The Hollow Places E-Book

T. Kingfisher

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 426

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Carrot has moved into the Wonder Museum -  an eclectic collection of taxidermy, shrunken heads, and Mystery Junk owned by her Uncle Earl. For Carrot, it's not creepy at all: she grew up with it. What's creepy is the corridor behind one of the museum walls. There's just no space for a corridor there – or the concrete bunker, or the strange islands beyond the bunker's doors, or the unseen things  in the willow trees. Carrot has stumbled into a horrifying world, and They are watching her. Strewn among the islands are the remains of Their meals – and Their experiments. And even if she manages to make it home, she can't stop calling Them after her…

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for the Author

Also available from T. Kingfisher and Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

Author’s Note

About the Author

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

“Can horror even be this rollicking, this fun, while still delivering on the creepiness, the dread, the ick? In Kingfisher’s hands, it can”

– Stephen Graham Jones

“Kingfisher neatly combines modern elements into a combined folktale and horror story that is rich in atmosphere and characterization...”

– Publishers Weekly

“Gripping, bold, sharply witty, inventive and most of all – terrifying!”

– Alison Littlewood

“A sweet and shivery tale of things best left unseen by one of the genre’s rising stars”

– Helen Marshall

“Original and compelling…populated by nightmarish figures that haunt you long after you’ve finished”

– James Brogden

Also available from T. Kingfisher and Titan Books

The Twisted Ones

THE

HOLLOW

PLACES

T. KINGFISHER

TITANBOOKS

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The Hollow Places

Print edition ISBN: 9781789093308

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789093315

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: November 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Ursula Vernon 2020. All rights reserved.

Ursula Vernon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For the staff of Café Diem, without whom I would write many fewer books

THE

HOLLOW

PLACES

1

Nobody ever believes me when I tell them my uncle Earl owns a museum.

They start to come around when I explain that it’s a little tiny museum in a storefront in Hog Chapel, North Carolina, although there’s so much stuff jumbled together that it looks bigger than it is. Then I tell them the name and they stop believing me again.

It makes for a good icebreaker at parties, anyway.

My uncle runs the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy.

Most of it is complete junk, of course. There are things in the cases that undoubtedly have MADE IN CHINA stamped on the underside. I threw out the shrunken heads when I was fifteen and found identical ones for sale at the Halloween store. But the wall of Thimbles of the World is real or, at least, contains real thimbles, and all the Barong masks are really from Bali, and if the Clovis points were chipped out in the seventies instead of thousands of years ago, they were at least still made by a human with a rock. The jar of MYSTERY PODS?! on the counter are the cones from a Banksia plant, but they’re a mystery to most people, so I guess that counts.

And the taxidermy is real, insomuch as it is genuine taxidermy. That part of the museum has eleven stuffed deer heads, six stuffed boar heads, one giraffe skull, forty-six stuffed birds of various species, three stuffed albino raccoons, a Genuine Feejee Mermaid—which I keep trying to get him to rename because I think it’s probably racist, or at least he could put a sign up explaining the context—two jackalopes, an entire case of dried scorpions, a moth-eaten grizzly bear, five stuffed prairie dogs, two fur-bearing trout, one truly amazing Amazonian river otter, and a pickled cobra in a bottle.

There’s a lot of other stuff, too. That’s just the ones on the first floor. I’m leaving out the things in boxes, and some things are hard to count. How do I classify the statue of St. Francis of Assisi with the carefully stuffed and mounted sparrows perched on his arms? And I’m not really sure whether the scene of tiny taxidermy mice in armor riding cane toads counts as one thing or as six mice and two toads. They’re in the case with the armadillo purse (and do I count that as clothing or as taxidermy?) and a mug that may have been used by Elvis Presley. The mug has an American flag on it. Uncle Earl put an album sleeve behind it and a large sign proclaiming that Elvis came to the Lord before he died. I’m not sure if that’s true, but Uncle Earl firmly believes that every celebrity he likes came to the Lord before they died. I think this is so that he can picture them partying with angels instead of being hellbound.

