House of Hollow

With multiple missed calls and messages from Cate, Iris calms her down, reassuring her that she and Vivi are heading home. Cate almost called the police, and Iris understands, given her and her sisters going missing years ago. Vivi discusses how Cate is too attached to Iris and will follow her to university, but Iris says, “You’re never here. I’m all she has left, okay? I have to be everything for her, every day” (59). The older comments that being someone’s everything is a heavy burden.

All the way home, Iris reflects on the bull-man knowing where she goes to school, where Vivi’s band played, and likely knows where they live. The sisters secure all the doors and windows, and Iris messages Cate that they’re safe. They call Grey again with no success.

Over dinner, Iris asks about their collective strangeness and powers of intoxication, and Vivi says they’re “peculiar but now new”—that history and folklore have talked about people, usually labeled “witches, mediums, Wiccans,” who are connected to the world differently (62). Iris speculates that the bull-man is connected to their past disappearance, that he made the half-moon cuts on their throats. Vivi dismisses her, and they fall asleep cuddling in the same bed, like they did as children.

The next morning, Cate isn’t fazed, stating that Grey can handle herself. Iris remembers a night Grey came home drunk, always testing their mother’s boundaries by drinking, partying, and getting boyfriends, and Cate grounded her. Grey slammed Cate against the wall, choking her, and whispered something in her ear, which “splintered through [Cate], electrifying her” and caused her to tell Grey to “get the fuck” out of her house and never come back (66). Cate and Grey haven’t spoken since that night four years ago. Iris had never been scared of Cate until then, though she was fearful of their father, Gabe, as his mental state deteriorated; one night, he whispered over his children at night, “Who are you? What are you?” (66). Still, Iris is confused about Cate’s indifference at Grey’s absence. Vivi promises to stay in town and call Grey’s manager to find her.

Iris calls Grey on her way to school, but every call goes to voicemail. She checks her Find Friends app, which only shows Cate and Vivi’s locations. Later, she finds a photo in her backpack from Jennifer and Justine of witches on a pyre, with Iris and her sisters’ faces photoshopped onto the women. Ignoring the bullying, Iris checks her phone; Vivi’s location has disappeared, so she rushes home in a panic.

Iris is relieved to find Vivi in Grey’s old room. Vivi says that Grey is gone, that she talked to her manager, publicist, and photographer among others, and no one has heard from her. She throws Iris the Vogue magazine, pushing her to read Grey’s whole story. The article in question details the Hollow sisters vanishing on New Year’s Eve 10 years ago near a burned-down house on their street, the only remaining structure being a door frame. The girls were found one month later, naked but unharmed besides the crescent-moon scars on their necks, and smelling of smoke with white flowers in their hair; Grey was found holding a hunting knife. Gabe believed his daughters were “replaced by identical imposters,” and died by suicide two years afterward (71). When the interviewer asks about Grey’s experience, she replies, “Of course I remember. I remember everything. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you” (73).

Iris is shocked and says Grey must be lying, as none of them remember what happened. Vivi blurts out that she can’t sense Grey anymore. One of the girls’ powers is sensing each other no matter the distance, so she pleads with Iris to try to sense Grey, but Iris finds nothing. When Vivi admits Grey’s door was open, Iris realizes she may have snuck in and left clues. They discover runes written underneath Grey’s mattress, an annotated poem, and a hole under a floorboard—which hides a dried white flower, an antique hunting knife (which Grey was holding when the sisters were rediscovered), and a key with a note. Grey’s note includes an address, but she writes that she might already be dead by the time Iris and Vivi find her, and that she wishes she told them more; she also implores them to run if “he” comes for them.

Grey’s secret apartment (at the note’s address) is filled with dried flowers, feathers, taxidermy, fashion sketches on the walls, and even the checkered floorboards Iris wanted and the library Vivi designed. They sense that Grey visited recently, and smell something rotten from her bedroom, where they find blood smeared on the bed and walls, leading them to the closet; they pray it’s not Grey’s blood. Vivi pulls the cord to a secret room in the closet—and the body of a man falls down, bloody runes on his chest and waxy, white flowers coming out of his mouth, nose, and eyes. Iris wonders if he tried to kill Grey.

The sisters hear heavy footsteps, and Iris hides in the closet and Vivi under the bed. Grey’s perfume and rot—the smell of the missing month—fill the room with the bull-man’s entrance (82). Iris experiences a flashback of a house in the woods, and Grey leading her. The bull-man, his chest also covered in bloody runes, picks up the corpse and burns it atop the bed with Grey’s belongings. Vivi is encased in smoke under the bed.

At last, the man leaves, and Vivi and Iris smother the fire with a quilt, which is hand-stitched with the “image of a ruined stone doorway teeming with white flowers” that they vaguely recognize (89). Vivi laughs upon recalling Grey’s story about an imaginary place called the Halfway, where souls remain “between life and death” if they can’t let go, or others can’t release them—the “version of the afterlife that you’d find in a dark fairy tale,” entered through a broken door (89).

Iris doesn’t remember this story; she only recalls once following Grey’s essence to a derelict church by the woods, where her essence stopped at the door. She repeats “find the door” from Grey’s note in her mind (82). The sisters keep Grey’s burnt belongings as possible clues.