The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “It’s only a two-story building.”

  “Well, maybe we didn’t go as far as we thought and this is in between the two buildings.”

  “Maybe there was a shit ton of black mold in the crawl space and we’re both lying on the floor hallucinating,” said Simon.

  “Pretty consistent hallucination.”

  “I mean, assuming you’re actually seeing this and I’m not hallucinating you.”

  “If we’re both hallucinating, then we might as well keep going,” I said, stepping forward.

  Another twenty or thirty feet on and the corridor opened up suddenly.

  I stopped in the doorway, slowly playing my light across the room.

  It was circular. It was at least forty feet across. The walls were concrete, scraped and marked with graffiti. The floor was also concrete, but a thin layer of grit and watermarks made wavy lines across it, as if it had flooded sometime in the past.

  And there was just no damn way that it was in the Wonder Museum.

  CHAPTER 5

  “I’m being very calm about this,” I said to Simon. “I want you to notice that.”

  “Consider it noticed.”

  “You’re being very calm, too.”

  “I’m getting really invested in the black-mold thing.”

  “This can’t possibly be over the coffee shop, can it?”

  “I mean, it’s got to be. Right?”

  “You just said a minute ago that you didn’t think it was.”

  “Yeah, but then you changed your answer, so now I have to change mine.”

  I inched out into the room. The floor crackled underfoot, not in a concrete-collapsing way, but in a multitude-of-twigs-and-small-pebbles way.

  “Looks like water got in,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  “Have to find it and put some buckets out. It might flood the main building.” Part of my mind had seized on the fact that I was responsible for taking care of the building and was not going to let that go, even if the building had a completely impossible set of hallways and a room in it.

  Simon did not answer me, probably because he was reading the graffiti on the wall, or trying.

  “You know this language?”

  I looked. I didn’t. Parts of it looked familiar, but not all of it. “Dunno. Cyrillic, maybe?”

  “Soooo… Russian moonshiners?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Because it makes no sense?”

  “Take it up with the black mold. I’m just a hallucination, remember?”

  “Yeah, okay.” He flashed his light on the ceiling. “Grating up there.”

  I looked up at it. Fifteen feet up, rusted nearly through. Looked like an air vent of some sort. Presumably that was where the water got in, but I couldn’t see anything but darkness through it. “Huh.”

  It had to lead to the roof of the building. Or, at least, it had to if we were still pretending that this was physically possible. Simon’s black-mold theory was starting to gain some ground.

  “There’s a door over there,” he said. I had to shine my light on him in the darkness to see where he was pointing. Opposite the hallway

  We walked over to the door. The crunching under our feet sounded incredibly loud in the silence.

  The door was metal. It looked industrial, all rust and flaked paint. It had several heavy bolts on it, but they’d rusted into a solid mass of oxidized iron.

  “Where do you think it goes?” I whispered.

  “No idea,” Simon whispered back. I don’t know why we’d lowered our voices. It just seemed like a good idea.

  “Should open over the street, shouldn’t it?”

  “Carrot, we should be standing over the street right now. We’re way past where the building ought to end.”

  I bit my lip. He wasn’t wrong. “Do you think we can open it?”

  He looked at me. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, there’s a hallway that can’t exist and a giant locked door at the end. Do you want to get eaten by monsters or open a portal to hell or whatever?”

  “It’s not a giant door,” I whispered back. “It’s a perfectly ordinary door.”

  “With like fifty dead bolts!”

  “…Three. Three dead bolts.”

  He looked at me. He looked at the door. He said, “Come on, let’s go back to the coffee shop and I’ll make us Irish coffees and we’ll discuss this like people who don’t die in the first five minutes of a horror movie.”

  I yielded to the logic of this.

  We backed out of the room. Somehow the darkness hadn’t been quite so bad when we didn’t know the door was there. Simon kept his light on the door, which was good. I’m not saying that I thought it might open if we weren’t watching it, but…

  Hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.

  We turned back down the corridor with the hole and I let out a shriek to wake the dead. Eyes were looking back at me, glittering flat green in the light.

  Simon jumped back, his shoulder hitting me, and I fell against the concrete wall, adrenaline screaming through my veins.

  “Myyeh?” said the owner of the eyes.

  “Christ—fuck—it’s the cat,” said Simon.

  “Dammit, Beau, you nearly gave me a heart attack.” I scooped him up, still light-headed from the shock. He permitted this indignity but dug his claws into my T-shirt just far enough to let me know that further liberties would result in significant bodily harm.

  “Myeh!”

  “I thought we were gonna get eaten by brain goblins or something,” said Simon.

  “What’re brain goblins?”

  “No idea. That’s just what I thought when I saw the eyes. ‘Oh, shit, it’s brain goblins.’ ”

  “It’s my fault.” I stepped back into the museum and set Beau down. “Should have closed up the hole. Let’s move something in front of this so the cat doesn’t get into it again. Or the tourists, for that matter.”

