“Shut the door, take a cot?”
“I guess that’s the best we’re going to get. Better than sitting in the room out front, anyway.”
The door closed. It even had a dead bolt. We opened and closed the door several times to make sure that we could get it open again, then shot the bolt and turned back to the cots.
“I’d rather take the made-up ones,” I said. “It feels less like I’m sleeping in a dead person’s bed.”
“Maybe they aren’t dead,” he said hopefully. “Maybe they went home.”
“You think?”
“It’s possible. Anyway, we didn’t find any more skeletons.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” I looked at the cot again. “You’re not… um… getting any kind of vibe off these, are you? Like in the bus?”
Simon sighed. “I don’t know what I got in the bus. I just saw you headed for the seats and it was like I was watching someone about to walk off a cliff.”
“You probably saved my life.”
The flashlight beam moved as he shrugged. “It was probably the eye, not me. Sometimes I see things in our world, too.”
“What sort of things?”
He shrugged again. “Not, like, ghosts or anything. Well, I don’t think I see ghosts. I can’t see real people all that well either unless the light’s really good, so for all I know, sometimes I do see ghosts, and they’re just blurry like everybody else.”
I had not previously contemplated the focal length required for ghosts, but was glad to think about that instead of the willows. “Huh. You’d think they’d be really in focus instead.”
“Right? Anyway, mostly what I see are just weird colors around things. Sometimes stuff looks dark that shouldn’t be, although I won’t swear that’s not the depth perception. But nothing like the bus.”
“Tell your twin thanks for me, then.”
“I’ll pass that along.”
I could have let it drop. I wanted to let it drop. But… “Nothing like the bus?”
He groaned. “Did you see the driver?”
“No. I knew something was there, but I didn’t see it. Did you?”
“Yeah.” For a minute I thought he was going to stop there. He shone the light over the door again, as if double-checking that it was closed. “I saw her.”
“Her?”
“Yeah. You know those animations people do, where the cubes turn themselves inside out? They’re supposed to show you the fourth dimension or some shit?”
“Right.”
“It was like that. She was sitting in the chair and then she sort of moved and turned inside out, and she was around the spot she’d been in. But she was looking at me the whole time.”
“Yikes,” I said, which was the understatement of the century. “All I saw was the kids in the seats.”
“She was farther away than they were.” He laughed, although without any humor. “I can’t tell you how far away that wall is, but I could tell you that.”
“What does that mean?”
“How the hell should I know? I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know how any of it works. I don’t even have real depth perception, my brain’s learned to fake it. So that’s all I’ve got. My brain said she was just… farther away.”
Farther away. On the back side of reality, but not pressed against it like the kids had been? “Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
I sat down on the nearest cot. It creaked, but the fabric didn’t seem to be rotted out. The blankets were stiff and dusty. I used my backpack as a pillow, which was lumpy but better than nothing.
“Don’t go out without me,” I said. “Promise me?”
“Christ, no!” Simon grabbed the second cot and dragged it so that it was touching mine. “You neither. I’m not leaving this room without you.”
I slid under the blankets. Nothing bit my toes, and the blankets did not seem to be a cleverly disguised monster devouring me from the ankles up. I switched off my flashlight. I heard Simon’s blankets rustling, then he switched his light off, too.
The room was pitch-black. Really, really black, mine-shaft-on-a-moonless-night black. I stared up into the darkness and then closed my eyes because I didn’t want to think about something hovering above me that I couldn’t see.
Pray they are hungry.
“I hate this,” I said quietly.
“Me too.”
“I was thinking, though…”
“Yeah?”
“About the English writing.”
I didn’t want to think about what had been written in English on the wall, but it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to be lying in the dark with pray they are hungry running through my head anyway.
“Look, you read the Narnia books, right? All of them?”
I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Even the one where they shot the talking horses, and I was pretty pissed about that.”
“Right. You remember Magician’s Nephew? With the Wood between the Worlds?”
I laughed, although without much humor. “I’ve been thinking about that since we got here. It’s like a weird reverse version, isn’t it? Instead of grass with pools of water, it’s a lot of water with little islands of grass.”
“Well, what if it’s like that? Lots of worlds touching this one? Not just ours. And sometimes people find ways through. So you’d get someone from a world that’s a lot different from ours, and they leave graffiti in an alphabet that we don’t know, and then you get people from one that’s almost exactly like ours, and they write in English.”
“Except the school buses are a different color and they use a serif font….” I rolled over on the cot to face the sound of his voice. “Yeah. I can see it. Except we haven’t found any other holes. If we’re in the Wood between the Worlds, we’re real short of pools.”
“Maybe they don’t happen all the time.”
“Maybe they don’t exist at all, and the Cyrillic is just people with bad handwriting from our world. Or this one.” I stared at the dark. “We could be in Byricopa County right now.”
“I thought of that,” said Simon. “But how did the school bus get there?”
“Eh?”
