The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “Fine. No cops.”

  Simon visibly relaxed. I turned back to stare at the dead body.

  “Nothing got at him,” I said finally. “No scavengers.” I thought of deer dead by the side of the road on the way into Hog Chapel, surrounded by flapping black vultures. Nature’s cleanup crew.

  They hadn’t cleaned up this guy.

  “Yeah, but what killed him?”

  I looked around the room. Empty tin cans. Fifty-five-gallon drum. The top was off and it was empty, but if there had been water, presumably it might have evaporated. It wasn’t that humid. “Heart attack? Suicide? Starvation?”

  “Isn’t that a bloodstain on the mattress?”

  I took a step forward. “Um. I… uh… think that was… goop.”

  “Goop?” Simon sounded strained.

  “Well, when he died, he would have… um… I mean, he probably decayed a bit, and it had to go somewhere.” I shone my flashlight under the mattress. There was a black, greasy-looking stain on the floor. It had bubbled up with fungus in places. I didn’t want to think about what the fungus had been feeding on.

  I thought Simon might have a serious freak-out, but he was made of sterner stuff. Probably being nearly eaten by alligators all those times helped. As long as a large reptile wasn’t hanging off your leg, life went on. He just nodded and looked around the rest of the room. “No more doors. I guess this is the end of the hallway.”

  “I’m starting to think it’s less of a hallway and more like a bunker,” I said. “This is survivalist shit, isn’t it? Eating out of tin cans and whatnot.”

  “He could have been a prisoner.”

  “The bolts on the door are on this side.”

  Simon grunted. “Fair. I’ve just got prison on the brain right now.”

  “Don’t worry. No cops.”

  “Thanks, Carrot.”

  I ran my hand through my hair. By my watch, it had been about ten minutes. It seemed like it had been about a year, but discovering a dead body, even a very old one, tends to distort one’s view of time.

  “Okay. Now what?”

  “Now I want a drink,” muttered Simon.

  I had no better ideas at the moment, so we went back down the hallway toward the hole, which is when I made the second alarming discovery of the night.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Simon?” I said.

  He lowered the thermos. “What?”

  “Look at the hole from this side.”

  “Uh… it’s the museum?”

  “No, not through the hole. Look at the edges.”

  He played his flashlight along the edge of our makeshift entry and swore softly under his breath.

  We had been so astonished by the hallway yesterday that we hadn’t bothered to look closely at the hole. I suppose if I’d thought about it at all, I thought there was a stretch of drywall in the hallway that Simon had chopped through to get in.

  The concrete stretched in both directions, with a rectangle sliced neatly out of it.

  “It’s got to be plaster.” Simon grabbed the edge of the hole with his free hand. “Look, it’s only wallboard thick. There’s got to be a layer of plaster over it and it only looks like concrete.”

  “So cut it with your saw thing. Just cut another inch out.”

  He muttered to himself. “I don’t need a saw, it’s just wallboard. Pocketknife will work, if you don’t mind it being ugly.”

  I shrugged. “You’re the one patching it.”

  Simon took out his pocketknife, set the edge against the hole, and tried to saw upward.

  Absolutely nothing happened.

  “Fuck,” he muttered after a few seconds, checking the blade. “It’s not going. Maybe I’ll get the saw.”

  “Try from the other side,” I suggested.

  He pushed Elvis aside, stepped into the museum, and sliced a ragged semicircle out of the wall.

  “What the hell…?”

  I watched as the point of his knife emerged through the concrete and cut a wavering arc. The bit of wallboard fell down, hit the ground, and went thud. Bits of gravel fell off it.

  Even I know that an inch of cut wallboard does not go thud.

  “Yeah, it’s concrete.” My voice was very calm, for someone who was watching the impossible happen in real time. I reached down and picked up the chunk. It had the same cross section as the bit that Simon had cut, but it was longer than my hand. Longer than Simon’s knife blade, come to that.

  “Cut just a bit on your side,” I ordered. “And catch it.”

  Simon ducked his head and gave me a puzzled look, but cut a thin slice and caught it as it fell. It lay in his hand, a shred of plaster-coated board, nothing much to look at.

  On his side, the wall was made of plaster and wood pulp and whatever else walls are made of.

  On my side, it was six inches of stone.

  I turned the concrete over in my hands and quietly relinquished the notion that I was dealing with reality as I understood it.

  “So about that black mold,” I said, handing him the chunk of concrete.

  Simon turned it, looked at the edge of the hole, and I watched him come to the same realization that I had. He looked up at me, looked down the hallway toward the body, and said softly, “Shit.”

  In one sense, this was a relief. If this wasn’t reality, then I didn’t need to call the cops about the dead body. Their jurisdiction ended at the hole in the wall. The dead body was the responsibility of… someone else.

  Somewhere else. The next world over. Another plane of existence.

  In another, much larger sense, my brain was screaming hysterically that there was a hole in the world.

  The funny thing was that I’d been thinking all along that the hallway was weird and it might be unnatural and toying with the idea of its being… someplace else… but it turned out that playing with that idea in my head and sitting there with a chunk of impossible concrete in my hand were two different things. The difference between thinking vaguely that a stretch of road was awfully dark and you hoped there weren’t any deer on it, and the sudden flash of eyes in the headlights and the scream as you stand on the brakes and try to stop.

