The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  I told Simon about how the Bible ended. “I hope they made it,” I said finally.

  “Hey, we made it, and look at us.” Which was either a comforting thought or a vaguely insulting one, depending on what direction you looked.

  I limped back home to the Wonder Museum and spent the time until we opened redesigning our logo.

  Beau was in a mood. He couldn’t find any more rats and suspected me of keeping them from him. I tried to pet him and he set his teeth on my hand in that I-could-bite-down-but-choose-not-to fashion. I left him to it.

  “The tourists come, the tourists go…,” I muttered as the door closed behind another set. “ ‘Talking of Michelangelo.’ ” I tried to remember the rest of “Prufrock” so I could butcher it, but all I could come up with was “ ‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown,’ ” and that was a little too close to the bone, given the other night’s events.

  Uncle Earl called. I assured him that everything was fine, except that a display case had gotten broken and the albino raccoon had gotten mauled by the cat. He sighed. “Well, Carrot, that’s how it goes sometimes….”

  Even though it was completely and totally the truth, I felt like I was lying to him. But what could I possibly say?

  “Have you ever thought about relocating the Wonder Museum?” I asked finally. I groped for a reason and came up with “Someplace without stairs?”

  “Couldn’t do that, Carrot. It’s a fixture of downtown. And I couldn’t afford another place anyway, not without selling the building, and I won’t do that to the Hen.”

  “No. No, I suppose not.” Anyway, how would he sell the building? Early twentieth-century brick commercial space, large metal patch on wall covering hole to hell. Hole does not convey any value.

  I sat that night under the sunflower pope, poking at my phone. It was late but I wasn’t sleepy yet, and the throb from my knee was going to keep me awake unless I was really tired. It felt weird not to be reading the Bible. I kept thinking I needed to finish it and see how it ended, except that it was over and I would never really know how it ended.

  Instead I was reading somebody’s rant about mislabeling fanfic, which involved the word consentacles, which made me giggle hysterically, and then I heard a scratching noise.

  I lifted my head from the tiny screen, just as a car passed and the headlights splashed light across the Wonder Museum. In the aftermath, the light faded… except where it didn’t.

  It took me a little time to realize that I wasn’t just seeing an afterimage but an actual glow. I stared at it, blinking, but it didn’t go away. If anything, it grew stronger.

  It’s not completely out of the ordinary for something to glow in the Wonder Museum. A couple of displays have glow-in-the-dark paint on them, and you’ll see that faint green-white luminescence at night. This wasn’t that.

  It was silvery light, shading to amber at the upper edge, and it was familiar.

  It was the color of the light in the willows.

  My mind went blank. I didn’t think anything. Maybe that saved me, I don’t know. My skull felt hollow, as if any thought in it would ring like a bell.

  It wasn’t coming from upstairs. Later, when I could think again, that seemed important.

  It came from behind one of the display cases on the ground floor, a fox-fire glow that seemed to move from behind the case, along the wall. It crossed the lower floor at an unhurried pace, waking sparks in the glass eyes of the animals.

  My skin was trying to crawl off my body, but I didn’t move. It was moving away from me, and if I made so much as a sound, it might turn around and come back.

  I didn’t know where Beau was. I hoped he was asleep on my bed, somewhere safe, if anywhere in the museum could be considered safe.

  It passed out of my vision from where I sat behind the counter. I saw the edges of the glow along the wall and finally under the stairs. It shrank down to nothing, and then I sat there while my phone turned itself off and another car drove by and the song “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” began to play through my head, and then I was sitting on the floor in the dark with my heart jackhammering in my chest because, God help me, the willows had come here.

  I have to get out of here.

  I have to get Beau and get out of here.

  I have to get Beau and wake Simon up and get us all out of here.

