The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “Heads up,” murmured Simon, looking past me. A moment later the front door banged open and a couple of tourists came in, hunting for coffee.

  “What time does that place next door open?” one asked. “It looks wild!”

  “It looks like a junk heap,” grumbled her companion.

  I took my coffee, gave them both a bright smile, and said, “I’m just about to open up!”—and left Junk Heap Guy turning red in the middle of the coffee shop.

  * * *

  Junk Heap Guy and his girlfriend were the first two customers, although Junk Heap couldn’t meet my eyes. She bought two T-shirts and a souvenir mug, possibly by way of apology.

  Brief flash of pettiness aside, I truly didn’t care. I had bigger fish to fry. World-size fish. I’d joggled my own brain, talking about how far the hole went, because we didn’t know, did we? We’d cut the hole bigger, right where it was, but we were enlarging the existing hole, not making a new one.

  What would happen if we went six inches over? Would we cut a hole into the corridor, six inches farther on, or would we find ourselves looking at insulation and studs?

  Did I dare to experiment?

  I gulped.

  “It can’t be every wall,” I muttered to myself. I was supposed to be working on my spreadsheet, but I’d been staring off into space for ten minutes. “Can it?”

  The two customers had left. I grabbed a screwdriver from the junk drawer behind the counter and tried to think of a chunk of wall that no one would miss. Not my bedroom… if it did make a hole to the willows, the last thing I wanted was that in my room. Not the bathroom, either. I’d never crap peacefully again.

  Behind the grizzly bear. There’s a space there, if you hold your breath and wiggle through, and while it shared the same wall as the original hole, it was a story down and a dozen yards away.

  The bear’s glass stare looked over my shoulder, one paw raised in salute. I patted his flank absently as I passed. Uncle Earl used to give him a high five every morning when opening the museum. The bear was old and the fur mostly hid that one of his legs wasn’t attached as well as it could be. Uncle Earl had said that he related to that more and more, the older he got. I got down on my hands and knees and punched the screwdriver through the wallboard behind the bear.

  I had to wiggle it a bit to make the hole large enough to press my cell phone up against the gap and get the flash as well. “I’ll spackle this later, I promise,” I muttered to the bear, or possibly to the absent Uncle Earl.

  I pulled the phone back out and pulled up the photo. My heart was pounding, and not just because crawling around behind the bear took some effort.

  The photo was of a narrow space a couple inches deep, with a layer of fluffy, mouse-eaten insulation. The flash had washed out everything, but it definitely was the inside of a wall, not a concrete corridor in a world made of willows.

  I sagged back against the bear and wiped away tears of unexpected relief.

  CHAPTER 15

  Over the course of the day, in between being cheerful at tourists, I poked test holes in three more places in the Wonder Museum. None of them led to the willows. One had been in the wall directly under the room with the patch, and the only thing I encountered was a piece of pipe that, thankfully, I didn’t damage with my inexpert probing.

  I was not brave enough—not yet—to test the patch behind the batik. Like Simon, I imagined I could feel it there, the wasp in the room, the hole to something else. But now I knew that not every wall in the building led to it.

  I closed up the shop, nuked the last of my leftover takeout, and sat on the bed, staring into space and trying to make sense of things.

  If the willow world and my world were touching in the wall of the Wonder Museum, was it just in that one single place? I put the tips of my chopsticks together and stared at them. Was it a limited space within the wall, the tips just touching? Or were they lying alongside each other, with something between them like… like…

  I picked up the red paper sleeve the chopsticks came in and sandwiched it between the two lengths of bamboo. Beau, who had wandered in looking for treats, watched me do this as if I had completely lost my marbles.

  “Look,” I said to him. “Say this one’s our world and this one’s the willows, and the paper between them is… uh… a barrier of some kind. Whatever keeps one world from bleeding into another one. Like a cell membrane.” (I had a feeling that I was completely butchering high school biology, but it sounded good when I said it to the cat.)

