The Hollow Places

by Kingfisher, T.

  The final object in the box was wedged crosswise to fit. It was a wooden carving, about the size of my forearm. Uncle Earl unwrapped it on the counter and paused, slowly crumpling the newspaper in his hands.

  “Yech,” I said. “That’s a creepy one.”

  He picked up the card and read, “Carved corpse-otter effigy, Danube area, circa 1900.”

  “Corpse-otter?”

  “That’s what Woody says….” Uncle Earl slid off the stool and actually came out from behind the counter to study the carving from both sides. “What a strange piece.”

  The carving was fairly crude, but you could still tell what it was. One side was an otter, turned with belly toward the viewer, head tilted up. The skull was too broad for any otter I’d ever seen, and it had a distinctly un-otter-like expression, but the tucked paws and long tail were unmistakable.

  From the other side, it was a dead body. You could tell by the crossed arms and the wrapped shroud that covered everything. The artist had scored lines that had been filled with dark dye or simply with years of dirt, which clearly indicated tightly wrapped cloth. The corpse’s head was at an odd, broken-neck angle, to match the otter on the other side.

  “That’s messed up.”

  “It’s a bit weird, yeah.” Coming from a man wearing a T-shirt proclaiming BIGFOOT LIVES!!!, this was quite a statement. He turned the carving over a few times. The carved lines seemed to squirm under the fluorescent light.

  Beauregard sauntered up and eyed the fish leather hungrily.

  “Well, we’ve got space in the raccoon case,” said Uncle Earl. “Masks with masked bandits.”

  “And the carving?”

  “Put it over by the otter, I guess.” He fished out the keys. “Would you mind, Carrot?”

  I took the mask and the carving and the keys and headed upstairs. Beau followed, trying to look as if he were just interested in me as a person and not because I was carrying a delicious-smelling art object.

  There are at least three raccoon cases, so I picked one that wasn’t too cluttered. Raccoons are easy. But the stuffed Amazonian otter was the pride of the Wonder Museum.

  Amazonian giant otters get around six feet long and weigh seventy pounds. They’re huge, bigger than wolverines. The natives call them water jaguars.

  Even by those standards, this one was a monster. He was closing in on eight feet, and Lord only knows what he weighed when he was alive.

  They’re also super-endangered. My uncle’s otter was a donation from an old trophy hunter who had lived up at the retirement village until recently. His kids all thought trophy hunting was revolting—I’m not saying they’re wrong—and he couldn’t sell his trophies because all his taxidermy was from years ago and didn’t have all the various certificates you need to have to prove it’s legal to have endangered-species skins. Nobody would buy them on anything but the black market. So this old guy was living in his little senior-living condo, the walls covered in mounted heads and skulls, facing the fact that when he died, his kids were going to throw all the animals in the trash.

  “It was real sad, Carrot,” Uncle Earl had told me on one of my visits. “He talked to all the heads like they were his friends. Asked me to keep his animals from winding up in the dumpster. So he donated them all to the museum and I promised to do my best.”

  He did, too. The wildebeest skull hangs on the wall behind the cash register, and kudu and blesbok and whatnot from this guy are scattered all through the museum. And the otter.

  I still don’t approve of trophy hunting, but the thought of the old man talking to the animal skulls, all alone in his room, was sad enough that I couldn’t muster a lot of outrage. If there was a sin there, he’d obviously done a lot of penance. Honestly, it reminded me a bit of that fairy tale “The Goose Girl,” where the severed horse head gets nailed to a wall and the heroine talks to it every day. That kind of bleak down-at-the-bone enchantment.

  I’d say that Uncle Earl was an unlikely fairy godmother, but he’d certainly swooped in and given me the gift of a spare room, so maybe it wasn’t that unlikely after all.

  A lot of the taxidermy gets nicknames eventually, not just Prince. “Move Bob to cover the hole.” “See if Tusky will fit there.” “Dust Corky’s horns, will you?” Bob’s the wildebeest, Tusky is a boar. Corky is the male kudu, from Corkscrew, which is what the horns look like.