  It didn’t matter about the museum anymore. When Uncle Earl could walk, I’d bring him here and I’d show him the hole and we could go in it a little way if we had to but not into the willows and then he’d know I wasn’t crazy and we’d shut down the museum and get the hell out forever.

  unless we open the hole and it’s nothing but willows on the other side

  they get their roots in, Sturdivant said

  oh fuck oh shit oh please God no

  I got onto my knees, which hurt like hell, and crawled to the edge of the counter, looking into the museum proper. Dozens of glass eyes watched me. I hated that the willowlight had been in them because it meant that they were stranger eyes, not the ones I’d grown up with, not the silent, benevolent shapes that had watched over me since I was small.

  Something rattled in the dark.

  My heart stopped and then slammed against my ribs so hard that I thought I might have a heart attack and save the willows the trouble. Can’t get to me, suckers, I’m gonna die first!

  I wanted it to be the cat. It could almost be a cat-brushing-against-something noise. But then it came again, then another, and it was a blind, groping footfall noise, something blundering its way through the darkened museum, something alive.

  the light makes things come alive then not alive

  Beau would never make a noise like that unless he was wounded and dying.

  It sounded slow. If I got to my feet and grabbed my cane, I could hobble away, and then we would have the slowest chase scene ever. But if it was Beau, if the willows had gotten to him—

  oh God what if they got him what if they changed him what if he’s like Sturdivant now or the kids in the bus and I destroyed him because I didn’t take him and run right away oh God

  Maybe it didn’t know I was here. Maybe I could stay low and it wouldn’t find out and I could get away….

  My phone rang.

  I flinched so hard I nearly threw it across the room. Then I almost lifted it to my ear because reflexes are reflexes and then I caught myself and fumbled for the button to silence the call. Too late, of course. The footfalls began to scrabble toward me, fast and irregular, like a wounded animal.

  It was my ex’s number.

  For a second, the outrage at him made a clear space in my head. I wasn’t scared. I was just pissed that it wasn’t enough he’d left me for another woman at a Halloween party, it wasn’t enough that he kept calling asking for absolution, now he had to get me killed by a goddamn willow monster because he just could not leave well enough alone.

  The anger was useful. I came unfrozen and grabbed for my cane and then the noise was directly in front of the counter.

  fuck fuck fuck fuck

  I turned my head. The top of the counter is glass and the front is glass and one of the opaque sliding panels in back doesn’t close all the way, so I had a narrow sliver of visibility. I saw only dimness and the back of one of the bits of Jewelry by Local Artist boxes from inside the case.

  Just as I craned my neck to look, there was a sudden, horrible scrabble—not from the front of the case, but from the top—and something landed on my back.

  It had claws like Beau and it was about the right size, but it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t the moment that it sank its teeth into me. Its mouth was cold and dry and gritty. It felt like a pointed clamp more than a bite, but something flapped against my skin inside the ring of teeth.

  I dropped my phone and heard the crack of glass. My shoulder burned but it didn’t hurt as bad as my knee had. I reached up and grabbed for the thing, and my fingers closed over cool, dry hair and I wrenched it loose and threw it as hard as I
could.

  Also I was screaming at the top of my lungs, but that probably goes without saying.

  It was surprisingly lightweight. It hit the floor and rolled and then it got up, but not easily.

  It was the stuffed fisher from the raccoon display case.

  Dark fur, weaselly body. Should have had dark eyes to go with it, but they were glowing with silver willowlight. Light oozed out of its mouth and leaked from a hole in its chest, but it wasn’t like a beam of light, it was dripping like liquid.

  It swayed on its feet and it didn’t look alive but it was moving.

  It was the raccoon at the door, I thought. It was. They’re walking. The willowlight made them alive and now they’re walking.

  The fisher opened and closed its mouth. I couldn’t remember how it had looked before, when it was one of dozens of displays, but the mouth looked as if it had been wired to only open halfway.

  That’s why the bite wasn’t very big. That’s why it didn’t tear a huge chunk out of me. Its jaw can’t open that far.

