Bone Gap (27 page)

Finn stopped pacing. “I've seen a cliff.”

“Did you?” said Charlie. “Can you say that for sure?”

“I—”

“Because we don't have your typical gaps around here. Not gaps made of rocks or mountains. We have gaps in the world. In the space of things. So many places to lose yourself, if you believe that they're there. You can slip into the gap and never find your way out. Or maybe you don't want to find your way out.”

“Roza didn't slip anywhere. She was taken.”

“But maybe she wants to stay now. Maybe he convinced her. I know stories like that.”

“Who is he?”

Charlie tried to remember, he tried, but all he had was fog and haze and a parade of loss that numbed and shamed. “I know him, but I can't name him. I think of him as the Scare Crow. Seems as good a name as any.”

Finn said, “Fine, just tell me
where
he is.”

For a moment, there was only the sound of the two of them breathing, the chickens worrying their feathers, clucking nervously. “You're not the one I expected,” said Charlie.

“Yeah, but I'm the one who's here.”

“Why?”

“I . . . ,” Finn began. His lips worked, his hands worked, struggling for the answers. Charlie had asked the question, but
the answers were obvious. Finn was here because he was the one who had seen the earth swallow Roza. He was here because he had done nothing to stop it. Because he had fallen in love, and it had made him brave and stupid and desperate. He was here because Roza was his friend. Because his name was Finn and he didn't want to be called anything else.

But—another surprise—the boy, the young man, said none of these things. What he said: “When I lost Roza, I lost Sean, too. I'm here because he can't be.”

Charlie Valentine, whose name wasn't Charlie Valentine, who hadn't been called anything else for as long as he could recall, who had lost more than even he could remember, said, “The chickens have been plucking out their feathers. They haven't been laying, but when they do, the eggs are small and gray as stones. They talk to each other. It sounds like
fox, fox, fox
. It's their word for nightmare. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“I know it's dangerous. How do I get there?”

“You know how. You're the one who's here.”

“I don't know what that means!”

“It means you can find her if you can find the gap.”

“What?” Finn said. He started pacing again. “Maybe the horse can—”

“The horse can't take you there,” said Charlie. “You have to go alone.” Not the horse. He wasn't willing to sacrifice the horse.

Finn drew himself up to his full height. He was getting so
tall and broad, more like his brother every day. Stern. Determined. “So, you won't help me?”

“I just did.”

Finn half laughed, half swore. “Fine.” He limped to the front door, opened it, slicing the room with a beam of moonlight, blasting through the fog of Charlie's memory, of his many pasts.

“Wait!” said Charlie. “I can tell you one more thing!”

“Yeah? What's that?”

“The Scare Crow is a betting man.”

THE RAIN STOPPED, LEAVING THE AIR THICKER THAN
it had been before it started, both soupy and charged. The light had retreated at the insistence of the darkness—a scrap of cloud lidding the blank eye of the moon—and Bone Gap was still. No cars traveled the roads, no creatures howled or sniffed or chuffed, and the wind, a constant in the cornfields of Illinois, pulled in on itself and snoozed like a cat. Finn's leg itched under the bandages, and his hand throbbed; he should have known his brother's jaw was made of iron.

He had no idea where to go.

Never had Bone Gap seemed so large, so full of hidden
spaces. If what Charlie Valentine said was true, Roza was here and there, everywhere and nowhere. And if Finn hadn't ridden the Night Mare, hadn't glimpsed the gaps for himself, he would have thought Charlie was crazy.

But he wasn't riding the mare, and he had no one else to trust. He almost screamed at the unfairness, at the injustice—
the blind in charge of finding the hidden, sure, that made so much sense
. Still, he walked from Charlie Valentine's house to the main road, racking his brains for some way into another world. The mare had taken him past the Corderos' and into the graveyard, and he had seen the mists rising and pooling, coalescing into vaguely human shapes. Ghosts? Maybe that was where the skin of the world thinned, and he could slip through.

