This whole fucking place is a trap.
Singer’s been here five weeks. She was with a squad like ours, but civilian. Except not like ours because she’s from another fucking planet. They opened a way to the vacuae and went through and wound up here too.
If we make it home, the eggheads are going to go nuts. Not one but two worlds. Except there’s probably no way we’re going to make it home. Singer’s squad had ten people. She lost eight in the first week. Had a drop-off point same as we did and she missed it, said they were all over the rendezvous point and they got the other survivor.
Five weeks… I shook my head. Bible’s squad hadn’t lasted that long, if the logbook had been any indication. And Sturdivant… he knew a woman who lived two weeks, he said? Singer had been lucky or tough or just plain smarter than everybody else.
I couldn’t imagine lasting over a month in the willows. Lucky, Sturdivant had said. Lucky that we’d come through in a bunker, not somewhere else, such as the middle of the willows. I was starting to realize just how lucky we’d been. Coming through in the bunker had let us find our feet and look around for a little bit before They noticed us. But five weeks?
Maybe if we’d crouched down in the bunker until we ran out of MREs, Simon and I might have lasted a week. I wonder what Singer had eaten for all those weeks.
She says the fish are safe, if you can catch them.
Well, that answers that, I thought.
She traded us some fish for FRRs. I’d rather have fish than heat-stabilized potatoes. She doesn’t have any cigarettes.
We let her take the commander’s bed. He’s sure not gonna use it. She slept for like twelve hours straight. Not like we’re going anywhere anyway. Marco’s all for going out, trying to shoot one of these things, says maybe they won’t be so invisible if we put some bullets in them. Petrov told him to shut up, we’re staying put until the way back opens up. I’m going to bed so I don’t have to listen to fucking Marco whine.
Woke up and Steen and Singer were talking about the things. Steen says maybe they’re extradimensional. Singer went off into some kind of jargon I didn’t get, a whole lot of stuff. Steen seemed to understand half of it, but their theories have different names, so we got a whole lot of “Oh, you call it that? We call it this!” Pretty sure it’s at least half bullshit. Nice that someone’s having fun, even if we’re all about to get eaten by monsters.
Singer says we can’t shoot them, or maybe that we can, but only if they want to be shot. Otherwise they’d just step out of the way, but on an axis we can’t get to, whatever the fuck that means. Marco did some dick-waving about how he’d shoot them anyway, until Petrov told him to shut up again.
I was starting to come around to Bible’s opinion of Marco.
We got four days until the way out of the vacuae opens. Petrov told Singer she could come with us. The boys back at decontamination will lose their shit, but she doesn’t care. Says that life in quarantine is better than here. For one thing, it’ll probably be a lot longer.
If we all just stay put for four days, we might make it. Petrov wants to scout the way out day after tomorrow, says we’ll have a better chance that way, instead of just charging blindly toward the exit. He figures there’s a good chance that the way opening will stir up the critters and they’ll try to pick us off as we go. I mean, he’s probably not wrong.
Singer said a weird thing though, she said, “Maybe. Or maybe they won’t even notice. Just don’t think too loud. I think they hear you thinking.” What the fuck??
They can hear you thinking…. The graffiti warning must not have been on the walls when Bible was there. Or maybe he was the one who scratched it, in the end.
It was too depressing. I couldn’t keep going. I put the Bible down. We were nearly to the New Testament, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop reading it, but not tonight.
I turned off the light, checked that I was indeed tied to the bed, and went to sleep.
* * *
I woke up to a noise so horrible that for a minute I thought I was having a nightmare. I sat up, yanked against the restraint, cussed, and then the sound of my voice against the noise made me realize that it was really happening, and furthermore that I knew what it was.
Beau was making the goblin wail of a cat in the throes of extreme rage. His tail lashed against my blanket-covered legs and his ears were flat against his skull.
“Beau? What the hell?”
