The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “I hate this,” I said out loud. Simon didn’t reply, probably because it was such an obvious statement and there wasn’t anything that anyone could say to make it better anyway.

  I tacked up the faithful batik sheet over the steel patch. We stared at it for a bit.

  “I don’t think piling up display cases is gonna work this time,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll pull them down on myself. It has to be something I can’t move.”

  “I know just the thing,” said Simon. “But moving it is gonna be a real pain in the ass.”

  * * *

  He wasn’t wrong. By the time we got the Bigfoot statue into position, my knee felt like the inside of Chernobyl, and my back was asking if I really wanted to continue down this road. But the carved wooden Bigfoot was in position, and there was no world where I could pull it over. The base was so wide that I could have climbed on the thing and not even rocked it. If I could move that out of the way while sleepwalking, I had superstrength on top of everything else.

  “I’m just glad this is over a support post,” I muttered. “A couple yards over, on that sort of mushy spot, and it’d only be a matter of time before it plummeted through the floor and crushed a tourist.”

  “Earl would feel terrible, but he’d still probably put a sign on it that says SEE THE STATUE THAT KILLS.”

  I laughed, a weary, near-hysterical laughter of the sort that I was getting all too familiar with. But it was still a laugh.

  “All right.” Simon stepped back from Bigfoot and picked up his tools. “You gonna be okay tonight? My couch is still open.”

  It was tempting. It was very tempting. But the Wonder Museum and I were stuck with each other… and more realistically, I couldn’t face the idea of going up all those steps to his apartment on my knee. If it didn’t start to get better, I might have to knuckle under and go see a doctor, and that was money I didn’t have and wasn’t going to have anytime soon.

  “No. But if you get any premonitions or whatever, call me.”

  “I was planning on getting falling-down drunk so I can’t walk, but that works, too.”

  He waved, and a minute later I heard the back door bang as he left. I dithered for a minute, then limped down the hall to make sure it was locked. Beau informed me that he wanted the litter box changed, immediately if not sooner, and I begged him to forgive me but it was not happening today. I could close a portal to hell or scoop the cat litter, but both in one day was asking too much.

  I went to bed, dragging the nightstand in front of the door just in case, and tied myself to the bed frame. I anticipated that it would be a real pain in the ass when I had to get up and pee in the middle of the night, but I didn’t find out because I slept straight through until morning.

  CHAPTER 17

  My knee stiffened up overnight again. I was starting to really sympathize with Uncle Earl. I hadn’t ever thought he wasn’t in pain, but the amount of pain he must have been in was being driven home like a railroad spike through my leg.

  I hobbled to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and changed—not without a lot of wincing—into new jeans. My knee had swollen, but as long as I didn’t take off the brace, I could stay in denial for a bit longer.

  There was no way that I could have gotten up the steps to the second floor to tear down the sheet metal and climb through the hole, but just in case, I staggered up the stairs until my head poked over the top of the landing. The batik lay quiet and the Bigfoot statue was undisturbed.

  A sense of profound relief settled over me. Okay. Made it through a night. We’re good. It was pathetic that one night without sleepwalking into an otherworldly hellscape was such a triumph, but dammit, sometimes we take what we can get.

  I threw down a couple of aspirin, flipped the sign to OPEN, and went to sit behind the counter and try to flex my aching knee.

  It was a slow morning. I worked on my spreadsheet, somewhat hampered by my inability to walk very far. Everything within an arm’s length of the counter got cataloged, and then I started writing in entries for all of the big pieces on the walls that I couldn’t take down.

  One moose head… one cowhide shield… one picture made from cut pieces of palm fronds… (Astonishingly, that last was not by the same artist who did His Sunflower Holiness.) One giraffe skull… one cross made out of saguaro ribs…

  A group of three came in, an older couple and their adult daughter by the look of it. They gazed around with horrified amusement, then immediately tried to school their faces into polite interest, just in case I was taking the Wonder Museum seriously.

