The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  I won’t say that I didn’t cry for about twenty minutes, standing in the hot water, because I did. But it was okay. I was home. I could cry if I wanted to. Nothing was going to hear me and come and turn me inside out.

  Beau was in a mood and not inclined to cuddle. I hugged Prince awkwardly instead. Taxidermy isn’t terribly huggable, but I needed to hug something. I put my forehead against his carefully painted muzzle and said, “I’m home. I made it back,” and let out a dry sob of horror and joy and frustration.

  Just a girl and her giant stuffed elk head. Nothing weird going on here.

  Maybe if I were less weird, I would have had nightmares and screaming horrors, but in fact I fell down and slept without so much as a dream.

  * * *

  I woke up with ten minutes to spare before the Wonder Museum opened. I almost went back to bed, but the irrational guilt that I hadn’t opened yesterday—despite a truly extraordinary reason!—nagged at me. I got up, ran a brush through my hair, threw on fresh clothes, and staggered out to flip the sign.

  One of the regulars at the coffee shop came by to ask why we’d been closed yesterday. Kay was a wiry woman with short hair and an angular face. In a fanciful moment, I once compared her to one of those puzzles where you stare at the brightly colored lines and move your head around and suddenly it’s a spaceship or a cheetah or something. At the exact right angle, Kay is stunningly beautiful; then she turns her head or you blink and she goes back to being like the rest of us. It’s a neat trick.

  (I mentioned this to Simon a while back, and he said those puzzles don’t work for him because of his eye and also he’s not into women, but he’d take my word for it.)

  “You okay?” Kay asked. “Both you and the Hen were closed up yesterday. Bryce was convinced you’d both been murdered.”

  “Had to run Simon to the ER. He had an allergic reaction to one of the flavored syrups, and I know that sounds just too stupid for words, but I went over to get my morning coffee and he’d keeled over behind the counter.”

  “My God!”

  “I know, right?” I paused. “Um… this is going to sound horribly insensitive, but I slept later than I should have. Could I beg you to grab me a cup from next door and bring it back?”

  “Of course,” said Kay, as somberly as if I were entrusting her to throw a magic ring into a volcano.

  She came back with coffee before I woke up enough to worry that Simon wouldn’t remember the absurd cover story we’d come up with, but nothing in Kay’s manner indicated that he’d told her I was lying. Instead she set the coffee down and said, “He looks pretty ragged.”

  “Simon?” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, he was pretty knocked down by the allergies, but he’s probably still better dressed than I’ll ever be.”

  Kay laughed. “How’s your uncle?”

  “Oh, you know. Just out of surgery. Mom says it went well, but it’s early yet.”

  Kay nodded. I thanked her for the coffee and she went back next door to drink her own coffee and work.

  It was a slow morning, thank God. Mr. Bryce came in and told me that next time I had to leave, he’d be happy to run the museum. I smiled and thanked him and silently vowed to do so over my dead body. The UPS guy had left a box yesterday, which, upon opening, was nothing but birdhouse gourds and dried cane toads. I didn’t even bother to catalog them individually, just noted them as toads, lot of 8 and gourds, lot of 4. My spreadsheet was getting lengthy.

  Narnia, hole to. Willows, lot of ten million. Them, number unknown.

  There were no customers, so I didn’t feel bad at all about sliding off the chair and down behind the counter and wrapping my arms around my knees and letting tears slide down my cheeks.

  This is normal, I told myself. This is totally normal. The world completely turned upside down and you were scared and you had to be competent and not freak out. Now you can freak out again and it’s just taking a while to all break loose. You’re fine. This is normal.

  Beau came by to see why I was on the floor. He head-butted my hand, which was rather like being affectionately punched. I rubbed his ears and he purred his gravelly purr at me.

  “At least I’m not crying over my marriage,” I told him, and started laughing.

  CHAPTER 14

  After the museum closed, I went next door to check on Simon. He looked hollow eyed and tired, but he was still there. He raised his coffee mug in salute and I leaned against the counter. There were customers, so I couldn’t say Oh my God, did that really happen?

