The Hollow Places

by T. Kingfisher

  CHAPTER 22

  And that, more or less, was that. Except that my grip on sanity is not quite what it was. I have nightmares, obviously. It would probably be strange if I didn’t. But they’re still less vivid than the dreams where I was sleepwalking and being called back to the willows, so even in sleep, I am not as troubled as I could be.

  Waking is harder. When I’m awake, I think too much and sometimes I see things out of the corner of my eye. A particular type of streetlight—not the big orange cobra heads, but small ornate ones with caps like acorns—leaves a silver smear across wet pavement in the rain. The silver is just close enough to the color of willowlight to set my heart hammering in my chest. I’ve nearly run off the road twice.

  There’s also a willow in my mother’s neighborhood. I went out there for dinner a few weeks ago and saw it in the neighbor’s yard. I don’t think it’s actually an evil willow, I think it’s probably just a plain old ordinary one from the garden center. But the first time I saw it, I ran the car up on the curb and missed a mailbox by a couple inches. Then I had to sit there, gripping the steering wheel and gasping for air, while my throat closed and my knee throbbed and the world got hot and tight around my head.

  When I was recovered enough, I drove down the street to my mom’s house and went in. Dad grunted from behind his newspaper. My mother fluttered and panicked and made me sit three different places in an effort to make me comfortable, until I told her that my knee wouldn’t let me get up again, and then she brought me dinner on a TV tray.

  Uncle Earl hugged me and apologized for not being there for the vandalism. “I’m so sorry, Carrot. I’m sorry. I had no idea that would happen. I shouldn’t have left you there.”

  “You should have,” I told him firmly. “You’re looking so much better now.”

  “I feel better.”

  “I’m just sorry that I lost your… exhibit.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “otter.” I was bombarding myself with memes of cute sea otters holding hands whenever I went online, because if you panic when you see an otter, the internet is a dark and terrible place. Then Kay told me that sea otters are actually adorable monsters who kill dogs and drown baby seals while dry-humping them to death. That set me back at least a week, but it wasn’t her fault.

  “It’s okay,” said Earl. “You know how the museum is. Stuff comes, stuff goes. I got a line on an ichthyosaur skull that’ll take that space up nicely.”

  I pictured an animated ichthyosaur skull snapping its bony jaws as it slithered after me. Eh, no legs. I could probably outrun it, even with my knee.

  “Simon says hello,” I said, lifting my wineglass, and Uncle Earl sat down next to me and I filled him in on all the latest gossip and it was good.

  The day that Uncle Earl came back, I put my ear to the wall. Was there still a pinhole-sized wormhole? Had we really closed it all? I moved around, trying to catch any sound. I don’t know what I was listening for. Knocking. Hammering. Humming.

  Only silence.

  I stepped back from the wall. The front door jangled, and I went down to welcome Uncle Earl home.

  Is it strange that I stayed at the Wonder Museum? Perhaps it would make more sense if I fled, leaving Uncle Earl and Simon to deal with whatever remnants might be left behind. But the museum saved me. The beasts inside saved me. Prince bought me time, and the others flung themselves onto the otter as it went by. Later, I found bits of otter fur in the jaws of other beasts, along the path to the stairs.

  Do objects that are loved know that they are loved? Did Prince know somehow that a little girl had loved him with the intensity that only a small child can muster?

  The Wonder Museum was full of taxidermy, but taxidermy is only skin and bone and stuffing. If animals have souls—and I will fight anyone who says they don’t—then the souls of those beasts departed long ago. I cannot believe that the spirits of the elk and the otter and the wildebeest hung around for decades, seething with rage at having been killed. That would be a cruelty worthy of the willow world, not this one.

  The Wonder Museum, for all its strangeness, was never haunted. If there were ghosts, they were benevolent ones.

  But perhaps skin and bones have a little memory to them, even after the soul is gone to greater things. And the bones in the museum had spent decade after decade marinating in my uncle’s fierce, befuddled kindness.

