The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  My shirt ripped. My scalp stung as the willows tore my hair out, but compared to my knee, it barely registered. I staggered backward and half fell, half leaped into the water.

  The cold felt like heaven on my knee. That is all that could be said for it. Water went up my nose, and probably I was going to get brain-eating amoebas from it. I snorted and coughed, lumbering through the water, mud squelching underfoot. My sandals were instantly heavy. I kicked them off. My lounge pants soaked through in seconds and molded to my skin.

  Well, if I hadn’t wanted to make any noise, I was doing a piss-poor job of it. The otter had to know where I was now. I was splashing and spluttering and choking and making more noise than an injured duck.

  Stop making noise. I tried to slow my breathing. Don’t kick. Don’t splash. And for the love of God, don’t lose track of your bunker this time. I hadn’t been able to mark it, but the smashed-in door should be pretty obvious, and the willows on top were decorated with rags that had been my shirt a few minutes earlier. The current tugged at me, and I let it. Downstream. There were more islands downstream, more doors, and some of them were open. If I could get to one, I could close the door. Wait the otter out, maybe.

  My original plan, not that there was much of one, had lasted all of five seconds, but maybe now that the carving was home, it would lose interest and go away and I could get out of here.

  Don’t forget which door it is this time. It has willows. Remember the willows.

  Everything in this fucking world has willows, so what good does that do?!

  There was a sound behind me. It was not anything so loud as a splash. It was a soft, almost silken noise, the sound of something entering the river as if it had been born for it.

  Water jaguar.

  I had just made a terrible mistake.

  Panic must have guided me. Maybe luck, although you’d think that if I had any luck at all, it would have stepped in much earlier. I swam with the current, my bad leg dangling uselessly, passing two doors, and then I saw one half-open and made for it.

  Something slithered past my leg. Something big. I felt a rush of heat, then cold, and then, a distant third, pain. I looked down and back and saw the water blooming red behind me. The heat had been the sensation of my calf being slashed open.

  I didn’t scream, but I made a rough, strangled noise. At least it was my bad leg, I thought, at least I’ve still got one good one, and then the humming noise rang overhead.

  They had heard me.

  It was close. It was at least as close as it had been when Simon and I hid inside the ruined ship, at least, except this time there was no thin wall of wood and sand to hide me.

  it got Petrov and Marco they just unraveled

  The water jaguar rose. Its remaining eye dangled obscenely. It moved its head back and forth, whiskers arched. Was it seeking me? Toying with me?

  Enemies in air and water. I had one chance left, and it was through the bunker door in front of me. If it was one of the ones filled with water and debris, I was going to die. If it didn’t have a door that I could close, a door that wasn’t rusted in place, I was going to die.

  But at least the otter could only tear me apart. I couldn’t take the chance that They weren’t hungry.

  I threw myself onto the shallow concrete ledge, knee tearing itself into even more horrible useless pieces, and rolled down the steps into the dark.

  I lost count of the number of steps. Five, maybe, or six, or eight. Then I hit dark water.

  My head went under yet again. Oh, well. The amoebas could only eat my brain once. I rose, treading water, and found myself standing knee-deep. The door behind me was a mass of welded rust. I threw myself against it and it didn’t even creak.

  Well, shit.

  Strangely enough, my greatest feeling was resignation. I didn’t scream or cry or fall down. Perhaps I had burned out most of my terror. I had gambled on a door that I could close and I had lost and that was it, shit happens, time to die.

  I looked up and the humped shape of the otter blocked out the light.

  Resigned I might be, but I was still going to make the damn thing work for it. I waded into the gloom, wishing like hell I were wearing my boots. There was stuff in the water down here, debris, things that felt hard underfoot and might have been broken branches or broken bottles or God only knew what. Things brushed past my bleeding calf—waterweed or algae, maybe.

  Was there a doorway? I didn’t have a flashlight. I put my hands out in front of me, waiting to hit the wall. If I could reach it, I could work my way along it. Maybe there’d be a doorway deeper in, a room that wasn’t full of water, with a working door that I could slam in the otter’s face.