  Besides, I knew it had really happened. The olive sweater from the bunker was still lying across the chair in my bedroom. I could have hallucinated a lot of things, but that sweater was real.

  He slid my coffee across the counter and I fist-bumped him awkwardly, which was the best I could do. He nodded. So did I.

  “After… uh… you close up…?” I raised my eyebrows. The customers probably thought I was propositioning him.

  “Yeah.”

  I’d brought my laptop over and stared at the screen. My cursor hovered over the search bar, but what the hell was I going to search for? People visiting other worlds?

  I tried it, on a whim, and got three ads for the Church of Latter-day Saints and a whole bunch of videos about alien cover-ups. Alien willow trees got me a list of invasive species taking over Australia.

  I searched for Byricopa County. The search engine decided that I must mean Maricopa County and began showing me school districts in Arizona.

  I looked up vacuae.

  It was Latin, to no one’s surprise. The feminine form of vacuus, which was the plural of vacuum. I scrolled through the various definitions: empty space. An empty space, one practically exhausted of gas or air. A vacant space. See also emptiness, see also vacant, see also, see also, see also.

  One definition far down the list caught my eye: space unfilled or unoccupied, or apparently unoccupied.

  Apparently unoccupied.

  The willow world had been full of apparently unoccupied spaces that were nevertheless full of… something. The bus driver. The children. The thing that had walked past us.

  I lifted my head from the wall and dropped it back with a slight thunk. A customer glanced around to see what the noise was, then pointedly looked away from the weird woman beating her head on the wall.

  Knowing the definition didn’t do me any good unless I could get an internet connection to the other world and see how they use it. Maybe it was something like blood sign, where they were using the same words but it presumably meant something else over there.

  Shit, for all I knew, the military people really had meant a helicopter.

  The customer finished her coffee and left. Simon squinted at his wristwatch, said, “I give up,” and went and flipped the sign to CLOSED.

  “So…” I trailed off because what the hell was there to say?

  Simon held up both hands. “Not yet. Drinking first. I’ve got microwave popcorn and tequila.”

  “You are the brother I never had.” I followed him up the narrow staircase

  Simon’s apartment had huge posters for the Cocteau Twins, Nick Cave, and the Cure, which did not surprise me in the least. The carpet was the vague stained beige of student apartments the world over. That was what it most reminded me of, a college apartment, down to the bright orange linoleum and the secondhand furniture.

  “You should make Uncle Earl renovate this place,” I said, sitting down on a couch that might predate the Wonder Museum itself.

  “He’s offered. But he doesn’t really have the money, and I don’t have anywhere to live while they’re doing it, so I’m not too worried about it.”

  Simon went into the kitchen. I heard beeping noises and then the familiar fireworks of microwave popcorn. It was so strange that I was in a world with microwave popcorn in it. I couldn’t seem to hold it in my head, that there could be willows and Sturdivant and microwave popcorn, all at the same time in the same place.

  But there isn’t, I thought.
They aren’t in the same world. That’s over in the other world, on the other side of the Wonder Museum wall.

  I just wished that the wall between us was more solid than drywall and a batik-printed sheet.

  Simon came out with the bowl of popcorn and a bottle of something called Dragones. He poured an inch into two juice glasses and handed one over.

  “We’re not going to mix it with something?”

  “This is a sipping tequila,” he informed me. “None of your cheap-ass bottom-shelf stuff.”

  I took a sip, expecting agony. Instead it tasted like desert sunlight sliding over my tongue. “Tastes expensive.”

  “When you’ve been to hell, you get to break out the good liquor.”

  I took a handful of popcorn and stared at it. “So it really happened, then.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Simon answered it like one anyway. “Oh, hell yeah, it happened.”

  “Not black mold?”

  “I’m not creative enough to have hallucinated some of that shit, no matter how much mold I huffed.” He leaned back and nudged his backpack with his boot. “And there’s one of those FRR things in here. I don’t think black mold can make MREs from another universe.”

