The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “Best I can do,” said Simon finally, stepping back. He put his tools back in the toolbox, took the handle in both hands, and began to pull, cautiously.

  The handle wiggled in his hands and I think both of us held our breath, but finally, with a long groan of metal, the door began to open. Light poured through the opening, and I think both of us cried out in surprise.

  Then the handle fell off.

  “Ha!” Simon tossed the handle down and shoved his hands into the narrow gap. I jumped in beside him, dropped my flashlight, found a grip without razor-sharp rust to bite into my fingers, and the two of us pulled.

  The door screamed and squealed on its hinges, but it opened another few inches. Just enough to wiggle through, if the two of us turned sideways and didn’t mind rust smears on our clothes.

  The light blazed strong as daylight, illuminating a narrow slice of the room.

  “Whoa.” I picked up my flashlight and turned it off. “That’s bright.”

  A dozen thoughts tried to crowd into my brain at once, about how it was night and if there was light, it must be artificial (but maybe it was the streetlight out front, maybe everything was still normal, maybe this wasn’t really another world), which meant that there was someone alive and changing lightbulbs, which meant…

  I clamped down on the thoughts. It felt like panic. One thing at a time. You’ll figure it out when you get there.

  “There’s a lip around the door,” said Simon, reaching out. “Like an air lock or something. All the way around. No wonder we couldn’t see the light through the cracks.”

  I nodded, sucked in my gut, and squeaked through the door.

  There was a little landing beyond, and a set of stairs. At the top of the stairs, another door stood open. Beyond it, all I could see was white.

  I crept up the stairs, hearing Simon work his way past the door behind me. Three steps below the top, I could see out the door. I put my hands on the top step to steady myself.

  The whiteness was the sky. The air was thick with fog, drifting over the surface of sluggishly moving water. I was crouched inside a doorway on a tiny, hump-shaped island, covered in thick green grass.

  I knew this because from the door, I could see dozens of other tiny, grassy, hump-shaped islands, vanishing into the mist.

  CHAPTER 7

  Will it sound strange that the thing that bothered me most was the daylight?

  It couldn’t be daytime. It was dark outside. And I hadn’t gotten on a plane and flown for hundreds of miles, crossing out of night. There simply hadn’t been enough time.

  I thought I had believed in a different world when I’d held the concrete. But a piece of concrete is a small thing. The sun is the biggest thing. Now I was feeling that different world on my skin, even if I couldn’t see the sun through the thick white mist.

  It’ll burn off soon, I thought, and then, like an echo, at least, it would in my world.

  I had always had mixed feelings about Narnia, mostly because of the heavy-handed lion-Jesus allegory. I suddenly had very strong feelings that C. S. Lewis had not spent nearly enough time on the sudden realization, when moving between worlds, that nothing could be taken for granted. Maybe fog hung around all day here, even when the sky was bright. Maybe there was no night, or maybe this was what night looked like. Maybe gravity stopped working here on Tuesdays.

  It was strange and quiet. The landscape looked deeply unnatural to me, all those strange, rounded islands. They were too evenly spaced, like gravestones. I thought of European barrows, the low, artificial hills where ancient people buried their dead.

  “O… kay…,” said Simon, crouching beside me. “Okay. That was… not what I was expecting.”

  After my first, bewildered impression, I saw that a few larger islands were scattered among the tiny islands. These were flatter, more natural looking, covered in short shrubs with silvery leaves.

  “Osier willows,” I said, pointing. “At least if they’re the same as in our world.”

  Simon gave me a look. “You’re a botanist now?”

  I snorted. “No, I did a logo design for a guy who sold woven-willow baskets. Withyworld LLC. I did about a thousand variations on willow patterns for him, and he could not make up his mind. I have looked at more willow photos than God.”

  “Does God look at a lot of willow photos?”

  “He does if he’s a graphic designer. Do you think we can get to one of those other islands?”

  “Depends on how deep the water is.” Simon climbed out and stood on the edge of the island. The grass stretched out in front of us, maybe three feet or so, then dropped off sharply. Algae softened the line, but it looked unnaturally squared off.

  “I think this is part of the bunker,” said Simon, crouching down. “Look, there’s steps down there, too.”

  I stepped up beside him and looked down. Sure enough, there were slick green stairs under the water, stepping down three or four feet, then vanishing into the mud.

  “I can’t tell how deep it is.” Simon tapped his forehead over the eye that may or may not have belonged to his dead twin. “Depth perception’s hard.”

  “We’d be wading. At the very least. Depends on how deep the mud is.”

  “If we climb up on top of this one, maybe we can get a better view.”

  I nodded.

  The island was, as I had guessed, another of the tiny barrow-like islands. Once we were actually standing on it, it looked like an elongated teardrop. Silt had piled up on the backside, probably from upstream, and presumably that was why the grass was growing so lushly over it. It was wet and slick underfoot, and we had to go up on our hands and knees.

  At the top, barely six feet wide and maybe ten feet long, we stood up.

  Downstream, the landscape was what we’d seen. Dozens of the tiny islands, though from this height, they were teardrop shaped as well.