  The monster took a step down, then another. I couldn’t hear its feet anymore, but I could see the light shifting as it moved. Empty eye sockets moved back and forth. I knew it could hear me. I wondered if it could smell me, too.

  My fingers touched cold concrete. I don’t know why I felt relieved, it’s not as if the monster couldn’t get me if I was touching a wall. But my heart leaped as I began feeling my way along. There might be a doorway, and if there was a doorway, there might be a door.

  I hit a corner. A threshold? No, an alcove. It only went an arm’s length back. Could I press myself into it, maybe kick the otter a few times before it got me?

  Kick it how? While levitating? Which leg are you going to stand on and which are you going to kick with?

  Fine, maybe punch the otter a few times?

  It seemed that even that was going to be denied. The alcove was too wide. I followed the back wall to a kind of stone pillar. It was only a few inches from the back. I couldn’t have fit behind it. I wanted to scream.

  I heard the soft, silken sound of the otter entering the water again.

  And then I heard another sound. A familiar one, practically under my left ear.

  “Gck! Gck! Gck!”

  CHAPTER 20

  Sturdivant’s hand closed over my wrist. It felt like ice-cold twigs. I jerked back, making a noise that might have been a shriek but was probably a squeak of despair. “Let go.” I tried to wrench myself free. “Let go!”

  “You,” said Sturdivant. “You. From before. Still alive? Still?”

  “I got out. I got out but I had to come back, it was over there, it’s here now, it’s after me. Let go!”

  Something rippled in the water. Was it the otter?

  No. It’s Sturdivant. You’re standing in him right now. If he can grab you, there’s probably guts in the water all around you.

  I was standing in blackness, but the world started to go gray around the edges anyway. I had not previously realized that fainting in the dark meant that things got lighter. How interesting.

  “Bleeding,” said Sturdivant. “Blood in the water. I taste it.”

  “It clawed me.” He tastes the water. How?

  Oh, you know how.

  Fainting suddenly did not seem so bad, but I tried to cling to consciousness. If I fainted, I was going to die. “It’s coming now.” Were the spots I saw in front of my eyes from inside my head, or was it the glowing willowlight on the otter’s belly? “Please. Let go.”

  For a long, long moment, I didn’t know if I’d gotten through. I waited to hear the hiss of water behind me, to feel the weight of the water jaguar on my back and the claws bearing me down.

  “Then get out. Get out! Gck!”

  On the last word, he flung me away. I landed in the water with a splash, the world going even grayer. My thoughts came from a great distance away and seemed to echo, as if I were at the end of a long tunnel.

  I heard the soft sound of the water jaguar moving near me. Had it heard the splash?

  I lay like a dead thing in the water, trying not to faint.

  Can’t move. Gotta move. Can’t but have to. It’ll hear me if I move. Move. Move. Things coming. Things in the water with me. Move. Gotta move.

  Ripples washed across my face, breaking over my lips. The otter? Sturdivant?<
br />
  “Gck! Gck!” The sound echoed off the walls and water sloshed over me again. Something slapped my ribs, long and muscled, and I realized that the water jaguar’s tail had struck me as it passed, seeking the source of Sturdivant’s voice.

  Somehow, I don’t know how, I crossed the room. I think I mostly floated, hauling myself along on my hands. Every time something touched my legs, I fought the urge to scream, because there were only a few things it could be and none of them were good.

  I reached the steps.

  I didn’t look back out of curiosity. I looked back to see if the water jaguar was coming after me. I wasn’t Lot’s wife, though I might have been Orpheus.

  The light only reached a little way into the darkness. My eyes had adjusted enough to see the surface of the water roiling. Almost, I turned away in time.

  But I didn’t, so I saw.

  The otter erupted from the water, a great sleek shape glowing with willowlight. In the sudden oily light, I saw things wrapped around the otter’s body, long black tendrils like hair or seaweed, a kraken wrap of tentacles.

