House of Hollow

We were sisters. We felt each other’s pain. We caused each other’s pain. We knew the smell of each other’s morning breath. We made each other cry. We made each other laugh. We got angry, pinched, kicked, screamed at each other. We kissed, on the forehead, nose on nose, butterfly eyelashes swept against cheeks. We wore each other’s clothes. We stole from each other, treasured objects hidden under pillows. We defended each other. We lied to each other. We pretended to be older people, other people. We played dress up. We spied on each other. We possessed each other like shiny things. We loved each other with potent, fervent fury. Animal fury. Monstrous fury.

And then I heard your voice. I felt your heart beating in my chest. We’re linked by what we did, by the lives we sacrificed. Linked by blood and death and magic.

“I will destroy you!”

A clear thought made its way through the rising shadow in my mind: You already have.

Grey had destroyed this man, as she had many others. Grey was a tornado in the form of a girl. She took what she wanted and left a trail of destruction in her wake, and I had always admired her for it. It took guts to be a girl in this world and live like that. She did it because she was powerful. She did it because she could.

I was glad for the ache in my bones, the sharpness in my chest. I was glad for each pluck of pain that would not let me sink too deep into my thoughts, because my thoughts were a well of horror.

You are not you.

Don’t think that.

If you are not you, what are you?

Don’t think that.

Three little girls fell through a crack in the world. Three things that looked like little girls came back.

Don’t think that.

“There are three little girls in a grave wearing necklaces with our names on them. What if, in the story Grey tells about what happened to us, we were not the three little girls?” I said. I met Tyler’s eyes. “What if we were the monsters?”

For a time, we saw other doors, all freestanding and half-ruined, held up by nothing. Stone archways and burned timber, doorways back to desolated parts of our world. Around each of them we found clusters of spirits turned to wood and stone, things that had once been human but were now only memories. I wondered about the people they had been before their souls had gotten snagged here on the way to death. What did they long for so badly that they had been unable to let go? Love? Power? Money? The chance to say sorry?

“God,” Tyler said as he crawled away from his vomit and collapsed onto his back in the grass. “Dorothy and Alice and the Pevensie children didn’t suffer like this.”

I couldn’t help myself. “I didn’t know you could read,” I said through my fingers. My stomach tightened and my vision jittered like I was drunk, but the sick burn was almost worth it.

I was seven the first time I slipped from the land of the living to the land of the dead.

The second time, I was seventeen.

I stepped through a broken doorway that once went somewhere, and then went somewhere else.

The purple,
otherworldly petals of the monkshood flower concealed poison that could deliver instant death. Poison dart frogs were pretty as jewels—and one gram of the toxin that coated their skin could kill thousands of humans. Extreme beauty meant danger. Extreme beauty meant death

“I am not like you. You must understand, by now, that you are different. Why are you so beautiful, do you think? So hungry? So able to bend the wills of those around you? You are like the death flowers that grow rampant in your wake: lovely to look at, intoxicating even, but get too close and you will soon learn that there is something rank beneath. That’s what beauty often is, in nature. A warning. A disguise. Do you understand?”