I have seen Lifeâs face Today and I am somber (Unsettled may be best); Shall the face of He be so Bewildered? So Shadowedâ So sequestered? As if I could reach out a Sparkling arm to Lifeâa lifesaverâ In timeâbefore his mighty hulk Descends into the deep Waterâ? What lies Beneath my Hope? What burrows sub-level In the heartâs wet chambers? The cold Atlantic water will Swallow him up, when all he Ever really wanted was tether, Dock, harbour. Within A circle of belonging. A calm little cove that says: Welcome. Again And again and Again.
The practice of channeling â a person’s body being taken over by a spirit for the purpose of communication â has been around for millennia. There are countless stories of shamen, witch doctors, prophets and others who claim to hear voices or receive some supernatural knowledge from the spirit world. Channelers, also sometimes known as psychic mediums, often use what are called “spirit guides,” friendly spirits who give them knowledge and help them on their spiritual journeys.
According to Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer, authors of “Opening to Channel: How to Connect With Your Guide,” “channeling is a powerful means of spiritual unfoldment and conscious transformation. As you channel you build a bridge to the higher realms â a loving, caring, purposeful collective higher consciousness that has been called God, the All-that-Is, or the Universal Mind…. Channeling involves consciously shifting your mind and mental space in order to achieve an expanded state of consciousness.”
To achieve this expanded state of consciousness, channelers usually meditate, trying to break free of worldly influences and tune in to a higher consciousness. They may imagine themselves seeking out specific spirits of the dead, or they may be contacted, apparently unbidden, by some unknown force that wishes to communicate.
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Ramtha, Roberts, & Other Writers
While most people channel to seek inner wisdom, entire books have been written, supposedly by ancient spirits channeled through modern mediums. In fact there are hundreds of such books, many of which can be found in New Age sections of bookstores and libraries around the world. The most famous American writer-channeler was Jane Roberts, who claimed to channel an ancient and wise entity named Seth. For her 1972 best-seller “Seth Speaks,” as well as several popular sequels, Roberts, as Seth, dictated esoteric information to her husband about the soul, the nature of consciousness, spiritual truths, higher planes of reality, and so on.
I started a novel. Itâs scary. Not the novel. Well, it is going to be scary sometimes. But the act of it. The writing down things unbidden things did not sound realistic in the how-to books (it sounded safer) but seeing it happen in real-time is scary. Things start to grab at your pen things dart about your room things shadow the paper so it never remains purely white or yellow in candle-glowâ but gray and hard to follow. I need to write this down; and so down I shall write it. Nail by damned cursèd cof fin n a i l .
Originally published in 1980 by Avon Books. The above edition was published in 2015 by Valancourt Books (covert art by Mike Mignola).
ââ
Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down nightâs nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms tossâd wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.
âWalt Whitman
ââ
PROLOGUE
One hot afternoon in July of 1965, Jim Larkin and his wife JoAnn were slowly paddling their small green boat upstream on the Styx River that drains the northwestern corner of the Florida panhandle. Having spent the several hours around noon lazily fishing in a favorite spot, half a mile downriver from their blueberry farm, they were bringing back enough bream for themselves and half the town of Babylon besides. Jimâs widowed mother, Evelyn Larkin, was back at the farm, taking care of their son Jerry, eight years old, and their infant daughter Margaret, born only the year before.
JoAnn Larkin, who had pale skin and dark red hair, and always wore dark red lipstick and matching nail polish even when she was working in the patch, had already started to clean the fish, and was idly scraping scales back into the water. Her husband, Evelyn Larkinâs only child, paddled slowly, and kept his face turned away from the sun. He had to be careful about burn, and considered that it was a sore trial for a farmer and his wife to have fair skin.
âWhatâs that?â JoAnn said curiously, and pointed at something in the water, twenty feet away.
âItâs a croker sack,â Jim Larkin replied, and turned the boat a little so that they would come nearer it.
âItâs not one of ours, is it?â she said.
