The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

I opened my mouth to say that of course it was the same spot, then closed it again.

  Was it? The riverbank looked the same up and down its length. That twisted tree might have been the oak we saw earlier, but there was another one off in the distance. We were near a bend in the river, but the earlier fog meant that I had no idea how close to the bend we should be. There had been two shrubs on top of an island in a line behind ours, but I suddenly realized that the concept of a line depended very much on where you were standing. That island over there had three willows, but from the other side, would it look like two?

  Simon’s vision was good enough to read my expression. He muttered, “Fuck,” took his top hat off, and dragged his fingers through his hair.

  “There can’t be that many that have open doors.” I stepped down into the water. “Come on. I want to get out of here before it gets dark.”

  * * *

  We waded to five of them, and the water definitely felt deeper, but I couldn’t be sure if I was going too far or if the water had risen or if I was just paranoid. Two had closed doors at the bottom. We could see those without going down the steps, which saved time. Three were open. The first two were all the way open and clearly not ours. The last one was open partway, but when I ran the light over the gap in the doorway, it became obvious that it wasn’t ours because of the six inches of standing water in the bottom, and the kind of algae that indicated it wasn’t a recent development.

  If we’d found one that had another portal in it, I’d have been seriously tempted to just go through it. Maybe it would be like a subway stop and we’d come out a couple of blocks away from the Wonder Museum. And if it wasn’t, if we wound up in… I don’t know, Tibet or Uganda or somewhere where we didn’t speak the language, we could presumably find an embassy, and we wouldn’t be near that horrible bus.

  What if you found a portal and it wasn’t to earth, it was to the world the bus was from? What if it went somewhere else? How would you know?

  Fine. We should only take a door to the Wonder Museum.

  But there were no portals. Looking through the doors showed only damp concrete, not the friendly lights of the Wonder Museum. No big holes in the walls that led to some clearly different space. Maybe our entry was the only one, and somehow the unknown tourist had knocked a hole in the fabric of reality with his elbow.

  “Look,” said Simon, “it’s going to be dark really soon. We’re not going to find the right one. Let’s take one of the ones with the closed doors, get down in the stairwell, and stay there for the night.”

  “The closed doors? But if something comes after us, we’ll be trapped.”

  “And if we take one with an open door, something could come out of the bunker at us. At least this way, we’ve only got to watch from one direction.”

  I thought of a dark, yawning hole at my back, sitting there through the night, waiting for something to come out of the blackness….

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay. But let’s try one more.”

  We slogged out into the stream again.

  * * *

  The next one had a door standing ajar at the bottom. I shone my flashlight through the gap, hoping against hope… and my hopes were immediately dashed. The opposite wall did not have an opening, and there was a chest-high wall between the wall and the door, with bits of rusted rebar standing out from the top. Not our bunker.

  I sighed, turned, and that’s when I saw movement over Simon’s shoulder.

  I dropped instinctively down on the steps, yanking Simon down with me. He didn’t yelp or make any kind of sound, just went flat beside me. Later, I would think that Simon’s life had prepared him for this sort of thing rather better than mine had prepared me.

  A figure came out of the gloom. They seemed to be standing on the water at first, but it rapidly became obvious that they were standing in a small boat, poling it along, like a gondolier.

  They looked human enough. They didn’t have tentacles or extra arms. They wore a faded shirt and loose drawstring pants, in a style that could be five or five thousand years old. I couldn’t see well enough to make out things like zippers. Or pointed ears, for that matter.

  They poled the boat along without making any more noise than the soft splash of the pole. If I had to guess—male, mid-forties. Seamed brown face, black hair under a broad hat, nothing that would stand out as being from any particular region in our world.

  But despite how normal they looked, that feeling came rushing back, the one I’d had before, that I was watching a thin skin of reality stretched over something vast and hollow. As if the boatman and the river and maybe even the sun piercing the clouds were all paint on a flat canvas, and if I had the right sort of knife, I could cut through that canvas and see what lay beyond.

  The boatman poled the boat past, the pole creaking gently in the water. They never even looked at our doorway, at the two of us crouched in the shadows on the stairs.

  It’s just the aftershock of the school bus, I told myself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the boatman. It’s just paranoia.

  It didn’t matter what I told myself. I did not want the boatman to see me, and that was all there was to it.

  The boatman passed off to our right and was gone. We listened to the sound of the pole until that, too, was gone.

  There was no question of going back out. The man would see us. And maybe he was fine, maybe he was a perfectly normal human, maybe we’d tell him about the bus and the kids under the seats and he’d be horrified. Or maybe he’d yell “Outlanders!” and pull out a gun and shoot us as aliens.

  Hell, we were aliens, weren’t we? This wasn’t our world.

  Maybe he’d open his mouth and nothing would be inside but willow branches, and the leaves would spill out like flat green words….

  Fuck. I didn’t know where that thought came from, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  As if the darkness had followed in the boat’s wake, the river was rapidly turning the deep French gray of dusk. (It’s a color. Designers use it a lot. When you see gray, but with some warm brown in it? That’s French gray.)