  “Isn’t it wild?” I smiled a customer-service smile. “My uncle collects all this stuff….”

  The trio relaxed. “This must be a fun place to work,” said the mom. Somehow I did not burst into braying, hysterical laughter. I said something. It must have been the right thing, because they went off to wander the museum and I heard the usual tourist calls receding into the building: “Omigosh, did you see this?” “Honey, come look at this one!” “Ha!” “Oh, Lord…” “My granddad had one of those….”

  I flexed my knee again and drank a little more of my cold coffee.

  A few minutes later, the daughter came down, looking apologetic. “Excuse me, I’m sorry—there’s some broken glass upstairs.”

  “What?” I slid off the chair and winced as pain jolted through my knee.

  “It looks like one of the display cases broke.”

  “I’ll get a broom,” I said. “Thank you for telling me. Sometimes the cat knocks things over…” This was absolutely a lie and vile slander against Beau besides, but I couldn’t very well say, Oh, I probably smashed open a display case trying to get back to Narnia through a hole in the wall there.

  How the hell did I do that? I can’t have done that. I can’t even get up the damn stairs!

  I grabbed the dustpan and whisk broom from the back and limped up the stairs. The daughter hovered nearby, clearly worried. “Can I take that for you?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’m fine. Just messed up my knee the other day. I’m slow, but I get there.” Uncle Earl used to say that when he had a hard time getting around: “I’m slow, but I get there.”

  I got up to the second floor, and the parents were standing off to one side, looking nervous, as if afraid I might blame them. “It’s just there,” they said, pointing.

  Glass glittered on the carpet. It had come from the raccoon display case. The front was smashed open, half of it gone, the rest a jagged spiderweb of cracks.

  The batik was undisturbed. I didn’t want to check on the patch with the tourists there. Why do you have a giant sheet of metal bolted to the wall? Oh, no reason.

  It didn’t make any sense, though. The raccoon case hadn’t been in front of the hole. We’d moved it back to its original spot. And Bigfoot looked just fine, exactly where we’d put him.

  If I were trying to break back through the hole—assuming I climbed up the stairs in a dream and wasn’t feeling my knee—wouldn’t I have gone for Bigfoot? Why would I have punched out the raccoon case?

  “Oh, dear,” I said to the tourists. “Well, these things happen. Why don’t you guys head down, and I’ll take care of the glass? I’d hate for you to cut yourself.”

  They filed down obediently. “I hope you can repair it,” said the mother over her shoulder.

  “Not a problem,” I said cheerfully. I couldn’t repair it, but I’d figure something out. I swept the glass up into the dustpan, picked a few bits out with my bandaged fingers, then studied the case. Downstairs, I heard the door jingle as the tourists left.

  I couldn’t have done it. I looked at my knuckles, then at the case. I tried to think of every possible scenario, and… no. No way could I have punched out the glass without breaking my hand. Hell, I’m not sure I could have punched out the glass even if I did break my hand. I am not a glass-punching person. I design logos. Those are two very different skill sets.

  Well, we’re used to this sort of thing at the Wonder Muse
um. We drape a nice blanket over the top—possibly another batik, heh—then stack some random objects on top, put up a sign about them, and suddenly it’s a whole new display. Eventually somebody donates a new display case or Uncle Earl finds a used one for twenty bucks and we replace it.

  I opened the top of the raccoon display… and stopped.

  There was no raccoon in it.

  The ermine was still in there, and the sign about albinism in animals and the toad wearing the sheriff’s badge. But the centerpiece of the display was gone.

  For once, I can honestly say that I was not thinking about the hole in the wall or the willows or anything else. I stared at the case. I stared at the glass. I stared at the floor. I looked around the room, as if somebody might have picked up a stuffed albino raccoon and put it somewhere else. I even opened the doors under the otter case, as if the raccoon would have wandered in there by mistake.

  Nothing changed. We were still short an albino raccoon.

