The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  They take you apart to see how you work… change you…

  They ate us when They were hungry, took us apart when They weren’t. Were we some kind of alien food animal to Them? Something tasty, and then when everyone was done with dinner, the willow equivalent of a scientist chopped you apart? Like dodos or Galapagos tortoises for early sailors, something to eat on the long voyage and then the naturalist said “Oh, hmm, I wonder how that bit attaches…?” and went after you with the knives?

  I could appreciate the cosmic irony a lot more if I weren’t about to be eaten by it.

  I wondered how the kids in the bus fit in with that. Maybe if you were wandering around behind reality, the way They were, it was obvious. Maybe it was only alien and unknowable and horrifying because we couldn’t see.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. No, I was pretty sure it was still horrifying. Maybe the fact that I couldn’t make sense of it was the reason I wasn’t a shivering wreck right now.

  The humming was directly over the boat now. I looked at Simon and he was looking up, as if he could see through the hull of the boat. “Think about something else,” he hissed.

  “Is it—”

  “Right there. Yes. Think about something else.”

  I had been thinking about Them clearly, probably loudly. Was it like lighting a signal flare for Them? Like…

  The gong noise seemed to descend, as if something had dropped lower and was hovering only a few yards up.

  Stupid. What are you doing?!

  “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt… his name is my name, too.”…

  When I get home, I’ll work on the catalog. Number one, Prince the elk. Number seventy-four, stuffed grizzly bear. A lot of them were assorted toads. We’ve got way too many toads.

  Simon’s already pale skin was nearly translucent. I could see a bead of sweat trickling down his forehead. He’d closed his eyes and his lips were moving, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Reciting something, probably. Good thought.

  …“Whenever we go out, the people always shout… there goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt”…

  Something happened. My ears popped and I felt a sudden hard thrum in the center of my chest. Simon’s nails dug into my wrist so hard that I nearly yelped. I sank my teeth into my lower lip to prevent it.

  Sand sifted down from the tilted ceiling. It was overhead. It was here.

  …“Whenever we go out… whenever we go out…” I couldn’t think of the rest. I couldn’t think of anything. I could hear Simon whispering to himself but I couldn’t make out the words. It could have been the Lord’s Prayer or the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” for all I knew.

  There were steps overhead. I wouldn’t call them footsteps, exactly. More like tank tread, a sense of continuous rolling weight. The wood groaned like a dying animal.

  Catalog number 126, armadillo lamp. Number 127, mounted fur-bearing trout. Number 128, Genuine Feejee Mermaid because he bought another one, goddammit, even though I snuck the first one out to the trash when I was sixteen. Catalog number… number… number infinity, a monster on the roof, waiting to take you apart and string your bones like beads….

  The movement stopped directly over my head. The willow was rustling almost excitedly. I would not have been surprised to see it squirm with delight, like a puppy pleasing its master.

  Simon’s eyes showed white all around the edges, and if I didn’t stop thinking about Them, I was going to get us both killed or turned into something like Sturdivant. Sturdivant, saying, “I probably can’t reach you there.” Sturdivant, starving himself in the darkness, and if he could have reached us, would he have tried to eat us? Swallowed us down in bites that passed into his guts and floated in the water around him? Hell, maybe he just has to hold us underwater and he’ll start to digest us, maybe that whole room full of water is his stomach and he’d absorb us as we started to rot….

  Stop. Thinking about Sturdivant was not the same as thinking about Them, but it led to it too easily. “Jingleheimer” wasn’t working, it was too easy, I could still think too clearly around the edges of the words. Did I know anything else to recite? The Gettysburg Address, maybe? “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and”… uh… something something… “history will not note nor long remember”… oh, blast, Miss Kaister in fifth grade would be so disappointed in me….