“No road. It’s axle deep in sand. You don’t take school buses off-roading.”
I had no good answer for that. He wasn’t wrong. “But why a hole in the Wonder Museum, of all places?”
“Have you seen your uncle’s museum? If a hole to another world was going to open up anywhere, it’d totally be in your back room.”
I grumbled. Fine, yes. There are weirder places all over the world, but certainly none in Hog Chapel. “Okay, so now we’re positing a whole bunch of… what, parallel universes?”
“Do you have another explanation?”
“Not unless we go back to the black mold, I guess.” I mulled it over. “But who made the bunkers?”
“Dunno. We saw that guy in the boat, maybe there’s a bunch more people somewhere. Or I guess if a school bus can get through, there’s probably a hole big enough for a cement truck from somewhere else. Or maybe they were here already and people just hide in them because…”
He trailed off, which I was grateful for because I didn’t want to think about the because.
“I suppose the people who left these cots could have made the bunkers. They’re that military poured-concrete-type thing. Maybe we can find the military base they came from and get help.”
Simon’s silence was oddly loud.
“Are you about to tell me something I don’t like?”
“Do you really want to tell a military organization from an alternate universe that there’s a big hole to our reality lying around? Seems like a good way to get invaded.”
“…Shit.”
I brooded about the holes and alien invasions for a bit. “We’re assuming a lot here. There’s no hole in this bunker. Or any of the ones we looked in. So far we’ve got exactly one hole and two worlds.”
“What about the bus, though?”
&
nbsp; “I’m not sure adding another universe satisfies Occam’s razor.”
“We saw kids stuck inside seats and a woman turning herself inside out and you want to talk about Occam’s razor?”
“Fine, fine…” I held up my hands, even though he couldn’t see them. “What if they were from a third universe? What would that explain?”
I heard him swallow. “Maybe they got stuck in between.”
“In between worlds?”
“In between… something.”
The skin of the world is very thin and they’re behind its skin pushing out and if they push too hard they make a hole and the hole goes somewhere else.…
“Tomorrow,” I said firmly, trying to drown out the gibbering voice of panic. “Tomorrow we will find our own hole and we’ll go home and we’ll patch up the wall and then we will go to the liquor store and I will max out my credit card and we will drink until we can’t stand up.”
“See, I knew you were my kinda people.”
I closed my eyes and I must have been exhausted, because I fell asleep almost immediately.
* * *
I woke up in the dark. It was impossible to tell what time it was. “Simon?”
“I’m here.”
“Do you think it’s light out yet?”
“We can go check.”
We went together, using only one flashlight. It had occurred to me that conserving batteries might be important. I hated the thought because it meant that we might be here in the dark for a long time, and I didn’t think I could handle that. Sooner or later we’d run out of granola bars and laced coffee.
Pray they are hungry.
We unbolted the door and crept down the hallway. A thin gray light came from the open door at the top of the stairs. Simon turned the flashlight off and we made our way up the steps together, dropping low, the same way we had when watching the boatman.
It was not yet dawn. Maybe we’d slept a long time. Maybe nights were shorter here. Either way, I was definitely late opening the Wonder Museum, and we were going to miss a whole lot of tourist income. The Black Hen, too. If we did get back, we were going to have to come up with a good explanation for the coffee shop regulars.
I knew that it was a stupid thing to be worrying about, but if I was worrying about what to tell people when I got home, I wasn’t worrying about being in a bunker in a nightmare world where children were imprisoned inside their school bus and outside reality. I’m not saying it was a good coping mechanism, just that it was what I had.
The gray light came from the horizon. The fog had lifted, or at least settled far enough that I could clearly make out a horizon line. It was dark and irregular but low against the sky. Trees, not hills. The grayness was less light than absence of dark, a cold, smudgy brightness behind the black lines of the willows.
Without leaving the shelter of the bunker entrance, I couldn’t see if the moon was up. I could make out a few stars, but I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about astronomy. I can find the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Orion’s Belt, and that’s where my knowledge ends. These could be the same stars I knew from home or be wildly different, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. All I knew was that the stars I could see didn’t make up one of the Dippers.
All that said, I suspected that the moon must be up, because the nearest willows shone silver with it.
One of the willow islands was across from and a little to the left of our bunker, and the wind was shaking the trees, sliding through the long silver leaves, branches moving back and forth, back and forth, while they hissed and whispered and snickered to each other. I did not like the sound.
The next island farther back was laced with darker silver, and beyond that they faded into blackness. I strained my ears for the sounds of insects or night birds or frogs or anything, but there was only the hiss and chatter of willows.
Simon’s hand closed over my forearm. I glanced over at him, and in the dim light I could see his expression was strained.
“Do you see it?” he whispered, so softly that it could have been mistaken for a broken breath.
I almost said See what? But then I saw it and didn’t need to ask anymore.
Something was moving in the willows.