  I groaned, remembered the Bible I’d stashed in my own backpack. “Yeah, me too. What do we do?”

  He poured out more tequila. “You’re asking me? It’s your family’s museum.”

  “You’re from Florida. There’s got to be more holes to hell in Florida than any other state.”

  “Touché.” He clicked his glass against mine, presumably for the honor of Florida’s hellmouths.

  We ate popcorn. I drank more distilled sunlight. “There’s something that’s bothering me, though,” said Simon finally.

  “What, only one thing?”

  “Heh. No, but, Carrot—what the hell kind of tourist knocks a hole in the wall that just happens to lead to another universe?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again and finally just drained my tequila because I realized that I didn’t have an answer.

  * * *

  That night I dreamed I was in the concrete corridors again. Bits of grit rolled under my bare feet. It was dark, but there was a silvery willowlight coming from the open doorway. Oh God, I thought, I’m back here.

  Had I ever left? Had I only dreamed that Simon and I had gotten home safely?

  My fingertips ached. I’d been clawing at the walls with them, hadn’t I? Trying to get out. Or back out. Or back in, depending on which side the willow world was on.

  In my dream, though, I was back in that world. I walked forward, step by step. It was incredibly cold, but whether I was shivering from cold or horror, I couldn’t tell you.

  This is a dream, I told myself. Please, God, let this be just a dream.

  I walked up the concrete steps. Sturdivant stood in the water just outside. I could see his organs spreading around him, like a drop of ink in water.

  This is a dream.

  “Did I get out?” I asked him.

  He shook his head sadly and opened his mouth to say something, but only willow leaves came out.

  * * *

  I woke up, sucking in air in hard, choking gasps. They turned into coughs and I sat up, hacking my lungs out. “Shit,” I wheezed in between gasps. “Shit. Shit.”

  Beau looked at me as if I were an idiot. From his point of view, I probably was. I’d been lying there in bed and suddenly woke up choking on my own spit.

  I fell back against the pillows. The sheets were cold with sweat. I’d been having quite a nightmare.

  “Well, no surprise there,” I told the cat. “If I get out of this with nothing more than nightmares, I’ll be astonished. I’ve probably got PTSD. I mean, how could I not?”

  I was not looking forward to finding a therapist to explain that I had PTSD from something that I absolutely could not tell a therapist about. How would I ever try to explain that? Claim I’d been high and had an unbelievably detailed hallucination that was so scary I had actual issues afterward? Was that a thing that happened? What would I even say I’d been on?

  “Two pounds of LSD,” I said to Beau, and snickered. “Yeah, right.”

  I got up to go to the bathroom. In the harsh light, my face looked puffy and I had dark circles under my eyes.

  “Yeah, well, who wouldn’t?” I splashed water on my face. Just a dream. It had just been a dream. I was out. I was safe.

  I climbed the stairs to the upper floor and looked over at the batik. It hadn’t moved. The raccoon case in front of it was undisturbed.

  Just a dream.

  What kind of tourist knocks a hole in the wall that happens to lead to another universe?

  I went back to bed.

  * * *

  My fingertips were raw the next morning. I stared at them blankly, as if they belonged to someone else. There were gray half-moons under my nails, as if I’d been digging in dirt, and the skin was red and sore, with tiny blisters.

  “Now how the hell did I do that…?” I said aloud. Beau, passing by, gave me the good-natured but contemptuous look that cats reserve for humans they like.

  In my dream, I had had bloody fingertips from clawing at the walls, trying to escape.

  It was a dream it was just a dream it didn’t really happen I wasn’t really there….

  Well. One of the things that doesn’t really come up if you don’t work with a lot of stuffed moose heads is that taxidermy is a nasty business. A lot of the older skins are preserved with chemicals that are so banned now that you can’t even say their names without a permit. I had been digging around in boxes for the catalog and handling a lot of taxidermy. Something could have reacted with something else and left my fingertips looking god-awful.