So Finn turned down the lane to Petey's house, expecting to see the Dog That Sleeps in the Lane, but it seemed that the Dog also had other business, because the lane was empty. When he got to Petey's house, he forced himself not to stop at her window, not to knock, not to whisper her name as he trudged through her backyard, past the hives with the bees humming so low Finn barely heard them at all.

He passed by the Corderos' house and, after some time, entered the graveyard. The ghosts that he and Petey had seen or imagined on their rides were sleeping, perhaps, and Finn had the graveyard to himself. He wound around the rows of graves, hands brushing against the cool, rough stones. Strangely, he wasn't afraid, but he wasn't hopeful either, which felt much
worse. A willow tree, branches caressing the tops of the mausoleums, anchored one corner of the yard, and Finn sat beneath it, just for a few minutes, just to watch and see, just to get off his feet. He thought he heard a soft, collective sigh when he collapsed into the grass, but when he looked up, looked out over the gravestones, he was still alone. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes later, his leg was stiff, the backside of his jeans damp from the grass, and the graveyard hadn't revealed itself to be anything more than a graveyard. All of a sudden, he felt stupid. Roza wasn't a ghost. If she was—he squeezed his fists against the possibility—she was beyond his help.

He hauled himself off the ground and walked back to the main road. A tired half hour later, he could see his own house, the roof of the barn canting as if leaning a bent elbow on a dark line of cloud. Maybe Petey was right and there was something magical about it. Roza had turned up there, the horse had turned up there. Sean could turn up there, too, but Finn needn't have worried; the house was dark. Stranger still, the barn was empty—no mare, no goat either.

“Night?” Finn whispered. “Chew?” Their smells were strong, musk and hay and dung, but it was as if someone had just carted the animals off, leaving the mess for someone else. Finn scratched for the flashlight Sean kept by the door, but the light was weak and yellow, casting the barn in sepia. As in the graveyard, Finn wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. He felt around the edges of the barn, wincing at the splinters, searching
for . . . for what? A slat of wood that wasn't actually wood? A trapdoor? A curtain behind which stood the wizard of Oz? What in the hell was he doing? The gaps weren't in the town, the gaps were in
him
, the gaps were in his eyes and in his brain and in his soul—he wasn't built right. He could not be trusted.

Something twined about his ankles and he jumped, fell over into a rather fragrant pile of feed. A soft
mrrrow
calmed him. “Calamity?”

The cat climbed onto his chest, and despite the pain of his bruises, he didn't push her away. “I've kept you alive, that's something, I guess. How are the kids?” He stroked her back and she purred, and slid her cheek against his cheek, and kneaded his flesh. Then she stopped, standing at attention, ears cocked.

“What do you hear?” he asked. “You look like Miguel when he talks about the corn running around. He says the scarecrows—”

—weren't made to scare the crows, they were made to scare the corn.

The corn.

He hugged the cat, who uttered a surprised mew, and released her with a rushed “Bye, kitty.” He got to his feet and half ran, half shambled out of the barn. He didn't even think about which direction to go, he let his feet take him to the nearest cornfield, any cornfield. He'd already plunged into the yellowing, crisping plants, dying plants, he'd already stumbled forward several dozen yards, when he began to feel stupid again, wrong again, worried again. But the corn whispered,
here, here, here,
so he kept
running, crashing through the plants, not certain where he was going or what he was doing but trusting—not himself, but the plants that had always sung to him, the plants that had always made him feel safe.