  I still bore a certain degree of resentment toward Miss Kaister, who had referred to any behavior she didn’t like as “fourth-grade.” “Now, Kara,” she’d say, looking over her glasses at me, “that’s behavior I’d expect from a fourth-grader, not from a fifth-grader like you.” I had been a cynical small child who remembered fourth grade fondly, and I resented what she was saying, by implication, about my younger self.

  The weight shifted to one side as if it were drifting away. Sand pattered down closer to the prow of the ship.

  They do hear us thinking, I thought. And when we don’t think about Them, they start to lose track of us. Or maybe it’s not Them, maybe it’s just fear in general that draws Th— Oh, fuck, I’m thinking the wrong thing again, fuck, “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt…”

  It would be a supreme irony if being mad at Miss Kaister saved my life. Who else was I mad at? My ex? Yes, I was definitely still pissed at him. How dare he? He could have suggested counseling or something, instead of just “Right, this isn’t working.” I would have been willing to go to counseling. But then I suppose the counselor might have decided it was someone’s fault, and Mark really wanted it to be no one’s fault so that we could stay friends and tell people we’d just grown apart.

  Friends. Ha. He hasn’t given a shit about my interests for years. He doesn’t even know the name I write fanfic under.

  Not that I want him to. That would be embarrassing. The only way you can splay your id out on the page is if you know that only total strangers are going to read it. And they’re right there reading it, so they’re practically accomplices, unless they’re one of those people who decide to leave comments telling you that shipping those two characters makes you worse than Hitler.

  This was an old, well-worn outrage and I dwelt on it lovingly with my toes in the sand of an alien world and a malign intelligence moving overhead. Part of my brain was screaming that it was small and petty and utterly ridiculous but if I listened, I was lost. I wallowed in petty outrage until I was ready to burn down the internet around fandom’s collective shoulders.

  My ears popped again. The sense of weight began to fade. Had it gone?

  When the hum came again, it was at least a dozen yards away. I started to feel relief, then caught myself and forced my brain back to its previous channels. “How dare you ship those two together? That would be abusive and probably incestuous and definitely you are the worst.”… Yeah, go ahead, leave a comment like that, I’ll just ship it twice as hard with more blow jobs.

  And what about the time I wrote twelve thousand words for a fic exchange, and they never even thanked me? What about that?

  The sound slowly drifted out across the river. It was probably a quarter hour before we were willing to move. Finally Simon exhaled and we looked at each other and crawled toward the exit.

  The first step out of the hole took more courage than I knew I had. I waited for something to grab me, probably a tentacle, something to lash out and wrap around my neck and then unmake my body for its amusement. It didn’t happen, so I looked up into the upper levels of the boat, but it looked the same as it had before. I couldn’t tell if the ruined boards had been rearranged or not.

  We kept low, crawling into the willows, which was stupid because the willows were obviously part of the whole mess, but the alternative was to stand out in plain sight, and that felt worse.

  “Can you tell me what you saw?” I asked Simon. I was keeping my voice down, which was probably stupid when They could hear thoughts.

  He made a small, pained noise. “I don’t know how t
o describe it. They go in and out of underneath? The world sticks to them? Shit. I can’t see three dimensions most days, but apparently I can see four. How fucking useless is that?”

  “The world’s just a skin and they’re moving around under it?” I suggested.

  “Better. But the skin’s everywhere. You and me and the air and everything else. They could come out of one of us.” He held up a hand. “Just… let’s not. I don’t want to think too loud and call something.”

  I nodded. We slogged down to the water and prepared to get back to work.

  * * *

  The fifth or sixth or tenth bunker after that took us home.

  We almost didn’t go into it because it had willows growing on top and I distinctly remembered that there had been no willows on our island. But I had forgotten about the willows on the bunker where we spent the night, and if I was being completely and totally honest, I thought there was a chance that they were moving around when our backs were turned, but if I didn’t say anything, I wouldn’t have to think about that. So we slogged out to that island, feet cold and pruned with water, and I didn’t mention the willows and Simon didn’t mention my not mentioning them.