  So my best guess is this: The carving was capable of limited movement, just enough to find the host and work its way inside and animate what it found. But the otter was too large for it—or perhaps simply it needed it to wake up and smash the tempered-glass display case—so the carving worked a great, uncontrolled awakening upon the animals’ bones.

  The malice of the next world over was profound, but it faltered before Uncle Earl’s influence. When the bones woke, they woke as objects that had been loved for many years.

  Who am I to say that such objects, given brief life, would not fight to defend their home? Who am I to say that Prince could not recognize a child who had loved him and try to save her?

  Well. There are more mysteries in heaven and earth, as Uncle Earl is fond of saying. Normally I get mad when he does that because he’s talking about something that’s easily disproven, but in this case, I think it might be appropriate.

  If nothing else, if the portal ever does open again, there is nowhere else that I would rather be than in a place where I already know that the inhabitants will fight to protect me. And if the willows do try to get their roots in, better to have someone on hand who can explain what’s going on.

  The taxidermy mostly went back to the way it was before, not stretching into some unusual positions or climbing down out of the cases. I’d almost think I hallucinated the whole thing, or that it was a strange illusion like the negative space in the willows, except for Prince and the cane toads.

  Prince’s head is tilted to the side, looking up, as if listening to footsteps on the stairs. I think when the strange animation left him, he was listening to see if I was coming back. And if bones and hide were aware enough to try to protect a little girl who loved him, I believe he must know that I did come back, particularly when I threw my arms around his neck and cried.

  The cane toads are… well, I don’t know if cane toads really care if they were loved. All I know is that the damn things got everywhere during their few moments of pseudo-life. We are still finding them under the display cases and behind doors and in boxes of T-shirts. It’s enough to make you sympathetic to Pharaoh with the plague of frogs.

  (I also have some suspicions about some of the tiny mice in costumes. I keep checking the photos I took for the catalog and they look right, but I can’t shake the feeling that something in their position changed or possibly keeps changing. Simon says I’m hallucinating, but he also doesn’t say I’m wrong.)

  I made Uncle Earl get rid of the Feejee Mermaid. The memory of those clacking teeth would keep me up at night if I weren’t already being kept up by all the other memories. I can’t swear it didn’t help me by attacking the otter on the stairs, but I’m pretty sure that it would have bitten the crap out of me, too. Uncle Earl sent it to a nice little start-up museum in Charlotte that needed one.

  The doctor at the low-cost clinic says I am a definite candidate for knee surgery and that I absolutely shredded some important tendons and membranes. He also says that he realizes it’s not an option without insurance. So I have a brace and some generic pain pills and I do my exercises and stretches religiously and mostly I hobble around the museum the way Uncle Earl does. We joke that we should get matching T-shirts.

  He says he’s going to leave the Wonder Museum to me in his will. I laugh and tell him he’s going to outlive me. The catalog is nearly finished, anyway, which is probably as close as it will come. Skulls keep coming through the door, and cane toads, and bits of fish leather that Beau tries desperately to eat.

  Woody came to visit once. I don’t know what I pictured from a man who had described the willow portals as “n
ot good.” Someone like Allan Quatermain, maybe, fresh from King Solomon’s Mines. Instead he was short and bald and had wire-rimmed glasses, but when he met my eyes, I saw a familiar haunting. Simon’s eyes looked like that. Probably mine did, too.

  I usually go over and sit in the coffee shop with Simon in the evenings, and sometimes afterward we hang out in the back of the museum and watch badly dubbed anime and terrible movies about Bigfoot and throw popcorn at the screen. We don’t talk about the willows much… or at all… but it helps to have someone around who’s been there.

  Anyway, here I am. I keep thinking I’ll get an apartment, but then I don’t. Nowhere else in the world would I be surrounded by so many valiant, if unliving, protectors. And the rent is nonexistent, and I get all the coffee I can drink.