  The otter doesn’t have a nickname. It’s just the otter. It’s the crown jewel.

  I dropped off the leather mask, much to Beau’s disgust, and proceeded to the otter. It gazed past me with wet black eyes. The creature’s mouth was mounted open, showing the heavy canines. It’s not a smile or a snarl. It’s just a businesslike showing of teeth.

  I nodded respectfully to the otter and looked around for a place to put the carving. There was a shelf up against the wall with a couple of tacky porcelain windmills. I took them down, put the carving on the shelf, and wandered around looking for a place to stick the windmills. I finally found a gap under the Thimbles of the World and called it good.

  My hands felt vaguely greasy. I’d say it was some kind of malicious taint from the otter carving, but realistically, given how suddenly eager Beau was to sniff my fingers, it was probably left over from the fish leather.

  I would have lingered over the otter but I heard someone on the main floor ask if we had a particular shirt in XL, and I went to go rummage in the back so Uncle Earl didn’t have to.

  * * *

  I was starting my third week at the museum when Uncle Earl didn’t come in one morning.

  He called me, so I didn’t have time to worry.

  “Hi, Uncle Earl.”

  “Carrot? This is your uncle.”

  I closed my eyes. His voice was a bit weaker than usual; it wasn’t the time to teach him how caller ID worked. “Are you okay?”

  “Well, I’m afraid it’s my knee, hon. Can’t walk real well right now. Can I ask you to open the museum for me today?”

  I assured him that I would, that he should stay home and stay off his knee, and insisted that he call the doctor.

  “You’re a real blessing, Carrot. God must have sent you to take care of me.”

  I avoided saying that God could have just sent an email instead of my divorce, and I made my uncle promise to take it easy.

  Running the Wonder Museum single-handedly was not much more difficult than helping Uncle Earl with it, except that I had to be up front to talk to the tourists instead of wandering around cataloging things. I used the downtime to work on my most recent gig, which was a logo design for a customer who wanted the logo to have everything, including—I am not making this up—a feather because his mother’s maiden name had been Featherstone and he’d started the company because she believed in him.

  Still, it was money.

  Uncle Earl was back the next day, but two days later, he was out again. Monday I hauled off and drove him to the doctor myself.

  He limped out of the back looking gloomy. “They want to do surgery,” he said. “Soon as they can. But not on my back. On both knees. They said I’m walking funny because of my bad knees and it’s throwing my back out.”

  “Yikes. Okay.”

  “I’d be out for weeks, Carrot. I can’t ask you to watch the museum while I lay in bed.”

  “You can and you will. Call Mom. She’ll take care of you while you’re recovering, and I’ll watch the museum.”

  A week later, Mom came down to drive Uncle Earl to Charlotte. I hugged him and told him to focus on getting well, that I’d take care of everything. He went over how to pay the power bill for the fourth time, then Mom gave me a fond, exasperated glance and shooed him into the car.

  “I know you’ll do great, Carrot,” he said, rolling down the window. “You call me if you have any problems. God bless you for doing this.”

  I still didn’t believe in Uncle Earl’s God, but he believed, and that’s all that mattered. I gripped his hand, then Mom started the engine and they drove away.

/>   I waved after them, then drove back downtown, unlocked the front door, and turned the sign to OPEN. The eyes of the mounted animals shone in the light and His Sunflower Holiness beamed down at me benevolently.

  It was the one-month anniversary of my arrival at the Wonder Museum.

  CHAPTER 4

  Everything went well, at least for a few days. There were the usual sorts of problems—Uncle Earl had told me how to pay the power bill but not the water bill, which took me nearly an hour to sort out, and then the point-of-sale system needed an update, and doing that took the computers down for two hours, and I had to make out receipts by hand for T-shirts and coffee mugs. An update came out for the website that broke every link, and I had to go through and update them by hand. And Beau groomed the grizzly bear’s left hind paw until he threw up, because old taxidermy is preserved with nasty chemicals. I assume this was revenge for not letting him eat the fish leather.