Uncle Earl believes strongly in Jesus, Moses, the healing power of crystals, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, that aliens landed at Roswell but the government is suppressing it, secret histories, faith-healing, snake-handling, that there is an invention that will replace gasoline but the oil companies are suppressing it, chemtrails, demon-possession, the astonishing powers of Vicks VapoRub, and that there’s proof that aliens contacted the Mayans and the Aztecs and probably the Egyptians, but the scientists are suppressing it. He believes in Skunk Ape, Chupacabras, and he positively adores Mothman. He is not Catholic, but he believes in the miracle of Fatima, visions of Mary appearing on toast, and he is nearly positive that the end times are upon us, but seems to be okay with this, provided it does not interfere with museum hours.

Uncle Earl also likes nearly everyone he’s ever met, even the ones who believe in none of these things. If you made a Venn diagram of the saved and the damned, the damned would all be outside Uncle Earl’s personal circle. He doesn’t like to think of people he knows being in hell.

I tried pointing out once that the nice tourist couple he’d just talked to for forty-five minutes were Muslim.

He said that was fine. “There’s a lot of Muslims in the world, Carrot.” (My name is Kara, but he’s called me Carrot since I was two years old.) “God wouldn’t send all those good people to hell.”

“A lot of people would disagree with you.”

“That’s fine, too.”

It’s hard to argue with Uncle Earl. He can believe in too many things at the same time, without any apparent contradiction.

“Dr. Williams at the coffee shop says the earth is billions of years old.”

“Could be,” said Uncle Earl. “Could be. Creation took seven days, but I don’t know how long a day is for God.”

“But you’ve got a sign in the case with the prairie dogs that says the earth is four thousand years old.”

“It’s a quote from the Reverend James Smiley. It’s attributed down at the bottom. If it’s wrong, it’s on him. I’m not here to judge. The visitors can decide for themselves what they want to believe.”

“What if they decide wrong, though?”

“God forgives a lot,” said Uncle Earl. “He has to. We all do a lot that needs forgiving.”

I gave up.

When I was a kid, my classmates asked if I thought the museum was creepy. Some of the taxidermy was old and kind of battered, and you turn around the wrong corner and there’d be glass eyes staring at you. One of the albino raccoons had a particularly unpleasant grin. But, no, I never found it creepy. I grew up in it. I was sitting behind the counter taking people’s donations when I was so young that I needed to sit on a phone book to reach the cash register.

(Years later I realized that I could probably have won instant fame from my classmates if I’d made up a story about the museum being haunted by the ghosts of the stuffed animals, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. Oh, well. Opportunities lost.)

The sign out front of the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy mostly has small print, but the word WONDERS is large, so most people call it the Wonder Museum. There are a lot of jokes—“I wonder what Earl was thinking,” “I wonder where he gets this stuff.” They stopped being funny a long time ago, but we all smile politely anyway, in case the person saying it has money.

To answer the second question, Uncle Earl gets the stuff at flea markets or estate sales or on the internet or he makes them himself. He dabbled in taxidermy for a long time and he has lots of friends on the internet. People like Uncle Earl.

To answer the first question, I don’t always know what he’s thinking either.

* * *

There was a time, when I was sixteen and working at the Wonder Museum for a summer job, that I tried to argue with him. I was angry at everything because this is the natural state of sixteen-year-olds.

“You believe in evolution,” I told him. “You just don’t know it.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Doesn’t seem right, us coming from monkeys.”

“Look, you believe that babies take after their parents, right?”

“Of course. That’s just genetics, Carrot. For example, your momma always liked to argue, and look at you now.”

I favored this with a snort and plunged onward. “And you believe in survival of the fittest, right? That fast antelope live long enough to have babies and slow antelope get eaten?”

“Sure, Carrot.”

“That’s evolution, right there. That. Those two things together.”

Uncle Earl shook his head sadly. “Doesn’t seem right,” he repeated, “us coming from monkeys.”

I threw my hands in the air and stomped into the back to rearrange the armored mice.

A few weeks later, shortly before I was done with summer break, he informed me that he had come around on evolution.

“What?”

“Thinking you must have been right, Carrot.” He nodded. “Seems like we must have evolved.” He waved a finger at me. “Only thing that explains Bigfoot, isn’t it?”

I stared at him. I did not even know where to begin.

“Yep,” he said, taking my silence for agreement. “Bigfoot’s the missing link, all right, so you figure we gotta have a chain in order to have a link missing. I’m gonna update the sign in the prairie dog case.”

