The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  “You tell him,” I muttered to the book. “Fuck Marco, anyway. What does he know?”

  There were some disturbing squiggles in the margins, possibly the writer’s attempt to draw the things in the trees. I turned the page in a hurry.

  The commander’s gone. We were going through the bushes and he was right behind me, but he didn’t come out. We looked for him for hours. Marco thinks it’s a sinkhole but we would have seen a sinkhole.

  Petrov says something in this place got him. Marco wants to go back to the drop point right now but it’s not open so I don’t know what good that’s gonna do. He says they’ll have to open it for us but that’s bullshit. They won’t open it until a week’s gone by, and there isn’t a door for us to hammer on.

  “Now, that’s interesting…,” I muttered. Did Bible writer come from a place where they could open and close the way to the vacuae? It sure sounded like it.

  Which meant… which meant what? That they had invented some kind of technology that opened wormholes to other worlds? Or had they found one of the throats to another universe and figured out how to open and close it, then sent Bible writer and his squad through to see what the hell they were looking at?

  Maybe it wasn’t even some high tech. Maybe they’d found a hole the same way we had and were covering it in spackle and drywall, same as we were. When it was time for the soldiers to come home, they’d pull aside their version of the batik sheet and open it up again. Here I was picturing something with lasers zapping portals in reality, and for all I knew, they were just like Simon and me, muddling through as best we could.

  Come on, Bible, casually mention the details of how you close up the hole, come on, that would be really helpful….

  Bible writer did not see fit to include this in his journal. Instead he detailed Marco’s freak-out and how Steen thought the commander might come back, but that was stupid because the commander was definitely a goner. We got out of Chronicles and clear to Nehemiah on this subject alone.

  I hate this place, I hate this place, I hate this place, the author wrote, and underlined it so fiercely that the scar from the pen left an indentation on the next dozen pages.

  “I feel you, brother,” I muttered.

  It was two in the morning, and tomorrow was a busy tourist day. The after-church crowd on a Sunday was reliably busy, as everybody came into town for brunch and then wandered around looking for something to do. I wanted to keep reading, but it wasn’t as if we were under a deadline. The owner of the Bible wasn’t going to come looking for it. The hole was closed. It was all just morbid curiosity now.

  I shut the book, stuck my foot under Beau, and went to sleep.

  * * *

  In my dreams, I walked down the steps of a bunker. Sturdivant looked up at me, surrounded by a pool of water and viscera, long hair hanging like tree roots.

  “Don’t come any closer,” he warned me.

  “I have to get out of the willows,” I said. “There are things in the willows.”

  He shook his head. “They’re not in the willows. They are the willows.”

  I wanted to explain to him that the distinction was meaningless, that I still had to get away from the willows, but I heard rustling behind me. I turned and the doorway was full of leaves, and something without eyes looked out at me from within them.

  I woke, sitting up in bed, with my throat aching as if I’d been yelling. My heart was hammering and my tongue tasted like metal.

  “Shit. Shit.” I staggered to the bathroom because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. My shirt had hitched up and was twisted around my armpits, and when I hauled it back down, it was clammy with sweat. “Shit.”

  I was moving on autopilot, and when I turned on the tap, it soaked the Band-Aids over my fingertips. They stung angrily. Christ, had I not gotten whatever was on them off?

  “It’s otherworldly flesh-eating bacteria,” I muttered, peeling them off and wincing. “I’m being devoured from the nails up.”

  There was more white goop under my nails. “Please let it not be pus,” I muttered to myself. I’d mostly been joking about the flesh-eating bacteria. Really.

  It came out powdery, like talc. Well, I usually throw baby powder under my boobs at night, so it’s possible that it had gotten down into the Band-Aids. Had I done it last night? I didn’t know anymore. I didn’t know anything. My head hurt.

  I took some aspirin and went to open up the museum. It was a dull morning, busy but boring. I took money, I sold T-shirts. An artist came in and got permission to sketch some of the taxidermy. That happens sometimes, and I’m happy to give the artists permission.

