The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “Did you send the otter carving here?” I shouted into the phone.

  There was a long, long silence on the other end. I had time to think that this might not even be the right number and that I had screamed at a random stranger, and also it might be the middle of the night wherever they were. My reflexive urge to apologize started to fight its way through the rage, and then Woody Morwood said, “Oh, hell,” and I burst into furious tears.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said, once I’d called him every name in the book while sobbing. He was very calm about it. He didn’t hang up. He just took the abuse as if he deserved it, because he probably did. So I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and drank the coffee Simon brought me, and I told Woody the entire story from start to finish.

  He asked questions, mostly about what Simon had seen, and a few about the light from the willows. I handed the phone over to Simon a few times. As angry as I had been, I felt suddenly relieved. Someone else knew what was going on. It wasn’t just Simon and me and a hole in the universe. Someone else understood.

  “Why did you send it here?” I asked finally, when Simon handed the phone back to me.

  “I thought it had to be near the willows to work,” Woody said. “I found it on an island in the Danube. It had made holes everywhere, like Swiss cheese. It was… not good.” He didn’t elaborate, but I got the impression that not good was an understatement for the ages.

  I tried to picture an island riddled with holes to the willow world, a place where you turned around and another hole opened under your feet, all dragging you back. Not good. Indeed.

  “I had figured out that the carving was a key, but I thought the willows were the lock and, if I sent it far away, it wouldn’t be able to open anything.” He cleared his throat. “I was very wrong. I’m sorry.”

  “It was trying to get home,” I said. “I think.”

  “Very likely.”

  “Why didn’t you warn Uncle Earl?” Woody had sent us a goddamn bomb and hadn’t even told us.

  There was a long silence. “I told him to keep it locked up,” he said, sounding more baffled than defensive. “In the book. Didn’t he read it?”

  It was my turn to be silent. Had there been a book in the box? I wrenched my laptop open and punched in numbers. Documented for posterity, there it was. Soay sheep bones, fish-leather mask, a blank book of banana leaves. It was neatly tied with leather cord. Still was. We hadn’t even opened the goddamn thing. It was just one more weird object coming into the museum. Why would anyone think to open it just in case there was a warning? I didn’t even know where the damn thing was. For all I knew, we’d slapped a price tag on it and sold it to a tourist.

  “Are you still there?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, we… we didn’t see it.”

  “…Oh.”

  I put my forehead on my fist. I wanted to scream, but this, at least, I couldn’t blame on him. Hell, even if we had found it, would we have believed it? “All right. You found the carving surrounded by willows.”

  “They burned. The carving didn’t. I torched the whole island, but I didn’t want to risk the carving near them if they grew back. So…” Woody trailed off.

  “But where did it come from?” I tried to imagine the boatman sitting and whittling out a corpse-otter carving. Surely not. Surely.

  “If there’s a way into hell, someone will always find it,” said Woody wearily. “The locals said that there used to be a wizard—that’s a terrible translation, but it’s what I’ve got—that lived in the water there. Maybe he was a real person who found a way through. Or maybe it was something simpler and stupider. A hole opened and a log got washed through from the other world, and somebody picked it up and said, ‘This is a nice piece of wood, let’s see what I can make and sell to the tourists.’ ”

  I leaned the back of my head against the wall, trying not to think how horribly plausible that last option was. Tourists. Of course it would be because of tourists. A wood-carver hoping to make a few bucks, puzzled by what came to life under his knife. Maybe he’d thrown it back into the river and it had been opening more holes, trying to get back home.

  “I had no idea it could take over a piece of taxidermy like that,” said Woody. “If I had, I’d have done something else. Buried it in a box in concrete, maybe. But I thought that if it was sent far away, it would molder quietly in a box in Earl’s collection, along with all the other oddities. I thought it had probably been in a box like that for decades already. That region saw a lot of upheaval. Somebody might have tossed a chest into the river during a war and it took a few decades to finally rot away. I didn’t have any idea that the carving had that much power by itself.”

  I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me over the phone. “It couldn’t do much by itself. It opened the hole, but it couldn’t move very much at all. If I hadn’t stuck it in the case with the raccoon…”

  “You couldn’t have known. And it was in a box with bones, wasn’t it? And nothing happened. There may have been something else it needed. Light or time or exposure to something else.”

  “No.” I took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. I couldn’t have known, and Woody couldn’t have known either. Neither of us had known, and we still didn’t know why or how the carving did what it did. Probably we’d never know. It’s not as if the carving had left instructions. Hell, for all I could prove, the carving had been completely dormant until exposed to the Thimbles of the World collection. I couldn’t logic my way through this. There were too many holes in our understanding, to go with the holes in the world.

  Which reminded me… “Do you know how to close the holes?”

  Puzzled silence came over the line for a moment. “Close them? The ones in the air close themselves pretty quickly. There was one in the ground, but I kicked sand into it, and it filled up and went away.”

  “The one in the wall sure isn’t going away.” I tried to imagine how I’d fill the thing with sand.

  “It’s still open?!”

  “Yes! Why do you think I called you?”