He smiled at me beatifically and I went and got him the sign from the prairie dog case so that he could remove the words of the Reverend Smiley. Even at sixteen, I was learning that you had to pick your battles.

Eighteen years to the day after Uncle Earl accepted Bigfoot into his life, my marriage ended.

It would be a better story if I had walked in to find my husband, Mark, in bed with my best friend and dramatically told him to never darken my door again. But it was just two people who got married too early and had a long, slow slide into comfortable misery. I can’t even say that it was my idea. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that I could leave him or that he could leave me, and it was rather surprising to find out how wrong I was.

I felt a lot of panic because I had no idea how I was going to support myself—he had the better job, with health insurance—but the rest of the emotional stuff got a lot easier.

He offered me the house, which I couldn’t have afforded to keep. I declined.

Which is how I found myself, at thirty-four, staring down the barrel of moving back in with my parents.

I love my mother. I cannot live with her. We are too much alike. If you have ever seen those photos of two deer who get their antlers locked together during a fight, dragging each other around until they both starve to death, you have a pretty good idea of how my mother and I get along.

Our optimal living distance is about two hundred miles. This is close enough that, in an emergency, I can drop everything and get out to see her, but limits random visiting. Since we are both aware of the whole locked-antlers problem, we can manage short bouts of family togetherness, then retire back to our respective corners to recover.

Moving back in with her was a more upsetting prospect than the divorce. Freelance graphic design just doesn’t pay a lot, though, and it was going to take me months to save up a deposit on an apartment. I actually contemplated lying and saying I was living with a friend and moving into a room at the YMCA, but it turned out that even the Y had a waiting list.

Jesus Christ.

So I packed. I had a pretty good system: pack for an hour, cry for five minutes, pack for another hour, rinse, repeat. I was grimly throwing my books into boxes—I was taking the Pratchett, dammit, and he could buy his own—when the phone rang.

It was Uncle Earl.

That in itself was unusual. Uncle Earl liked the internet a lot, but he wasn’t great on the phone. He called on my birthday every year, but that wasn’t for months yet.

“Hi, Uncle Earl. What’s up?”

“Hi, Carrot. It’s your uncle Earl.”

“Yes, I . . .” I closed my eyes and leaned against the bookcase. Pick your battles. “How are you doing, Uncle Earl?”

“Me? Oh, I can’t complain. The gout came back last month, but the doctor’s a real nice lady. Museum’s doing well.”

I realized that I’d derailed him and waited.

“Heard you were having a rough patch, Carrot.”

“Well, these things happen.” I had an immediate urge to downplay the divorce, even though I had been sobbing furiously about an hour earlier. “I’ll manage.”

“I know you will, hon. You were always tough as an old boot.”

From Uncle Earl, this was highly complimentary. I laughed. The tears were still a bit too close, so it came out strangled, but it was a laugh.

He hemmed and hawed for a minute, then said, “I’m sure you’ve got plans already, but I wanted you to know, I cleaned out the spare room at the museum last year.”

“What?”

“The spare room in back,” he said patiently. “Next to my workshop. I know your mom’s probably real excited to have you back home”—this was a profound lie, and we both knew it—“but you know, with the gout, I don’t get around as easy as I used to right now, and if you wanted to stay here for a bit, I thought I’d offer.”

“Uncle Earl.” I could feel the tears starting up again and pinched the bridge of my nose.

“It’s no trouble,” he assured me.

“I would love to stay there,” I said, all in a gasp. My mother lived sixty miles from Hog Chapel. My ex-husband had visited the Wonder Museum once and told me the place was “kinda freaky,” so all my memories of the Wonder Museum were good ones, without him in it. I could wander around the dusty cases and pet the stuffed grizzly and make the armored mice reenact the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

Hell, I could actually catalog the damn collection and earn my keep.

“Really, Carrot?”

“Really.”

“Great!” I think he might have been as surprised as I was. “Then I’ll get some new sheets for the bed. Just let me know when you’re headed down.”

I thanked him a few more times and hung up, and then I cried on the bookcase for a while.

When I finally stopped, I wiped my eyes, then I took all the Lovecraft and the Bear and left Mark with the Philip K. Dick because I never liked androids anyway.

2

I moved into the Wonder Museum on a rainy Monday afternoon.

