The Hollow Places
49 pages • 1-hour read
T. KingfisherThe Hollow Places
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Chapters 7-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Kara and Simon step through the door and struggle to orient themselves in a misted river landscape threaded with small, barrow-like islands, each with a concrete bunker and a metal door. The light, plants, and birds mimic Earth’s, but they are slightly wrong. Before exploring, Simon mounts a deadbolt on their entry bunker as a fallback. They wade the cold water to a willow-covered sandspit, where Kara feels a sudden, crushing dread. In the sand, they notice neat, cone-shaped funnels like antlion pits.
They test nearby bunkers; one door is rusted shut and another is flooded. To avoid losing their entry point, they mark it with a forked stick. Moving along the shore, they spot a carrot-colored school bus half-buried in sand, with the words “BYRICOPA COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS” (85) rendered in an unfamiliar serif font on the side. Abruptly, it begins to rain in sheets, so they duck inside for shelter. The interior looks intact, but Simon urgently warns Kara not to sit on the seats.
Chapter 8 Summary
Inside the bus, Kara sees the shapes of children thrashing beneath the green leather of the seats, as if they are stuck inside the cushions; Simon sees them, too. An intentional presence seems to gather at the driver’s seat, and they both run back outside. The rain has gone from a pour to a drizzle. They return to the riverbank only to find that the flood has swept away their forked-stick marker, and they lose their bearings. Panicked, they force themselves into a methodical search, checking each island’s bunker one by one.
Night falls as they work. Downriver, they glimpse the boatman, a silent figure poling a skiff, and hide until he passes. With darkness deepening and the river rising, they choose a bunker at random and take shelter. Inside, their flashlights illuminate scratches on the concrete that read “They Can Hear You Thinking” (97) and “Pray They Are Hungry” (101).
Chapter 9 Summary
Deeper in the bunker, they find a living area with cots, footlockers, and bolted inner doors. They reflect on their experiences with the bus and the boatman, and as they try to make sense of the situation, they compare the place to the Wood between the Worlds from C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. Exhausted, they choose cots and sleep.
Before dawn, Kara wakes and joins Simon at the bunker entrance, where they peer cautiously outside. Everything appears to be normal at first. Kara is disquieted by the sounds of the willow trees moving, because they sound as if they are talking and laughing in hushed tones. Simon sees something in the dim light, and Kara realizes that there is strange movement in the willow trees.
Chapter 10 Summary
In the half-light, they watch as light coalesces between the willow leaves, rises in translucent, human-like figures, and then fades. Mesmerized, they watch the strange figures for at least an hour, then something solid and dark moves through the trees. The willows bow in sequence as it passes, as if making way for it. They go back downstairs and quickly shut the door.
After bracing the entrance, they search the lockers, uncovering military rations, coarse sweaters, a Bible with unfamiliar books in its table of contents, and a pornographic magazine. Simon finds a logbook from a military team serving a government called UNA, placing the writers in a third parallel world. The notes call this place the vacuae and speculate it is a junction touching multiple realities. The writing stops suddenly at day five. They decide to rest, and Kara pictures the strange figures in the willow tree light until she falls asleep.
Chapter 11 Summary
In the morning, they step outside to find their once-bare island now sprouting willows. They hear a low humming sound with a gong-like timbre, growing louder as they resume their grid search for the original bunker. Instead, they find a bunker with stairs submerged in murky water. Inside it, an emaciated man, Martin Sturdivant, clings to a pillar to keep his head above the flood. A former park ranger, he came here through what he calls a kudzu cathedral. He hears the humming and says it signals the approach of hostile beings he calls Them. He insists that thinking about Them draws their attention, and that when They are not hungry, They keep people alive while disassembling them for sport.
He tells them about a researcher he knew; when they caught her, They took out her bones and stacked them beside her, leaving her alive and boneless. He also notes that They can’t get into the bunkers because the willow roots can’t penetrate the concrete. When Sturdivant pulls himself upright, he reveals what They did to him: His body from the waist down is gone; careful cuts have removed his lower torso, and his organs drift like algae in the water around him, still tethered to his frame. Kara and Simon scream and flee up the stairs.
Chapters 7-11 Analysis
These chapters thrust the characters into an alien world that explores The Fragility of Reality by systematically subverting fundamental physical and perceptual laws. Kara’s initial disorientation—daylight appearing when it should be night—is a profound assault on the basic constants of time and space. This ontological instability is reinforced by the landscape itself, where the unnaturally regular spacing of the barrow-like islands suggests an artificiality that defies natural geology. The true violation of physical law occurs within the abandoned school bus. The ghostly children are not merely spirits occupying a space; they are described as moving inside the seat cushions, physically distending the leather. This detail reframes the haunting from a supernatural event into a metaphysical one, suggesting that matter itself is permeable. This concept is fully realized in the horror of Martin Sturdivant, a man whose body has been physically deconstructed yet remains alive. His state is a grotesque testament to a universe where the rules of biology are not laws. His existence proves that the coherence of the physical self is as fragile as the perceived boundary between worlds.
In the face of this existential collapse, Kara and Simon seek to impose order through familiar intellectual and narrative structures. Their repeated references to C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and its “Wood between the Worlds” are a critical cognitive tool. By mapping their experience onto a known fictional universe, they attempt to contain the incomprehensible within the safe, rule-bound confines of a story. This coping method extends in the form of problem-solving, such as when they create a grid search for their lost bunker. The discovery of the UNA soldier’s logbook and the alternate Bible provides a crucial, albeit terrifying, validation of their parallel-worlds hypothesis. The artifacts serve as evidence that they are not hallucinating but are participants in a larger, hostile cosmic system. This process reveals the primary function of belief systems as psychological bulwarks against the terror of an irrational universe.
The environment of the willow world functions as a complex symbolic ecosystem, with the willows themselves representing the insidious, sentient nature of this alternate reality. Kara’s sense that they are a “thin willow-shaped skin” (78) stretched over a void establishes them as more than simple flora. They are an active, invasive force, which is confirmed when the characters witness spirits coalescing in the “negative space” (115) between branches. This imagery suggests the beings of this world are born from the gaps in perceived reality, and the willows are the medium through which this otherness manifests. Their ability to move and multiply overnight, altering the landscape and erasing the characters’ path home, literalizes their role as agents of chaos. Sturdivant’s declaration that “the willows are the soul of this place” (140) solidifies their symbolic weight, positioning them as the central, animating intelligence of a world predicated on consumption. The recurring, cone-shaped funnels in the sand further this, transforming the seemingly familiar pit of an antlion into the predatory mark of an unseen entity, demonstrating how this world inverts the familiar.
Kara’s colloquial, first-person voice creates a tonal counterpoint to the high-concept cosmic horror. Her narration is filled with snarky asides, pop culture references, and pragmatic complaints that make her reaction to extraordinary events relatable. Similarly, when confronted with the loss of their landmark, Simon’s exclamation, “I’d like to panic for a minute, if it’s all the same to you!” (90), injects a moment of dark humor that releases the tension built up in the scene. This conversational style prevents the narrative from succumbing to abstract dread and instead structures it around a personal, psychological ordeal. Kara’s everyday internal monologue makes the esoteric horror intensely personal, filtered through the lens of a graphic designer in the aftermath of a divorce. This stylistic choice emphasizes the emotional and psychological impact of the incomprehensible on an ordinary individual, rather than focusing solely on the cosmic scale of the threat.
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