After a moment he said, “You came through here, on the river… yes?”
I nodded, then realized his eyes were closed. It didn’t seem to matter, because he answered his own question. “Of course you did. You’re alive. No one… lives… anywhere else.”
“What do you mean?” Simon’s voice was calm and polite, the customer-service, no-we-don’t-serve-Frappuccinos-here voice, wildly out of place in this world.
Yet somehow, Sturdivant seemed to respond to it. “There was a woman. No… wait. I said that… already? Didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“We tried to… get away. From the river. We went as far as we could. Three days.” He shook his head slowly, fingers pulsing on the surface of the water, wrapping thick tendrils of his hair around his hands. “We had to turn back. There was no more water. Nothing but willows. Willows forever. The light… all the time, the light. All the shadows coming alive in the light. But we saw buildings… great concrete things. Like parking garages. That big. But you couldn’t get near them. They were everywhere… the buzzing around the buildings… like… like wasps… we thought if we could get in one, it would be safe… but we couldn’t get close. They were watching those buildings. They hated them. Wanted in. The river… seemed safer… somehow… gck!”
“The willows are making the light?” asked Simon carefully.
“Yes. Watch for it. Won’t hurt you. Probably. But if you see the light, the willows have gotten their roots in.”
I was sweating, despite the cold. I wiped the back of my neck, and it felt as clammy as a mushroom. “But we’re safe in the bunkers?”
“Safe…?” Sturdivant’s body shook with laughter. “Safe! None of us are… safe. They touched me and I fell down here. It stopped Them changing me more, for all the good it did me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly. “Can we do anything?”
“Safe…,” said Sturdivant, and then he stood up in the water.
It wasn’t hair.
Martin Sturdivant’s skin stopped at the bottom of his ribs, and his lower half had been taken apart. His guts were black with algae and dirt and hung loose in the water, some of them floating, so that he was moving through a cloud of his own organs. I realized that when he had been stroking the surface of the water, he’d been stroking his own body dissected around him, fingers moving across intestine and bowel in a horrible, loving touch.
Simon and I let out twin screams and fled.
CHAPTER 12
I made it to the opposite shore, among the willows, and collapsed. I couldn’t seem to breathe. All I could see was Martin’s lower body, spreading into the water. It stopped Them changing me more, for all the good it did me….
I pressed my face against the sand, breathing in through my teeth, and tried to think of something else. The Wonder Museum. Prince, with his magnificent spread of antlers and benign glass gaze. Uncle Earl, speaking earnestly and kindly to tourists. His Sunflower Holiness. The taxidermied mice riding cane toads, which were also horrible but a different kind of horrible, a familiar, tacky one that I had a grip on.
The Wonder Museum existed. If I could hold on to that fact, then I didn’t have to think about other things that existed. If I could get back to it, then I could shut the door and never, ever think about those other things again.
If I could get back to it.
If it was still open.
Oh, God, what if we found the right bunker and went down the hall and there was only the dead man in his room and the way home was gone?
I wondered again why he had died. Had he starved to death in the little concrete room rather than go out into the willows? What world had the poor bastard come from?
I could imagine it all too easily—someone stumbling in like we had, finding their way to what felt like safety, and barring the bunker door to the outside and the horrors that lurked among the bunker islands. Whatever he had seen in the willows had convinced him to stay in that room, even if it meant his death.
After seeing Sturdivant, I couldn’t blame him.
If only the hole to our world had opened sooner, maybe we’d have found him in time. But he’d been dead for years. We had passed close in space, but separated by far too much time to make a difference.
The throbbing, gong-like note came again, from overhead or underfoot, I couldn’t tell. It sounded louder or maybe just closer.
“We’re going to die here, aren’t we?” I said, finally sitting up.
“Yeah.” Simon was sitting next to me, wet sand all across his fishnets and his shorts. “Yeah, we probably are.”
He sounded so matter-of-fact and resigned that it helped. We were going to die. It was one of those things that happened. No sense screaming about it. Maybe death was just a thing that happened, like finding that a tourist had knocked a hole in the drywall or that we were out of size XL T-shirts. Well, damn.
I wiped sand off my face. “God. I can’t believe I spent so much time crying over my marriage. What a load of horseshit that was, when there was all this….” I gestured vaguely at the willows and the water and the world that wasn’t our world at all.
“Well, it’s not like it would have helped at the time. If somebody showed up and said, ‘Stop crying, Carrot, you’re going to die horribly in an alternate dimension later this year,’ would you have listened?”
I snorted. There was sand up my nose and I wiped my nostrils raw trying to get it out.
The willows were higher than our heads, a series of shifting, leafy walls. If the spirits we had seen last night were still here, only invisible, we were right in the middle of them.
Things come alive in the light, then not alive, Sturdivant had said. Which probably meant that the spirits weren’t here, because the willows did not have that strange silver glow that he must have been referring to, the light that made things alive—but now I was thinking of Sturdivant again. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing.