  Sturdivant clung to the monster’s neck with bony arms, and the otter rolled in the water again and again, getting more and more tangled in Sturdivant’s organs, two thrashing figures in a nightmare of water and concrete and darkness.

  I crawled up the stairs and fell out into the light.

  Even in the willow world, the sun felt like a brief benediction. But I couldn’t stay there. I had to get home.

  Christ, I thought, making the world’s most pitiful dog paddle. Christ, we were so close to the way home all along. But we’d run from Sturdivant, run in the wrong direction, and gotten hopelessly lost among the islands, and it was only dumb luck and stubbornness that led us back home.

  I was sure I knew which island to go to now. Pretty sure. Mostly sure. I looked ahead and it was crowned with willows, but it was the right bunker, wasn’t it?

  I wondered how much blood I was losing, and whether Sturdivant would win.

  The hum was chasing me. I was almost certain of it. It was so close that I could pick details out of the sound, a high buzz like cicadas, and a strange rubbery squealing noise. I didn’t like any of them.

  The water in front of me went glorp!

  I veered out of the way, not sure what the hell had just happened, but pretty sure that it was bad.

  It happened again, a little to my left, a splash as if a rock had fallen into the water, except that there was no rock.

  The third time it happened, I realized what it was. The cone-shaped hole They left, cutting into the water, not sand. The water rushing to fill it. If I was in the way of one of those holes, it would cut a hole into me as easily as the water.

  you could see his brain and skull all neat lined up layers like a sandwich

  “No!” I said, throwing myself forward.

  The hum wailed overhead.

  “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt…”

  It is extremely hard to run from something that you are not allowed to think about. I dodged, or tried to dodge, but how do you dodge something invisible that can’t quite see you either?

  “…whenever we go out… the people always shout…”

  A water funnel opened up practically under my feet.

  I had to get out of the water. There was a sandspit nearby, maybe even the first one we’d waded out to, so very long ago. I crawled up onto the shore, trying to stay in the clear, out of the willows, the willows couldn’t be trusted oh goddammit I was thinking about the willows I had to stop thinking about them but they were right in front of me—

  The humming wail in my ear sounded triumphant. Whether it was the proximity of the willows that had brought me into Their focus, or if They had simply finally blundered close enough to sense me, I didn’t know, I couldn’t know oh motherfucker I was still thinking…

  I half rolled on my side and saw one of Them overhead.

  It was on the other side of reality, but They were coming through. It was tearing a hole in the sky to get to me, and for a moment I could see the hole and the shape that They made pushing against the skin of the world, like the children in the school bus but not remotely human.

  They looked like nothing I understood, like an Old Testament angel, all wings and wheels and eyes. The sky billowed nauseatingly and the hole grew larger, edged with jittery migraine colors. What made the hole was a beak or a drill or a spike, pushing through the back of the sky. The sort of thing that might make a funnel-shaped hole in the water or reality or someone’s body.

  Seeing Them did not make me more afraid. There was nothing I could hook my fear onto. It was not a shape that my body understood enough to fear. But the sound They made was a hunting sound, a train whistle of hunger, and that I understood.

  Pain, I thought hazily, listening to the shriek as They descended. What had the Bible said? She says they hear us thinking and the pain was what saved us. Singer had attacked Bible and he’d retaliated, and the pain had saved them both. And They had been right there at the mouth of the bunker when Simon and I had fallen down the stairs and the pain in my knee had whited out all my thoughts. And we had lived.

  There was nothing else to try, no other place to run. I took a deep breath, raised up as much as I could, and dropped my full weight on my bad knee.

  The world slewed sideways and I nearly vomited. I have never felt pain like that before in my life, and I hope to never do so again. My mind went blank. I was suspended alone in a red-shot void with the God of Pain.

  I fell over into the sand. I don’t know if I screamed, but I know that I bit both sides of my tongue so hard they bled.

