The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “Or this whole world could be about a hundred yards across and walled in by fog.”

  I stared at him and he waved his arms. “We don’t know! I don’t know! Why does it have to be the size of our world? For all we know, it’s teeny!”

  “Then where would the water come from?” I asked. “Rivers have to have a source.”

  “Rivers in our world do.”

  I groaned. I wasn’t completely willing to abandon my understanding of geography just yet. “Look, we can get to that other… whatever it is… and look in the door.”

  As it turned out, we couldn’t. The door was closed tight, and when we pushed against it, it didn’t give even a fraction. Rust had formed a thick scab around the frame. I frowned at it. “If we had a crowbar…”

  “Maybe.” Simon shook his head. “Look, some of the other doors are wide open. We should go look in those before we waste time prying this one open.”

  This seemed logical. I looked around to make sure I could still spot our door easily. The last thing I wanted to do was lose track of our entry point. There it was, grass on top, the island with two willows just visible beyond it. No problem. We waded laterally to another door. This one was close to the riverbank, but the water was deeper getting to it. My jeans got soaked to midthigh and I started to shiver.

  The door stood open. I pulled my flashlight out of my pack and shone it down the steps. At the bottom, the door was ajar.

  Several inches of water stood in the room below, with a slurry of dead willow leaves on top. I shone my flashlight over the still water, not wanting to step down into it. Simon joined me on the threshold, balancing on the single step.

  “I’d rather not walk in that,” I confessed.

  “Me neither.”

  The flashlight revealed a doorway on the opposite wall, door askew on its hinges, sagging drunkenly against the frame. Rust had eaten away at the bottom. The water continued on behind it. We’d be wading through sludge, full of God knew what.

  If there was a portal to somewhere else in there, it wasn’t immediately obvious. Honestly, I felt relieved. One extra world, as Simon had said, was more than enough.

  “Go back, try another one?”

  “Yeah.”

  There wasn’t another one in easy reach. The shore was closest, although, for all I knew, it wasn’t really a shore but a much larger island. All I could make out were the willows vanishing into the mist and one or two larger trees that were hunched over, as if to get out of the wind.

  “Well, we can test your theory about the world being a hundred yards wide….”

  “As long as we can still get back home.”

  I pointed to our bunker. “Right there.”

  “Then lead on,” said Simon, so I did.

  It wasn’t a long way, although one unexpected undercut left me soaked to the hips. I was glad I’d put my phone in my backpack when I started to wade. (It had no signal, which didn’t surprise me. I’d snapped a couple of photos, which all came out looking like a vague misty river with some lumps in it. As proof of a trip to another world went, it wasn’t much. I could just as easily make them into postcards, claim they showed the Loch Ness Monster, and sell ’em at the museum for a buck apiece.)

  We stood on the shore, looking back toward the bunkers. They all looked nearly identical, differing only in whether the doors were open or closed, and by how much. More were closed than open, from what I could see. I had no idea if that meant anything or not.

  “Do we go upstream or downstream?” asked Simon.

  “No idea. But let me mark this spot, first. Everything looks too much alike.” I was having a memory of the Wood between the Worlds in the Narnia books, where every pool led to a different world, and all of the pools were identical. You had to mark your pool or else you might never find it again. I didn’t have a good way to mark our bunker and I still knew which one it was, but I didn’t want to let it out of my sight and risk losing it for good.

  I didn’t think that each bunker led to another world, but what did I know? Better to mark our place.

  The detritus washed on the beach from the river included several stout sticks. I found one with a fork in it and jammed it into the sand so that it stood upright. “There,” I said. “Ours is the second one out on the left-hand side.”

  Simon nodded gravely.

  The river had cut away the bank here, and it was a scramble up to the top. From the top, our view was increased by… well… very little. There was still fog. I felt drops of water falling on me, but I couldn’t tell if it was rain or if the fog was just getting thicker. A chunky fog, my dad would have called it. The kind you can get your teeth in. (My dad says about twenty words per year, on average, and is completely overshadowed by my mother. He must have spent one year’s allotment on chunky fog for me to remember it now.)

  At the top of the bank were more willows. There was also the sort of widely spaced grass you find on sand dunes, and a lot of bare sand and gravel. Ant-lion funnels were scattered across the sandy bits. Mostly, though, there were willows.

  I heard the killdeer again, but it only called once and then went silent. No insects. That probably didn’t mean anything. My extensive research into willow leaves didn’t include whether a bug ate them, and anyway, I couldn’t imagine most bugs would be out and about in the fog. Even the ant lions were probably taking the day off.

  I was so glad to see a tree that wasn’t a willow that I made for the first one I saw through the fog. It was about twelve feet tall and hunched over like an old woman.

  It had shaggy, furrowed bark and splotches of lichen on the trunk. It smelled like cedar, but that’s as much as I could tell you.

  “Well, they have plants other than willows here,” I said.

  “I’ll make a note of it.” Simon unscrewed the cap on his flask and took a slug of coffee and whiskey, possibly toasting the existence of the non-willow.

  Another couple droplets of rain or chunky fog splattered my face and arms. “I think it’s starting to rain.”