After a few minutes, I was settled enough to actually say it. “Sturdivant…”
“Yeah.”
“You saw it, too.”
“Yeah. I thought it was hair or algae or something, but…” Simon shook his head.
“He said he came from somewhere else, too,” I said dully. “Someplace with kudzu.”
“That could be ours. Although it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve got kudzu everywhere.”
“All right. We’re here. This is one world. The hole in the museum opened into the bunker in this one world. We know there’s probably at least one more world. The one the porn magazine came from.” I had abandoned any hope that vacuae was a helicopter. “Maybe two worlds, if that’s not also where Byricopa County is.” It was easier to think about other worlds than it was to think about Sturdivant and what had happened to him and what might yet happen to us. “So that’s a minimum of three, with ours. Maybe four.”
“Maybe five hundred,” said Simon, and he didn’t say So what?, although he could have, because knowing the exact number of alternate universes didn’t help us in the slightest.
So there was a chance we could fall through a hole to another world, not our own. I said as much to Simon.
“At this point, I’d take it,” said Simon. “I figure they need good baristas in every world, you know?”
I sighed. I didn’t want an alternate universe, I wanted to go home. Besides, if we left the hole in the wall behind us, Uncle Earl was going to find it, and then he’d die in the willows instead.
“Come on,” I said, standing. I slapped more sand off my knees. “Let’s keep looking.”
The sun crept overhead. The killdeer called. The mist burned off. We went to bunker after bunker, looked in the doors, and kept going.
I banged my foot on a rock under the water and gouged my big toe pretty well. We couldn’t do much about it, though. If alien organisms were entering my bloodstream through the wound and beginning to devour my flesh, I couldn’t feel it under the general throbbing from my damaged toenail.
“Of course I didn’t bring toenail clippers,” I muttered.
“Next extradimensional jaunt we take, we’ll bring spares.” I knew Simon was being cheerful and snarky to keep my spirits up, or maybe to keep his own spirits up, so I tried not to get annoyed. Someone had to be cheerful while the other one freaked out. That was the bargain we’d made.
Something moved in the water near the bend in the river. I caught Simon’s arm and pointed. It was underwater, mostly, rolling and twisting. I caught the occasional flash of light off a dark, wet back rising out of the river.
“What the hell is that?”
“Fish?” I said a bit doubtfully. “Or… uh… otter, maybe? Do you see anything weird?”
“With the eye? No. But I’ve never seen a wild otter.”
“Don’t they have them in Florida?”
“We have gators in Florida. If there are any otters, they’re very scared.”
I thought of the giant otter in the case at the Wonder Museum. Somehow I suspected that it would not be particularly scared of a gator, even the big ones.
We stepped down into the river again. My throbbing toe quieted briefly in the cold water. If They get me, I won’t have to worry about my toe falling off, I thought, and bit down on a hysterical giggle.
Don’t think about Them. It draws Them, Sturdivant had said.
How the fuck do you not think about the things that are going to kill you or take you apart or pull out your bones?
I tried to get a song stuck in my head. This is a surprisingly hard thing to do. I thought of all the theme songs to TV shows and jingles from commercials and Christmas carols and tried to jam the catchiest bits into my skull, and in under a minute I was back to thinking about Sturdivant surrounded by his halo of organs unraveled in the water and oh, Jesus, that’s going to happen to us….
“We’re getting too far from shore, I think,” said Simon as we stepped up onto the next bunker island. “This is the third or fourth one out.”
I glanced over at the opposite shore of the river. Tall grass grew along the edge, and behind it, great gray masses of willows. No buildings. That was probably for the best. If anything lived here, the willows had gotten to it by now. Sturdivant’s description of the dirt and the leaves piling up until there was something inside the bunkers for their roots to get into came back to me. How much faster could they do it with a building where the willow roots could work in from the sides?
Stop. Think of a song. Any song. “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, his name is my name, too….”
“Back to the shore, then?” I said. “We’ll start closer.”
“We’re getting near the bend.”
“Yes.”
I shaded my eyes and looked downstream for the bunker where we had spent the night. Could we find it again? I could just pick out the stick atop it, so hopefully yes.
There was a small bluff on the river bend, if you could call something that short a bluff. It was only about ten feet high, but I don’t know what else you’d call it. Willows covered the top, but it was also the tallest point of land for a good distance. I pointed.
Simon shrugged. “It’s all you. Depth perception’s not my strong suit.”
“Right. Well, let’s see what I can see from up top.”
On the far side of the bluff was… something. It looked like a tangle of downed trees at first, with willows growing up and through it. But some of the trees were too smooth and regular, and they had grooves and they weren’t trees at all, they were boards of some sort. Then I turned my head and it seemed to resolve into a shape, like a broken house, but the shape was odd.
“It’s a ship,” said Simon. “An old-style one. Jesus.”
As soon as he said it, I recognized it. A boat. Half of one, anyway. The prow was up in the air and partly on its side and there were gaping rents in the hull, and at least one actual uprooted tree was jammed through it. The tangle of roots had confused the shape.