He hunkered down against the sheets and gave out another long, furious vowel. He wasn’t looking at me, but at the door.
My first thought was that the raccoon thieves had returned, perhaps for another piece of taxidermy, and that Beau was pissed about the intruders. Which made no sense because he was a cat, not a watchdog, and also he hadn’t cared at all the first time they were here.
Then he paused for a breath and I heard it.
Scratching.
Something was scratching at the door of my bedroom.
Skritch… skritch… skritch…
It was a loud scratch, at about knee height. My first reaction was one of relief—Oh, thank God, it’s not intruders, it’s some kind of animal—followed by What the hell? We’re a museum, not an animal park!
Hog Chapel has a couple options as far as medium-size animals go. It was just barely possible that one had broken in, I guess. I might have left the back door unlocked and something came to the trash and just kept going. Possum? Raccoon? Rat? Skunk?
Skritch… skritchchch…
Oh, sweet mother of God, please let it not be a skunk. I didn’t particularly want to fend off a rabid raccoon, but a rabies shot seemed minor compared with having to hose down half the museum with tomato juice.
Could it be another cat?
The scratching came again. Beau’s tail lashed so hard that I was surprised he didn’t become airborne.
No, Beau didn’t get that worked up about other cats. He had the kind of lazy confidence that came from knowing he could take anything up to and possibly including a small bear.
It had to be a rat. I would have had to leave the back door not just unlocked but ajar, and I wouldn’t have done that. In fact, I remembered checking the door twice. It had to be something already in the museum, and since all our possums and raccoons are stuffed, that meant it was a rat. A big rat, by the sound, but a rat.
Well, I had the solution to that. “Time to earn your keep, buddy.” I untied myself from the bedpost. I walked to the door, grabbed the knob, and yanked it open, careful to step out of the way as I did.
Beau shot across the room so fast that I was surprised I didn’t hear a sonic boom as he went. I caught a glimpse of something pale, and then Beau was on it and he and the rat rolled ass over teakettle down the hallway.
Christ, it was huge! Maybe it was a possum after all. I couldn’t make out any details, just the rolling melee down the hall. Beau was yowling with rage. Whatever he was fighting didn’t make any sound. Possums hiss when they’re cornered, so it could have just been a giant goddamn rat.
Beau and his victim rolled out of my line of sight. I hurried after them, not sure if I should grab a broom or just let the professional do his job. I hadn’t realized it would be so big. Was this going to require a trip to the emergency vet?
I limped down the hall toward the museum proper, already wracked with guilt. I should never have opened the door. Beau was going to get bit to hell, and it would be all my fault.
Silence fell so suddenly that it rang in my ears like sound. I sucked in my breath. Oh, God, had it killed him? No, surely not. Beau had a skull like a fist and claws like box cutters. I don’t think he’d ever lost a fight in his life.
I snatched up the nearest thing I could find, a didgeridoo (which I happened to know had a MADE IN CHINA stamp on the bottom), and brandished it, stepping into the moonlit museum. Where was Beau? If I had to beat the rat to death with a fake didgeridoo to save the cat, so be it.
Nothing. No movement. No sound. I looked from shadow to shadow. G
lass eyes glinted back at me. Where had they gone?
And then, casual as if he did this every day, Beau sauntered out from behind a case, into a pool of moonlight, sat down, and began to groom his paw.
I swept Beau up in my arms and sobbed an apology into his fur. Beau bore this patiently, purring his rusty-engine purr. When I tried to check him over for injuries, though, he put a paw on my arm and extended the claws just slightly.
“Sorry. I don’t want you to get an abscess or something.”
Beau blinked his vast green eyes at me, possibly indicating that while he appreciated the sentiment, he was not in the mood to be examined by a hysterical primate at this hour of the night.
From a cursory examination, it looked as if he had lost a patch of fur and maybe gotten clawed a bit along the flank, but was otherwise uninjured. There wasn’t any blood, just a raw pink line. A few other tufts of fur were missing, that was all.