âI donât think itâs one of ours. Whoâd be throwing our croker sacks in the river?â
âI donât know. We ought to take it back. Good croker sacks are getting harder to come by every day. Looks dry. Must have just fell in from somewhere.â
JoAnn leaned over the prow, and snared the sack. She swung it over the side of the boat, and set it between herself and her husband. The string that held the top together had already come loose in the water, and the sack fell open in her hands. With dampened rattles, five snakes slithered out over the lip of the burlap.
The man and woman drew back in fear, pushing frantically against the rattlesnakes with their feet. Each was bitten several times, and probably would have suffered more had not their thrashing panic overturned the small boat.
Jim Larkin dived deep, and in a few seconds attempted to come up for air. Among the dead bream that floated on the surface of the water, he could see the snakes coiled and waiting. Their tails swaying slowly in the water beckoned him upward. He lost consciousness and drowned.
JoAnn Larkin swam to a sandbar, crawled across it, and fell into a sand-sink, which are as common as leeches along the margin of the Styx. She was sucked in slowly, and all the while never left off calling her husbandâs name. But she gave over all resistance to the sinking sand when she saw his corpse rise suddenly to the surface of the water, and bob among the dead fish. His head was thrown back, his eyes wide, and one of the snakes pushed its way into his slack mouth.
Their bodies were never recovered. JoAnn Larkinâs skeleton, white and contorted, still lies frozen in the sand a dozen feet below the surface of the Styx. Jim Larkin was spun a couple of miles downstream, and then wedged into a rocky crevice in the bed of the river; there the normally sluggish black waters of the Styx, rushing through this submerged ravine, industriously pried the rotting flesh from his bones.
Evelyn Larkin had nothing of her son and daughter-in-law to mourn over and bury. The overturned boat, protecting the nested croker sacks and two drowned rattlesnakes, told no plausible story of their deaths. One July morning they had rowed down the Styx and simply failed to return.
Though she had no remembrance of her parents, Margaret Larkin never went swimming in the river, for fear that she would be dragged down to the bottom by her drowned mother and father. And her brother Jerry never after crossed the bridge over the Styx without glancing uneasily among the pilings, dreading to see there his parentsâ decayed corpses. Yet they said nothing of these irrational terrors to one another, nor to their grandmother, who never lost the feeling that her son and daughter-in-law were still to be found somewhere in the riverâs meandering length.
Eventually, a small cenotaph was raised in the Larkin family plot in the Babylon cemetery. It was marked with the names of the couple and bore the simple legend: LOST UPON THE STYX. 14 JULY 1965.
You derail meâ Like a cool freight Train and I lose My way veer so far off track We both know I wonât make it Out And you just keep Rolling on You Have agendas Depots Promises to keep I fall down through Flamboyant green woods Dark and unfamilar Trees snap My wake scarred earth And fuel leaking ember sparks flying
Heap of coalfire Twisted iron glowing Glass and heart pieces Like Parade candy All over the ground
Torn wood catches And I am aflame Like a silly Valentine In this absolution
Savior Loveâ Is speaking His licking tongues Sharp and hot As any devilâs tail
Choking smoke billows can be seen A hundred miles away From this wreckage
A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncleâs house, leading to madness and terror in this gripping new novel from the author of the âinnovative, unexpected, and absolutely chillingâ (Mira Grant, Nebula Awardâwinning author)Â The Twisted Ones. ââ
Kara finds the words in the mysterious bunker that sheâs discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncleâs house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring this peculiar areaâonly to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughtsâŚand the more one fears them, the stronger they become.
With her distinctive âdelightfully fresh and subversiveâ (SF Bluestocking) prose and the strange, sinister wonder found in Guillermo del Toroâs Panâs Labyrinth, The Hollow Places is another compelling and white-knuckled horror novel that you wonât be able to put down.