  I wasn’t expecting to get home anymore. I wasn’t expecting anything. I was going down the stairs mechanically, listening to the humming sound get closer and louder. I wondered if they would open up our guts like they had Sturdivant’s or pull out our bones or trap us underneath the surface of wherever they caught us, like the school bus. I wondered if one of us might get away and be able to come back and kill the other one. Then I realized I was thinking again and began singing “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” inside my head and trying not to think around the edges.

  Then I stopped thinking anything because I was standing at the bottom of another set of stairs, and Simon’s toolbox was right there at my feet.

  “Simon,” I croaked, pushing it with my foot. “Simon, look!”

  He was right beside me. He fell down to his knees, grabbing at it, and said, “It’s mine, it’s really mine,” and then I yanked him to his feet and we sprinted through that silent concrete room and into the hallway.

  I didn’t believe that the hole would still be there. Not really. Ever since Sturdivant had said that the holes didn’t last, I had been expecting it to close. I didn’t believe that we’d get out so easily, not after everything I’d seen. But there it was, a hole in the world, and on the other side was the fluorescent light of the Wonder Museum.

  We were both crying. We skidded the last few yards down the corridor and half climbed, half fell through the hole, and then we were there, we were in the Wonder Museum again and the real world, our world, the world with Chinese takeout and coffee shops and sunflower pictures of the pope, a world where willows were only willows.

  I reached out and touched the cabinet that held up the case with the stuffed raccoons. It was cheap fiberboard and it was real and I didn’t feel like there was a whole nightmare world just on the other side of reality. Simon was rubbing his hands over the floorboards.

  “It’s real,” I said, choking on tears. “It’s real. We’re back. We made it.”

  Home.

  CHAPTER 13

  The phone was ringing downstairs. Simon and I couldn’t get far enough from the hole. We rushed for the stairs. The phone stopped ringing.

  Part of me was simply astonished that there was still a world with phones and I was in it and I could pick up that phone and maybe talk to someone on the other end and that was normal. Had I really always been able to do that? Was I really part of this utterly normal world?

  Before I’d gotten very far into this musing at all, the phone started ringing again. I grabbed it off the cradle, and my mother started talking before I even got through “Hello.”

  For a minute I was too stunned with relief to speak. I hadn’t expected to ever hear her voice again. This had the happy knock-on effect of her wearing out her first outraged demands while I was still getting my composure back and was able to wonder why she was calling the museum in the middle of the night. Was it the middle of the night? Had time moved differently? If you go to fairyland, time goes differently. Oh, God, what if it was next week? What if Beau had starved to death in the bathroom?

  Panicking about this caused me to lose another couple of sentences, but that was fine because my mother doesn’t actually want to talk at first, she wants to yell so that she gets it all out of the way up front. I looked for the clock over the front desk, which is made from the taxidermied body of a cuckoo and resembles a dad joke given flesh. It was 1:27 A.M.

  “…and on a Saturday, too! You know that’s his busy day! Where were you? I’ve been calling you all day! I thought you were dead!”

  Saturday. We’d been gone for all of Saturday, just as I thought. Time hadn’t done anything strange. I sagged against the counter in relief. “Mom, it’s the middle of the night.”

  “I know that! I was about to drive over there! Mr. Bryce called your uncle to ask why the museum was closed, and he tried to call you four times! And you weren’t answering your phone or the store phone!”

  Of course it would be Mr. Bryce. He was a coffee shop regular and a friend of Uncle Earl’s. It took someone with the patience of Uncle Earl to deal with Mr. Bryce, who had been thrown off the neighborhood watch committee for being a geriatric jackbooted thug. I could just imagine how the whole thing had snowballed—Uncle Earl trying to call, then asking Mom if she’d heard from me, and then once Mom got it into her head that I had been AWOL all day, the wheels of anxiety had started turning. I could almost hear Uncle Earl trying to talk her down, but once Mom had the bit between her teeth… “I’m sorry, Mom, I—”

  “I thought you were dead in a ditch!”