  “Not like we can get much wetter.” Simon glanced at his rolled-up pants and soggy fishnets. His look had gone from Safari Mad Hatter to Bedraggled Drag Queen. He was still wearing it better than I did.

  I gazed up at the sky, which looked exactly like the rest of the fog, only straight up. A fogdrop splashed on my forehead and ran down the sides of my nose.

  “Is that a rock?” Simon pointed. “It looks like a dark blob to me.”

  For once it wasn’t his eyesight. It looked like a dark blob to me, too. A vague, rectangular shape, the opposite direction from the river. We made our way toward it.

  It was a school bus.

  Buried axle deep in the sand, tilted a little to one side, it was utterly recognizable and utterly out of place. Willows had grown up and through the back bumper, and rust had crept up the sides from the wheel wells. It had been there for a while, though in this damp, rust probably didn’t take long. Still, it read SCHOOL BUS in the right place on the front and BYRICOPA COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS on the side. And there’s nothing that looks like a school bus except a school bus.

  Except… except…

  It was the wrong color.

  Honestly, if it had been blue or something, it might have been easier to take. I would have shrugged and said that perhaps the school buses in this world were simply blue. But this was just close enough that it was jarring. School buses are usually goldenrod, and this one was a shade darker, with too much orange to it. Carrot colored.

  I’m a graphic designer, I notice these things. If it had been paler, I could have chalked it up to bleaching in the sun, but not this. Also, the font they had used for SCHOOL BUS was a serif font, not sans serif. It was pretty chunky, still easy enough to stencil on, but… serif.

  I had a suspicion that when we went back to the museum, if I looked up Byricopa County, I wouldn’t find anything.

  Simon looked at me and I looked at him. Then I shrugged and picked my way across the sand to the bus.r />
  The sand was full of the same little ant-lion funnels as the tiny beach. Some of them were quite large, the size of a saucer. I skirted around those. Whatever insect had made them probably couldn’t eat a person, but I suspected it could give me a nasty pinch, and I didn’t want to risk the possibility that this world had ant lions that could bite through a sandal.

  The bus door was on the side tilted down, and it was open. The inside was empty—just rows of seats, in the fake green leather familiar to school buses the world over. Apparently the universe over.

  I opened my mouth to say something—I’ve forgotten what—and the sky tore open with a ripping sound and began to pour rain.

  “Jesus,” muttered Simon as we both ran for the empty bus. Thunder crashed overhead. The rain came down in a solid sheet, like standing in the shower.

  Simon’s top hat gave him a measure of protection, so his hair was only soggy. I was drenched from head to toe in the three seconds it took for me to reach the bus door.

  “Well, at least we’ve got someplace to sit,” I said, moving toward the green leather seats.

  “Don’t!”

  The note of panic in Simon’s voice was so real and immediate that I froze in place. “What?”

  “Don’t sit there.” He took off his hat and shoved the lank strands of wet hair out of his face.

  I looked at him, puzzled, then back at the rows of seats. “Err… what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” He put his hat back on, hunching his shoulders a little. “Just… don’t sit there.”

  You can, if you find yourself in a strange world, ignore the intuition of your friend who devoured his twin in the womb and is seeing the world with one of her eyes. You would probably be foolish to do so, but I suppose it’s an option that you do have.

  I was not feeling quite so foolish. I sat down with my back against the front wall, near the driver’s seat. Simon sat down beside me. We stared at the long rows of green seats and waited out the rain.

  CHAPTER 8

  I know I dozed off. It’s probably a good thing. Because I was half-asleep, what I saw seemed like a dream at first, so I didn’t do anything stupid, like leap up screaming.

  In my dream, I was still sitting in the bus, knees drawn up, head leaned back against the dashboard, under the complicated set of handles that the driver would use to open the door. I was looking down the center aisle of the bus, except that the seats were no longer empty.

  They were full of children, except the children were inside the seats.

  I could see them moving under the green leather, distending it as they pushed forward against it. It molded to their faces and shoulders, drew tight around their fingers as they reached out through the leather. Were they trying to get out? I couldn’t tell. They might simply have been moving restlessly, as children do, climbing over the seat backs and turning and talking to each other, waving their arms and poking each other.

  It wasn’t until Simon’s hand closed over mine that I started to think it wasn’t really a dream.

  “Carrot…,” he said quietly. His nails dug into my palm.

  The fake leather made groaning, whispering sounds. At least, I hoped like hell that it was the leather. Otherwise the children were talking to each other in voices of old springs and creaking fabric and… no, it had to be the leather.

  I seemed to be moving impossibly slowly as I turned my head. “You see them, too,” I said just as quietly.

  He nodded.

  I looked back to the children trapped in the seats. I don’t know if they heard us or simply sensed that I was awake, but they began to move more violently. Fists punched against the leather. I watched one girl—I was nearly sure she was a girl—pull her knees up against her chest. The green leather molded itself over her arms as she leaned forward, hugging her knees. I could see the individual barrettes in her hair, the bracelet wrapped around one thin wrist, but the way the leather pulled tight across her face left her with blank eye sockets and a lipless, tented mouth.