  The wind was rising. I could hear the willows rustling. The wind in the willows, but without Ratty and Mole and Badger to lend some practical, earthy advice to the scene.

  Shit, if a giant talking rat showed up, I’d probably scream bloody murder, so maybe it was for the best.

  “I guess we’re spending the night here,” I whispered to Simon. “Door or no door.”

  He nodded glumly. “Guess so. Well, let’s see what’s down below… maybe there’ll be a room that’s more comfortable.”

  We descended the stairs without any enthusiasm. I looked over my shoulder a few times. Nothing but river and darkening sky. I almost wished the killdeer would call again, just so that there would be a sound of some kind to break up the heavy silence of the sky and the movement of the willows.

  The room below was in the same poured-concrete style as our bunker. It did have a hallway leading off it. It wasn’t opposite the door, but set into the right-hand wall. The chest-high wall we’d seen earlier was an odd construction, dividing the room down the middle, like a privacy screen maybe, or a way of denoting two rooms. It was open on both sides.

  I shone my flashlight over to the left side. Markings on the wall caught my attention, and I raised the beam of light higher.

  On the left-hand wall, in letters eighteen inches high, someone had scratched:

  They Can Hear You Thinking

  I went to my knees. I went slowly, as if I had just decided to sit down, but I could not have stopped. My heart was hammering as if I’d been running, and I could actually see my blood pulsing in my eyes, a rhythmic sparkle in time to my heartbeat. My mind was a screaming blankness.

  “Fuck,” said Simon softly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He grabbed my shoulder. “Carrot…”

  “This is bad.” I sounded so calm when I said it, too.

  “Yeah, it is. Stay with me, Carrot.”

  Gradually t
he panic receded. It’s not that I was less scared, but kneeling on concrete isn’t fun and there was gravel under my knees, and I started to think about how much it hurt, and if I was thinking about the pebble digging into my right calf and the way that one of my sandal straps was twisted under my foot, I wasn’t thinking about… about whoever They were. The ones who could hear me thinking.

  If They’re listening right now, they know a lot more about my sandals than they did before, I thought, and then I began to laugh soundlessly.

  “Carrot, if this was a movie, I’d slap you to snap you out of it, but I don’t think that actually helps, because if you’ve been slapped, then you just have something else to be hysterical about, don’t you?”

  “It’s fine,” I said hoarsely. “I’m fine. I mean, I’m not fine, but I’m… yeah, okay.”

  “It’ll be okay. As long as only one of us freaks out at a time.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I gestured at the wall. “What… who do you think…?”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just some crazy person writing crazy shit.”

  I’d meant Who do you think They are? but I didn’t try to clarify. It’s not as if he was going to know. He knew exactly as much as I did, no more, no less.

  The kids in the bus could hear you thinking? Or people like the man in the boat? Or something we hadn’t met yet?

  the willows it’s the willows they hear you thinking they’re listening right now and rustling their leaves and talking to each other

  I bit down on my lip and concentrated very hard on the rock under my knee.

  “Come on.” Simon helped me to my feet. “Let’s go look farther in.”

  “Farther in. Yes.” Don’t look at the wall. Look over there. There’s another hallway to explore.

  My appetite for exploration had vanished. I wanted to go home. If I didn’t get home soon, the museum would be closed for tourists. I’d let Uncle Earl down. Or something would kill us, and then he’d find a gaping hole in his wall and go through it and find the same thing we had, and then whatever had got us would get him, too.

  I had to not panic so that I could get home and save Uncle Earl from this awful willow-filled Narnia.

  “I hate this,” I said conversationally.

  “You and me both.”

  I took a deep breath. I did not look at the words on the wall. If I didn’t look at them, they didn’t matter. Words are meaningless until you read them.

  Simon and I went around the room together, so close that my hip kept bumping his arm. If you didn’t know better—or at least know Simon—you’d think we were an item, but I’ll tell you, this was the least sexy intimacy I’ve ever had, and I include gynecological exams in that.

  No, we just didn’t dare lose track of each other for an instant because the whole world seemed hostile. And I had a thought somewhere way down, where I didn’t even dare vocalize it, that if I lost sight of Simon, he might come back as something… other. That it would look like Simon and maybe even talk like Simon, but somehow it wouldn’t move like Simon.

  And then I’d be alone.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for another human being’s presence. Not in all the years I was married, certainly. That led to me thinking of how Mark would have handled being here, and I gave a short, choking laugh.

  “Carrot?”

  “Thinking how glad I am that you’re here and not my ex.”

  He snorted. “That bad, eh?”

  “He’d probably still be screaming that none of this was real. Or demanding to see a manager.”

  “I could try that, if you think it would help.”

  “That’s okay.” The words on the wall were behind me now. My ex had done me that much good. If I didn’t look at them, I didn’t need to think about them. Okay. I was okay.

  Little brass tubes littered the floor on the far side of the wall. Someone had fired a gun here. I could imagine how deafening that sound must have been in the enclosed space. You’d be deaf for an hour afterward, if not permanently.