  “And that would explain the dream,” I told Beau. “I had sore fingers, so my brain added that into the dream.”

  The only three universal home remedies in the South are Epsom salts, Vicks VapoRub, and whiskey. This did not seem like a Vicks VapoRub situation, and it was a little too early in the day for whiskey. My head was surprisingly clear after the tequila, but I didn’t want to tempt fate. I found some Epsom salts under the bathroom counter and filled the sink. My fingertips stung. I rubbed them gingerly with a washcloth and dug up Band-Aids. Uncle Earl being the sort of person he was, the Band-Aids had little angels on them and a Bible verse on each backing paper. I wrapped Jeremiah 17:14 around my left thumb, shaking my head.

  Typing on the spreadsheet didn’t seem like a good idea this morning. I went next door to the Black Hen for a muffin and coffee. No one was in yet, thankfully.

  “You doing okay?” I asked Simon.

  “Nightmares,” he said tersely. He had dark circles under his eyes, but had managed to hide it nicely by applying so much black eyeliner that he looked very Undead Chic.

  “Me too,” I sighed.

  He forced a smile. “Given… everything… it’d be amazing if we didn’t have them. But I’ll be glad when things…” He waved his hand near his temples, as if unsure what word he wanted. I got the gist. After a minute he said, “Have you checked the patch?”

  I nodded. “All the stuff we put in front of it is still there.”

  “Good.” He stared down into his coffee. “I keep feeling it there. Like knowing there’s a wasp in the room, except in the next building over. Whenever it slows down in here, I can just… feel it.”

  “The hole is closed. Isn’t it?”

  Simon gave me a long, unreadable look. “What do you think would happen if we pried that patch off?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. I was hoping that the other side of the wall was just concrete now, that it had turned solid by whatever extradimensional magic let it be plaster on one side and six inches of concrete on the other. “I guess we could try to make a better patch…. It’d take us weeks to move enough concrete to fill the hallway, though. Uncle Earl would be back by then.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t figure something out.” Simon frowned into hi
s coffee.

  “Maybe it’s fixed and the way’s closed,” I said hopefully. And then, rather less hopefully: “Maybe it’s still right there on the other side of the wall and always will be.”

  “That’ll make it fun the next time we need to work on the HVAC system.”

  “If we were smart, we’d probably start running and never come back here.”

  “Somebody’s gotta watch the coffee shop.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “And I can’t bail on Uncle Earl. Even if I told him, he’d never leave the museum. It’s his whole life.”

  That was what it came down to. I couldn’t afford to go anywhere, and even if I’d had all the money in the world, I couldn’t leave Uncle Earl to the mercy of the willows. How long can you really live in a building without having to get inside one of the walls? How long before a tourist bashed into something again, or the pipes needed work, or Earl tried to hang something too heavy on a nail and tore it out of the wall and suddenly there’s a pinhole leak from our world into the next? He’d go in and find the skeleton and he really would call the cops and then everything would get very weird, very quick, and the best scenario was that Uncle Earl would lose the museum and the FBI or the military or somebody would take it over and also Simon would wind up going to jail for two pounds of LSD.

  Hell, even if we pulled the skeleton out and barricaded the metal door, Uncle Earl was bound to find the door eventually, and he wouldn’t even have a token conversation about its being a horror movie, he’d take a jackhammer to that thing in hopes Bigfoot was behind it.

  “If only we knew why it had opened, or how far it goes…,” I said, digging my nails into my scalp. Simon had been right. I couldn’t really believe that a careless tourist had knocked a hole in reality with their elbow.

  So what had happened? How had it opened up? Accident? Fate? Had some nefarious being come to the museum disguised as a tourist and tried to open a way to another world?

  I had a sudden image of a willow wearing a trench coat and dark sunglasses saying, “How do you do, fellow humans?”—and I fought down the urge to giggle hysterically and then start screaming and never, ever stop.