  Simon turned to look upstream and his breath went out of him as if he’d been kicked in the chest. Filled with sudden dread, I turned.

  There were more islands upstream as well. All of them identical, green with grass, spaced like graves.

  Set into the side of each of those other islands was a single metal door.

  “Holy…” Simon shook his head. “I… dude…”

  “There’s so many.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think they’re all bunkers like this one?”

  “I don’t know. Seems likely, doesn’t it?”

  “Why would there be so many?” I turned in a slow circle, trying to count all the little islands. If the ones downstream had doors as well… that was thirty, forty, fifty bunkers. And that’s just what I could see before the fog brought the curtain down.

  A bird called somewhere over the water, and both Simon and I jumped like we’d heard a gunshot. Then we both laughed. It was a killdeer, the sort you see in fields and parking lots all over North Carolina, dragging its wing and pretending to be injured. “Kildeeeeee kildeeee kildeeeee…”

  “I guess that’s the same as back home.” Simon exhaled. “Glad it’s not a crow.”

  “Oh?”

  He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “I feel like the crows here would be weird. Too smart, maybe.”

  “Huh.” I thought about that. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but then I thought of the great mobs of crows that gather sometimes at twilight, cawing at each other, and thought of all those crows sitting in the willows on the larger islands or perched across the barrow islands… yes, all right, maybe I could see it.

  I scanned the mist-covered horizon again. The islands vanished into it, growing paler and less distinct, an exercise in atmospheric perspective. One or two had willows growing over them, which should have broken up the monotonous regularity and made the scene less strange, but didn’t.

  “This is so bizarre,” said Simon finally.

  I shook my head. That it was clearly daylight here was still messing me up, more than it should have. My internal clock had shorted out and was
blinking 12:00.

  The dozens of tiny islands and doors weren’t helping.

  A couple of the doors were ajar. One or two seemed to be all the way open, or perhaps the doors themselves were missing.

  “Do… do you want to go look in one of the others?” I asked finally. “I think we could get over to that one island behind us. It doesn’t look too deep.” That island had no door, being more of a sandspit with willows on it, but from there, I thought I could probably get to a couple other islands without having to swim.

  “It’s not that I really want to,” said Simon, “but what are we going to do? Spend the rest of our lives wondering what’s behind door number one… number two… number fifty…?”

  “I don’t know that I want to explore fifty.” I gnawed on my lower lip. “We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  Simon groaned. “I sort of want to, I just want to complain about it.”

  “Were you like this in the abandoned mental hospital?”

  “Oh, you have no idea.”

  “Right.” I started toward the edge of the island.

  “Wait.” Simon caught my arm. “Before we go out there, I want to do something. I need you to hold the flashlight.”

  I raised an eyebrow, but he was already heading back down the steps.

  He dug around in his tool bag and pulled out a dead bolt. It was new and shiny looking.

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “Got Holderfield to go get it for me.” (Holderfield is one of the regulars at the coffee shop.) Simon picked up the drill. “And a concrete bit, just in case.”

  “You knew we were going to open this door,” I said, holding the flashlight steady as he applied lock to doorframe. “You argued with me, but you brought this along?” I’m not sure if I was more exasperated or amused.

  Simon snorted. “Your uncle says nobody’s ever won a fight with you. I figured I’d lose.” Wrrrrrrr went the drill.

  “Hey!”

  “He says it in a very complimentary fashion.” Wrrrrrrrrr.

  The lock was installed in short order. He swung the door back, nearly closed, to check the alignment, then pulled it open again. Skreeeeeekkkkk. “All right. If we run into zombies or Godzilla out there, this’ll hold them for… I dunno, a good thirty seconds.”

  “That’s comforting. I’m feeling very comforted right now.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  We finished up. He set down his toolbox and I rolled up my jeans, prepared to wade the river.

  “Are we going to be able to find this one again?”

  I glanced around. I didn’t have any good way to mark the opening, but the islands weren’t quite identical. “No willows on this one. Just downstream from the one with two big bushes on top.”

  “Fair enough.”

  On the first step in, the water was cold, but not frigid. Not like the warm ocean on the Carolina coast, but not icy mountain stream, either. Chilly. The concrete steps were slick with algae, but the next step down into mud, it was… well… mud. My hiking sandals sank in and squelched.

  Simon removed his boots, tied them around his neck by the laces, and followed. “Gaaah.”

  “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my first boyfriend said about anal.”

  “Simon.”

  “What?”

  I knew if I looked at him, he’d be grinning like a shark, so I kept my eyes on my feet. Truth is, I was glad for the distraction. My sandals had vanished into the mud. Trying not to think about Simon’s love life was better than waiting for something to bite my toes. Otherworldly piranhas, maybe, or leeches.

  I didn’t see any fish, or even any bubbles of the sort that would make me think some small creature was lurking in the water. It was still quiet. Our voices, even kept low, seemed to echo over the whole river. The splashing as we walked sounded like gunfire.

  The nearest island was a flat sandspit covered in willows. I was glad to step out onto it and see my feet again, even if they were crusted in mud and algae.