  This was easier said than done. I wound up tacking a batik tapestry over it. It belled out toward me, as if air was coming out of the hole. Well, that wasn’t so strange. Clearly, water was coming through into the one room through the vent. I went and found a poster of Elvis with a cardboard backing and hung it over the tapestry, which helped some. I didn’t want tourists getting lost in the hallway.

  We went down to the silent coffee shop and Simon started a pot of coffee and pulled whipped cream out from the minifridge under the espresso machine.

  “You thinking black magic or aliens?” asked Simon, while the coffee brewed.

  “We could flip a coin,” I said, because the alternative was to scream at him to shut up, that there was nothing there and none of it had happened. This seemed excessive and Simon did not deserve to get yelled at.

  He took out a coin. “Heads for aliens, tails for black magic.”

  “Why does it have to be black magic? Can’t it be neutral magic? Magic with no significant moral imperative?”

  Simon rolled his eyes, caught the coin in midair, and slapped it on his wrist. “Good news, it’s aliens.”

  “Shouldn’t we have flipped for black mold first?”

  “The coin gets mad if you ask it too many questions.”

  “Ugh. Don’t you have a better source of divination?”

  “We could order Chinese food and ask the cookie.”

  “That’s… no, that actually sounds like a great idea.” I punched in the number for Panda Palace and recklessly spent my last gig’s earnings on beef lo mein and broccoli and pork fried rice.

  I had to drive to pick it up. (Simon graciously threw himself on my Irish coffee.) As I pulled away, I stared up at the top floor of the building. Was it really only two stories? Could it be two and a half? The brick facade was stairstepped at the top; maybe you could hide another corridor in there. That didn’t explain how we could have walked so far forward, but maybe it wasn’t that big. Maybe it was one of those bui
ldings they make with odd angles so that you think you’re going straight, but you’re really veering sideways and it’s all optical illusions.

  It had to be something like that, didn’t it?

  The alternatives were… well…

  Black magic or aliens?

  I didn’t believe in either one. Uncle Earl, I knew, believed in both.

  I wondered which one of us was right.

  * * *

  “Okay,” I said, stabbing my fork into the pork fried rice, “what do we need to explore the hallway?”

  “Oh, God, we’re really doing this.” Simon stared at his beef lo mein as if it might save him.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Obviously I want to, I just feel like one of us should say ‘Don’t go in there!’ ”

  “We’re not in a horror movie, Simon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because one of us would have to be spunky and virginal.”

  Simon digested this for a moment. “I’m spunky.”

  I gave him a Look.

  “…Fair. We’ll need flashlights, I guess. Better ones than our phones.”

  “And a tape measure,” I said. “Or at least a string.”

  He looked blank.

  “So we can measure how long the hallway is. That way we’ll know if it’s impossible or… I dunno, if it’s a weird optical illusion or something.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. Maybe it’s just like a hall of mirrors, and we’re not going as far as we think we are.”

  Despite his protests, he was still saying “we.” I was glad of this. I did not feel any urge to explore the concrete hallway by myself. I might not believe in black magic, aliens, Bigfoot, or brain goblins, but people who go exploring alone in haunted houses get horribly murdered.

  Horror movie or not, the hallway was starting to feel a lot like a haunted house that had somehow been grafted onto my uncle’s museum.

  “Do you think Uncle Earl knows it’s there?” I asked.

  “He’s never said anything about it. And I can’t imagine him just walling off space and ignoring it. Not when he could be using it for exhibits.”

  I pointed my fork at Simon. “Yes. Exactly.”

  “So when are we doing this?”

  I frowned. “I dunno. Tomorrow night?” Tomorrow was Friday. Given the choice between being stuck in the museum on a Friday night, looking at social media about how my friends were out partying, and trying not to spy on my ex-husband’s life, I would much rather explore a haunted house.

  Apparently Simon had the same amount of social life that I did, because he nodded. “Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll kick off a few hours early.”

  “Your boss won’t mind?”

  He rolled his eyes. “My sister’s always telling me to take more time off. I tell her I don’t have anything to do, might as well make money, but, eh. You know how they are.”

  “Only child,” I said.

  “Lucky you.”

  I thought of my mother and the possibility of having another sibling to blunt the intensity. “We may have to agree to disagree on that one. Anyway—tomorrow at… seven? Will that work?”

  “It’s a date.” He fished out one of the fortune cookies. “Here, let’s see if cookiemancy works any better than the coin.”

  I snapped apart my cookie. The fortune said “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” “Ugh. Platitude cookie.” I tossed it aside. “You do any better?”

  “ ‘A business opportunity is coming your way.’ We should probably have stuck with the coin.”

  “Oh, well.” I picked up my leftovers and my new Irish coffee. “Tomorrow at seven. Be there or be square?”

  Simon, possibly the least square human being I knew, just raised an eyebrow at me and shook his head.

  * * *

  At 7:00 p.m. the next day, we assembled with flashlights, string, and a tape measure. Simon had a thermos of coffee. He said it was medicinal.

  He had dressed for exploration in camo cargo shorts, black fishnets, a pair of stomping boots that would fit in a mosh pit, and a top hat with a pheasant feather on it. His T-shirt read SILENT NIGHTCLUB.