  On a whim, I went to the Wi-Fi spot and searched the internet for how to close a portal to another world. The results said a lot about humanity, but nothing directly useful for my situation. A bunch of links were to spiritual warfare, which Uncle Earl had told me about once, where people think they’re off fighting demons. I suppose that’s one way to make church more interesting, but it all sounded like Jesus LARP to me. (I told Uncle Earl that, which forced me to explain LARPing. If you’ve never tried to describe hitting other people dressed as orcs with foam weapons, particularly to an elderly relative, you haven’t really lived.)

  My phone rang while I was holding it. I didn’t recognize the number, but I usually answer the phone anyway, since you never know when it’s going to be the highway patrol telling you they’ve found a family member wrapped around a tree. (This probably says a lot more about me than I’m comfortable with.)

  “Hello?”

  “Kara?” said a vaguely familiar male voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “Kara, it’s me.”

  “Sorry, who is this?”

  The man on the other end made an exasperated noise, and that was what I recognized, not his voice. “Kara, don’t be like that.”

  “Mark! Sorry, is this a new number? You didn’t come up on the caller ID.”

  “Oh. Yes.” My ex coughed, embarrassed. “Yes, once I didn’t need a family plan, it turned out to be cheaper to just cancel the plan and get a new one than to sort out the switch. Sorry, I didn’t realize I hadn’t…”

  He hadn’t needed a family plan anymore because I wasn’t on it. Right. I watched the front door while he rambled on about his new phone. A small knot of tourists ambled by, then Kay on her way to the Black Hen. “Yeah, it’s fine. What do you need?”

  “I don’t need anything.” He sounded nonplussed. He was the magnanimous one in the relationship, the one who’d supported me without complaining, who had given so much in the divorce, had offered me the house, everything. We had our assigned roles in the drama, and I wasn’t playing mine correctly. “I wanted you to know that I’m selling the house.”

  “Okay.”

  Kay came back out of the Black Hen and opened the door to the Wonder Museum. I pointed at my phone and then at my coffee cup and made pleading gestures. She smiled, took the cup, and went to get me a refill. Goddamn, I liked Kay.

  “I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “I mean, it’s your house. You can sell it if you want to.” We’d refinanced to take my name off the mortgage as soon as the divorce proceedings started. Thanks to a rather shady initial mortgage, there was maybe a thousand dollars’ worth of equity in the place, tops, and I’d already used my share to pay down my credit cards.

  “Yes, but…” He was getting frustrated now. One of Mark’s great character flaws was that he’d have an idea in his head about how a conversation would go, then get upset when it didn’t go that way. “You loved that house.”

  “Yeah?” I tried to remember. Had I? Probably. It seemed like a very long time ago now.

  Jesus Christ, there was a portal to hell in the wall and this asshole was expecting me to have performative emotions over the phone for him. I didn’t have time, and I certainly didn’t have energy. “I’m sure somebody else will love it, too. It’s fine.”

  “Kara…”

  What did he wan
t from me? Was I supposed to burst into tears and tell him to keep it as a shrine to our failed marriage? “Do I need to sign anything?”

  “No, but… look, is this about Riley?”

  Riley? My brain tried to sort out who the hell Riley was, and all I could come up with was the dog that belonged to the neighbors two doors down. “The chocolate Lab? What about him?”

  A long, long silence. I was pretty good at reading Mark’s silences, even now, and this was the I-don’t-know-if-I-should-be-mad-or-not one. “Is that a joke?” he said finally.

  “One of us is very confused. I’m not sure which one.”

  “Riley,” he said in clipped tones, “the woman I’ve been seeing.”

  Oh. Huh. I’d been right. How ’bout that?

  I did a quick inventory of my soul and realized I didn’t even feel righteous indignation. He was in another state. He would have been awful at pretty much everything about the current situation. I realized, with sudden intense relief, that I did not need to explain it to him. He never had to know. He could go hang out with Riley.

