The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  The bell over the door chimed as it opened, and two tourists came in. You could tell they were tourists because the first words they spoke were “Isn’t this place cute?”

  One does not talk about rat infestations in front of the customers. One woman had a T-shirt that said WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA, and the other was wearing a red hat. They cooed over the charming decor and the charming barista, who they appeared to think was part of the decor. Simon, who can be much more pleasant under pressure than I can, responded appropriately. World’s Greatest Grandma ordered a half-caf latte with sugar-free hazelnut syrup. Red Hat ordered a black coffee.

  I checked the time, sighed, and got to my feet with the help of my cane. World’s Greatest Grandma saw me, and I braced myself for suggestions of hemp oil and/or acupressure.

  “Honey, you’re too young to need a cane!”

  One does not yell at tourists. One does not. It is economically counterproductive. Even when they start giving you their opinions about things that are none of their goddamn business. But I had been under a lot of pressure lately, and something in the back of my brain went ping! and I opened my mouth and said, “That’s not what the guy with the baseball bat thought.”

  From behind the latte machine, I heard Simon choke.

  World’s Greatest Grandma stared at me, her mouth falling open so wide that I could admire her dental work. Red Hat put a hand over her eyes.

  Simon, God love him, had my back. “Did they ever catch that guy?” he asked.

  “Nope. I was lucky, though. They think he might be the guy who killed those women and cut off their”—Shit, what could he have cut off?—“ears. I was just in the wrong street at the wrong time.”

  “Was… was this in Hog Chapel?” breathed World’s Greatest Grandma.

  Even at my most malicious, I couldn’t do that to the other small businesses. “Nah, it was over in Raleigh.” I picked up my coffee, waved to Simon, and hobbled out of the café with my head held high.

  * * *

  It was a slow day. I found no further rats. I made a TV dinner in the microwave, the same kind I’d made for lunch. (I’d found a sale on Swedish meatballs, five for $5. I was going to live on Swedish meatballs until I got scurvy.) I decided maybe it was time to read more of the Bible. I picked it up and propped it open in front of me, and then the phone rang. An unfamiliar number, but just in case someone was dead in a ditch… “Hello?”

  “Kara?”

  Oh. Right. My ex and his new number. Joy. “Oh, hey. What’s up?” Please don’t say we need to talk, please don’t say we need to talk….

  “I thought maybe we should talk.”

  Goddammit.

  “I called back after hours since I know you have customers.”

  “Yeah?” What did he want, a medal for respecting business hours?

  He sighed. “Kara, I know you’re mad.”

  “I am?”

  Fumbling at the other end of the line. He was taking his glasses off. “Don’t be like that. You have every right to be mad, okay? I just wanted to clear the air.”

  “What are we clearing the air about?”

  “Kara…”

  I had not previously realized how much I hated it when he said my name with that inflection. Well, live and learn, as Uncle Earl would say.

  “Mark, once again, I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. It’s late, I’m tired, it was a long day. I don’t want to play Twenty Questions about why you think I’m mad at you. Just get to the point already.”

  “Uh…” He sounded startled. I was going off script again, apparently. “The Halloween party?”

  The words were utterly nonsensical. I had a book in my hands written by a guy in an alternate-universe hell-world full of willows, there were rats in the taxidermy, and my ex wanted to talk about a Halloween party?

  “What Halloween party? Halloween was six months ago.”

  He swallowed audibly. “You didn’t see the photos?”

  “I told you, my Wi-Fi here is terrible.”

  “Uh. Ah. Your mom saw them and commented, so I thought she’d have told you. Uh… apparently I was wrong. I’m sorry to bother you.”

  I leaned my head against the wall, feeling the slick paper of the Mothman poster against my cheek. “Maybe she left a message.”

  “Yeah, uh, maybe.”

  “Mark, in all the years we were married, did I ever rush to answer the phone when she called? You know I don’t talk to her that often if I can help it.”

  “No, you didn’t, I just…” We were way off script now. He’d be pissed about it in the morning and figure out how it had been my fault, but for the moment, he was completely at sea. “I’m sorry.”