  Beau blinked to indicate that he was with me so far.

  “But there’s a hole in the paper, right? And the little hole in the paper is where the worlds touch. And… um…”

  I stared at the chopsticks for several minutes. But they were just chopsticks and the red paper sleeve was just paper and whatever breakthrough I was trying to make, I wasn’t making it.

  Beau reached out and delicately attempted to tease a cube of pork loose from the pork fried rice. I dropped my model of the multiverse and fended him off.

  Worlds running alongside each other… did that mean that there could be many holes? People could wander into the willows from anywhere? Sturdivant had gone through a kudzu cathedral and into the willows. Had that been a hole somewhere else in the South?

  Maybe it wasn’t alongside. Maybe worlds wrapped around and passed through each other, and then… I don’t know, something something hyperspace and black holes and probably string theory or quantum.

  Maybe I couldn’t get my brain around that many dimensions.

  Maybe all I had was a couple of chopsticks.

  Beau went for the pork again.

  I was reminded of the feeling I’d had in the willows, that the reality I could see was only a skin over vast emptiness. But I couldn’t figure out how to make that fit with my chopsticks and the paper.

  I finished off my meal, still struggling with concepts that were too big for me, trying to find a metaphor that would snap it all into focus.

  Maybe the willows surrounded my world, or maybe my world surrounded it, like a tumor in my world’s flesh.

  Maybe the place of willows was bigger. Maybe it was a lot smaller. There was no way to tell, short of going back with surveying gear, and there wasn’t enough money on earth to get me to go back there. Not after seeing Sturdivant.

  “No, tumor’s not the right metaphor,” I said. Beau, perched on the end of the bed, glanced up at me to see if I was saying any important food-related words. “It touched other worlds, didn’t it? Like… uh…”

  I’d dropped my bag in the corner earlier. Now I dug inside. Two FRRs in foil, and a small, rectangular book with onionskin pages.

  I picked up the Bible and stared at the soft, pebbled cover.

  What a profound, astonishing discovery. Another world. Another universe. And here was physical proof, held in the palm of my hand.

  And it was so profoundly, utterly useless.

  Hell, for all I knew, it was profoundly inimical, not just useless. There might be a disease on the cover, something slow incubating that I had picked up from touching it, and in a few days it would wake and destroy my entire species because none of us had the antibodies for it.

  “Well, if not this, then the porn magazine,” I said to Beau. “That’s way more likely to have been covered in diseases.” Beau, untroubled by human depravity or the potential for human eradication, purred.

  “It’s not like I could do anything about it anyway. I’m sure they’d love me at the CDC. ‘Pardon, but I went to another world and I think I’m maybe infected with a superbug that will kill us all.’ I bet they’ve heard that one before.”

  Beau closed his eyes, presumably agreeing that the CDC was unlikely to be helpful.

  “Anyway, if people made it back before, then… then… what?” We couldn’t be the first, could we? Simon and I were much too incompetent for that. And the soldiers must have had some ability to go through because they’d been sent on a reconnaissance mission with full
kit and supplies. You don’t carry cots and blankets and buckets if you’re just poking your head into a weird hole in the world.

  The vacuae.

  I grabbed my phone and padded out into the dark museum. There was a thump and a disgruntled noise behind me as Beau jumped down from the bed to accompany the human.

  The sunflower visage of His Holiness smiled benevolently down at me as I sat down and leaned against the wall. Beau, never a lap cat, sat close enough that I could reach him if I suddenly realized that I needed to scratch a cat behind the ears.

  My phone picked up the Wi-Fi from the Black Hen and I looked up holes to another dimension. I got a whole lot of stuff about black holes, Stephen Hawking, and CERN. One website that looked fairly respectable and devoid of aliens suggested that I think of the universe as a sheet and a wormhole as a “throat” connecting our sheet to another one.

  “I could really have done without that image,” I told Beau. “Since I think Simon and I very nearly got swallowed.”