  Did someone break in and steal a raccoon? And if you were going to do that, why that raccoon, of all things? It wasn’t even good taxidermy, for God’s sake; it had the cheap plastic whiskers and its tail was all ragged.

  I did another sweep of the room, to no avail.

  Finally, completely stumped, I limped back downstairs—going down hurt almost as much as going up, with the jarring on the knee joint—and found a piece of moth-eaten brown velvet. I picked up a couple more cane toads and the lynx skull, went back up the stairs with my teeth fastened in my lower lip, and arranged the toads in a circle around the skull, with the sheriff toad presiding.

  “This meeting of the Amphibious Skull Worshippers will come to order,” I said out loud, and started giggling because the world was completely batshit and there were holes in the universe and people who went around stealing albino raccoons.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out if anything else was missing. Nobody had touched the till. If they’d taken a T-shirt or fudge, I’d never know.

  I checked my catalog twice. It said there had been a stuffed fisher in the case, which was gone too, assuming that Uncle Earl hadn’t moved it to another display at some point after I’d written things down. I tried to remember what a fisher was. Some kind of weaselly thing. I looked it up online. Yup, some kind of weaselly thing.

  If my catalog had been better, I could have cross-referenced everything, but it wasn’t, so I couldn’t, and anyway, going back through the damn thing checking off each box was so daunting that I shuddered.

  Would it sound strange to say that I felt better? Here was a mystery, and an obnoxious one, but I wasn’t dead or sleepwalking into mortal danger. Nobody was going to die of a missing raccoon. And my brain, which had been trying to drift back to the horrors of the willows at every opportunity, found itself gnawing over where the devil the raccoon had gone instead.

  I grabbed one of Uncle Earl’s canes and limped next door. He was the wrong height, so it wasn’t quite comfortable, but it did have a lacquered alligator head on it, which had to count for something.

  “Simon, did you borrow an albino raccoon?”

  Simon, consummate professional, did not stop pouring steamed milk into the drink in front of him. “Say that again, but slowly, because I think I’m hallucinating again.”

  “Did you borrow an albino raccoon from the museum?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought you said.” He wiped his hands on his apron. “No?”

  I sighed. “I didn’t think you did. You’d have asked first, and you sure wouldn’t have broken the case. But you have a key and the lock’s fine and nothing else is missing. I’m completely stumped.” I briefly outlined the Case of the Missing Taxidermy.

  “Cultists,” said Simon.

  “What?”

  “I mean, they’re the sort of people who would think a white raccoon was super-spooky.”

  “Yes, but we live in Hog Chapel. There aren’t any cultists here. The closest we’ve got are snake handlers, and Jesus never told anybody to handle raccoons for the glory of the Lord.”

  “Can you watch the coffee shop a minute? I need to go found a religion.”

  “Simon!”

  “Fine, fine…” He held up both hands. “Okay, so a tourist did a smash-and-grab on you.”

  “I’d have noticed,” I said darkly.

  “Would you? Do you watch them all when they go out the door?”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again. The trio of tourists from this morning had left without any observation. They could have stashed the raccoon somewhere, told me about the glass, and then walked out carrying it and I’d have had no idea.

  Simon made me a coffee. I knew he paid his rent in coffee, but I was drinking so much that it was possible he was losing money on the deal by now. I stared at the internet for a while, wondering what the hell to do next, and eventually composed an amusing post for social media about someone having stolen the albino raccoon, probably for a cult. (I hadn’t updated the museum’s website for ages and was starting to feel guilty, but I couldn’t very well tell people about the willows. When there is a portal to hell or Narnia lurking upstairs, you tend to fall behind on blogging.)

  The internet thought the raccoon cult was funny. A few people expressed gratitude that whoever had stolen the raccoon hadn’t attacked me as well.

  I tied myself to the bed, just in case, and went to sleep. Nothing terrible happened and I woke up still tied to the bed, with my hand starting to fall asleep.