  Sweet, blithering Christ, why had I married this guy to begin with? I was starting to think that half of the angst of a divorce wasn’t the loss of stability, it was coming to terms with just how lousy your judgment had been.

  “So what’s the big deal? Why am I mad?”

  “There… um… there were photos of me and Riley at the party. I uploaded a bunch and forgot they were in there.”

  Halloween was a month before I’d been informed we were getting a divorce. Well. So much for two people drifting apart. I could see why my mom had commented. I hoped it was marvelously sarcastic. Mom definitely had her moments.

  “Say something,” said Mark.

  I said the first thing that came into my head, which was “Right, okay.” I stretched my knee. My knee that I’d banged up in another fucking dimension. Running from a monster that might have been a human, only warped and twisted into some kind of monster with teeth like a baboon. And I was supposed to get worked up about my ex making out with some chick at a party before he dumped me?

  “Kara, I’m sorry. I should have been straight with you to begin with. I—we—didn’t mean it to happen. You deserved to know and I’m a piece of shit for not telling you, and…”

  I took the phone away from my ear so I could check the time, then looked at my voice mail. Yeah, my mom had left a five-minute message the night before. Huh.

  Mark was still talking. I wondered how long the call was going to take, then realized I didn’t actually have to deal with it. We’re divorced! I don’t have to fix this! Hot damn, it’s not my problem anymore!

  “Mark,” I said, returning the phone to my ear and cutting him off in mid-guilt, “I really truly do not give a shit right now. Tell me what you want me to say so that we can end this call and I can get back to my dinner.”

  Silence. Then, with a flash of the humor that I really had loved, once upon a time, “I was kind of hoping you’d yell at me.”

  “Fine,” I said wearily. “You’re a cad, how dare you, my heart is forever broken, woe is me. Will that tide you over for now?”

  He snorted. After a minute of awkwardness, he said, “I hope we can still be friends.”

  “Yeah, keep hoping,” I said, and hung up. Then I erased my mother’s voice mail, unheard, and picked up my fork.

  My Swedish meatballs had gone tepid. I found I was genuinely annoyed about that. So my ex had left me for another woman. Just another cold Swedish meatball in the TV dinner of life.

  * * *

  I opened the Bible, which was well into Ecclesiastes by now.

  Fuck it’s been a night. Something tried to get in. It busted through the doorway and Marco emptied a clip in it. We’re all deaf, but it’s dead.

  Didn’t know what it was at first. Looked like a cross between a deer and a chimp, like on all fours. Lower legs just like toothpicks. Marco said it went around the room screaming like a kid but the only thing I heard was Marco screaming before the shots started. Steen got real excited, said it was the first “native fauna” we’d found and pulled its mouth open and then he started freaking out because it had fucking fillings and then Singer looked it over and started losing her shit and yelling for a razor.

  I gave her mine because if she’s gonna slit her wrists she’ll need a lot more than a safety razor but she s
tarted shaving its arm and it had a fucking tattoo on the biceps. A mermaid, the real old-school Sailor Tommy kind. Real distorted, but still there. Then she threw the razor down and started crying and we all stood around real awkward until Petrov finally went and hugged her and told her it was okay.

  It was one of her team, I guess, although he didn’t look like that when he went in. Obviously. He was the first one to vanish, she said, and she thought he was dead but apparently something happened. Marco was yelling that it was a virus and we were all going to turn into that and I’m about to hit him over the head to shut him up but Steen said not to be stupid, Singer would have it too, and she doesn’t look anything like a chimp on stilts.

  “It’s not a virus, Marco,” I said. “It’s Them. They changed the poor bastard.” I wondered what he’d thought in his last minutes, if he’d been hoping that other people would help him, or if They’d done something to his brain and he was like the boatman, only more mobile.

  Singer wants to bury him but we can’t. Petrov told Steen and Marco to take him to one of the other bunkers and put him in. Singer’s crying mad, but she says she knows he’s right.