We stood looking down at it. There was something written on the hull, but the uprooted tree had gone right through it and willows had overgrown the other side, so all I could read was RON MOUN and then tree roots.
“Ron Moun…,” I said, trying to think of a name that would fit. What did ships get called, anyway? “Aaron Mounds? Darron Moundlebrot?”
“Iron Mounties?”
“Of course that’s what you came up with. I suppose you dated a Mountie once?”
“No, but I had a calendar of pinups.”
“Of course you did.” I shook my head. “Well, I know we didn’t go past this thing.” I looked south. “So let’s start working our way downstream from here.”
Neither of us had the slightest desire to go into the ship. For one thing, there was no way our route home was there, and for another, I think we were afraid there’d be something else inside. Something like Sturdivant, or worse.
They’d stacked her bones up next to her, all very neat, from small to large. She was like jelly….
“I wonder if the ship’s from here,” I murmured, trying not to think about that.
“Can’t be. It’s too big. You couldn’t get it through water this shallow, and there’s all these little bunker islands here. Nobody’d bring a ship down this way.”
“Oh, hmm. Yeah, I guess.”
I turned to descend from the bluff—and froze.
Something that wasn’t there passed us in the willows. It was not a ghost or a spirit or a trick of negative space. It wasn’t there, but it still went past us, just on the other side of a line of branches, and the humming noise came so close that my ribs vibrated with it. Simon put his hand on his sternum, grimacing, and I looked past him and saw the willows bend as the thing walked by.
The spirits last night had been made up of the shapes where the willows weren’t. This one forced the willows out of the way, just like the big thing we’d seen the night before. The same kind. Maybe even the same one. It was on the other side the way that the kids on the bus had been on the other side, pushing against reality hard enough to move leaves and branches out of the way.
I wanted to run, but that might attract attention. I didn’t even dare cry out. I reached over and put my hand over Simon’s mouth, and his eyes went as wide as mine and we stood in absolute silence while the sound rang in our chests and I tried so hard not to think of the thing I couldn’t help but think about.
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt…
His name is my name, too!
Whenever we go out!
The people always shout!
Fuck fuck, we’re going to die, we’re going to die
There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!
I could feel sweat trickling down my back. I dug my toes into the sand and concentrated hard on it, the tiny grains, the large piece of gravel digging into my toe…
It walked away. Simon turned his head, taking my hand with him, and we watched the willow branches bow outward from the passing, and it was invisible except that invisible was not the right word, because its not-there-ness hung in the air like an afterimage.
It reached the water and stepped onto it. We watched as concentric rings spread out and were immediately lost in the current. Eventually it either went away or the current was too swift to see it. The hum went with it, moving away.
“Is it gone?” I whispered finally, after long minutes had passed. I let my hand drop.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see it?” I asked hoarsely.
“Yeah.” He rubbed the eye that might belong to a dead woman. “Yeah, I saw it.”
“What did it look like?” I didn’t want to know, but I asked anyway.
“Like that thing in the willows last night. The second one. Only bigger and… more. Like if that one was a rat, this would be a dog. No, that’s not right.” He shook his head. “Like a trilobite made of skin. Like you got really high and the back of your eyelids glued itself to your eyeballs, and then that got up and walked around. No. I don’t know
.”
I nodded. I didn’t understand and I didn’t want to understand. What else could I do?
“Let’s not go in the water for a bit.” His voice was raspy. “I think it’s still over there. Or it… it went behind the water. Somehow. But there.”
The ship was still unappealing, but at least the walls seemed as if they might offer some kind of shelter. We slid down the slope, avoiding the funnels that might or might not contain this world’s equivalent of ant lions.
There was a rent in the side of the hull. The willows lined a path to it, as if they were a hedge on either side. I didn’t like touching them, but that ship had sailed long ago, no pun intended. We stepped inside.
It was dim. Light slanted through holes in the boards. I could see what looked like a bar counter on one side, affixed to the wall and tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. Sand and gravel had filled in the bottom of the hold. No ant lions, though.
I lowered myself down to sit with my back against a board. It was good to sit somewhere dry, anyway. Simon sat down next to me, rubbing his hands over his face.
It went behind the water somehow….
I was struck again by the intense feeling that this world was only a skin over a vast other space. Were the things in the willows moving in that other space, behind the world? Were They looking through from behind it? Was that why They hadn’t been able to pinpoint us exactly yet?
Was Simon seeing, however dimly, through the skin and into that other alien space?
The humming noise chimed, coming closer again. Something moving behind the world, looking for us.
A willow was growing through a break in the corner, where a shaft of light came in. The leaves were small and stunted. I felt as if it were a spy in the room, watching us for its masters.
Still better in here, I thought. One spy is better than a whole crowd of them out for blood.
The noise rang out again, then again, overlapping itself. Two of Them? One getting excited? Did numbers even apply to Them? Were They a singular entity or something like a swarm of bees where the individual didn’t matter?
The Hollow Places Page 12