49 pages • 1-hour read
The Hollow Places
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Chapters 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
Kara collapses on the riverbank, reeling from the sight of Martin Sturdivant’s mutilation. She and Simon conclude that multiple worlds exist, and that they may die here. They set off again across the river to find their way home. Kara injures her toe on a rock in the water. Moving on, they climb a bluff and see a half-sunken ship tangled in willows; its hull bears the letters “RON MOUN” (153). They spot something moving, and an invisible, humming presence pushes through the willows, bowing the branches. They crouch and hold still until it passes. Simon, whose vision is more sensitive than Kara’s, describes it as a trilobite-like creature made of skin.
Another humming entity approaches, and they take shelter in the derelict ship. The thing moves over the roof directly above them. Terrified, they try to think about anything else to avoid attracting it. Kara repeats the song “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” in her head until it moves on. They leave the ship, find the correct bunker, and confirm it by spotting Simon’s toolbox. They sprint down the concrete corridor, jump through the portal back into the Wonder Museum, and collapse in exhaustion.
Chapter 13 Summary
The museum phone rings. Kara’s mother calls in a panic after Mr. Bryce, Uncle Earl’s friend and neighbor, reported that the museum was closed all day. Kara checks the clock and sees it is Saturday at 1:27 am; only one day has passed, meaning time moves at the same rate at home as it does in the willow world. She lies to her mother, making up a story in which Simon had an allergic reaction to the flavored syrups at the coffee shop, causing him to have a seizure. Once her mother accepts that Kara was at the emergency room all day, Kara and Simon decide to secure the portal. They reenter the corridor, bolt the bunker door from the inside, and begin patching the hole in the museum. Kara reaches into the corridor to support a drywall patch and discovers the corpse-otter carving, which she sets on top of the racoon display case.
Back on the museum side, Simon finishes patching the hole with drywall. They hang a batik sheet over the patch and drag a display case in front of it. After Simon leaves, Kara feeds her cat, Beau, showers, cries, and hugs the taxidermy elk head Prince for comfort before sleeping. The next day, she opens the museum. A customer brings coffee and mentions hearing about Simon’s emergency. The morning is slow, and Kara stays behind the counter, weeping intermittently as she tries to process everything.
Chapter 14 Summary
After work, Kara visits Simon at the coffee shop and then searches online for information on interdimensional travel, alien willow trees, and Byricopa County. She finds only that the word “vacuae” means empty spaces in Latin. She goes to Simon’s apartment, where they share tequila and popcorn and confirm their shared experience. Simon wonders if a tourist could have made the original hole. That night, Kara dreams she is back in the willow world with Sturdivant. She wakes with raw, scraped fingertips and dirt under her nails, blaming it on the museum’s taxidermy chemicals.
She meets Simon for coffee. He admits he is also having nightmares and can feel the closed hole as a kind of pressure. Concerned that other breaches might exist, Kara tests another section of the wall in the otter room with a screwdriver. A photo taken through the small test hole shows ordinary insulation and studs, confirming the portal is a localized phenomenon.
Chapter 15 Summary
Several days later, Kara studies the Bible from the bunker and finds handwritten journal entries in the margins. An unnamed soldier describes a military mission into a fog-shrouded region he calls the vacuae. The team’s commander goes missing and is later found mutilated with cone-shaped wounds all over his body. The journal’s description of the wounds matches the funnel-shaped depressions Kara saw in the sand, confirming they are left by Them. Overwhelmed, she closes the book.
Her ex-husband, Mark, calls about selling their old house. The next morning, she sees the batik sheet moving over the patched hole. Behind it, she finds deep gouges clawed into the new drywall. She recognizes the pattern and realizes her scraped fingertips came from attacking the patch in her sleep. She is about to flee when Uncle Earl calls to check in. The familiar conversation steadies her, and she decides to tell Simon that she is unconsciously trying to reopen the portal.
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
The return from the willow world marks a transition from external threat to internal, psychological invasion. This shift demonstrates that under the theme of The Fragility of Reality, the membrane between sanity and madness is as permeable as the wall between worlds. The danger is no longer confined to the other side of the portal; it has been internalized as an invasive trauma. Simon’s admission that he can still feel the sealed hole as a presence reveals that the breach is no longer just architectural but psychic. The most potent manifestation of this psychological colonization is Kara’s sleepwalking. Her unconscious, self-destructive attempts to claw open the drywall patch signify a profound loss of agency, suggesting her mind is no longer a sovereign space. The willows have taken root in Kara’s subconscious, and the physical evidence of her raw, plaster-dusted fingertips confirms that her nightmares are extensions of the other world’s influence, compelling her to reopen the way. In these moments, the fragility of reality is emphasized by the mind’s susceptibility to alien consciousness.
In their attempts to process an otherworldly experience, Kara and Simon cycle through coping mechanisms that underscore the theme of Belief Systems as Frameworks for the Unknowable. Their efforts highlight the inadequacy of human logic and science when confronted with the horror of parallel worlds. Kara’s mental strategy of focusing on petty, mundane outrages is a conscious attempt to fill her cognitive space with manageable anxieties, which helps her to avoid attracting the thought-sensitive entities. This act reveals belief systems not as tools for understanding truth, but as deliberate, self-imposed fictions for survival. Similarly, Kara’s reaction to a pop-science metaphor for a wormhole as a “throat” (191) connecting universes—“I could really have done without that image” (191)—encapsulates the failure of human language to clearly convey or contain the horror. The soldier’s journal provides the only functional framework, yet it offers no comfort, only a grim confirmation of the terror and a new vocabulary (the “vacuae”) that solidifies the threat without making it more comprehensible.
The motif of holes and portals expands to explore the contested nature of sanctuary, transforming the Wonder Museum from a haven into a precarious borderland. Sealing the portal becomes a study in futility, a testament to insufficient human-scale solutions for a cosmic-scale problem. The flimsy drywall patch, covered by a decorative sheet, is a potent symbol of denial and the superficiality of their security. Kara’s methodical testing of other walls is a search for reassurance, an attempt to believe the breach is localized and contained. Her relief upon finding ordinary insulation behind other walls is palpable but short-lived, as the true threat is not the potential for more holes, but the unstable nature of the existing one. The discovery of the gouges in the patch, made by her own hands, shatters the illusion of safety. The sanctuary has been breached not by an external monster, but by an internal compulsion, making the concept of a secure boundary meaningless.
This psychological pressure precipitates a significant development in Kara’s character, as the narrative juxtaposes the mundane trauma of her past with the horror of her present. This contrast solidifies the theme of Defining Home and Safety in the Bizarre. In this section, Kara’s ex-husband, Mark, calls her about selling their former house, which would have been a source of grief just weeks earlier. After surviving a “portal to hell” (203), Kara sees this issue as a mere triviality. As Kara’s past pain is dwarfed by this new, existential reality, she officially breaks away from the person she was at the beginning of the story. This recasts her as a survivor not of a failed marriage, but of a cosmic intrusion. Her decision to stay and protect the museum is no longer a default choice born of desperation but an active acceptance of her new reality.
Kara bringing the corpse-otter carving back through the portal functions as significant foreshadowing. This object, retrieved from the liminal space of the corridor, ensures that the breach is more than a memory or a psychological scar; it is an active, physical contamination. Kara’s observation that the carving refuses to lie flat hints at its inherent instability and alien nature, which resists assimilation into the normal laws of its new environment. While the patched hole represents a closed pathway, the carving represents an open invitation. Its retrieval is a catastrophic error born of distraction, where the protagonist unwittingly carries the source of the curse home. The carving’s presence transforms the threat from something that might break in to something that will rise from within.
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