  The dry plastic tongue moved in its mouth and I realized what that flapping thing against my skin had been.

  It began to shuffle toward me. It didn’t move right. Weasels all have that sinuous humpbacked lope, and this wasn’t it. Its back was stiff as if it couldn’t bend, and it wobbled from leg to leg like a stool that couldn’t get all four feet on the floor.

  When it was close enough, I rose up and smashed it in the face with my cane. My knee screamed and my shoulder throbbed, but it fell over.

  I struck it again. The silvery glow got brighter, as if something had slipped loose. I hit it with the cane, over and over, and it felt like hitting a sack or a lumpy cushion, not anything alive. Its legs paddled against the air, ratcheting and mechanical, like a spider curling up on its back.

  My breath came in great choking sobs while I tried to beat the dead thing to death a second time.

  The last blow shoved it a dozen feet across the floor. It rolled and lay on its side. Its feet were still moving, but the hide had split in a half dozen places and silver light spilled out as if it were burning from inside.

  I tried to stand up and my knee buckled. My shoulder was hot and sticky and I could maybe have dealt with that, but my leg was white agony. Every smash of the cane had pushed my knees into the concrete floor and now it felt like I’d shoved a crowbar under the kneecap and tried to pry it off.

  I had a thought of calling Simon, who had two working legs, but my phone was a dark spiderweb of glass. Shit.

  If I can stand up, it’ll be better, I told myself. If I can just get up. Kneeling is what’s killing me. I tried to get the cane under me and my muscles flatly refused to obey.

  The dead fisher began to rock back and forth. I hauled on the cane with both hands, trying to pull myself up far enough that I could grab the edge of the counter. We were locked in a horrible, slow-motion race, injured woman and possessed corpse, trying to see which one of us could get to our feet first.

  It won.

  Its head lolled to one side, no longer functional. I’d say I had broken its neck, except that it didn’t have one, it was just an armature, the only bones left were the skull and the feet and the end of the tail. I’d broken something. The hole in its chest gaped open like a mouth.

  Something moved inside the hole.

  I clung to my cane, all thought of getting up forgotten. Inside the fisher’s chest, outlined in silver light, the corpse-otter carving turned its head to look at me.

  Everything snapped into place.

  #93 - Corpse-otter carving, circa 1900, from Danube.

  “It was you,” I said. “It was you the whole time.”

  CHAPTER 19

  It was here. It was in my museum. It was the source of everything.

  It was here.

  How dare it come here? This was home. This was what I had been trying to get back to. I had survived the whole stupid divorce and the hellscape on the other side of the wall, and I kept coming back here and it was safe, the museum was the safe place where Uncle Earl kept a little corner of the world weird and ridiculous and kind.

  It wasn’t allowed to be here. It felt like a betrayal, the way my ex cheating on me hadn’t. He was just a person. This was the museum.

  The corpse-otter carving twitched in the hole.

  The hole in the wall. Of course it hadn’t been a tourist. Simon had said as much. I’d left the corpse-otter on the shelf and it had managed to knock a hole in the drywall and fall into the other side. Then I kept putting it back, thinking it was rolling off the case. Was it trying to get to the willows?

  Trying to get back to the willows?

  Jesus. Jesus. If I’d just left it there, if I hadn’t kept absentmindedly picking it up and putting it back where I thought it belonged…

  Oh, God. I wanted to howl with laughter or throw up or wail. Both of us had been on the wrong sides of our respective walls, trying to get home.

  When we sealed the hole, had it realized that it wasn’t getting home under its own power? Had it been responsible for the sleepwalking? What the hell even was it?

  #93 - Corpse-otter carving, circa 1900, from willow-infested hell…

  The fisher backed away and began to limp up the stairs. One of its hind legs couldn’t quite make it, so it would climb two stairs, then do a lurching hop to the next. Its body was stiff and grotesque from the weight of the carving inside it.