  My cell phone, which had not gotten any signal in the other world, suddenly dinged to let me know that I had seventeen new missed calls.

  “Mom, I had no choice. It was Simon from the coffee shop. I… uh… had to take him to the ER.”

  Simon raised both eyebrows, but inspiration had struck and I was off and running. “Yeah, I went over for coffee and found him on the ground. He had a seizure…. No, he’s fine now. They think it was an allergic reaction to… uh…”

  “The flavored syrups,” said Simon, lips twitching. “Those things are full of chemicals.”

  “The flavored syrups,” I said gratefully. “Yeah, he was mixing up a new latte or something and had a reaction, and then the bottle broke when he fell down, so he was covered in it…. Uh, I’m not sure. I think it was the maple-bacon flavor…. No, I don’t know who wants bacon-flavored coffee…. Right. So I ran him to the ER and then I had to stay with him because he was really woozy and I didn’t feel right leaving him…. No, I know. I would have called, but the hospital is all cinder blocks, I couldn’t get any signal at all…. Yes, I know. I should have gone out and called but I didn’t want to leave him. I’m so sorry I worried you. I… Yes, I know. I’m sorry…. Thanks…. No, he’s fine. He’s got a friend coming over to sleep on the couch in case something else happens…. Uh-huh…. Uh-huh…. I’ll open up on Monday to make up for it. Right. Love you, too, Mom. All my love to Uncle Earl. Bye.” I dropped the phone and sagged against the front counter.

  “I see why you didn’t want to move back home,” said Simon.

  “Oh my God. I survive a hideous otherworld and then I had to talk to my mother. I could sleep for a week.”

  “So could I. But we have to get that hole closed, or I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.”

  * * *

  Neither of us wanted to go back in the willow world, even just into the corridor to close the bunker door, but if we didn’t… well, whatever came out would probably be worse. We went back through the hole together. Maybe it would have made more sense for only one of us to go through. That way if the hole closed in the next two minutes, at least one of us would survive. But we’d come this far together, and neither of us wanted to be alone.

  The door closed with a metalli
c screech. Simon threw the bolt. We scurried back to the hole and came through, and I didn’t kiss the ground, although I thought about it.

  Simon got his drywall kit. I fed Beau, who was angry about his incarceration and had scored dozens of claw marks in the bottom of the door. I shut the door on his angry yowls and went to help Simon.

  I didn’t want to put my arms into the corridor—what if the hole snapped closed and I wound up with a pair of stumps?—but the drywall patch didn’t have a stud to anchor itself on, so I had to reach in and brace part of it. My hand touched something that rolled and I pulled back, startled, but it was only the stupid corpse-otter carving. I’d meant to pick it up and put it away a few days earlier, but there had been a lot on my mind. I fished it out of the corridor and set it on top of the nearby raccoon case.

  In the end, Simon had to screw the patch into the existing wallboard, and the patch was huge and ugly. I didn’t care. I’d have welded steel plates over the hole if I could have.

  We hung a batik sheet over it, then each took an end and moved the raccoon case to partly cover it. If anything came through, at least we’d be alerted by the sound of crashing taxidermy.

  “God, this feels flimsy,” I muttered.

  “I don’t know how to fill it with concrete,” Simon admitted. “We’d have to flood the whole corridor, wouldn’t we? That’d be a lot of concrete. A couple of trucks’ worth, at least.”

  I couldn’t see how we’d get a truck to the second floor of the museum anyway. The patch and the batik would have to do for now.

  And that was that. We stood looking at each other, and I said, “Well… I think I’m going to take a shower and go to bed.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Our society doesn’t teach us a graceful way to handle the aftermath of incredibly stressful events. If he’d been straight and I’d been interested, we’d probably have fallen into each other’s arms and had poorly considered sex, but, thank God, he wasn’t and I wasn’t, so we hugged fiercely and then he went off to the coffee shop and I went off to my shower.