“Okay. You get until tomorrow morning. Then I’m checking.”
I’d have to find the dead rat in the morning, too. Nothing freaks out the tourists like dead vermin in the exhibits. I knew which case it had to be behind, but there wasn’t enough room for me to squeak back there, so I’d have to pull it out in the morning.
Beau went back to cleaning his fur, which was now mussed by both combat and a human snuffling on him. I vowed to order fried rice tomorrow night and give him every piece of pork in it.
It was so late that it was probably early. I didn’t see myself getting back to sleep after that.
Nerves jangling, I limped upstairs and poked my cane at the sheet-metal patch on the wall. It went clonk in exactly the way you’d expect sheet metal with fabric over it to do. There was no plaster dust on the floor or weird billowing to the batik. Bigfoot gazed at me from under his heavy brow ridges.
I exhaled.
It was just a rat. A big goddamn rat. Nothing to do with the willows at all.
It may sound strange, but it was hard to think that something weird could happen that didn’t have anything to do with the willows. As if every awful horror had to be linked somehow.
I went back to the bedroom, stared at the bed, and said, “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”
Reading the Bible really didn’t appeal to me. I went and made a cup of tea, grabbed my phone, and spent until dawn tucked under His Sunflower Holiness, reading about ships that had gone missing at sea and increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories about what had happened to their crews. (It was cannibalism. The answer is always cannibalism.) It was creepy, but I was also hundreds of miles from the ocean, so it was a creepy that I didn’t have to worry about.
When dawn finally came, I yawned my way to bed and set my alarm an hour early so I could find the damn dead rat.
I slept surprisingly well. I did nearly jump out of my skin when I heard a scratch at the door, but it was Beau deciding it was time to patrol and use the litter box. I got up with him, turned on the Wonder Museum lights, and began Dead Rat Quest.
Naturally Beau had chased his opponent under a case where I couldn’t possibly fit, and naturally it was one that was too damn heavy to lift. I had to haul the giraffe skull—a replica, but don’t tell anyone—down, then walk the end of the case inch by inch out from the wall.
Bingo. There was definitely a shaggy lump back there. I gritted my teeth against the pain in my knee and kept wiggling the end. A carving of the Squash Kachina rattled against a bobblehead of Elvis, and a string of rosary beads rolled off the shelf and lodged against the glass. “Dammit,” I muttered, but I kept going until I had space to get behind the case. “All right, you bugger, let’s see how badly Beau beat you up.”
I stopped.
I looked down at the body while the ramifications slowly worked through my head, all of them utterly impossible, all of them bad.
The creature in front of me had long gashes along its sides, and its belly had been ripped out. Straw dripped from the wounds.
Beau had gutted his opponent, but he hadn’t killed it, because it was already dead.
He’d been fighting the albino raccoon.
CHAPTER 18
I stared down at the long-dead raccoon and thought, That isn’t straw, it’s wood-wool.
I was quite correct. Taxidermied animals are stuffed with a product called excelsior, or wood-wool. It was also possibly the most useless thing I’ve ever thought in my life, but if I thought about anything else, like the fact that a stuffed fucking raccoon had been clawing at my door, I would begin screaming and I wouldn’t stop until my voice gave out or they called someone to take me away.
The raccoon looked deflated. Most of the wood-wool had been yanked out. I rolled it over with my cane, feeling the skin flex over the armature. The legs were hard and dry, sticking up in the air when it rolled.
It couldn’t have been clawing at my door. It wasn’t possible.
But the thing that you saw was big and pale and it was dark and it could have been it could have been it could have been—
This is nuts, I told myself firmly. You can’t know that was what Beau was fighting. Taxidermy doesn’t walk around. A tourist tried to do a smash-and-grab, then panicked and dropped the raccoon back there. The rats got into it and hollowed out the wood-wool for a nest. It was a rat. He fought a rat. He just chased it back here, to the nest. That’s all.