  It hurt. It hurt unbelievably. I thrashed in the sand like an injured mouse. Waves of black, tinged with red, washed over me. Knees are the worst, I’d blithely said to Uncle Earl once, not knowing the half of it.

  There was a call in my ears and I couldn’t remember what it was from, except that I could hear it and that meant that I had to keep going.

  I got up on my hands and collapsed onto my knee again, and that time I think I really did lose consciousness for a few minutes. The waves went from black to white and then they went away.

  When I came back to myself, when the pain had receded enough for me to think anything, I was staring at a funnel in the sand less than an inch from my face. I heard the hum, but it was farther away, drifting away over the river, frustrated and hungry.

  I was alive.

  They had struck blindly and missed.

  I wasted no time. The fabric of my lounge pants had formed a crude bandage over the gashes. My knee had swollen, and every step felt like electric shocks were being fired up my thigh. I focused on that. It hurt. God, it hurt. It hurt so damn much. Think of that, not of… anything else. The pain was safety. So I focused on the pain, swearing under my breath, feeling tears prick at my eyes. So much pain. Never felt anything like that, nope. It hurt so badly that I had a mad urge to laugh, because it made no sense that anything could hurt like that. Agony—

  The doorway loomed in front of me. I have never been so glad to see an empty doorway. I staggered down the steps. The metal door lay discarded on the floor. Maybe we could prop it back into place somehow. Later.

  Just a little farther, I told myself. A little farther. That’s all. It doesn’t matter that my knee’s a bunch of useless bits right now. Only a couple dozen feet.

  I put my shoulder to the wall and used it to hold my weight when I took a step on the bad leg. I had to go the long way around the wall to get to the corridor, but I made it, one slow, halting step at a time.

  I found the hole and fell over into it.

  The silver willowlight was gone. The animals no longer moved. The bone snake coiled motionless in the case, the Feejee Mermaid’s face was curled in its usual silent rictus. Still, the museum wasn’t dark. Light—cold pinkish gray, not silver—was beginning to filter through the front windows.

  the light makes things alive then not alive

  I curled up
on my side, cheek against the floor, and watched the sun come up over Hog Chapel and the Wonder Museum.

  CHAPTER 21

  It was very early in the morning or very late. Simon bandaged up my leg. I should probably have gone to the emergency room, but I still didn’t have insurance. He cleaned everything out, then used superglue to close the cuts. Either I’d die or I wouldn’t, which is about as much as you could say about anything.

  “So it was the otter carving,” he said.

  “Yeah. It must have been.” #93 - Corpse-otter carving, circa 1900, from Danube.

  Was it a key? Or worse, a seed?

  I wondered if, somewhere along the Danube, a clump of silver willows swayed in a wind from another world. And if they did, if there was a humming sound somewhere above it. If They moved behind the walls of the world, did the willows give Them a marker where to emerge? A guidepost? Were they the vanguards of an invasion and a beacon all at once?

  It can’t be, I thought. There can’t be willows there. That was a hundred years ago. The world would have been eaten by willows by now.

  “But where did it come from?” asked Simon.

  “A friend of Uncle Earl’s sent it.” Then a thought split my brain like a lightning bolt. “Woody. Woody Morwood.” I stood up, nearly fell over, and grabbed for my cane.

  “If you tear that open, I’m going to put Little Mermaid Band-Aids on it and call it good,” Simon yelled. I grunted an acknowledgment, hobbling toward the front of the store.

  Uncle Earl was the last person on earth with a Rolodex. I flipped through it, looking for names. Woody Morwood. Knowing Uncle Earl’s somewhat idiosyncratic method of cataloging, I didn’t bother with the M section and flipped straight to W.

  There were three telephone numbers, two of them crossed out. I didn’t recognize the area code on the third one. I punched it into the landline and listened to the ringing.

  I was surprised to discover that I still had adrenaline left after last night. My hands were shaking. If the number had come back as disconnected, I would probably have thrown the phone across the room.

  When a groggy male voice said “Hello?” I realized that what I was feeling was fury.