The crowd was loving the band, but by the fourth song I was distracted, worried. I kept looking around for my eldest sister, sure she would sneak up behind me and put her hands over my eyes at any moment, but she didn’t show.
Then, somewhere toward the end of the gig, something happened.
Onstage, Vivi stopped playing her bass and let her arms fall slack to her sides. She was staring at someone or something in the crowd behind me, a veil over her eyes. I turned to look at what she was fixated on, but the room was dark and crowded. Laura and Candace exchanged confused glances and tried to catch Vivi’s attention, without any luck. Vivi was frozen, wide-eyed, drawing quick, shallow breaths through her shuddering mouth. Candace moved across the stage as she sang and nudged Vivi, who blinked furiously and shook her head. She found my eyes in the crowd. A tear slipped down her cheek.
I knew then that something was very wrong.
Vivi swallowed and picked up her instrument again. The band played two more songs, but Vivi’s heart wasn’t in it, and she kept making mistakes. When the crowd called for an encore after the last song, only Candace and Laura came onstage to do an acoustic cover. I made my way through the crowd and slipped backstage. Vivi was sucking on a cigarette like it was hooked up to an oxygen tank, her head between her knees.
“Jesus,” I said. I ran to the sink and wet a cloth, then draped it over the peach-fuzz crown of her skull. “What the hell happened out there? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” A necklace of saliva sagged from her open mouth and drooped to the floor between her feet. “I think I had a panic attack.”
“You saw something,” I said.
Vivi shook her head.
“Yes, you did,” I pushed. “What did you see?”
She sat up straight. Her lips were tinted faint blue and her skin was clammy with sweat. “A man. Except not a man. A . . . dude with a bull’s skull over his head.”
I stood up and took out my phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
“What? No. Iris, seriously, it was dark and I was probably hallucin—”
“I saw him today too. Twice. He was at my school. Tall shirtless dude cosplaying a decomposing demon Minotaur.”
“What?”
“Yeah. So, no, you weren’t hallucinating. Some freak stalker from the internet has decided to try and scare us like that woman who broke in when we were kids, and I’m not putting up with that.”
Vivi frowned. “Iris . . . you know this is not that, right?”
I hesitated. “Uh. No?”
“I recognized . . . the way he smelled. I can’t explain it. It felt . . . familiar.”
I stared at my sister for a long time, then at my phone, which still showed no notification from our eldest sister. “Where’s Grey, Vivi? Why isn’t she here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Grey doesn’t miss these things. If she says she’s going to do something, she does it. If she’s not going to come to us, we’re going to go to her.”
5
We slipped out the back entrance of Jazz Café while Laura and Candace were still onstage, then hurried toward the crowded mouth of Camden Town Station, checking over our shoulders the whole way that we weren’t being followed by whoever—or whatever—was stalking us.
Vivi was still rattled. On the train, she breathed into her cupped hands to settle her stomach. It took a few stops before the color started returning to her cheeks and dots of sweat stopped rising from her forehead.
We emerged from the Underground at Leicester Square, into a world in which Vivi no longer belonged. In Camden, her tattoos and piercings didn’t look out of place, but here, as we hurried past crowds of tourists and chain restaurants and kiosks selling tickets for Matilda and Magic Mike, she was an oddity.
We let ourselves into Grey’s apartment building with the keycodes she’d sent us when she bought the flat a year ago, though she was so infrequently in London that neither Vivi nor I had ever actually visited yet. Horrible images slotted into my thoughts as we caught the lift up to the penthouse, one after another, like an old-fashioned slide projector: Grey, OD’ed on her bathroom floor; Grey, murdered by the man in the bull skull. When we opened the front door, though, we found the place neat and vast and impersonal. City lights seeped through floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Thames. The London Eye turned slowly in the distance.
There were no signs of anything weird. In fact, there were very few signs that anyone lived here at all. A couple of coffee table books about fashion but no bookshelves stuffed to bursting with the dark fairy tales Grey had loved most as a teenager. A sleek galley kitchen of gloss white and marble with floors of polished concrete, but no wood, no warmth, no food. The air tasted bitter, the smack of bleach and ammonia. All the furniture looked as though it had been chosen by an interior designer, then styled and lit for a Vogue photo shoot about bland celebrity homes.
It didn’t feel like Grey. Grey’s brain was chaotic. When she was a teenager, her room had never been clean. Her socks had never matched. She was always at least fifteen minutes late to everything. Nothing in her life had ever been neat or ordered. She slammed through the world, a tornado in the form of a girl, and left a trail of destruction behind her. That’s what she’d been like at seventeen, anyway. Maybe becoming a supermodel and fashion designer had changed that, but it seemed as impossible as switching out the bones of your skeleton.
Vivi and I moved through the apartment in eerie silence, trailing our fingertips over Grey’s possessions. The couches, the mirrors, the clocks and cabinets. It felt clandestine to be in someone else’s personal space like this. Like I could open any drawer or door or cupboard and there find my sister’s bare-naked soul, neatly folded. A thrill settled over me.
Suddenly I was ten years old again and obsessed with my big sister. Back then, Grey’s bedroom had been a temple in wartime, a place of worship I had to sneak into when its guardian was unawares. Whenever I knew she’d be out of the house for a couple of hours, I’d push open the door and start exploring. I only did it when I knew I could take my time, savor the experience. Her makeup bag was a favorite, a seemingly bottomless chest of treasure filled with glosses and glitters that left my skin sticky and shellacked. I wanted to live in her skin, to know what it was like to be as beautiful and mysterious as Grey Hollow.
But the apartment was not the home of the sister I knew. When Grey daydreamed about running away, it hadn’t been to a place like this. It had been to some rich, dark hidey-hole in Budapest or Prague, a place swaddled in velvet and brass. Vivi’s request to Grey was that the place have a library. All I wanted was black-and-white chessboard floors in the kitchen and bathrooms, like I had in all my houses in Sims 4 whenever I played. At thirteen, I’d considered it the height of opulence.