  “Do you think we can get some horrible disease from the water?” Simon asked.

  I considered this. “Like dysentery, you mean, or giardia? I think you have to drink the water for that.”

  “I was thinking about that one you can get from wading in stagnant water with the wrong kind of snail, and then five years later your liver falls out.”

  “That is not a real disease.”

  “Hand to God. I mean, maybe your liver doesn’t fall out, exactly, but it stops working. It’s like a snail parasite that eats human liver. Also, isn’t there that one worm?”

  “Guinea worm. They’ve about wiped that one out.”

  “They’ve about wiped that one out on earth.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again, because I had no response for that.

  The sand looked like… well, sand. Nothing proclaimed it as having alien origin. A bunch of rocks had broken down into a bunch of smaller rocks and then into this. Apparently geological process worked the same in Narnia or Oz or whatever this was.

  The willows were either osier willows, as I’d thought, or a close otherworld relative. The silvery leaves looked exactly like the ones I’d stared at and drawn and stared at some more. They rustled in the wind. A hissing rustle, layered and complex, the sound made by thousands of leaves moving against each other. The kind of thing that you’d describe as a susurration or murmuration if you felt like busting out the fifty-cent words.

  Simon stepped up beside me and looked around the sandspit. The water flowed by silently, but the willows whispered on and on and on.

  If you faced downstream so that you couldn’t see all the doors, it was pretty. Soft mist, rolling water, silvery leaves. I tried to dredge up some of the excitement I’d felt before. I was standing somewhere completely alien, completely unknown. There was so much possibility, just waiting to be explored.

  In the concrete hallway, which was arguably far creepier than a pleasant island full of shrubs, I had been excited. Now what I felt was more like…

  Dread, I thought, acknowledging it to myself for the first time. This is dread.

  It wasn’t the fact that I was suddenly in another world. I had either made peace with that, or I had convinced myself that I was probably completely out of my mind and I might as well go along with the internal logic.

  No, it was something about this place itself.

  If you play video games, sometimes you’ll encounter a bug where you suddenly fall through the world. Something goes wonky and the landscape that is pretending to be solid suddenly isn’t. And you fall through and suddenly you see that the whole virtual world is just a skin a pixel deep, and you’re looking at it from the back, like a stage set viewed from behind. All the shapes are still there, all the rocks and mountains and trees, but inverted. You can stand inside things that looked solid just a minute ago and look up through trees that are suddenly chimneys.

  I was getting the strangest feeling that the willows were somehow like that. If I dug one up, it wouldn’t have roots, it would just be attached to the sand, a thin willow-shaped skin made of the same stuff as the islands and the river. As if the willows and the river were… not artificial, exactly, but behind them was something vast and hollow.

  Hollow, but not empty.

  This is ridiculous, I told myself. You’re just freaking out because this is all so strange, and blaming it on the willows.

  I scuffed at the sand with my foot and dug a small hole. The sand was damp and became wet barely an inch down.

  Well, what had I expected? The sand and the willows weren’t really a single pixel deep.

  Physically, maybe not, I thought, digging at the hole. But some other way. If I took a step wrong, would I come out behind… everything?

  “What’s up?” asked Simon, looking down at my feet as I dug at the sand with my heel. “And what’s with the funnels?”

  “Eh?”

  He pointed w
ith one stockinged foot. He had hairy toes. “There.”

  I followed his foot and saw a little cone-shaped depression in the sand. It was bafflingly familiar for a moment, then snapped into place.

  “Ant lions!” I said, snapping my fingers.

  “Huh?”

  “They’re a bug. Eats ants. They make those little funnels in the sand to catch the ants when they fall in. You see them all over Texas.”

  “Oh!” Simon stepped carefully around the funnels. “We called ’em doodlebugs in Florida. Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  I nodded. My mother-in-law’s yard in Texas had been full of them. And I was never going to have to go back there for Thanksgiving and listen to my ex-husband’s relentlessly successful sister recount her triumphs ever again.

  The wave of relief that hit me was absurd. Apparently I’d hated those holidays more than I’d ever realized.

  Besides, I thought, I bet that smug twit with her perfect kids never went to another world. I win that one.

  That the ant lions would dig in such wet sand was odd, but maybe they had aquatic ants here. There’s supposed to be ants that live in weird rafts in South America and climb trees when it floods. No reason you couldn’t have swimming ants in Narnia.

  My gleeful malice toward my former sister-in-law dispelled a great deal of the dread, which may be the only good turn she ever did me. The willows swayed and rippled as if small animals were moving through them, but it seemed to only be the wind at work.

  “We can reach that bunker from here, I think,” I said. “Without too much wading.”

  “Are you sure it’s a bunker?”

  “No, but I don’t know what else to call it.” I lifted my hands helplessly and let them drop. “For all I know, every one of these has a hole that leads to a different planet.”

  “God, I hope not,” muttered Simon. “One’s hard enough to deal with. Fifty would be entirely too much.”

  “You think there’s only fifty?”

  “You think there’s more than fifty of these doors?”

  I looked around, over the chest-high willow bushes. “I have no idea. There’s too much fog. They could go on for miles.”