  The first major crisis occurred on the Thursday after Uncle Earl left, when I was doing my sweep to make sure nobody was left in the museum after closing and discovered a hole in the drywall in the otter room.

  The hole was jagged and irregular, about a foot and a half long. Probably one of the tourists had put their elbow into the wall. None of them had come around and apologized for it, though.

  I swore under my breath. Not even in charge for a week, and some idiot was wrecking up the joint….

  “Well, better the wall than the otter,” I muttered. The hole was in the back wall of the museum. The shelf that had been up on the wall had fallen down. I couldn’t remember what had been on it—ceramic windmills? I didn’t see any broken ceramics on the floor, but maybe the guilty tourist had shoved them under something else and fled.

  It occurred to me, as I stared at the hole, that I wasn’t sure how to patch it. I could spackle nail holes and dents and whatnot, but this was something else again. Major home repairs had been my ex-husband’s job. Anything bigger than a Dremel scared me.

  I went next door to the coffee shop to mooch on the Wi-Fi and look up how to patch drywall.

  Okay, that’s not entirely true. I went to check up on various social media, maybe have a rousing argument with someone about a particular fanfic ship, and then look up how to patch drywall.

  My ex was posting inspirational quotes again. I swear I wasn’t looking for them, they just came across my timeline anyway. I know, I should just have unfollowed him, but it felt petty. We were having a Friendly Divorce™. Probably some people really have those, but in our case it felt as if we were locked in a competition over who could be publically most gracious to the other. Ha ha, no, I’m not bitter, why would you think that, no, my teeth always lock like this when I smile, I don’t know what you’re talking about….

  “How’s it going?” asked Simon.

  “Ugh. One of the customers knocked a hole in the wall, and now I have to figure out how to fix it. And my ex is posting pictures of…” I paused. “One of his coworkers with her hands all over him. Huh.” That son of a bitch. It had been a month! A month!

  “Need any help?”

  “An alibi,” I muttered.

  “You were with me the whole time.”

  I set the phone down. No, no. We were divorced. He was allowed to have relationships. I could have one, too, if I wanted. With… err… well, Simon definitely was not interested in anything I had to offer, but presumably someone else. There were straight men in Hog Chapel. A couple were probably even under sixty. “I don’t suppose you have any spackle lying around?”

  Simon rolled his eyes, or possibly his eye and his late twin’s eye, however that worked. “I am the god of spackle. Wait until we close and I’ll come help you patch it up.”

  “It’s a big hole. I think the goop will just fall through.”

  “Oh ye of little faith.”

  So I waited around until closing, and Simon flipped the little sign on the door, counted out the cash register, then vanished into the back. He reemerged with a tool kit and a sack full of mysterious home-repair objects.

  “Christ,” he said when he saw the hole. “Did they offer to pay for it?”

  “I don’t even know who did it. Nobody fessed up, and you know Earl doesn’t have cameras.” (Cameras were expensive, and why spend money setting up a CCTV system when you could spend money on a life-size statue of Mothman?)

  “It’s gonna need the big patch put in.” Simon frowned. “I’m gonna need to find a stud.”

  “Don’t we all,” I said, not quite under my breath. Simon grinned.

  He took out his phone, turned on the screen, and stuck it into the hole, angling it to the side, then peered into the hole. “Let’s see where the…”

  He stopped.

  He turned the phone the other way and turned his head to look.

  “No stud?” I asked after a few seconds.

  “Um,” he said. “Carrot, you might want to take a look at this.”

  Simon backed away from the hole and held his phone out to me. He sounded calm, but it had a strange, brittle edge.

  My heart sank. There would be leaking pipes or exposed asbestos or something. Something expensive.

  I shone the light through the hole.

  There were no leaking pipes. There was no stud.

  I was looking into a dark hallway that vanished out of the circle of light, in both directions.

  “Ugh.” I pulled my arm back. “Isn’t this over the coffee shop? Isn’t there supposed to be more of a wall?”