  Ladies, get you a man who can handle a portal to hell without freaking out.

  “Kara?”

  “Didn’t know. Good for you.”

  Another throat-clearing noise, the defensive one he used when he realized he had just put his foot in it. “Oh. I thought, since I’d said something online, and you’re always…” He trailed off.

  I decided I was not here for the implied criticism. “Only Wi-Fi in this place is at the coffee shop. Look, I’ve got some customers here, I gotta go. It’s fine about the house. If I need to sign any extra papers or something, just mail them to the museum. Bye.”

  I hung up. Kay returned to find me glaring at the phone.

  “Trouble?” She handed me my newly warmed-up coffee.

  “You are a saint. No, just my ex.”

  “Do you need an alibi for the next few hours?”

  “Ha! No. He’ll make some nice woman very miserable someday. Today, apparently.” I slugged back the coffee. “How are you doing?”

  She launched into a saga about her extended family’s legal battles, which were almost Medici-like in their complexity and malice. I listened, fascinated, to the tale of an estranged aunt storing cats in the house vacated by her late grandfather, when said house was supposed to be on the market, and the Realtor opened the door and ten feral cats bolted out. “A litter box in every room. None of them changed in months.”

  “Jesus.” I had a strong urge to go scoop Beau’s litter box, even though I had just done it that morning.

  By the time more tourists arrived and Kay excused herself, I had been cheered into a better mood. Other people’s horrible relatives are remarkably soothing. You can be comfortably appalled without having to deal with them yourself.

  I closed up the museum, went next door to mooch Wi-Fi, and worked on logos. I had a client who didn’t know what she wanted but would know it when she saw it. This phrase fills every designer with intense dread. On the other hand, I was billing by the hour and she paid the invoices on time, so there was that.

  I waited until a gap in the tourists and told Simon about the Bible.

  “Creepy,” he said.

  “Do you want to read it?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “Show me?”

  I opened to a relevant page. He took one look at it and snorted. “Yeah, no. I’ll go even blinder if I try to read that handwriting. I gotta use the giant font on my ebooks already. Give me the highlights.”

  “They’re stuck in the willows and the commander vanished.”

  “…We have a different definition of highlights.”

  I glanced around to make sure that there wasn’t a customer lurking unseen in the corners. “They saw a lot of the same stuff we did.”

  Simon was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I mean, that doesn’t surprise me, really, but I’m glad it wasn’t just us. Except I wish it hadn’t happened to anybody else, you know?”

  I did indeed. After the Black Hen closed, I opened up the Bible again. “All right, bud,” I muttered. “Let’s see what happens to you now….”

  We found the commander today. Something got him. It was the same thing that left all the holes all over the islands. Big funnel shapes in the sand, except they were all over him instead. No blood, just these cones scooped out of him and the edges all red. There was one through the side of his head and you could see his brain and skull all neat lined up layers like a sandwich.

  Marco puked. Petrov thought it was some kind of weapon, but Steen pointed out it was the same as the ones in the sand. Fuck fuck fuck I want a cigarette!! I want out!

  I set the Bible down and walked to the bathroom, and then, much like the absent Marco, I heaved my guts up.

  Big funnel shapes in the sand…

  They hadn’t been ant lions.

  They’d been everywhere.

  The marks had been on every sandspit. They’d been on practically every surface that wasn’t concrete or stone. We’d been walking through Their footprints with every step.

  I went back to my room and shoved the Bible under my bed. Two pages and I couldn’t take any more. I was out. Reading it felt like watching a snuff film in slow motion. I knew they were dead. Somewhere in there, the writer had written the last entry in the Bible, set it down, left the bunker, and gone out into the willows. I didn’t want to go back there. I wanted my time in the willows to be over and done and not a thing that was still happening to me every time I closed my eyes.