  Beau blinked solemnly.

  It worked, though, image aside. The big hole in the wall was a throat to another world. The other holes I’d punched with my screwdriver were just holes.

  Say that all the universes out there were a pile of sheets, and more than one had wormhole-throats leading to the willows. Was it some kind of hub? Or was it just easier to break into the willows somehow? Maybe wormholes were drawn to it.

  Hell, maybe it had been a perfectly ordinary world once upon a time, and then the willows got their roots in….

  “And then the people there built bunkers to try to hold them off,” I said, “but the willows ate everything anyway.”

  That was one possibility. The other was that the bunkers were leftovers from something like a nuclear war and there wasn’t anyone to fight back when the willows showed up. There was no way to know. You’d need an archaeologist to go digging around to find out, and what’s the average life span of an archaeologist in hell?

  Still, the idea of a nuclear war made me add radiation poisoning to the list of things I should be worried about. I tried to chew on my thumbnail and got a mouthful of bandage instead. Jeremiah 17:14. I wondered what the otherworld version was.

  I opened the Bible, held my phone up so the light fell over the page, and ran my bandaged finger down the list of books. I flipped through to Jeremiah… and stopped.

  I hadn’t seen it before, since I hadn’t been going through and actually reading the text, but someone had written on the margins in blue ink. It was a combination of print and cursive and reminded me vaguely of the way my mother wrote when she was in a hurry.

  It would start on one side of the page, at the top, then go down the side and around the bottom. The writer could only fit in one line or so, and the title of the book would still be at the top in midsentence, so the first line I read said, “If Marco doesn’t stop talking every goddamn minute, I’m going to put a slug in his JEREMIAH head and throw him in the river. If we’re all going to die anyway, at least let us have a little bit of quiet.”

  I stared at the page for quite a long time.

  Something about the handwriting reached out across worlds and grabbed me. This was a person. Until then, the contents of the bunker had felt vaguely like movie props, real but impersonal. Suddenly this Bible belonged to a real person who had written in the margins in blue ink and who had really wanted Marco to shut up.

  My cell phone screen went off and left me sitting in the gloom under His Sunflower Holiness.

  I picked up the Bible and went back to my room, trailed by Beau. I am sure he was starting to think that the occasional cube of illicit pork was not worth all this back and forth. Still, he jumped up on the bed, punched my arm with his fist of a skull, and flopped down beside me.

  The writing started at the beginning of First Chronicles, partway through the Old Testament. It was slightly larger then, and the author had drawn a little box around the title of the book.

  I left my journal back home in case I didn’t come back. I thought I could probably go a few days without writing but it’s the second day and I’m already itchy. The problem with taking up a journal to quit smoking is that I want to write every time I want a cigarette and I really really want a cigarette. So I’m writing in the Bible from Mom (sorry Mom) and it feels super weird like I’m drawing on the pews at church and the deacon’s going to come smack me.

  Starting in Chronicles because it’s a chronicle, right? If we make it back home I’ll transfer it over or maybe tear out the pages and glue them into my journal (really sorry Mom) but I don’t know if it’ll even matter. It’ll probably all get classified anyway and they’ll take this away and anybody who talks about the vacuae gets thrown in the stockade.

  Fuck I hate FRRs.

  Going through the vacuae was also super weird. It didn’t feel like anything. All that buildup and the lectures and the big shiny membrane and enough razor wire to shred a buffalo and decontamination and then we just walked through some plastic sheeting and we were here. All that buildup and it didn’t even make a noise. I don’t know what noise I wanted it to make. Glorp or some kinda theremin shit.

  The landscape on the other side of the vacuae looks a little like the bends around the Rio Grande. Gravel spits and bushes and water. Lots more fog though. Marco says it’s like some river up north in Pennsylvania. Marco hasn’t shut up since we got here and he talks in his sleep.

