House of Hollow

Iris wanders the forest while the Halfway seeps into her, blackening her body. Finally, she spots a clue—Tyler’s new shoes on the forest floor, which point to a clearing of long grass and decaying leaves. In the middle of the clearing, Grey and Vivi are tied to stakes, gagged and bound. The third empty stake waits for Iris, as Gabe plans to burn the sisters alive.

Vivi speaks to someone, shouting for release, but cracks her head on the stake and falls unconscious. Grey spots Iris sneaking up and warns her with her eyes. Iris mouths Tyler’s name, but Grey shakes her head. She’s uneasy that Grey is cowering, but then Tyler appears. Iris happily greets him, but as she gets closer, Grey struggles against her bonds. Tyler doesn’t speak, his features aren’t quite right, and his tattoos are warped “as though his skin had been wet and wrung out and re-draped over his bones” (259). It’s not Tyler, but Gabe.

Gabe explains that he did the same thing to Tyler that Iris and her sisters did to his daughters—flayed Tyler to steal his skin and take his form. Iris doesn’t understand and denies Gabe’s claim, but Gabe reveals that Grey killed his daughters, that the current Hollow girls are dead things who wear their skin. After Grey manipulated Gabe to die by suicide, he searched for his daughters in the Halfway and buried them. He then waited to get revenge.

Iris sobs at her father‘s uncharacteristic hatred. Gabe lights the pyre as Iris watches Grey writhe, shouting that she’ll destroy him. He then strangles Iris, but she puts her hands on his face and says “Papa.” Taken aback, Gabe finally lets her go, moving onto the afterlife and leaving Tyler’s empty skin.

Iris unties Grey and Vivi, the latter regaining consciousness. Grey holds Tyler’s skin and binds him there with her grief, crying that she can find his soul and stitch it back together. Though they wait, Tyler’s soul doesn’t appear. Iris sees a flicker of Tyler’s soul, but he shakes his head and vanishes.

The sisters drag themselves out of the Halfway, which spits them into Grey’s apartment’s burned kitchen filled with carrion flowers. As Grey tends to Vivi’s head wound and gives both sisters the potion to vomit out the Halfway, Iris questions her. Grey confirms that she killed the Hollow girls. Iris tries to rip off her skin, but Grey tells her that she’ll die if she does, and that Cate needs her.

Finally, Grey reveals the whole truth: She lured the Hollow girls into the Halfway through a door, as they trusted a fellow young girl. Then, Grey cut their throats and skinned them. She claims “I didn’t…enjoy what I did. I’m not a monster. I only did what was necessary to [...] give us a second chance” (270). The sisters tricked the door back to the living world, since they were neither “alive nor dead, but something in between” and that “to escape the Halfway, we had to become halfway” (271). Grey says they’re linked by the lives they sacrificed, and that they aren’t the first changelings with strange abilities, since many fairy tales and myths describe such beings.

However, Grey doesn’t know all the secrets of the Halfway. When she and her sisters returned to the living world, she forgot their past too. She eventually figured out how to traverse the Halfway by using bloody runes to unlock doors. The soul of Gabe Hollow tracked Grey as she traveled through worlds, plotting his revenge. Once he had her blood, he had a permanent way to find her. Grey tried to stay away from her sisters to keep them safe, but Gabe eventually tracked them as well. Cate also knows the truth, as Grey revealed it on the night of their argument—that she killed Cate’s children and husband and would do the same to her.

Iris and Vivi are in disbelief, unsatisfied by Grey’s answers. Iris can’t believe Cate still loves her, but Grey states it’s better than having no children at all. Grey has no remorse and says she would do everything a hundred times over to protect her sisters and give them the life they deserve. Iris doesn’t want Grey in her life anymore and leaves.

Iris meets Cate at the doctor’s, where she receives treatment for her broken ribs. She’d been gone for two weeks due to time moving differently in the Halfway. Cate cries and hugs her, teasing her about being homeschooled from now on. Iris explains her journey and gives Cate strips of fabric, one from each of the original Hollow girls’ coats. She comforts her mother, saying that the girls died peacefully, though this is only an assumption. Cate clutches the fabric pieces and sucks in sharp breaths. When Iris promises she didn’t know “what we were or what we did,” and wonders how Cate can stand her, Cate reassures her that she’s been her daughter for 10 years and reminds her of the real Iris because she’s “quiet and empathetic and whip smart” (280). Iris thinks of Cate as both her mother and not, feeling grateful for her love. Vivi enters with her head bandaged and apologizes, hugging Cate.

As the family leaves the hospital, Grey sits with police and news reporters. She enchants them with her power, manipulating them to believe a stalker, the same man who took her and her sisters as children, kidnapped them again. She claims Tyler saved her but was killed by the stalker. Everyone believes her.

Later, Iris, Vivi, and Cate attend Tyler’s funeral. He has a cover story in Vogue about his life and love for Grey. The funeral is extravagant, like the man, with celebrities and weeping. When Grey arrives, she’s the “portrait of a weeping widow from a fairy tale,” and the whole church feels her grief (284). When Grey cries and passes by Iris, the latter, aching to comfort her sister, denies her for the first time.

Iris returns to school and faces her bullies, Jennifer and Justine, after years of torment. Justine jokes about hoping Iris died after missing two weeks of school, and Iris threatens to force her to shave her hair in front of the school again—though she would never torture her like Grey did. Justine backs off. Iris’s power courses through her, making her feel strong.

Iris and Vivi take a private tour of an old tidal mill in the city of Bromley-by-Bow, where Mary Byrne went missing, Grey found the first working door to the Halfway, and Gabe was buried. Iris thinks about how her understanding of the world has shifted, and how her sister Grey is now a stranger—though she’s back to her celebrity status as a model, fashion designer, and author of a book detailing her kidnapping. The youngest doesn’t keep contact with Grey. She feels it’s “unfair that Grey got to live and Tyler had to die,” but is working to change this by saving Tyler’s soul (290).

Iris and Vivi tell their tour guide that they need to use the bathroom, traveling down a staircase to a run-down basement. They find a freestanding door that will bring them to the Halfway. Iris texts Cate for approval of the quest to rescue Tyler, and she approves as long as Iris promises to keep coming back. She tells her mother that she loves her. Iris and Vivi count the seconds until sunset and step through the door’s threshold, holding hands and hoping that Tyler is waiting.