  Simon looked at me. “I don’t think you quite understand. That’s not the coffee shop.”

  “Well, it’s not the museum. Did somebody wall up a room between us?”

  Simon looked skeptical. “I don’t think there’s enough space, is there?”

  “Don’t look at me, I just work here.” I frowned at the hallway. It looked as if it was made of concrete, which was weird given that it was on the second floor of a brick building, but then again, I was working in a museum with a sunflower seed portrait of the pope, so who was I to talk about weird? “Hmm. Do you think you can take out a big enough chunk of wallboard for us to go through? I’d like to see where it goes.”

  Simon gnawed his lower lip. “Yeah, but my patch kit isn’t gonna work to close it back up. I’ll need to go buy actual wallboard.”

  I dithered for a minute, but curiosity won out. This wasn’t just a crawl space, this was clearly a full-size hallway. Presumably the ends were blocked off, but if we could get even a couple square yards of usable space, that would give us room for another couple displays. And room in the Wonder Museum was always at a premium.

  “Open it up,” I said. The chance of more room was worth the few bucks to patch the hole.

  He pulled out a power tool of some description. A saw thingy. Like I said, home improvement is not my skill set. A few minutes of muttering about the charger and fooling with batteries, and then he made four bold cuts in the wall, chopping a doorway three feet wide and tall enough to step through if we ducked our heads.

  “Mind the floor,” he said. “There’s a soft patch in the floor over the coffee shop, and if this attaches to it, it might be rotting out.”

  “God, I hope not.” I had a flashlight app on my phone and shone it into the hole. The floor looked like concrete. Did that mean it was solid, or that I was going to ride a slab of broken cement down two stories and into the basement?

  Well. Nothing ventured…

  I stepped through into the hallway.

  It was quiet. That was the first thing I noticed. It was very, very quiet, more so even than you’d expect from the Wonder Museum at night. No car noises came through the wall. Even the soft hum of electric motors, the one you stop hearing after about thirty seconds, was silenced.

  Simon stepped through after me, holding his top hat in one hand. He settled it back on his head and adjusted the brim.

  I shone my cell light down the corridor and whistled. It went much farther than I expected, at least thirty feet,
before hitting a wall. “Holy crap. This must go clear to the end of the block.”

  “In both directions,” said Simon, checking the opposite way. “Shit. Do you think we found… I don’t know, part of the Underground Railroad or something?”

  “The building’s from 1907, Simon. I’m pretty sure the Underground Railroad stopped before that.” (I wish I could say that I was an expert at local history, but there’s actually a big brick in the outer wall with 1907 stamped on it, and I passed it every time I went to get coffee.)

  He thought for a minute. “Moonshining tunnels?”

  “Now we’re talkin’.”

  I set out in the direction of the coffee shop. The concrete wall had been painted, but the paint had chipped off and fallen away so that the only thing left were scaly patches of navy blue.

  The floor didn’t echo at all. It also didn’t feel particularly unsteady, thankfully. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that Simon was following.

  “Right behind you.”

  “Good. This is eerie.”

  “Hell yeah.” He grinned. “There was an abandoned mental hospital in the town I grew up in. We used to get high and go sneak into it.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, that place was creepy as hell. Peeling linoleum and weird rings on the walls and empty elevator shafts. Plus it was totally haunted by dead inmates.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How could it not be?”

  “…You make a valid point.”

  We were about ten feet from the end of the corridor when I saw that I’d been wrong about its being the end. There was a gap in the right-hand wall. It wasn’t a dead end, it was a ninety-degree turn.

  Simon and I both slowed down as we approached the turn. I don’t know what we were expecting. Monsters, maybe. Empty elevator shafts.

  No, it was just more corridor.

  “Along the outer wall of the coffee shop, do you think?” I said.

  “There’s windows in that wall.”

  “Oh. Hmm.” I played my light down the corridor. “Maybe… uh… we went up, somehow? We’re just under the roof?” The concrete had felt level underfoot, but I was coming up short on other explanations.