  There were stains on the wall and floor, too, but I couldn’t tell you if that was blood or water or some discoloration of the concrete. There were stains everywhere. If they were all blood, somebody had been systematically murdering people in these bunkers for decades.

  …Thanks, brain. That was a very helpful thought. I’m so glad I had it.

  Hannibal Lecter from Dimension X! screamed my brain.

  “They shot at something.”

  “Or killed themselves,” I said gloomily.

  “I don’t think you need quite so many bullets to kill yourself.”

  This was an undeniably valid point.

  “Through the opening, then,” I said, sweeping my flashlight over toward the opening in the wall.

  And stopped.

  “Oh, God,” I said softly.

  As the light passed over the wall with the door, the one we’d entered from, it caught more letters. They were scratched in the paint, a foot and a half high, just like the other ones. We just hadn’t seen them because we hadn’t looked behind ourselves until now.

  The same blocky shapes. If I had to guess, I’d say the same person had written them.

  Pray They Are Hungry

  I did not freak out again. I looked at the letters. I looked at them for quite a long time, then I looked away and Simon didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything and we both did not say anything so loudly that the room rang with our silence. It felt as if we were standing on the skin of a soap bubble, and if either of us so much as breathed, the bubble would pop and I would descend into a screaming breakdown.

  But neither of us broke the bubble. I turned away from the words and walked into the opening.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was another hallway. I wasn’t surprised. One side dead-ended about twenty feet down. The floor was an alluvial fan of debris, with a thin puddle of water against the wall. I turned my flashlight the other way, joining Simon’s light, which shone against a door.

  More metal, more rust. Standing ajar.

  Simon and I looked at each other. I couldn’t see more than the vague outline of his face and top hat, but that didn’t matter. I sighed, squared my shoulders, and went forward.

  Whatever was in there, I felt as if it couldn’t be as bad as what might be outside.

  (Looking back, I have no idea why I felt that way. They, whatever They were, could just as easily have been something that lived in a bunker and came out. The brass shells could have been from an attempt to kill Them in Their lair. Fortunately, I did not think of that at the time.)

  “English,” said Simon abruptly.

  The non sequitur jarred me out of my thoughts, and, happily, my terror. “What?”

  “The writing was in English. The school bus, too. Not Cyrillic or whatever that was.”

  “Oh.” He was right. I gnawed on my lower lip, still staring at the half-open door. “It was, wasn’t it?” Despite the strange font choice on the bus, it had definitely been English. I’d been so distracted, I hadn’t thought about it.

  Simon hooked his elbow through mine and we made our way down the hallway together. I suspected he had no more desire to lose track of me than I did of him.

  Well, if I don’t make it back, he has to report me missing, and then the cops will have some words about all that LSD…. No, that was unkind. I believed that Simon liked me for my own sake, and vice versa. We were neighbors and maybe even friends.

  God, I hope we’re friends. I’d hate to be trapped in a hellish otherworld with someone I didn’t like.

  Simon touched the door. Either the water hadn’t made it to this side or the rust was more recent, because it actually moved. In grim silence we watched it swing inward.

  After about thirty seconds when we were not attacked by brain goblins, I said, “Well…,” and the two of us, arms still linked, went sideways through the door.

  It was a larger room than the one with the writing, although
most of that was length. The entryway had been divided up into what looked like a kitchen area, with crude counters made of packing crates. I moved my flashlight over five empty cots, two made up with olive-drab blankets, two rumpled and messy, the heads pushed up against the wall. The air smelled vaguely of mildew and dust, but not of rot.

  “People lived here,” I said unnecessarily. I shone the flashlight under each cot in turn—don’t think about eyes looking back at you don’t think about things under the bed don’t think about people hiding here from the things that hear your thoughts—but there was nothing.

  “And left under their own power. At least two of them.” Simon wiggled the beam of light over the unmade beds.

  “Or four, and two were slobs.”

  “Look, I don’t make my bed in the morning either. I’m just going to sleep on it again.”

  “I’m not judging.”

  We made our way down the row of cots. Each one had a footlocker, surprisingly free of rust. It all looked very military, except…

  Simon flicked his flashlight over the wall over the head of one of the unmade beds. There was a bolt in the wall, and a rosary dangling from the bolt.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “No matter where you go, the Jesuits got there first.”

  This struck me as hilarious for some reason. I shoved the side of my hand into my mouth to keep from howling with laughter. Simon chuckled.

  “Right,” I said after a minute. “Right, okay. I’m fine.”

  “That’s the spirit.” He highlighted the very end of the room with the beam. A curtain hung there, so stiff with age and disuse that it cracked like a board when I pushed it aside.

  The cubicle behind it was perhaps four feet on a side. There was a bucket. The contents of the bucket had dried, which was probably for the best.

  “Oh, look,” I said, “there’s a roll of toilet paper left and everything.”

  “How civilized.”

  We left the cubicle. We looked at the cots, then at each other, then back at the cots.

  “What do you think?” Simon said.