Reviews
âKingfisher imagines the horrors lying between worlds in this chilling supernatural thrillerâŚKingfisher has crafted a truly terrifying monster with minimal descriptions that leave the readerâs imagination to run wild. With well-timed humor and perfect scares, this one is a keeper for horror fans.â âPublishers Weekly
“There are no cheap scares here…entirely of the authorâs wonderfully twisted and endlessly fertile imagination….The perfect tale for fans of horror with heart.” âKirkus ReviewsâCan horror even be this rollicking, this fun, while still delivering on the creepiness, the dread, the ick? In Kingfisherâs hands, it can.â âStephen Graham Jones, acclaimed author of The Only Good Indians
Author
T. Kingfisher, also known as Ursula Vernon, is the author and illustrator of many projects, including the webcomic âDigger,â which won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story and the Mythopoeic Award. Her novelette âThe Tomato Thiefâ won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, and her short story âJackalope Wivesâ won the Nebula Award for Best Story. She is also the author of the bestselling Dragonbreath, and the Hamster Princess series of books for children. Find her online at RedWombatStudio.com.
Excerpt from Chapter 1
Nobody ever believes me when I tell them my uncle Earl owns a museum.
They start to come around when I explain that itâs a little tiny museum in a storefront in Hog Chapel, North Carolina, although thereâs 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 theyâre 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 Mermaidâwhich I keep trying to get him to rename because I think itâs probably racist, or at least he could put a sign up explaining the contextâtwo 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.
I KNOW A YOUNG MAN who can build almost anythingâa boat, a fence, kitchen cabinets, a table, a barn, a house. And so serenely, and in so assured and right a manner, that it is joy to watch him. All the same, what he seems to care for best âwhat he seems positively to desireâis the hour of interruption, of hammerless quiet, in which he will sit and write down poems or stories that have come into his mind with clambering and colorful force. Truly he is not very good at the puzzle of wordsânot nearly as good as he is with the mallet and the measuring tapeâbut this in no way lessens his pleasure. Moreover, he is in no hurry. Everything he learned, he learned at a careful paceâwill not the use of words come easier at last, though he begin at the slowest trot? Also, in these intervals, he is happy. In building things, he is his familiar self, which he does not overvalue. But in the act of writing he is a grander man, a surprise to us, and even more to himself. He is beyond what he believed himself to be.
I understand his pleasure. I also know the enclosure of my skills, and am no less pert than he when some flow takes me over the edge of it. Usually, as it happens, this is toward the work in which he is so capable. There appears in my mind a form; I imagine it from boards of a certain breadth and length, and nails, and all in cheerful response to some need I have or think I have, aligned with a space I see as opportunistic. I would not pry my own tooth, or cobble my own shoes, but I deliberate unfazed the niceties of woodworkingânothing, all my life, has checked me. At my side at this moment is a small table with one leg turned in slightly. For I have never at all built anything perfectly, or even very well, in spite of the pleasure such labor gives me. Nor am I done yet, though time has brought obstacles and spread them before meâa stiffness of the fingers, a refusal of the eyes to switch easily from near to far, or rather from far to near, and thus to follow the aim of the hammer toward the nail head, which yearly grows smaller, and smaller.
Once, in fact, I built a house. It was a minuscule house, a one-room, one- floored affair set in the ivies and vincas of the backyard, and made almost entirely of salvaged materials. Still, it had a door. And four windows. And, miraculously, a peaked roof, so I could stand easily inside, and walk around. After it was done, and a door hung, I strung a line from the house so that I could
After it was done, and a door hung, I strung a line from the house so that I could set a lamp upon the built-in table, under one of the windows. Across the yard, in the evening with the lamplight shining outward, it looked very sweet, and it gave me much satisfaction. It seemed a thing of great accomplishment, as indeed, for me, it was. It was the house I had built. There would be no other.
The labor of writing poems, of working with thought and emotion in the encasement (or is it the wings?) of language, is strange to nature, for we are first of all creatures of motionâŚ.
The Sanguine Woods 