  The phone crackled with static. “Fill it somehow. But get it closed. Whatever it takes.”

  * * *

  “I’ve figured out how to do it,” said Simon. “I think.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said.

  It had taken three days, but I’d cleaned up the museum and reported a break-in. I told the police that the otter case had been smashed and the contents destroyed. Insurance didn’t cover irreplaceable and not entirely legal taxidermy, but Simon and Kay had both pitched in to help. I was going to have to write Kay into my will. I didn’t have anything except the world’s largest collection of knee braces and ice packs, but as far as I was concerned, she and Simon could split it.

  The hole was covered, yet again. This time, though, it felt different. Quieter. If there was a wasp in the room, it was dead now. I wasn’t going to pick that metaphorical wasp up—even dead wasps can still sting—but the source of the malice was gone.

  I still wanted it closed for good. I kept thinking about what Sturdivant had said, about concrete buildings the size of parking garages, surrounded by alien humming. And sometimes about the Bible—This whole goddamn place is a trap.

  It wasn’t anything I could ever prove, but in my bones, I was pretty sure that the willow world hadn’t always been full of willows. They’d gotten their roots in somehow. Maybe someone over there had found a corpse-otter carving and it had opened a hole—a vacuae—to another place, and the willows had come through after it.

  Did the willows cause the walls between the worlds to thin? Were they the first wave of invaders, setting the stage for Them? It would make sense. The willow world was so empty. Nothing but killdeer and fish and the occasional otter. More than that, it felt empty. It was hard to believe that there was anything in the world but death and ruined bunkers and the victims of Their curiosity.

  The carving had opened the holes. Probably it had been trying to get home, but I wouldn’t swe
ar that it wasn’t trying to open the way for the willows to get their roots in. Perhaps that was how it worked. A chunk of willow dropped into another world, like a seed. And the reason we weren’t overrun by them was the same reason we weren’t overrun by willows from this world. Not all seeds fall on fertile ground. The conditions had to be right.

  Well. The otter wasn’t coming back easily. Sturdivant had seen to that. But I still didn’t want that hole just sitting there, where Uncle Earl might stumble into it.

  Where something else might come through it.

  “What’s your plan, Simon?”

  “I’ve been talking to Woody and reading up on easy concrete walls.” He smiled ruefully. “And since your knee’s busted, looks like I get to be the one who carries it.”

  We raided the cashbox of the Wonder Museum. I didn’t feel guilty. This counted as cleanup after the not-entirely-fiction vandalism. Uncle Earl had told me to buy whatever the museum needed, and as far as I was concerned, forty bags of quick-setting concrete counted.

  It took five trips. My little car could only carry so much. The back bumper nearly scraped the ground each time. But Simon hauled the bags into the hole and built a wall, stacking them up like sandbags. Then we ran a hose from the kitchen sink, up the stairs, and soaked the bags down for thirty minutes.

  “And this’ll work?” I said.

  “It’ll take a long damn time for something to get through, anyway,” said Simon. “They do it to make quick retaining walls in flood zones sometimes.”

  “Works for me.” I thought briefly of the skeleton at the other end of the corridor. We were walling him up down there. Maybe that’s what he’d have wanted. Hell, he’d chosen to die of thirst or starvation or something rather than go out into the willows, and I couldn’t blame him.

  When the concrete had set up, Simon went to work patching the hole.

  “Woody thinks that the holes close if you fill them in with whatever’s supposed to be there,” he said. He laid mesh over the opening, not the whole thing but about a six-inch patch, then leaned his torso through into the corridor and spackled it shut. “The ones in the air filled in with air. That’s why Woody said the holes closed up. The ones in the sand filled in with sand. And this one…”

  “Fills in with wallboard and plaster. But why didn’t it work before?”

  “We didn’t fill it.” Simon’s voice was muffled from its position on the other side of the wall. He had one shoulder braced against the bags of cement and looked like a particularly fashionable praying mantis trying to contort himself into position. “We put patches over it. We gotta actually fill it up with more wall.”

  “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  “As opposed to everything else about this situation, which has been remarkably straightforward?”

  I snorted and passed him more spackle. “What stops somebody from punching through the wall here again?”

  “Ugh, now we get into theoretical physics or something like that.” He emerged and rubbed his shoulder, then laid in another patch of mesh. “Look, Woody explains this better than I do. But this isn’t actually a physical passage from the museum to the hallway in the bunker in the willows. It’s a wormhole thing that’s anchored to this particular patch of wall. If we could change where the wormhole came out, you could go through this chunk of wall to somewhere else.”

  “The throats between the worlds,” I muttered.

  “Right. Except the throat in this case is the thickness of a piece of wallboard.” Simon stuck his arm through the throat and waved it around. “My wrist’s in a wormhole right now. My hand is in the willow world. You see?”

  I rubbed my forehead. So the vacuae was… what? Like one of those paintings that the Coyote made to fool the Road Runner, a flat wall that looked like a portal, except that the Road Runner could run through yelling, “Meep meep!”

  I tried this analogy on Simon, who got a pained look on his face, but didn’t argue. “Sort of like that, yeah. And now our job is to repaint the rock flat so that the portal goes away.”