The museum is closed on Mondays since Uncle Earl stays open all weekend to cash in on the tourists. Hog Chapel would love to be like the town of Southern Pines, an hour east, but can’t sustain quite so much quaintness. There’s one famous golf course that brings people in, and a retirement community for wealthy seniors, who bring their grandkids into downtown on weekends, but that’s about it for big money. The rest of the population is mostly tiny organic farmers looking for cheap land, and extremely earnest hippies who want to talk to you about biodiesel.

Every now and then the small-business bureau suggests changing the name from Hog Chapel to something more enticing, but it never passes. Who wants to live in Pinestraw or Pine Needle or Happy Pines or Sunset Pines anyway?

As it is, downtown Hog Chapel can reliably sustain one coffee shop, one diner, a hardware store, and two junk stores with pretensions of being antique shops.

The Wonder Museum does okay. Uncle Earl bought the building dirt cheap decades ago, so while it’s not a cash cow, it doesn’t have many expenses. It’s sandwiched between the coffee shop and a boutique clothing store. The boutique clothing store goes out of business approximately once a year, whereupon someone buys it, changes out the name and the scented candles, and proceeds to gently lose money for another year.

When I drove my aged Subaru up, the boutique was named Glad Rags and had a mannequin dressed like a flapper. Judging by the signs advertising 30 percent off everything, I expected the shop would soon be changing scented candles again.

Uncle Earl came out to meet me, despite the rain. He’s not a terribly physically demonstrative man, but he hugged me and said, “It’ll be okay, Carrot,” while I snuffled on his shoulder.

I didn’t have that many boxes. Most of them were books. I have always been one of those who rhapsodized about the book as a physical object, but having to pack and carry the boxes was enough to make me want to throw over physical books altogether and just live on an e-reader.

I’d left Mark the furniture. I had no place to put it. I had my clothes, a couple of pictures I’d taken off the walls, my laptop, and a couple of coffee mugs. And refrigerator magnets. I had been collecting refrigerator magnets whenever I traveled anywhere, and damn if I was leaving my ex souvenirs of cities he hadn’t visited.

Uncle Earl wanted to help, but his gout was bad and he kept having to stop and rest his foot, so I pretended I was too tired to unload and just grabbed a couple essentials.

“Your room’s through here,” he said, once I’d gotten those out of the car. He limped through the back hall, which was hung with posters announcing the anniversary of the Mothman sightings—“Fifty Years of Terror!”—and a random assortment of small-animal skulls wired to a kayak paddle. (Why a kayak paddle? you ask. Look, if I could explain this stuff, it wouldn’t be the Wonder Museum, okay?)

My uncle may well have cleared out the room last year, but the coat of warm-yellow paint on the walls was brand-new. The room still smelled of it, even though a fan was in the doorway to blow some of the fumes out. The bed was an antique with elaborately lathed corner posts higher than my head, ridiculously imposing and faintly absurd, given that it was only a twin bed and had a green comforter decorated with little pineapples.

On the wall opposite the bed was the mounted head of a Roosevelt elk. Roosevelt elk are massive animals, nearly the size of horses, and this one had a rack of antlers like tree limbs. I took one look and started laughing in recognition.

“Oh my God! Uncle Earl, is that Prince?”

“You always were fond of him.” Uncle Earl sounded a trifle embarrassed. “Thought you might appreciate the company.”

I laughed again, walking up to my old friend.

When I was five or six, I saw Bambi, because this is a baffling thing that parents still do to their children. I had not cried, but I had stared huge eyed at the screen while Bambi’s mother died. But the figure that really impressed me was Bambi’s father, the Prince of the Forest.

(Incidentally, if you haven’t read the book, by Felix Salten, there is an incredibly weird scene where the Prince shows Bambi the body of a dead poacher to explain to him that humans can die, too. Everybody goes on about how disturbing Watership Down is as an animal book for kids, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Bambi.)

The next time I went to the Wonder Museum, I walked up to the mounted elk head and shouted, “Prince!”

My deer-identification skills were not strong at six. My mother, being that sort of person, explained that elk and deer were different species and this wasn’t the Prince.

Uncle Earl, being the sort of person he was, waited until my mother had gone next door and told me that elk were even greater princes of the forest than deer, and that this elk would be honored to be called Prince.