“Yes, of course,” I said out loud. I rolled the raccoon back. There was a hole under its chin the size of my fist. A rat could certainly have burrowed into that. It made perfect sense. And then Beau would have chased it and the rat ran into the stuffed raccoon to hide and Beau tore at it. Yes. Absolutely logical. No one has zombie raccoons roaming around their museum. That would just be silly.
I went and got gloves because I didn’t want to handle a raccoon with rats in it, then stumped back on my cane and picked the thing up. Even through the heavy-duty dishwashing gloves we use to handle ancient taxidermy that might have formaldehyde in it, it felt horrible. The furry skin rolled between my fingers and gummed itself together. More wood-wool slid out onto the floor.
“I declare this raccoon a loss,” I announced to the museum. “Um. Sorry, bud.”
It occurred to me that there might be a dead rat in there, and I should probably check, because if there wasn’t, that meant there was a dead rat somewhere in the museum, and I needed to get to it before it started to smell. Grimacing, I flopped the head back and peered into the opening.
This is where the zombie rat lunges out and latches onto my face…
There was a hollowed-out tunnel as thick as my forearm inside the raccoon, but no dead rat. No live rat either, thank God. The last thing I wanted was to be carrying a live, pissed-off rat in what amounted to a white coonskin purse.
Of course, that still meant that there was a dead rat somewhere in the Wonder Museum. (Okay, there were like five, but all the others had been dead for decades and were wearing little hats.) Which meant that I got to play the world’s least fun party game, Where Is That Smell Coming From?, for the next few days, and to buy enough air freshener to sweeten a battleship.
I carried the dead raccoon to the trash and pitched it. The wooden base was nowhere in sight, but presumably I’d find that stashed somewhere one of these days, too. I wondered why the thief had panicked and ditched the raccoon. It seemed like the sort of stupid prank you’d pull for a fraternity hazing, but we’ve got about as many fraternities in Hog Chapel as we do cultists.
Beau was not interested in being checked for injuries, but I offered him some wet cat food and poked and prodded while he was eating. All I could find were the scratches. One was deep enough that I dug out some antibiotic goo from the last time he’d gotten out of the museum and picked a fight with another cat and slathered it on. He gave me a disgruntled look.
“Don’t lick that off or you’ll get the cone.”
Beau did not actually roll his eyes, but it was strongly implied.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get any bites, or we’d be going
to the vet right now.”
Of course he didn’t get any bites, the raccoon’s mouth was sewn shut.
I jammed that thought down into the subbasement of my brain and refused to think of it again.
“Jesus, what a morning,” I muttered, and went next door to get coffee and update Simon on the details.
“Oh, that is fucked-up,” said Simon. “It was living in the taxidermy?”
“Yeah.”
“You know what that means, right?”
“Eh?”
He leaned forward. “There could be rats living in other pieces, too. Like the grizzly bear could just be full of them.”
“No, they couldn’t,” I said with false bravado. “Some of them are resin mounts and half of them are in cases. And anyway, that’s why we’ve got a museum cat.”
“I’m just saying…”
I scowled. “I already checked the grizzly bear.”
“And?”
“And there was a hole in the back leg, but you can’t really see it from the front and there’s no poop, so it’s fine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How’s your nightmares?” I asked, determined to change the subject.
“I had the one where your teeth fall out and you can’t find a dentist. But nothing to do with… uh… yeah.”
“That’s good.” I stared into the coffee. “Yeah, that’s good. Maybe we’re getting over it.”
“Not much choice, really. How’s the knee?”
“Hurts like the devil. I’ve had two tourists recommend acupuncture, and one told me to rub it with hemp oil.”
“Bless their little hearts.” Simon rubbed the eye that may or may not have belonged to his dead twin. “Steel patch is fine?”
“It was at about four in the morning when I went and checked.”
“Good, good.”
The Hollow Places Page 20