  It’s pretty, anyway, just weird and quiet. (Except for Marco.) You figure you go to another planet and stuff would look different, but no. There’s some birds and some bugs. Steen got super excited over that, taking tons of photos. I wouldn’t mind doing some fishing, but we don’t get to eat it if we catch it. Supply gave us FRRs and we better be grateful! Tax dollars at work!

  Fuck I want a cigarette.

  There was a gap and some doodles, just abstract stuff in blue ballpoint. I set the unexpectedly talkative Bible down and went to get a cup of tea. Uncle Earl started drinking tea in the afternoon because he says that coffee gives him palpitations that late in the day, and then some of his correspondents figured out that he liked tea, so the tiny break room has about fifty boxes of the stuff. The only problem is that they send tea the way they send artifacts. Most of them are old and some of them aren’t labeled except for somebody scribbling TEA on the envelope.

  Hell, for all I know, the owner of a rival museum somewhere sent him poison and has been waiting for years for him to finally reach the critical tea bag and expire. Except I’m not sure if there are any rival museums, and it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to poison Uncle Earl.

  I pulled out a tea bag, sniffed it, put it back, rejected two more that smelled more like silage than tea, and finally found a box of elderly Lipton in the back of the cupboard.

  * * *

  When I returned to the bedroom, Beau had moved to the warm spot on the bed that I had been sitting on. I attempted to pick him up, whereupon he became extremely heavy in that way that cats have, and I gave up. He graciously allowed me half an inch of space on the edge of the bed, so I perched there, armed with my tea and the Bible from another world.

  “Their military sent them,” I said to Beau. “I mean, we knew that, right?”

  Beau blinked slowly. He had indeed known that.

  “But it sounds like they found a hole and then quarantined it off with razor wire and stuff….” Which, I had to admit, was probably sensible. Decontamination, the Bible writer had said. Decontamination, so they didn’t track any foreign diseases into the vacuae? And presumably they’d decontaminate the soldiers again on the way out, so that they didn’t carry diseases back.

  Hell, I’d been thinking about the CDC, but maybe Simon and I had carried diseases into the willows and they’d all get… I don’t know, Dutch elm disease, or whatever the willow equivalent was.

  I had a hard time summoning much grief over this. I love nature and all, but if every one of those willows rotted and died, I’d have considered it a good day’s wo
rk, after what they did to Sturdivant.

  “And what they did to you, my friend,” I said to the Bible writer. He hadn’t made it back, had he? He and the other three had left their gear and a pile of spent brass behind and vanished.

  “Unless they knew where an opening back to their world was, and something spooked them back into it,” I said thoughtfully. Lord knows there was enough in the willows to spook anyone. They could have found that school bus and just turned tail and run.

  This was a more pleasant thought than holding a book by a dead man.

  Speaking of dead men…

  I set the Bible down for a moment, went out to the Wi-Fi spot, and looked up Martin Sturdivant.

  Five pages of search results later, I gave up. Apparently this was not an uncommon name, and also there was somebody in the Civil War who had led a cavalry unit. Entering park ranger and missing into the search engine didn’t give me anything useful. If Sturdivant had been from our world, he was buried deep. Then again, it wasn’t as if thousands of people didn’t go missing all the time. His name could be in some police report that nobody had bothered to put online. And what am I going to do, even if I do find it? Call them up and say that he’s alive, sitting in another universe in a pool of his own intestines?

  I didn’t see that going well. I tried willow world and got a whole bunch of links about geishas, which were apparently called the “flower and willow world.” This was fascinating from an anthropological standpoint, but absolutely destroyed any chance of finding useful information. Adding more keywords about visiting a willow world got me an even split of travelogues and fetishes, which was depressing in a way that had nothing to do with missing park rangers.

  I picked up the Bible again.

  Something weird going on out there. Petrov was on watch and he came down and woke us up. Weird shit in the trees. Everything’s moving, and it looks full of aliens. I don’t know. Marco says it’s not real, but he can fuck off because I know that’s not wind.