The next time I came back, the plaque next to the elk had been changed, and it now read:

“PRINCE”

Cervus canadensis roosevelti

Even at a young age, I was aware that he was doing this partly to be kind and partly to make sure both my mother and I could be right. At a much later age, it would occur to me that my mother had been Uncle Earl’s sister first, and he probably had a lot of experience in working around her inexhaustible need to be correct in the face of adversity.

It was good to see Prince again. I hugged Uncle Earl. “You didn’t have to do this. Thank you.”

“It’s what family’s for, Carrot. Anyway, I’ll work you hard while you’re here. Don’t you worry about that.”

He tried to look stern and failed miserably. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and only cried a little while I was in there, mostly because of the kindness, and a little out of sheer relief.

* * *

I went to bed early, exhausted from the drive and the emotions, and slept like the drugged dead. I didn’t even get up to use the bathroom.

I woke up and did not have even a moment of confusion about where I was. The last few weeks, sleeping in the living room, I would wake up and stare at the ceiling and wonder why I wasn’t in the bedroom, and then the divorce would come crashing back down on me all over again. But here I woke up, and even though it was dark, I smelled paint and I saw Prince’s antlers in the thin sliver of light from the door and I knew exactly where I was.

I had to fumble for my cell phone to see what time it was. Eight fifteen. Early for me, but if I was going to help run the museum, I had to get used to getting up early. We opened at nine. I got up, showered, threw on clothes, and padded out to the front, where Uncle Earl was setting up the point-of-sale system.

“Morning, Carrot,” he said. “I brought doughnuts.”

I looked over at the box of Krispy Kreme and reminded myself that I was back in the South, where our cultural food is deep-fried. Sure, great wars are fought over the proper sort of barbecue, but everybody finds common ground on the hush puppies. And Krispy Kreme. It’s as close to a religious pilgrimage as you can make in this part of the country. (Go a bit farther south and Graceland fills this ecological niche, but not in the Carolinas.)

I took a doughnut and bit into it. It was made of air and glory.

“You want to run next door and get us some coffee?” asked Uncle Earl. “I’d go, but . . .”

I took note of the way he was sitting on the stool and got a suspicion that it wasn’t just gout bothering him. His back was straight, and I could see a brace under his clothes.

“Back bugging you, Uncle Earl?”

“It’s fine.”

“Fine like it’s fine, or fine like it hurts like hell but you don’t want to complain?”

His lips twitched. “Well, more like the second one. Went out on me a few weeks back. Still twinges sometimes.”

“Jeez. Didn’t they give you meds?”

He shrugged carefully. “The ones that work make me foggy. Always afraid I’ll fall asleep in front of the customers.”

I paused on my way out the door to get coffee. “Well, if you want to take one tomorrow, I’ll be here and make sure you don’t.”

I almost expected him to turn me down—Uncle Earl would let you cut his leg off rather than complain—but he said, “I’d like that, hon,” and I had a sinking feeling that he was in a lot more pain than I thought.

* * *

The Black Hen coffee shop next door was ostensibly owned by a woman named Martha, but her brother Simon was the barista. I assume he got off shift at some point, but I never saw him leave. Simon was interesting. He dressed like a thrift-store Mad Hatter, with fingerless gloves and strange hats. He looked exactly the same now as he had the last time I had been here, five years ago, and exactly the same as he had when I’d first met him, nearly a decade ago. Simon had to be nearly forty, if not older, but he looked about eighteen. Somewhere, a portrait was probably aging for him.

Uncle Earl and I drank free at the Black Hen because Uncle Earl owned the whole building, and I think he took at least half his rent in caffeine. Simon loved the Wonder Museum and came over sometimes with interesting skulls, also in lieu of rent.

“How’ve you been, Simon?” I asked, flopping down in one of the chairs while he filled up a carafe for me to take back.

“I’m good,” he said. “I hear you’re not so good.”

“Divorce.”

“Ugh. Do I need to kill him?”

Simon was approximately half the size of my ex, but it was an arresting mental image. “No, but you’re sweet to offer. I’ll manage.” (I’ll manage, I said, as if I weren’t still bursting into tears at inconvenient moments once or twice a day.)

“Aww. You’re better off. Men suck.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, it’s the eye talking.” He put my coffee on the counter.

