House of Hollow: Chapters 20–24

I dug my fingernails into the man’s skin, but it was dry and rancid, and he didn’t seem to notice the pain.

We rarely spoke to each other as we fell into a monotonous slog, one foot after the other.

“Now, do you want help or not?” I sat up and begrudgingly lifted my shirt from my chest.

I followed it and came across a brook babbling with movement, but the water was dark and smelled stagnant.

All were warped, in varying degrees of severity: black-eyed, covered in lichen, little gardens of flowers sprouting from the thick moss on their backs.

Grey would rend flesh and break bones and salt the earth of your life if you crossed her.

What I could remember was this: the warmth of Gabe Hollow’s chest as he carried me from the couch to my bed after I fell asleep watching TV....The cadence of his voice as he read me bedtime stories.

“I tried to make amends for what I did to those girls. I found Agnes, this living child trapped in a dead place, and I brought her home. That has to count for something, right?”

We were sisters....We loved each other with potent, fervent fury.

How many careful threads of silk she’d had to weave, just so, to convince the world that Tyler Yang had been murdered by her stalker when the police would never find any evidence to corroborate her tale.

Who had had the living ghosts of her murdered daughters haunting her house, eating her food, siphoning her life, for a decade.

I lunged forward in a feint.

The exterior was all brickwork but here, inside, the walls were wood, warped and weathered by age.

I knew this because I continued to follow her on Instagram, saw her triumphant return to regular posting about parties and catwalks and celebrity friends, saw the announcement of her eight-figure book deal about her harrowing “kidnapping” ordeal and the equally rich movie deal to go along with it, in which she would play herself.

The idea that I’d missed something kept niggling at me.