  I was suddenly glad that we hadn’t tried having me watch from the other side while he closed up the hole. “What stops someone from repainting the portal?”

  I could only see one of Simon’s eyes—the one that belonged to his dead twin. She had a thousand-yard stare for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing stops it. But whatever portal They make over there could come out anywhere. This world, the next world, any world. If this is the Coyote and the Road Runner, They’re inside the rocks and under the ground. We just hope like hell that the hole doesn’t come out anywhere near us.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything much to say to that. I handed him another tub of spackle.

  Perhaps I had it wrong, thinking of multiple walls getting thin. Say that there were many worlds, but one ran behind them all, like an access corridor for the universe. The crawl space of eternity. If you knew how to do it, you could open a door in the skin of reality and step into it. A small place, without much going on. A few fish, a few otters, a killdeer calling. A quiet place. Maybe there had been more there once, maybe people, maybe a whole civilization. Maybe I just hadn’t seen very much of it. Maybe it was vast, though somehow I doubted it.

  Say that it was a world full of willows, willows that sometimes shone with light and brought things to life. Perhaps it was the willowlight that made the walls so thin. And then one day They came creeping along behind the sky. Say that the willows and Them found each other and became… oh, symbiotic. They fed on the things the willows brought to life, and the willows became… what? Somewhere between crops and worshippers?

  It was a perfect hunting ground. The skin of the world was already permeable there. They could go back and forth, under and through. The willows could open more doors to more worlds, somewhat haphazardly, and sometimes unfortunate people wandered through. (I imagined a hole opening in a dusty road, a school bus plowing through it and sinking axle deep into the sand, children screaming and the driver trying not to crash. God help them all, they would have been so much better off if the bus had crashed, before They could descend upon Their new prey.)

  But say that inanimate objects from that world weren’t quite inanimate, either. How could they be, bathed constantly in the light of the willows? The wood and the water wanted to go home. They wanted to go home so hard that if you drank the water, you found yourself sleepwalking, trying to get back. Though I hadn’t gone sleepwalking since I got back. Perhaps I’d finally flushed whatever it was out of my system. Although, given how much water I’d swallowed and how much had gotten into the cut on my leg, maybe it had all been the otter’s influence. Maybe the carving had latched on to the sleeping minds of the two humans that had been to that other world and tried to force them to open the way again… and when that didn’t work, it had gone to inelegant solutions, animating dead flesh to carry it home.

  I wondered what it would have done if left alone with a living body that could not get away. Then I decided not to wonder about it.

  “Simon,” I said, after about ten minutes.

  “Yeah?” His voice echoed oddly in the corridor, muffled by the impromptu cement wall.

  “You should probably look at this.”

  He pulled back out and looked at his handiwork, then let out a slow whistle.

  I don’t know what it looked like on the far side, but the drywall on this side was knitting itself up as pristine as if it had never been damaged.

  “It’s like when you cut the wallboard before,” I said slowly. “It cut through the concrete on that side, even though that should have been impossible. Now you’re patching the concrete on that side and it’s patching up the wall here, even though it’s still impossible.”

  “Well, let’s see how small we can get.”

  It took him hours. I braved the stairs to bring him bottles of water and more spackle. But inch by inch, the wall closed up.

  When he couldn’t fit his whole body in the hole, he just put in h
is arm. When his arm no longer fit, he put his wrist in. Eventually he tossed the spackle knife aside and began using two fingers.

  “Your hands are smaller,” he said finally. “See how much more you can get in.”

  I nodded, swept up a glob of wet spackle on my index finger, and went to work. In a few minutes, there was only a hole in the wallboard, like a bullet hole, into darkness.

  I coated my pinkie in the wet white goop, slid it into the hole, then scraped it back out.

  And then there was only a tiny discolored depression in the wall, as if someone had driven a nail in and then patched it up again. If there was an opening to the other world at all, it was the size of a pinhole.

  I sank back, groaning stiffly, and rubbed my back, not caring that I got spackle all over my T-shirt. Simon exhaled slowly. Beau wandered by, saw that my fingers were dirty, and disdained to be petted.

  “Hey, Carrot?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bet that Riley chick couldn’t have done all this.”

  I started laughing. “Come on. Let’s go get Chinese food and get drunk.”

  “That’s the best idea I’ve heard all week.”

  * * *

  The wall was dry. The wall was smooth. After about two weeks, I couldn’t take it anymore and drilled a small hole and held my camera up to it.

  The flash illuminated drywall and studs. The hole was closed. At least for now.

  I told Simon. He was less surprised than I thought he’d be. “I didn’t see anything,” he said. “With the eye, I mean. Before, there was something there.”

  “You could have told me.”

  Simon scratched the back of his neck. “Sorry. I didn’t really put it into words. It wasn’t like a huge neon sign. It was just the wall was a little deeper than it should have been.”

  “So it’s over,” I said. “For now.”

  “Hopefully forever.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears,” I said, which is one of Uncle Earl’s phrases, and then a customer came in and we didn’t say anything more about it.