“. . . the eye,” I said.

“Oh, you haven’t been around for a while! Yeah. Turns out my left eye’s got some rare form of color blindness that only women get. So they think I’m probably a chimera and ate my twin in the womb and it’s actually her left eye.”

I sipped the coffee. It was extremely good coffee. “Huh.”

“The optometrist got very excited.”

“I bet.”

“Sometimes I see weird shit with it.”

Knowing Simon, weird shit could encompass anything from ghosts to auras to invisible aliens performing in a barbershop quartet. I thought about asking if he’d seen anything in the Wonder Museum, but given that it was wall-to-wall weird shit, how would he even tell?

After a minute, because I am incapable of leaving things alone, I said, “Is it just the left eye?”

“Well, it’s hard to tell. I’d have to get everything tested individually, wouldn’t I? I mean, my pancreas could be female. How would I even know?”

I had never before contemplated the gender of my pancreas. I gazed into my coffee.

“How’s the museum?” he asked.

“Seems to be doing okay. I’d like to try and catalog some of the things, maybe update the website while I’m staying here.”

“Hoo, good luck.” Simon shook his head. “Better you than me.”

A man who had devoured his twin in the womb and was now carrying her eye around in his head was pitying me. That seemed as if it should be a good metaphor for my life, although I’d be damned if I could make sense of it. I took the carafe of coffee, clutched my own cup, and headed back to the museum.

* * *

A couple of early tourists showed up to tour the museum, promptly at nine. I unlocked the door and waved them in. “Welcome to the Wonder Museum!”

“I love this place,” one of them confessed, a shaggy-haired woman with a bull ring in her nose and a T-shirt that said i ♥ CHICKENS. “It’s the best. I bring all my friends here when we’re in town.”

“Glad you think so!” I said cheerfully.

The little knot of tourists vanished up the stairs, their voices drifting after them. “Wait until you see the taxidermy. . . .”

I swept my eyes over the displays, packed to bursting with . . . stuff. Contemplating the cataloging job ahead of me was like standing at the bottom of Everest and looking up. “Do you have any kind of inventory system?”

“Oh, yes,” said Uncle Earl. “For the T-shirts and the bumper stickers and the mugs.”

“But the museum exhibits?”

He frowned. “Well, I know what they all are . . . mostly . . .”

There is probably a phrase that strikes more fear and terror into the heart of someone attempting to take an inventory, but I do not know it. But looking at Uncle Earl’s hopeful, slightly worried face, I could not say it aloud.

“Spreadsheets,” I said. “We will do this with spreadsheets. And stickers.”

I pulled up a fresh one and wrote #00001 in the first box, then wrote Prince—mounted Roosevelt elk head. I went into the back, took a photo with my cell phone, then plugged it into the spreadsheet. Uncle Earl had a bunch of tiny price-tag stickers, for putting on the coffee mugs. I wrote #1 on one and affixed it to the back of Prince’s plaque.

“One down,” I muttered, looking around me. “Another couple million to go.”

I got to work.

3

A week later, we were settling into a routine. I got up just before the museum opened. I ate whatever Uncle Earl brought in—muffins or doughnuts or whatever. I went next door, got coffee for both of us, and then Uncle Earl sat at the till and I did all the jobs that required mobility—fetching mail, putting out the signboard, restocking the stickers and the coffee mugs. Somewhere around lunch, he’d send me out for sandwiches at the diner, and I’d spend the rest of the afternoon cataloging.

When we closed up at six, he’d say, “Good job today, Carrot. Don’t know what I did without you.” Then he would go home and I would go next door to the coffee shop and leech on the Wi-Fi. If I could think of something fun to say, I’d update the museum’s social media. I had grandiose visions of overhauling the web page and doing more with it than the occasional blog post about the history of Feejee Mermaids, but I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. And you had to be careful when you posted pictures of skulls and taxidermy because there were always people who wanted to tell you that this made you a murderer and the moral equivalent of Ed Gein. My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds and was thus impenetrable, but Uncle Earl was a gentle soul, and I was afraid that someone might hurt his feelings.