  It wasn’t until much later that I’d realized that something else had been missing, because I’d already forgotten about putting it in the display case in the first place.

  * * *

  The UPS guy delivered another load of skulls, mostly pigs’. I wrote them up as Lot of Pig Skulls and didn’t bother with tags. If somebody stole a pig skull, I don’t think we’d notice. A few more boxes and I might just put a sign out front that said PIG SKULL—FREE TO GOOD HOME.

  It was a normal day. Just… normal. Nothing weird. Nothing horrible. Nothing broken. The worst that happened was that something went scurrying along the baseboard on the other side of the museum. Beau’s head snapped up and he descended upon the culprit like the angel of death. I heard loud scuffling, a thump, and then Beau settled down in front of a gap under the staircase, paws folded under his chest, with the air of a cat willing to wait until the end of the world if need be.

  Normal.

  The next day was Monday, my day off, and I hardly knew how to act. I locked up the museum and drove away. Thankfully my left knee had been the one to take the beating, so I could still work the pedals okay. By the time I got over to Southern Pines and the bookstore there, my knee was stiff enough that I had to haul the cane out of the back seat and limp in with it. (Incidentally, if you’ve never had to use one, there’s a skill to using a cane, and it doesn’t come naturally. I switched hands like four times trying to figure out the most comfortable way to walk, where to grip the cane, and sundry other irritations. Bipedalism is just the worst.)

  I bought a book, then I wandered around the town for a while, looking at the tiny quaint everything and the boutiques with the scented candles, then I had a crepe at the crepe shop and thought, This is normal. I am normal. Normal life is going on. I read my book for a while and had coffee that wasn’t as good as Simon’s. When I had finished the coffee, I couldn’t justify spending the money on another one, so I went home.

  Bigfoot was still standing guard. The batik wasn’t billowing. Beau was still at his mousehole, although he was showing signs of getting bored. When I scooped him up and took him into the bedroom, he didn’t protest.

  The book only lasted me another hour. I should probably have just stuck to fanfic, given my budget, but the book was one of a series, and even though I didn’t much care about the series anymore, the characters were familiar and seeing them in their little world, doing their little thing, was comforting.

  I sat up and put my book on the nightstand, and my heel
hit something under the bed.

  “What the devil…?”

  I groped under the bed and my fingers closed on another book.

  It was the Bible from another world. I’d almost forgotten it was there, which is a helluva thing to forget. I’d taken a break because it had gotten too intense, and then there’d been sleepwalking and patching and… Lord, had it only been a couple of days? I felt as if I was floundering around in time, unmoored from the calendar beyond “the museum is open today” and “the museum is not open today.”

  It looked so innocuous in its black fake-leather cover, with the little gilt words HOLY BIBLE. I wondered if they had a Gideons of America over there. Although I guess it would be Gideons of the UNA.

  I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know what happened next. Or rather, I knew what happened next: everybody died. I just didn’t want to watch through the Bible’s eyes as they did.

  But I opened the book anyway. I was well past Second Chronicles. And it felt somehow like if I didn’t keep reading, Bible would be stuck on the other side of the pages where I’d left him, stranded in the willows forever.

  “That’s stupid,” I said to Beau. “I’m being stupid.”

  Beau didn’t open his eyes. He had spent most of the day in front of the hole under the stairs, and now he was exhausted from the effort of sitting in one place not catching anything.

  A woman showed up today. Walked right into the bunker. Marco nearly shot her, but Petrov knocked him out of the way and he fired into the ceiling. We all went deaf for about a minute, but she put her hands up.

  Says her name’s Singer. She speaks like five languages, which is good because she started with one we didn’t know. Took a couple tries before we found one, and the first thing she said was “I’m not one of them.”

  She means the ones who killed the commander. She’s not from here. Nobody’s from here. She doesn’t think the people who built the bunkers were even from here. The bunkers are pretty safe, but as soon as you step outside, things start trying to find you.