CHAPTER 10
Simon and I drew together instinctively, shoulder to shoulder, watching the willows twist and sway in the wind.
My first thought was that my eyes were playing tricks on me. The willows were full of irregular shapes, their branches braiding and unbraiding, gaps forming and vanishing as they moved. But in the gaps, in the spaces made between them, I could see more.
There’s a concept in graphic design called negative space. It’s all the spaces where you haven’t put something. If I draw a figure eight, for example, the negative space would be the two holes and the space around the outside of the lines. A good designer can use that to advantage. If you’ve ever looked at the FedEx logo, the negative space between the E and the x forms an arrow pointing forward.
It isn’t always your friend. I once did a design where the negative space… well, let’s just say it had a certain male anatomical quality to it. Sometimes when you’ve stared at something for too long, you miss the really obvious.
Whatever was in the willows, it was made of the negative space between the branches. I don’t know if I can explain it better than that. As the branches moved and swayed and the leaves shifted, they made shapes in all the places that they weren’t.
Those shapes were full of bodies. Not human bodies. Not even physical bodies as I understood it. But something there nonetheless. Silver light, though here and there I caught glimpses of bronze, patterns of light and shadow moving up through the willow branches. They rose up from the sand and slithered through the willows, huge and inhuman, shifting like smoke.
I tried to focus on one, hoping that it would resolve into just an optical illusion, just the play of wind and leaves. Like clouds, I thought. Like shapes in clouds. That’s all it is.
The body I focused on was faceless. Its neck stretched out, twisting like the willow stems, and I could not tell if it had two legs or ten or a hundred, if its arms were really arms or if they were tree roots. It slipped up from the sand, squirmed eyelessly through the willows, while its shape changed as leaves fell across it.
When it reached the top of the willows, it rose up in a drift of amber light, joining dozens—hundreds—of other shapes rising from the other willows. They twisted, hardly visible, above the bushes, then they vanished.
One, I could have explained away. Dozens were harder. And the colors were not quite right and they were too clearly bodies, even if they weren’t bodies of anything that I understood.
Are these Them? Should I be frightened?
The figures did not seem to notice we were watching. If they could hear us thinking, they didn’t care. They were just there, twisting, streaming upward, a vision I didn’t understand.
“That can’t be real,” I whispered to Simon. “It’s an illusion. It’s just the light.”
“Black mold,” he said, not as if he believed it. That was understandable. I didn’t believe it was a trick of the light, either, yet the light seemed to be part of it, as if the light were bringing the spaces in the willows to life, animating them, giving them form and substance beyond what they had possessed.
I was not as frightened as I should have been. The things rising up through the willows did not seem to have anything to do with us. There was nothing human about them, nothing I could get a grip on to fear. Even the long, sinewy shapes looked like willow roots, not like tentacles. Everything in a Lovecraft story has tentacles. These weren’t like that. They didn’t look like squid or werewolves or brain goblins. They looked like the dreams of trees cast in bronze. What I felt was more like wonder than terror.
It was hypnotic to watch them, like staring into a fire as it burned. Simon and I must have lain across the steps watching for an hour at least, long enough for me to start shivering
, for the concrete to leave flat red marks on my elbows and knees. The dawn light grew no brighter, but stayed a sullen gray mark on the edge of the world.
Then they vanished.
We both jerked upright, as if we had fallen asleep.
Something went through the willows. Not a ghost this time. Not a shape made of the wind and the leaves. This was solid and dark, and we saw the branches bow down as it passed.
The wonder snapped like a bone breaking, and horror rushed in. Whatever was moving was dark and solid, and the willows bent down as if they were worshipping it. We watched it move through the bushes as if it were going somewhere, rapid and businesslike.
Then it, too, was gone.
I had no problem believing that the solid thing had been one of Them, whatever They were. Every animal instinct screamed at me to get away from it, to run away and curl into the smallest ball I could and pray that it went away.
The feeling didn’t lessen when it vanished. If anything, it got worse. They were somewhere and now I couldn’t see Them and that meant They could be anywhere, They could be moving around behind the world, like the kids on the school bus, They could suddenly come out right on top of us….
By mutual unspoken consent, Simon and I backed down the stairs together. The silvery willowlight gave him an ashen pallor, but I’m not sure if regular light would have made him look any better.
We didn’t talk until we had retreated to the far room and bolted the door. The skreek of the bolt made me shake with relief. I knew that was ridiculous—the things we had been watching were made of smoke and silver light, they could have slithered under the door—but the bolt divided the world into in here and out there, and as long as they were out there, we would be safe. Surely.
“What was that?” whispered Simon. “What did we just see?”
“The dark thing at the end or the things in the bushes?”
“The ones in the bushes can’t have been real,” croaked Simon. “Not really real.”
I just looked at him.
“They can’t,” he said, as if I’d argued. “Look—shit—one time when I was high, I watched the clouds turn into ghost trilobites and eat the moon, okay?”
The Hollow Places Page 9