  I tried to get up again and my body would not do it. I screamed in frustration at myself and my leg for turning traitor. My arms shook with strain trying to pull myself up, and something twitched in my back that made the edges of my vision go red.

  Fuck fuck fuck gotta move gotta get up fuck…

  The fisher vanished over the top step, onto the second floor.

  Light flared on the second floor of the museum. Silver willowlight again, another world’s madness bleeding over and infecting my own. I abandoned my attempt to get up and ducked down behind the counter.

  It knew where I was, I knew it knew, but clearly the carving couldn’t kill me by itself. I’d been picking it up carelessly for weeks. But what might it be calling with that light?

  the light makes things alive

  The light didn’t fade. It grew stronger and began to pulse and flicker. It crawled down the walls, and the shadows of the animal heads grew and elongated like the shapes in the willows at night.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. “Oh God.”

  What was it calling up? What was it doing to the Wonder Museum? Could it call one of Them into this world, to hunt and feast and change us at Their pleasure? How was it calling the light? Was there some essence of the willows in it? Was it carved of willow wood?

  And why hadn’t it done any of this before?

  Maybe it just wasn’t frustrated enough, I thought. Well. I guessed between Beau and me, we’d gotten it plenty frustrated now.

  I closed my eyes against the light, which didn’t help. On the backs of my eyelids, I could picture my friends and neighbors running down the street while some unseen thing overhead hummed and chimed and unraveled their flesh until they fell down in their tracks, not alive but not nearly dead enough.

  On the wall behind the counter, shadows moved. I turned my head.

  The wildebeest stretched as if the animal had just woken up, then turned its head. Its skin shivered in the light, as if a fly had landed on it.

  “You can’t be here,” I told the light miserably. “You’re not allowed. Not here. This is a good place.”

  Was.

  Was a good place.

  Now it was alien. An outpost of the willows. Not my home. Not Uncle Earl’s home.

  The wildebeest looked at me. I saw silver light reflected in its eyes.

  I scuttled backward on my hands and one knee, bad leg stretched out awkwardly in front of me. All around me I heard crashing, groaning, the sounds of movement.

  The wildebeest snorted. I heard it breathe and it couldn’t be inhaling, it didn�
��t have lungs, there was no place for the air to go—but still it breathed.

  I looked at the phone on the counter and realized that I had no idea what Simon’s phone number was. He was a name in my contacts list, a button I pushed. I could no more have dialed him on the ancient antique rotary than I could fly.

  Call 911? Yeah, that would be terribly helpful. They’d think I was on drugs and probably hit me with a Taser. Or they’d start shooting the taxidermy. God knew I couldn’t explain what was happening in less than two hours.

  I reached the corner of the counter and looked around it again.

  The grizzly bear leaned back, scratching its back against the wall. The kudu’s ears swept up, alert to danger. In the cases, bones rattled and articulated themselves together. A bone snake reared up and struck the glass, and I heard the shadow of a hiss leak through.

  “Stop,” I said hopelessly. “Stop. Please.”

  They did not stop.

  I have to stop it. I have to get rid of whatever it is. If I can get the carving and destroy it… throw it out… smash it…

  I had no real idea how I could destroy it. Putting it out at the curb in the trash probably wasn’t going to cut it. Would it burn? I didn’t have an axe.

  It can’t move much, can it? Or it would have been wandering around by now. It can only move a little bit, surely. I remembered it in the hallway, always falling on the floor.

  The bone snake struck again, hissing.

  That was before. Now that the willowlight is here, now that it’s got a host, what can it do?

  I did not want to leave the questionable safety of the counter, but I had no choice.

  I got my legs under me. “Come on…,” I hissed, jamming the cane into my armpit. “Come on, just let me get up.”

  My knee screamed, but it held. That was fine. If I needed surgery like Uncle Earl after this, fine. I’d declare medical bankruptcy. Or they could just take it off at the hip. I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered now was stopping the carving before the museum’s beasts tore themselves off the walls.