  What can I say? It’s bizarre, it’s sometimes tacky, but it’s mine. It took me a few years, but I found my way back at last. The Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, open nine to six, six days a week, closed Mondays. The Wonder Museum.

  I wonder what happens next.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  H. P. Lovecraft wrote that “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood was one of the most terrifying stories ever written. Before I read it, I assumed that this probably meant some people in it weren’t white, and I began it preparing to roll my eyes a bit. But “The Willows” is a genuinely disquieting story, for all the occasional excesses of the prose. Some lines stick with you—“the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.”

  Frequently, a line from a story that sticks with me is what eventually spawns a book. My first horror novel, The Twisted Ones, was derived from the line in Arthur Machen’s “White People”: “And I twisted myself about like the twisted ones.” That line stuck in my head, and eventually I had to write a book to unstick it.

  With The Hollow Places, I found myself thinking about this alien world, tenanted only by willows, and by strange alien forces that seek to change humans, who make funnel shapes in the sand and who are attracted by human thought… and by otters and corpses and boatmen and a number of other elements. It seemed like an interesting place. Not a good place, but an interesting one.

  Giant Amazonian river otters do exist, though they are endangered. If you look them up on the internet, you may find a video that records their vocalizations as they hunt. They make a high-pitched giggle, like feral children, and it is deeply unsettling. Nevertheless, they are extraordinary creatures, and I hope we have the sense to find a way to preserve their habitat. The world is richer and stranger for having such creatures in it. (Much gratitude to my friend Eve Forward, who spent time swimming with giant otters and was able to tell me things about them.)

  As for the Wonder Museum, which has no place in Blackwood, it is a mash-up of a dozen fascinating little museums that I have visited over the years. I love few things so much as an incredibly earnest tiny museum that is deeply passionate about its focus and wants to tell you all about it. The Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque; the Museum of Creation, Taxidermy and Tools and the sadly now-defunct Serpentarium in my own North Carolina; the Mothman Museum in West Virginia; the Voodoo Museum in New Orleans and, down the street, the Pharmacology Museum; the Museum of English Rural Life; and possibly the single most earnest place on earth, the Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, are all profound delights of my heart.

  Well. Every book has to come from somewhere. I spend an inordinate amount of time at my own beloved coffee shop, writing books such as this one. Infinite gratitude to Ducky, the barista, and Emmett, the owner of Café Diem, for coffee and surreal stories of their childhood that gave rise, eventually, to the character of Simon. (If anything, I toned him down! I have heard things.)

  Thanks as always to my husband, Kevin, who read the book at various points and assured me that it was at least semi-coherent, and my editor, Navah, who made it even more coherent, and my agent, Helen, who bears up under the strain of my increasingly idiosyncratic writing. You are all quite lovely people, and I am grateful for your patience.

  T. Kingfisher

  October 2019

  More from the Author

  The Twisted Ones

  The Mythic Dream

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  J.R. BLACKWELL

  T. KINGFISHER, also known as Ursula Vernon, is the author and illustrator of many projects, including the acclaimed horror novel The Twisted Ones and the webcomic Digger, which won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story and the Mythopoeic Award. Her work The Tomato Thief won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, and her short story “Jackalope Wives” won the Nebula Award for Best Story. She is also the author of the bestselling Dragonbreath and the Hamster Princess series of books for children. Find her online at RedWombatStudio.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Ursula Vernon

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  First Saga Press trade paperback edition October 2020

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  Interior design by Lana J. Roff

  Cover design by Chelsea McGuckin

  Cover photograph by Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kingfisher, T., author.

  Title: The hollow places : a novel / T. Kingfisher.

  Description: First Saga Press trade paperback edition. | London ; Sydney ; New York : Saga Press, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020008540 (print) | LCCN 2020008541 (ebook) | ISBN 9781534451124 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781534451148 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.I597 H65 2020 (print) | LCC PS3611.I597 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008540

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008541

  ISBN 978-1-5344-5112-4

  ISBN 978-1-5344-5114-8 (ebook)

 

 

 
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