  I don’t want to go out there but I kind of wish I had because Singer’s crying and I hate it. I’m not good at that. Do I go do something? Fuck.

  I went over and hugged her like she was one of the guys and told her it was all fucked up but she’d get through. She didn’t hit me so I guess it worked. I don’t know. I asked her about her friend and she told me. She was crying for part of it, but his name was Van Verth and his hobby was singing and she kept saying he was just a really good guy.

  Fuck, I’m sorry.

  I tried to say the right things but I just kept thinking that in another month, that’s gonna be me and I’m gonna be telling some stranger that Marco was a good guy but he wouldn’t shut up and Marco’ll be a piece of cooling meat in the next room.

  We have to get out of here.

  “Yeah, you do,” I told him. I knew that he was probably going to die, but I still wanted to see it through. There wasn’t much left, and I needed to know what had happened to my profane, overwhelmed friend in the pages. If nothing else, I’d promised to tell Simon what it said.

  Fuck, I don’t know where to start. Fuck. I can’t. Fuck.

  Singer and I are the only ones left. They got the other three right in front of us.

  We were going back to the vacuae. We did the route yesterday, everybody knew what we were doing. I was bringing up the rear because we thought that’d be the dangerous spot. Ha.

  Ha was underlined so violently it had torn the page.

  We drew straws. Singer was second to last and she started out and then she stopped right in the water and jumped back and grabbed me. She said she heard the noise and that meant the things were there.

  And they got them. Marco was in the water and he just unraveled. These threads came off him and I thought it was his clothes and it was at first but then it was his skin, like something just grabbed a thread and pulled and he was standing in this sort of haze but it was all made out of bits of him. It didn’t happen nearly fast enough. He just kept walking forward with the threads falling off and I hope to fuck he didn’t feel it and then he fell down into the water.

  I wanted to go to him, I was trying to, but Singer was holding on to me and I tried to fight her off but she had hold of my gun and kept saying “It’s over, you can’t fix it.” I kept trying and then she grabbed my ear and pulled. I think she nearly yanked the damn thing off. I decked her and I’d feel like shit about that but she says that’s the only reason we lived.

  Steen went down the same way, I think. I only saw the tail end of it. Petrov came running back, trying to grab Steen and hold him together with his bare hands, and then it got him too. Not the same way. The unraveling started and then there was another noise and a bunch of holes appeared, like on the captain. Singer dragged me back to the bunker by then.

  Singer thinks that means there was more than one of the things out there, maybe different kinds. She says they hear us thinking and the pain was what saved us. We were right out there not three yards away but when she yanked my ear half off, my brain went blank of everything else and then I punched her and that made her brain blank and the things lost us and we got away.

  I can’t. I can’t. Fuck.

  Fuck everything.

  I got up from bed, even though my knee was stiff again, and went to the kitchen. There was a tiny airplane bottle of rum that I’m pretty sure Uncle Earl kept for medicinal purposes. I decided this counted and slammed the whole thing back.

  Poor Bible. Poor Singer. Poor soldiers up against something too big and too awful to deal with.

  I could guess what it was, of course. One of Them had been hungry and the other one hadn’t. That one had been taking the people apart for… for whatever reason. I hoped they were dead. Christ, please, let them be dead, not like Sturdivant, not alive and feeling and lying in long tangled skeins under the water…. Christ!

  My skin crawled. I tossed the empty airplane bottle in the trash and dug through the cupboard looking for another one. No luck.

  Poor bastards. Their vacuae must have been out in the open somewhere. If it had been inside a bunker, they might still be alive. I licked the last stinging drops of rum off my lips. Of course, if their military was just opening a hole at random into the willows, they couldn’t have known.

  There wasn’t much left in the Bible. I didn’t want to read it, but I couldn’t leave the author there. I leaned against the counter, in the harsh fluorescent lights, and read the end.

  The vacuae will open again tomorrow. That was the plan, if we couldn’t get through the first time for some reason. Singer and I are hunkered down. Tomorrow I guess we run for it. If pain makes us harder to spot, I’ll bite my own damn fingers off if I have to.