  In my Wonder Museum T-shirt and jeans, I felt distinctly underdressed.

  “Have you told your uncle there’s a portal to Narnia in his museum?” Simon asked as we climbed the stairs to the otter room.

  “No. He has surgery tomorrow and I don’t want to worry him.”

  “You think he’d worry?”

  “I think he’d come back here, knee or no knee, to see what was going on.”

  We stepped through the hole and into the hallway. I had taken the precaution of locking Beau in the bathroom, a crime for which I was going to pay heavily in feline scorn.

  “Which way?” asked Simon.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “It’s your museum.”

  “Ugh.” I turned to the left. “Well, we haven’t gone this way yet.”

  Simon turned on his flashlight and followed.

  If nothing weird was going on, except maybe for optical illusions, we should have been behind the upper story of the boutique. I was no longer quite willing to swear that nothing weird was going on.

  The corridor went—you know, I don’t know how far it went. It didn’t seem as if it went that far, but distances were clearly a little wonky at the moment. I didn’t break out the twine and measure it, anyhow.

  It ended in another door, but this one stood halfway open. The room behind it seemed very dark.

  Simon and I stared at the door.

  “I liked the abandoned mental hospital better,” he said a bit plaintively. “It had linoleum.”

  “If you want to bring some linoleum next time, I won’t stop you.”

  “Ha.”

  I took a step forward, then another. Brain goblins did not leap out and eat me. I touched the door.

  It was stuck in place, but open wide enough to get through. Unlike the other door, this one had a metal grate inset into it, which had wept rust in long red streaks.

  I slid through, light held in front of me.

  This was a small room, smaller than my bedroom in the museum. It had a single bed and a metal cupboard. Empty tin cans littered the floor. Something in the corner looked like a fifty-five-gallon oil drum.

  The beam of light crossed the floor to the mattress and up.

  There was a dead body on the bed.

  CHAPTER 6

  I let out a squawk and backed up. “Oh, shit! Oh, shit!”

  Simon said, “What?” Then he caught sight of the body. “Shitshitshit!”

  I had the hysterical thought that I’d already said that, and then we both clutched each other’s forearms like two teenagers in a haunted house.

  The body did nothing. The body had not done anything for quite some time, by the look of things. It was mostly bone, with bits of blackened skin lying patchy and tight over the forehead, the teeth exposed. Hair clung in a ragged halo around the head. The mattress had a dark, spreading stain in the outline of the body.

  Five years old? Fifty? Five thousand?

  The clothes had survived better than the body had, but I couldn’t see their original color under the layers of dust.

  “Well, at least he doesn’t smell,” said Simon, after a few minutes had passed and the body hadn’t jumped up and attacked or done the Macarena or whatever dead bodies in impossible bunkers did when they were disturbed.

  “Uncle Earl had a skeleton that sorta looked like this,” I said. “Except it was fake.”

  “I don’t think this is fake.”

  “Me neither.”

  Look at how calm we are, I thought. Super calm. Two responsible adults, being calm. And responsible. I took a deep breath. “Well, we have to call the cops, I guess.”

  “What?” Simon’s head shot up. “No!”

  “There’s a dead body! You have to call the cops when you find a body!” I waved my arms and
set the beam of light bouncing over the ceiling.

  “No! You can’t call the cops! Carrot— I—uh—”

  There are generally only two reasons people don’t want the cops called, and since Simon was whiter than mayonnaise, I could rule one of them out. I sighed. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not doing anything! But I’ve got an outstanding warrant in Florida.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You haven’t been back to Florida for twenty years! Come on, the statute of limitations has expired on everything except…”

  I ran through a mental list of Simon’s possible crimes. Murder seems unlikely, although I guess I can’t rule it out. Kidnapping’s even less likely.

  “Dealing LSD,” he said.

  Yeah, okay, should have seen that one coming. So much for us being responsible adults, I guess….

  “I was young!” he said defensively. “It was that or sell my body!”

  “I’m not judging. How much did they catch you with?”

  “Two pounds.”

  “Two…” I had to clutch the doorframe. “Simon, they sell that stuff in like micrograms! Milligrams! Whatever! How the hell did you have two pounds?”

  “It was on sugar cubes,” he said glumly. “And you know they go by weight when they’re trying to prosecute you.”

  “How the hell did you get away?”

  “I had very skinny wrists when I was nineteen. Slid ’em right out of the handcuffs and ran like hell.”

  I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. “Okay, but… dead body!”

  “And if the cops come out, it’ll be a murder investigation and they’ll start looking very seriously at us to make sure we didn’t murder anyone, and I’ll wind up in prison for the next thirty years with a cellmate who won’t even give me a courtesy reach-around!”

  I groaned. He probably wasn’t wrong. And if I was being honest, I didn’t really want the Wonder Museum shut down for a month on my watch while the cops tore apart the walls getting into the bunker. And Lord knows what they might impound on the way… such as the taxidermy that was a bit too old to have papers….

  Frankly, I wasn’t even sure what you were supposed to do when you had an impossible hallway in the walls. Did you call the police to report that the laws of time and space were getting broken?