, but for Vivi and myself. Whoever Grey was afraid of, they knew where she lived. They had been here. Maybe they had killed someone. Maybe they were back.

There were heavy footsteps. In the hall, just outside Grey’s bedroom.

Hide,Vivi mouthed to me, already taking off her backpack and crouching to slip under Grey’s bed. Then there was a hand on the bedroom door, pushing it open. I had no choice but to back into the closet, over the body of the dead man. Years of following my sister like a spy had given me sure, quiet feet. I sidestepped the pool of decay and pushed myself deep into Grey’s clothing, hoping it would be enough to hide me.

A man came to stand in front of the closet door. A bare-chested man who was wearing a bull’s skull stripped of flesh to hide his face. The man who’d been following me. He stank of rot and earth, powerful enough to momentarily mask the scent of the body.

The smell of the darkest part of the forest.

The smell of Grey’s perfume.

The smell of the missing month.

A memory hummed through me, sharp as a plucked string. A house in the woods. Grey taking me by the hand and leading me through the trees. A strip of tartan fabric tied to a low branch. Grey saying, “It’s not far now.” Where were we?

I backed farther into the closet, unbreathing, unblinking, as the man discovered the corpse—and was entirely unsurprised by it. The man—in the half-light, his skin looked sallow and seeded with lichen—nudged the body with his bare foot. I thought of the hostess last night, how she’d said a frightening man had been asking after Grey.

The man grunted, hot breath coming from the nostrils of the skull.

Wordlessly, he knelt to scoop the dead guy up and hoisted him over his shoulder. A runnel of black liquid slipped down his back from the dead man’s open throat. I covered my mouth to stop myself from gagging. He dumped the body onto Grey’s bed, then worked quickly, moving from room to room, bringing back armfuls of Grey’s possessions to stack on top of the corpse. Sprigs of dried flowers, leather-bound notebooks, animal bones. Tapestries, sketches of dress designs, jewelry. Photographs. Many, many photographs, of Grey and Vivi and me, of the three of us together. He piled it into a pyre over the dead man and kindled the flames with scrunched paper, then stood and watched it as it burned.

From where I was hidden, I could make eye contact with Vivi. She had a hand pressed to her nose and mouth to stop herself from coughing in the smoke. Her eyes were wide with panic. If the man stayed much longer, she’d have to scramble out from underneath the bed before the flames ate too far through the mattress or the smoke became suffocating.

Slowly, I moved to cup my hands over my mouth and nose. The man turned to stare into the shadow of the closet, directly at me. I stopped breathing, didn’t blink. The firelight danced in his eyes, his irises black inside the skull he wore to hide his face. There were bloody runes written down his torso as well, the same markings as the dead man’s. Had this creature snatched me from the street when I was seven? Had he kept me and my sisters locked away for a month?

I waited for a gruesome memory to climb forward, but none came.

The man turned and left.

The smoke was black and choking when the front door finally closed and I burst out of the closet, the air thick with the stink of singed hair and burning fat.

Vivi was fighting for breath as I dragged her out from underneath the bed. “Save it,” she gasped through her coughs. “Save it.” Grey’s things. I yanked a quilt off an overturned armchair and cast it over the pyre like a fishing net, hoping it would work like a fire blanket.

Vivi and I both paused at the sight of it. On the quilt was the hand-stitched image of a ruined stone doorway teeming with white flowers. An odd look crossed Vivi’s face, a brief moment of recognition and understanding that gave way to confusion. “I don’t . . . ,” she said through a coughing fit. “What the hell is going on?”

“What is it?”

“A memory.” Vivi traced her fingers over the map’s stitching. “Or maybe déjà vu.”

I felt it too, a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t quite call up.

Vivi smiled. “The Halfway. Grey’s made-up place. Oh my God, she used to tell us stories about it when we were little.”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

“It was this weird place somewhere between life and death. Somewhere people ended up if they couldn’t let go of something—or if someone couldn’t let go of them. Some people get stuck there after they die. The ones who can’t move on.”

“Like . . . limbo?”

“I don’t know. Grey never made it sound religious. It was more like a version of the afterlife that you’d find in a dark fairy tale: Everything was kind of stuck halfway. Like, it was always dusk and always dawn at the same time. All the trees were rotting but they never died. Food only ever left you half-full.” Vivi laughed. “I haven’t thought about this in years.”

“What does the door have to do with it?”

“That’s how you get there, I think. You fall through a broken door.”

Bring the key. Find the door.

Vivi and I waited to see if the flames would prick through the fabric, but the fire had been starved. I peeled the quilt back slowly, like removing dressing from a wound, and let it fall, still smoldering, in a heap. Smoke curled across the bed but the flames didn’t reignite.

“The body burned so quickly,” I said as I picked through the journals and drawings and jewelry that had survived. It took hours for muscle and teeth and bone to burn, but more of Grey’s possessions had survived than the dead man.

“What answers does she want us to find?” Vivi said as she continued to comb through the charred debris, more frantic by the second. “What door are we looking for?”

My gaze drifted back to the decay the man’s body had left. Who was he? Had he attacked her? Had she killed him trying to defend herself, then gone into hiding? Who was the man who came back for his corpse?

Where did she want us to follow her to?

“I need water,” I said. The air was still stained with the smell of death, and the smoke from the fire hung over us, snaring in our throats. “Want some?”

Vivi nodded absentmindedly. I wandered out into the hall, rubbing my eyes, and took two or three steps before I looked up and stopped.

“Oh,” I said. “Shit.”