I scrambled to my feet and ran hard in the direction I’d come from, my blood hot and quick, my feet slipping, visions of a monster snagging my ponytail playing on repeat in my head. I kept checking behind me until I passed Kenwood House and stumbled out onto the road, but no one followed.
The world outside the green bubble of Hampstead Heath was busy, normal. London was waking up. When I caught my breath, my fear was replaced by embarrassment that a wet brown stain had spread over the back of my leggings. 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. A passing cabdriver laughed at me, and a man out for his first cigarette of the day told me I was beautiful, told me to smile.
Both left a prickle of fright and anger in my gut, but I kept running, and they faded back into the white noise of the city.
That’s the way it was with Vivi and Grey. All it took was one phone call from them for the strangeness to start seeping in again.
At the end of my street, I messaged my middle sister:
DO NOT come to my school.
2
At home, I found my mother’s red Mini Cooper in the driveway and the front door ajar. It keened open and closed on its hinges, breathing with the wind. Wet footprints tracked inside. Our ancient demon of a cat, Sasha, was sitting on the doormat, licking her paw. The cat was older than me, and so threadbare and crooked she was beginning to look like a bad taxidermy job. She hissed when I picked her up—Sasha had never liked me or Vivi or Grey, and she made her feelings known with her claws—but she was too decrepit these days to put up much of a fight.
Something was off. The cat hadn’t been allowed outside for probably ten years.
“Cate?” I called quietly as I pushed the door open and stepped inside. I couldn’t remember when or why we’d stopped calling our mother Mum, but Cate preferred it this way, and it had stuck.
There was no answer. I put Sasha down and scuffed off my muddy shoes. Soft voices echoed down the stairs from the floor above, snippets of an odd conversation.
“That’s the best you can do?” my mother asked. “You can’t even tell me where they went? How it happened?”
A tinny speakerphone voice responded: a man with an American accent. “Listen, lady, you don’t need a PI, you need a psychiatric intervention.”
I followed the voices, my footfalls quiet. Cate was pacing by her bed, still in her emergency room scrubs, the top drawer of her nightstand open. The room was dark, lit only by a dim honey lamp. Night shift at the hospital called for blackout curtains, so the space always had a slightly sour smell to it from the constant lack of sunlight. In one hand, Cate held her phone. In the other, a photograph of herself with a man and three children. This happened every winter, in the weeks following the anniversary: My mother hired a PI to try and solve the mystery the police were no closer to unraveling. Inevitably, the PI always failed.
“So that’s it, then?” Cate asked.
“Jesus, why don’t you ask your daughters,” the man on the phone answered. “If anyone knows, it’s them.”
“Fuck you,” she said sharply. My mother rarely swore. The wrongness of it sent a prickle into my fingertips.
Cate hung up. A glottal sound escaped her throat. It was not the kind of noise you’d make in the presence of others. I was immediately embarrassed to have stumbled on something so private. I went to turn away, but the floorboards creaked like old bones beneath my weight.
“Iris?” Cate said, startled. There was a prick of something odd in her expression when she looked up at me—anger? fear?—but it was quickly replaced with concern when she spotted my muddy leggings. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“No, I was mauled by a rabid pigeon.”
“And you were so scared that you shat your pants?”
I threw her a very funny pout. Cate laughed and perched on the edge of her bed and beckoned me with both hands. I went and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her so she could fix my long blond hair into two braids, as she had done most mornings since I was little.