  * * *

  There was an ancient VCR in one of the back rooms, and some home videos. I shoved one in. In another place, I might worry that I was going to locate Uncle Earl’s porn stash, but here…

  Tinny music played and I watched the famous footage of a guy in a Bigfoot suit walking across the forest. Then I watched it again, slowed down, while a guy in a lab coat pointed to various things and explained that absolutely nothing we were seeing could be explained by someone wearing a rubber suit. This bit here was definitely a muscle, not a suit. This was not a seam. He pointed to the seam several times while telling me how clearly it was not a seam.

  When that video was done, I watched The Search for Bigfoot, Behind the Red Eyes (that was a Mothman video), Bigfoot Unveiled, Loch Ness: Home of Mystery, and a documentary on the phenomenon of phantom kangaroos. (People in America see kangaroos a lot, often in areas completely devoid of kangaroos. I don’t know if this says more about kangaroos or Americans.)

  I fell asleep sitting in the back room with Beau on my lap. When I woke up, the tape had played all the way through and the screen was a soft blue. I staggered to my bedroom and slept for the next few hours, fitfully, dreaming of Bigfoot walking through the willows and turning away, while things hummed and buzzed and screamed overhead.

  I woke with a dreadful crick in my neck, probably from sleeping in the chair, and slammed down some coffee and aspirin. I did my quick walk-through of the museum before opening, partly to make sure the cat hadn’t barfed anywhere, mostly, if I was being honest, to make sure that the hole was still closed.

  The upper floor was quiet.

  “Nothing to see here,” I muttered, and turned to go, then I saw a flicker of movement.

  The batik sheet belled out as if a breeze moved behind it.

  It was the most innocent thing in the world. I stared at it for upward of a minute, watching the pattern of blue spirals ripple gently. The sheet went out to the edge of the raccoon taxidermy case, and there it stopped, but without a doubt air was coming in behind it.

  It’s an air vent overhead, I told myself, not believing it even as I thought it. If there had been a vent, it would have been blowing the last dozen times I’d come back through here.

  I picked my way across the room as carefully as if it were a minefield. It seemed very important to set each foot just so, very precisely, as if I might stumble and fall through the world.

  You fell through the world once alrea
dy….

  The giant river otter bared his fangs in the case. I trailed my bandaged fingertips along the cold glass and it hurt a little, but I didn’t stop.

  As slowly as I walked, though, I could not stop myself from finally reaching the other side. I stared at the wall, at the batik moving softly in the unseen breeze.

  You have to look.

  You have to look.

  It’s not like Medusa, looking won’t kill you. But you have to look.

  I reached out and pulled the batik aside.

  There were huge gouges in the wall patch. It looked as if someone had tried to dig it out with his or her nails. I stared at it for a long time, then down at my own bandaged fingertips.

  The stuff under my nails hadn’t been dirt. It had been plaster dust.

  I am still amazed at how calm I was. I felt as if ice had glazed over my mind and my nerves, six inches thick, and all my emotions and most of my thoughts were on the other side.

  Calmly, very calmly, I studied the gouges. Part of the board had been ripped down. Was it large enough to fit through? Had I actually gone through into the corridor, in those dreams where I was sleepwalking?

  No. No human could have fit through that. Even Beau would have had a difficult time.

  I let the batik drop back down over the hole. I pushed the raccoon case back into position. Something rattled on the floor as I moved the case, and I reached down mechanically to pick up the stupid otter carving. How many times had I had to pick it up? It seemed like it was always rolling off something. It didn’t want to lie flat.

  The top of my mind was able to think about the difficulty of cylindrical carvings. Under the ice, I was screaming, but that was fine. That was miles away.

  I went downstairs. I picked up Beau, who was puzzled, but draped his paws over my shoulder to see what happened next. I picked up my car keys in my free hand. I had no thought anywhere in my mind except to get in the car and drive away until I ran out of gas and to never, ever, ever come back.