  Have you told your uncle there’s a portal to Narnia in his museum?

  If this were Narnia, I’d expect more fauns, and maybe some Turkish delight. And I don’t even like Turkish delight. The first piece I had tasted intensely of rose, which means it tasted the way Head & Shoulders shampoo smells, and I have never gotten over that association.

  …This was probably not the best time to be thinking about shampoo.

  The chunk of concrete hadn’t turned back into wallboard when it passed through the hole. I had no idea what that meant, or if it meant anything at all.

  “What do we do?” asked Simon.

  I rubbed the back of my neck and looked around the hallway. Even though absolutely nothing about it had changed, it felt suddenly more sinister. If this was another world or dimension or whatever, maybe things were different. Maybe it had monsters that didn’t make a sound before they ate you. Maybe things just appeared out of nowhere and snatched you away.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “We could close the hole back up,” he said a bit doubtfully.

  “Could we?”

  “I mean, I can get a drywall patch….”

  “Right, but… no. That’s not what I mean.” I waved my hands. “If you put up a patch, does it become concrete over here? Or is it just going to be drywall?”

  Simon blinked. He reached up and touched the edge, as if looking for an answer. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either. If it’s just drywall, though, couldn’t something just break it down?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know! Something! Whatever killed that guy!”

  “You said he died of starvation!”

  “I said maybe! I don’t know! I’m not a doctor! He could have died of all kinds
of things!”

  Simon’s face disappeared from view as he rested his forehead against the museum wall. “We could fill the hallway with concrete?”

  “Errr…” This seemed a little drastic. I had visions of wet concrete slopping out onto the floor.

  “You could stand on that side and see if it turns to concrete as I patch the drywall?”

  My vision changed to myself being walled up alive, “Cask of Amontillado” style, watching the hole slowly fill in. For the love of God, Montresor! “Oh, no! What if it closes off for good once you’ve patched it? I’d be stuck in… in wherever this is.”

  Simon’s shoulders sagged.

  After a minute he said, “Let’s cover the dead guy.”

  “What?”

  “The dead guy. I’ll get a sheet.”

  “How will that help?”

  “It won’t, but I’ll feel better. I can’t stop thinking about the fact there’s a dead body there. It’s really distracting. Plus… you know…” He scuffed his foot. “You cover dead bodies.”

  He was right, and at least it was a problem we could fix, unlike the hole. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  Simon left and I stared at the hole. I didn’t want to turn my back on it. Where did that other door go? What was on the other side?

  Could there be another dead body there?

  I gnawed on my lower lip. Another live body?

  Had we uncovered… I don’t know, a serial killer’s lair? Someplace he was leaving his victims?

  Serial killers aren’t magic. They can’t make holes that turn drywall into concrete.

  Okay, what if it’s a serial killer from another dimension? I had a vision of a movie poster like some of the ones in the Wonder Museum. Hannibal Lecter from Dimension X!

  …Jesus effing Christ.

  I was mulling over the implications of extradimensional serial killers when Simon returned with a sheet. It had little flowers on it.

  I looked at the flowers, then up at him.

  “Look, it’s clean,” he said defensively. “And I don’t think he cares.”

  I doubt he cared about much anymore, but Simon obviously cared about covering the body, and he was right. When he’d dropped the sheet over the bones and stepped back, I felt better, too. It was… well, there was still a dead body, but it felt less urgent, somehow. (How exactly there was urgency to a body that had been dead so long he’d turned to bones, I don’t know. Humans aren’t logical about death, okay?)

  We closed the door behind us. It squealed, but it closed.

  “So what do we do now?” Simon shone his flashlight down the hall. “Try to wall it off?”

  “There’s still another door,” I said.

  “The door that’s locked from this side to keep whatever’s over there out?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  I expected Simon to argue. Possibly I was hoping that he would argue. But he groaned and stomped around the hall for a few minutes, then said, “Okay. But this is how people die in horror movies, you know.”

  “You’re not the teensiest bit curious?”

  “I’m incredibly curious! I’ve just also seen horror movies!”

  I waved my hands. “Probably the dead guy locked it.”

  “And he’d rather starve to death than go through it? That doesn’t bother you at all?”

  I was starting to regret that I’d ever suggested starvation. “We don’t know that. Maybe he was old. Maybe he knew he was dying and just wanted to die in peace without his relatives bothering him.”

  “A giant bolted metal door seems a little excessive just to keep out your relatives.”

  “You only say that because you don’t know my mother.”

  “I’ll give you that one.”

  “We’ll be fine. We won’t touch anything that looks like a giant egg sac.”

  He folded his arms. “And no wicker men.”

  “Positively no wicker men.”

  “And no clowns.”

  “Jesus, if there’s clowns, I’ll keel over on the spot and save them the trouble.”

  “And we turn around if anything seems even the least bit creepy.”

  “What, more so than the dead body?”