Most of my time was spent designing people’s logos and wedding invitations and sending them off to clients, while Simon slung coffee and told me rambling stories about his childhood in Florida. This sounds boring. It was not. I would be head down in a project, letting the words flow over me, and Simon would casually throw out that his parents had been religious-party clowns on weekends, or that he had nearly been eaten by an alligator on two separate occasions. I would jerk upright, startled, and say “Wait, what?” and then Simon would explain how his sister had fought the alligator off with a lawn dart, and I would stare at him and wonder how he had survived to adulthood. (I asked him about this once. He said he’d never expected to live this long and now he was just happy to be here. Possibly that explains why he seemed so absolutely content to be a barista and live over the coffee shop. I think he genuinely expected to keel over on the espresso machine one day and be buried with a steamer in his hand.)

At some point, the coffee shop would close. Simon never kicked me out, but when he’d turned the sign to CLOSED, I’d finish up what I was doing and head back next door. If I sat in a particular spot against the wall downstairs—directly under the kudu head, next to the portrait of Pope John Paul done entirely in sunflower seeds, I could still get Wi-Fi, so I’d check various forums, eat the other half of my sandwich from lunch, then congratulate myself on not stalking my ex-husband on social media to see if he was appropriately miserable.

(Mark was not appropriately miserable. He was posting platitudes about life being full of possibility and moving bravely into the unknown. Dammit, I can’t believe I spent so much of my life on a man who would unironically post the line “Today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.” And in Papyrus, too.)

Sitting alone in a darkened building full of dead animals, fake shrunken heads, and, of course, His Sunflower Holiness might have been creepy if I wasn’t used to it, but it didn’t feel that way. Even when a passing car would splash its headlights through the window and the glass eyes of the animals would catch the light, it didn’t bother me. Sure, they briefly looked alive, but so what? They had a kind of benevolence, like stuffed and mounted guardian angels. Uncle Earl’s basic kindness infused every corner of his beloved museum.

It was a kind place. It was beginning to feel like home. I could feel it working its way into my bones, and that worried me a little, because a few months ago I had been a graphic designer with a house and a husband, safe and stable, building up a career a little bit at a time. My life had stretched out in front of me, not terribly exciting but comprehensible.

Now I was on a completely different track. I had barely any money, my job prospects were awfully thin, and stability was starting to look like a room with a stuffed elk head and a portrait of Elvis over the bed.

It’s only been a week, I told myself. You get at least a month to recover from your marriage before you have to start worrying that you’re a slacker. Which was all the excuse I needed to pull up some suitably smutty fanfic and go to bed.

* * *

The UPS guy came in with a box the next morning, shoving the door open with his shoulder. Uncle Earl started to get up, winced, and I hurried to grab the pad and sign for it so that he wouldn’t have to.

“Got a new helper, I see.”

Uncle Earl nodded. “This is my niece, Car—Kara.”

The UPS guy tapped the brim of his hat. “I’m sure we’ll see each other plenty.” He headed back toward the door. “At least until your donors slow down a bit!”

“Not much chance of that,” I muttered, glaring at the box. I’d been working all week, including most of the day we were closed, and I felt as if I’d barely made a dent. And here was more stuff coming in.

Oh, well. I took the job on myself, after all.

“Let me photograph these,” I said, getting out my phone, while Uncle Earl unpacked the box. “For the catalog.”

“Okay, Carrot.”

He pulled newspaper-wrapped bundles out of the box and laid them on the counter. “From my old friend Woody,” he said. “He haunts estate sales and sends me things. I like his because he always includes the provenance when he can find it.”

Woody’s gifts were eclectic, to say the least. The first bundle was a bag of leg bones from Soay sheep, barely as long as my hand. “Soays are tiny,” said Uncle Earl. “Up to your knee, maybe.” The next two were modern primitive carvings of birds with their beaks gaping open and strange, flopping fish in their mouths. Then a lynx skull—“We can always use more skulls”—a blank book made of banana leaves, and a woman’s face molded out of fish-skin leather.

“Oh, fish leather,” said Uncle Earl wearily. “You have to keep it in the cases or Beauregard gets it.” Beauregard is the latest of the Wonder Museum cats, an immense tabby with a skull like a fist. He had come up briefly when I was unpacking, headbutted me in the shin, and slouched off. Beau is excellent at catching the mice that might gnaw on the edges of the taxidermy and has a personality like a benevolent feline Genghis Khan.

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.

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.”