House of Hollow: The haunting New York Times bestseller

by Krystal Sutherland

Dark, dangerous things happened around the Hollow sisters.

There are things in every family that are not talked about. Stories you know without really knowing how you know them, tales of terrible things that cast long shadows over generations.

I stayed alert while I ran home, the way women do, one AirPod out, a sharp slice of adrenaline carving up the line of my spine.

“What you don’t understand,” she said to me once when I told her how dangerous it was, “is that I am the thing in the dark.”

She collected each wolf whistle, each smacked butt cheek, each groped breast, kept them all beneath her skin where they boiled in a cauldron of rage that she let out onstage on the strings of her bass guitar.

I didn’t follow my sister. I was my sister. I breathed when she breathed. I blinked when she blinked. I felt pain when she felt pain. If Grey was going to jump off a bridge, I was going to be there with her, holding her hand.

“But true. None of this is Grey. She must’ve paid someone to do it. Either that or a reptilian shape-shifter is wearing her skin.” “I didn’t know reptilian shape-shifters were renowned for their interior decorating skills.” “And that’s why you’ll never be part of the Illuminati.”

We knew all too well what could happen to girls on poorly lit streets at night, because it had happened to us. Then again, all girls knew that.

But they had grown up and left home, and I’d realized there were scarier things in the world than the monsters that lived in my nightmares.

Vivi, Iris, First of all, stop going through my private shit. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you. (Okay, fine, this time I was counting on you to go snooping—but still. Not cool.) I hate to say this, but if you’re reading this, I might already be dead. There is so much I wish I’d told you. Come to the address above. Bring the key. Find the door. Save me. And if he comes for you—run. I love you both more than anything. Grey

that it was possible to suffer devastating, incomprehensible loss and continue to live, to breathe, to pump blood around your body and supply oxygen to your brain.

cut us open and peeled back the skin, I was sure you’d find something strange: one organ shared, somehow, between three girls. We were puzzle pieces, the three of us.

“Just so we’re all on the same page here,” Tyler said, “this is definitely some Satanic cult thing, right? Like some freaky sex cult with blood and human sacrifices. That’s where we’re all landing at the moment, yeah?”

Maybe it was because of us. Maybe our strangeness had seeped into the walls and made the space feel haunted.

“Some people go missing because they want to; some go missing because they’re taken. And then there are the others—those who go missing because they fall through a gap somewhere and can’t claw their way back.”

“Vivi, fell through what?” My sister turned and took me by the shoulders, a half-mad smile on her face. “A crack in the world.”

girl, dressed in white, her fingertips dripping blood. “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Grey?” My oldest sister looked up at me. Her eyes were black and her white hair hung in filthy clumps around her face. “Run,” she said. She tried to take a step towards me but sank heavily to her knees. “He’s coming.”

I could never unleash my sister on her, no matter how mean she became, because Justine was just a girl and my sister was something more, something crueler, the thing in the dark.

“I must say, I am not a fan of this Uber,” Tyler said. “One star. Two at most.”

“All part of my image, Little Hollow. Bad-boy swagger. I’m actually very deep.” “I knew there had to be some reason Grey was dating you.” “Beyond my outrageous good looks, you mean? I didn’t really go to the train station, you know.”

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?”

“Your sister is a wily one. A trickster. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Agnes reached out

“Do you think there is any terrible thing she wouldn’t do to save you? Any line she wouldn’t cross? Any sacrifice she wouldn’t be willing make?” “Tell me. Tell me the truth.” “Your life would be happier if you didn’t know.” “Knowledge is power.” “And ignorance is bliss.”

“We both have to go,” Tyler said. “Together.” I sighed and softened. “Your eye looks terrible.” “Well, I did take a right hook from a demon, bang in the socket. Frankly, it’s a miracle I’m not dead. My delicate bone structure was not built for physical combat.”

I pressed forward into the dark hall. “I will leave you here,” Tyler whispered, but his feet were moving forwards to follow me.

“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,”

“Can I leave you behind if you die or do you expect me to be heroic and drag your corpse home?” Tyler asked.

pulled them out one by one: a child-size green tweed duffle. A small Bordeaux faux-fur jacket. What remained of a little red tartan coat with gold buttons. Each was stiff with dried blood. A gruesome amount of dried blood, what must have been cups and cups of it soaked through and gone dark and moldy with age. The police had never found these items of clothing, despite extensive searches for them.

Something terrible had happened to us here—and someone had gone to the effort of trying to hide it.

There, beneath the names of my sisters, was a third name I hadn’t noticed in my panic. IRIS “Unless you’re a remarkably solid ghost, it seems there’s been some kind of clerical error,” Tyler said.

Why did someone who was supposed to love me look at me like that?

“Gabe,” I said quietly through my fingers. Gabriel Hollow. My father. He moved toward me slowly, the eyes he kept trained on me bulging from his skull. My chin was shaking. Tears slipped down my cheeks, but I didn’t run, didn’t look away.

“That’s what you want to talk about right now?! The grave?! Your dead father has been trying to kill you! Your dead father kidnapped your sisters!”

bodies of children, curled up together. Each of them wore an identical heart-shaped gold locket dangling from what remained of their necks. I held the necklace of the smallest and wiped the mud away with my thumb to reveal the engraving beneath. IRIS, it read. The body it belonged to was missing its two front baby teeth.

“What does it mean?” Tyler asked as he watched the gold heart spin slowly in the half-light. “It means . . .” I looked up at him. “I’m not Iris Hollow.”

I was alive—and Iris Hollow was not. The child that had fallen through to this place ten years ago had never left. I was sure of that now. The dark-haired girl who’d disappeared on New Year’s Eve a decade ago was buried in a shallow grave a few meters away.

Something else had come back in her place. Something that had looked almost like her, but not quite. A changeling. Me.

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?”

Rosie Yang’s soul was untethered from her brother’s grief. Rosie Yang was gone.

left him to whatever fate had come his way because I had no other choice but to press on and do what I had come here to do: find and save my sisters.

“You know what you are.” “I don’t. I swear.” He drew a finger knife across his neck, then mimed sticking the fingers of his right hand in the wound and drawing the skin up, up, up over his head. My jaw shook as he stared at me, waiting for a reaction. “That thing you call a sister is a monster,” he said as he pointed at Grey, “but at least she let you forget that.” Forget this, Grey had whispered to me. “Forget what?” Gabe was circling me now. I tightened my grip on my knife. “That you are a dead thing walking around wearing the skin of a murdered girl,”

“That you went home to her family—to her bed, to her parents’ arms—while she decomposed in a grave in a dead place. That you slipped her warm skin over yours, and then your sister stitched you up at the throat.” “That can’t be true,” I whispered, because it was gruesome and terrible and impossible—but I knew, even as I said it, that it could be.

The skin of a dead girl encasing the body of a dead thing. The petals of a heady flower concealing something rotten and dangerous beneath.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing, Agnes had called Grey. Something monstrous, draped in a disguise, something so unnatural that she confounded not only humans but the very rules of life and death. Half-dead, half-alive, and thus able to move between those states as she pleased.

“Because I told her,” Grey said. “The night she threw me out. When I came home drunk, I snapped. I was angry. She was so controlling. I told her that I skinned her children and killed her husband, and if she didn’t leave me alone, I’d skin her too.”

For the first time, I felt the power of what I was coursing through my veins, and it didn’t scare me. It made me feel . . . alive.