  Simon muttered to himself. “I gotta go get my tools. Wait right here.”

  He went downstairs, still muttering, but I was pretty sure it was mostly for show. This was much more mysterious than an abandoned mental hospital, and he couldn’t possibly be immune to the excitement. I felt like an explorer standing on the brink of some impossible discovery.

  Maybe there won’t be anything, I warned myself. Maybe it’ll just be another dead-end hall. For all you know, this place isn’t very big.

  Hell, for all I knew, the universe was full of little pocket worlds made of two rooms and a connecting hallway and not much else. It wouldn’t make any sense, but what about this made sense?

  I swept my flashlight around the hallway again and noticed something near the wall. It looked like a piece of wood, right under the hole in the drywall on the hallway side. We’d been stepping over it without realizing it.

  I bent and picked it up. It looked familiar.

  It was the corpse-otter carving.

  I had a bad moment when I thought that maybe it was another one, and that the creepy little carving had somehow reached out and called to another one like itself, but then I saw the sticker on the underside, with #93 on it. It was the same one. I’d cataloged it myself.

  #93 - Corpse-otter carving, circa 1900, from Danube – gift from Algernon “Woody” Morwood.

  I slapped my forehead. Of course, the damn thing had been on the shelf that had been hanging askew on the wall. I remembered moving the ceramic windmills the day it arrived. Then I’d forgotten all about it. When the tourist had knocked the hole in the wallboard, it must have fallen through onto the floor. We’d been looking up, not down, so we’d missed it.

  “Christ,” I muttered, stepping back into the museum. “Give me a heart attack, why don’t you.” I set it on top of one of the raccoon cases. Not a great display spot, but it’d do until we could get the wall fixed.

  Simon came back, carrying his tool kit. “This is stupid,” he said, more to thin air than to me. “This is maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, and I dated a Baptist boy once.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “ ’Bout like you’d expect. He got off hard on self-loathing. I think he’s a Republican lobbyist now.”

  There did not seem to be much that I could say to that. I led the way through the hallway.

  No, not the “hallway.” The bunker.

  The room at the end was the same as it had been. Nothing had changed. We moved our lights over the walls, looking for anything we’d missed, but all we saw was graffiti.

  “I don’t think it’s Cyrillic,” said Simon. “Look, this bit’s… squiggly. And this over here is in different handwriting.”

  I looked at the one he’d indicated. It looked kind of like the bubble writing that we girls had done in grade school, all the big loops and i’s dotted with hearts. It was hard to read, but it didn’t look like the same letters as the other graffiti. A different alphabet? Or just handwriting so stylized I couldn’t make it out?

  Hell, maybe it’s like tagging and there’s letters in there somewhere, but it’s nearly impossible to make out.

  “Huh,” I said. “I suppose that means there was more than one person down here?”

  “No body.”

  “Maybe they left.”

  “Or got cannibalized.”

  “Jesus, Simon…”

  “What? It could happen!”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Unless he ate their clothes, too, no.”

  “Okay, okay. That’s fair.” Simon set his tools down in front of the door and examined the rusted lumps that had been bolts at some point in their careers.

  I couldn’t get the thought of cannibals and serial killers out of my head. “Should we bring some kind of weapon?”

>   “Outstanding warrant, can’t buy a gun. You?”

  “Never touched one.” I had a vague feeling that guns were not exactly point and shoot. You had to load them, right? There were hammers or bolts or safeties or something.

  “You ever stab somebody?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Well… I was holding a sword once and my sister was chasing me and she tried to kick me and stabbed herself in the leg. It was a whole thing.” He went back to work on the locks.

  “So swords are out.”

  “I’d prefer it.”

  I gave up on the thought of weapons. What was I going to do with one? Self-defense wasn’t exactly my strong suit anyway. I took aikido for a while but mostly for the exercise and to get out of the house.

  I reached out and touched a bit of wall. Rough, with sharp bits of flaking paint. Dry to the touch, which didn’t surprise me. It looked as if there had been water once, but then everything had dried out. Probably why the skeleton was still intact, even if the tin cans had turned to crumbling rust.

  I wondered idly what the labels on those empty tin cans had looked like. Had they been in this odd not-Cyrillic, too? Or the bubble writing?

  “Okay,” said Simon. “I think I’ve got it.”

  “You can work the bolts?”

  “Work is a strong word.” He took out a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver, set the edge under the first rusted bolt, and whacked the back of his makeshift chisel with the hammer.

  The lump of rust came partly away from the door, with flat sheets of dried paint attached to it. He hit it again and it fell off the door and landed at his feet.

  The rest of the bolts came off just as easily. The screws holding them in place were nothing but rust.

  “I’m a little afraid that when I pull on the door handle, it’ll come off, too,” admitted Simon. “This thing is like… rusted solid around the edges. I might have to take the hinges off.”

  “Can you loosen up the edges?”

  “Mmm.” He crouched down on the ground and slid the screwdriver into the crack there. “Maybe…”

  The tapping of his hammer echoed in the room. I rubbed my arms. It was cooler than I liked in the room.

  Hey, if it’s still here in summer, we can totally save on air-conditioning….