  We promised not to go back for each other, if one of us goes down. I don’t know if I’m lying or not. I would have run out there for Marco. I couldn’t think.

  I’m leaving this here. If something happens, when they send the next squad through to figure out what got us, maybe they’ll find it and know to get the fuck out. This whole place is a great big feeding ground for… for whatever the fuck these things are. Nothing but death and willows and monsters. Whoever built the bunkers here must have known, for all the good it did them. You don’t see them around here either.

  If I get back, I’ll tell them to close up the vacuae. They won’t listen, but I’ll try. And then I’m going somewhere else, someplace real cold, maybe, where willows don’t grow at all.

  If you’re reading this, just get out. Bug out as fast as you can.

  Good luck.

  I turned the page and that was all.

  Had he made it? Had he and Singer gotten out? I didn’t know. Seemed unlikely that I would ever know. The vacuae he spoke of must not have been terribly far from the bunker where Simon and I had found the Bible, but if it had closed up, how would we know where it had been? It’s not like he was going to stop in headlong flight to write I made it! on a rock or something.

  I chose to believe he’d made it. There had only been the one bunker with their gear. If there had been a second mission sent, surely they’d have found the first one’s and cleaned it up or disrupted it or taken their personal effects, or something. That argued that somebody had gotten back and told them not to send any more people, didn’t it?

  “You made it, buddy,” I told the Bible. “You and Singer both. You probably got married afterward and had ten kids. Or at least lived down the street from each other and babysat the other one’s ten kids.”

  I closed up the book and stared at the cover. A genuine artifact from another universe, where they had Sailor Tommy tattoos instead of Sailor Jerry, and blood signs instead of horoscopes.

  If I tried to tell anyone, they’d think I was completely out of my head.

  It made me wonder just how many artifacts like this were out there. How many people had stumbled into a
nother dimension and come back knowing that if they told anyone, they’d get thrown in an institution? Was the world full of random objects from the next world over? Not the kind of curios that ended up in the Wonder Museum, but banal things that no one would ever notice or pay attention to?

  I sighed and tucked the otherworldly Bible into a drawer in the kitchen. It could sit next to the rubber bands and the manual for the old microwave and a couple of salt packets from a fast-food restaurant. Any one of which might, presumably, also be from the next universe over. How would I ever know?

  I closed the drawer and went to bed.

  * * *

  “How you doing?” asked Simon, sliding my coffee across the counter. It was early, and the only other person in the Black Hen was wearing headphones and had their music turned up so loud that I could hear every lyric about the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust.

  “Found out that my ex left me for another woman,” I said, prodding the wound to see if it was going to hurt. It didn’t, although it felt like it should.

  “Oh, that sucks!”

  I shrugged. “I mean, I guess? Honestly, at this point, it’s just so… I dunno. Banal.”

  He rubbed his twin’s eye. “Yeah, I can see that.” He was silent while I dumped cream into my coffee, then said, “Hey, look at it this way?”

  “Huh?”

  “Bet she couldn’t survive five minutes in another world.”

  I laughed. It hurt a little in my chest, but in a good way, as if bits of a clot were breaking loose. Was it possible for emotions to clot? Did I have some kind of weird horror scab in my lungs?

  “God.” I took a swallow of coffee. “Are we gonna be doing this in ten years? Like we’ll be ‘Hey, remember the time we accidentally went to hell?’ ”

  “Beats the alternative.” He grabbed a muffin out of the day-old bin and tossed it to me. Men with no depth perception do not throw well, and I couldn’t move fast with my knee, so the muffin hit me in the chest, bounced, and we eventually located it somewhere under one of the chairs. It was in plastic wrap, so I didn’t care. A slightly squashed muffin was nothing. A wrecked knee was… well, something significantly more, but at least I was here on earth and the portal to hell was closed and I wasn’t married to some idiot who didn’t know when to stop wailing on the phone.