  This is real, I thought sluggishly. This is really happening. I am here and this is not a dream.

  Simon’s nails dug deeper into my palm, but I barely felt it.

  It occurred to me, belatedly, to drag my eyes to the driver’s seat. The driver’s seat, which was right beside me.

  Stillness. The seat was still exactly the same as it had been.

  And yet… I don’t think it was empty. I had a powerful sense that if I looked at about head height and somehow looked—I don’t know, sideways, or through, I would meet the eyes of someone sitting there. Someone made up of the empty space that I was looking through.

  The school bus driver hadn’t abandoned the kids, but whatever had happened to the driver had been… different.

  “On three,” Simon breathed. “One… two…”

  On three, we both threw ourselves out of the bus. The rain had let up to a drizzle, but I didn’t care. I would have plunged into a rain of fire to be off that bus.

  The rain had cleared up a great deal of fog, which is probably the only reason we didn’t get separated. We tore through the willows. Simon’s boots banged against his chest as he ran, and he was probably going to have massive bruises there. (He told me later that he didn’t even feel it, which didn’t surprise me at all.)

  The willows slapped at us with thin stems and long silver leaves. In retrospect, either of us could have fallen and broken our legs or our neck, but we just collected thin red welts and leaves stuck to us.

  It was still so quiet. Even with the fog lifted and our breath coming in gasps, even with my heart hammering in my ears, it was unnaturally silent. As if there was nothing in the world but wind and water and willows and two terrified people and a school bus full of…

  Ghosts? Spirits?

  I had the feeling again, of things waiting on the other side of reality. The kids had been on the other side, pushing against the world. And the driver. The driver had been there. I couldn’t see them, but there had been someone right there, and whatever had separated us had been as thin as a single pixel.

  Don’t think about that. Just run.

  We reached the river’s edge.

  And stopped.

  And stared.

  “Where’s the stick?” gasped Simon. “Where is it?”

  “Never mind the stick, where’s the beach?”

  The narrow sand-and-gravel beach was gone. The river had swollen under the heavy rain. Only a few feet, but a few feet was all that had been needed.

  Our tracks were gone. The stick pointing to our door was gone.

  “Shit,” Simon whispered. “Which one’s the way home?”

  The bunkers all looked the same. From this angle, all the open doors looked the same. The islands were all nearly identical little green mounds. We could see much farther now, for all the good it did us. The opposite shore of the river looked exactly like this one. It was also a lot farther over than I’d thought, and there were a lot more bunkers than I’d thought.

  Second one out. Left-hand side. From where?

  We’re in the woods between the worlds and we’ve lost track of which one is ours….

  I tried to clamp that thought down before it could get much further. “Let’s think about this logically.”

  “I’d like to panic for a minute, if it’s all the same to you!” snapped Simon. “There were things in that bus! Ghosts or—or something! I don’t know! And the stick’s gone and now we don’t know how to get back and we’re going to be stuck here with that bus full of whatever the hell it was!”

  I waited. Honestly, I was rather glad he was panicking, because if he hadn’t, I was going to. Panic was definitely called for right now, but for some reason, if there’s two people, only one of you panics at a time.

  He put his face in his hands and breathed heavily for a few minutes.

  I gazed upstream to give him a little time. The fog had cleared, but the clouds were still steel blue, and they had cracked open to let beams of light thr
ough, the kind that look like an inspirational postcard. But the beams were coming through at a low angle and dusk was starting to pool under the willows. The eerie, regular shapes of the bunkers looked like… like… I wracked my brain for a comparison that wasn’t gravestones or teeth or something worse.

  Egg cartons?

  …Yes, all right. Egg cartons. Sure.

  For some stupid reason, all I could think was that if it was light here, it was dark at home, so if it got dark here, it must be getting light at home, and that meant that pretty soon I’d be late opening the museum and I’d be letting down Uncle Earl. Which was ridiculous, because Uncle Earl would never blame me in a million years, but that made it worse.

  Get a grip, I told myself grimly. If you can’t find the right bunker, you’ll not only not have opened the museum, you’ll have left a door to Narnia open in his wall. That’s much worse.

  Shit, and you left Beau locked in the bathroom, too. I winced.

  No, no, he can drink out of the toilet. When I don’t answer the phone, Mom will come over to yell at me and she’ll let him out. And maybe discover the hole in the wall.

  Please, God, if you love me, don’t let me be stuck in this horrible alternate Narnia with my mother.

  Simon finally straightened and put his palms on his legs. “All right,” he said tiredly.

  “Better?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “That bus…,” I started to say, and stopped.

  He held up a hand. “Let’s… not. Not right now. I can’t. After we’re home, maybe. Now what?”

  “Well, look.” I waved to the line of bunkers. “We know it’s one of the ones that’s a little back from the shore, right? It was the second one out, with just grass on top. And it has to be one of the ones with the door partway open. So we just have to check those until we find the right one.”

  Simon frowned. “Assuming we’re standing in the right spot.”

  “What?”

  “The right spot.” He waved his hands. “Look, my vision isn’t great. Is this where we were before? This all looks the same to me, and I wasn’t paying attention to what direction I was running.”