It took a second for him to register the cold and the damp leaching into his sneakers. He kept walking, slipping on rocks here and there, righting himself, slipping again, walking, walking, walking. He had just begun to question his own sanity in a serious way when he noticed the stream carved into the plants. Waterways used to channel runoff from the fields. He followed the channel as it got wider and wider, cutting a little more deeply into the earth, and the water deeper, first splashing up around his ankles, then his knees. Soon, he was wading through the water, the current sucking at his legs, pulling him forward. The water was waist level, then chest level; he couldn't see over the banks of the stream, the river. His feet no longer scraped the rocks on the bottom, and the current lifted him, carried him. The water churned and rushed and sucked and tossed him, and strange yellow eyes watched him from the sky and from the tall banks, and black shapes writhed under the surface of the river and brushed and bumped against his body—ridges of bone, sandpaper skin, the brief press of teeth that tasted, tested. He would have screamed if he could have, but he was too busy trying to breathe. He was sure he saw a boat, and a skull-faced man glaring from the prow, but then he was past it. The water surged forward, powerful as spring rapids. His foot kicked a rock, his
knee hit another, and he was running along the bottom as he tried to keep pace with the rushing water, and ran, and stumbled, and ran some more, and then it was not the water sucking at him, it was the wind whipping, and the cold air chilling him and the leaves grasping at him and the plants whispering
here, here, here,
and he opened his eyes, which he must have screwed shut, and saw he was in a river no more, he was in the middle of a field, the plants reaching upward,
alive
alive. He stopped running and slowed to a walk. He moved through the field, the plants turning from corn to wheat to thick grasses back to corn. The sky overhead brightened, and turned from black to blue, like the healing of a bruise. He pushed through the plants until he stepped out onto a road. A dusty cutaway road that seemed, simply, to end, as if it had been sliced off by a scythe.

“Wait,” said Finn, to himself. “This is Bone—”

A crow landed in front of him, flapped its glossy wings.

“—Gap,” Finn finished.

“Coward!” said the crow.

“Not today,” Finn told it. He stood in the middle of the road, looked one way, then the other. An engine rumbled and a truck appeared in the middle distance. Finn stepped back into the corn to watch it go by. There was another truck, and another, and another. A fleet of trucks with monster wheels, followed by other kinds of trucks—food trucks, vans, carnival rides on eighteen-wheelers. The fair wasn't supposed to be held until August, but this wasn't the same town he knew, it couldn't be.
The plants were too green, the sky too blue, the road too black, like a scar knifed into the landscape.

“Where am I?” Finn asked the crow. “Where am I
really
?”

The crow cackled and took off after the noisy parade of trucks, circling overheard as if daring Finn to follow. He dared, running as fast as he could with his injured leg. By the time he reached the fairgrounds, the parking lot was packed and the fair was already in full swing, as if time had condensed, collapsed, and only seconds were needed to set up the coasters and games.

“Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me,” Finn said, as he barreled through the throngs of people, thousands of people, more people than he'd ever seen at the fair, or anywhere in his life. The streets of Chicago couldn't have held more faces, the faces of strangers, bobbing like flowers in a breeze, each one indistinguishable from the next. Was Roza hidden somewhere at this fair? And if she was, how would he ever find her, when the fair seemed to stretch out for miles and miles and miles, bigger and wider and denser than any city, when there were so many people, when his lungs squeezed and would not let him breathe? He searched for the familiar, for Miguel's long arms, for Petey's angry bee face, for Sean the giant, for a chorus line of wishbones, but if the Rudes were here, he couldn't see them.

“I can find you,” Finn said, to himself, to Roza, to everyone here, whoever they were. “I can.”

A woman glanced his way. “I am Roza,” she said, with a Polish accent.

Finn stared at her, stared at the green eyes and the inky hair and the bright smile. “No you're not,” said Finn. He shouldered the woman aside and plowed through the streams of people.

“I am Roza,” said another woman.

“I am Roza.”

“I am Roza.”

“I am Roza.”

“No,” said Finn. “No, and no and no.” He waved off a clown selling cotton candy and a mime pushing against an imaginary wind and a pimpled teenager braying, “Three ring tosses wins you a prize for your girlfriend. Do you have a girl? Where's your girl? Where's your girl?”

“She's her own girl,” said Finn.

“Roza is mine,”
a voice buzzed. Finn whipped around, scanning the endless waving, twisting bodies, a vast sea of faces, searching for the pocket of stillness. There, there,
right there
, next to a man on a unicycle juggling swords. Finn charged forward, but the crowd surged with him, pushing him and dragging him at the same time. He punched and kicked his way to the juggling man, but by the time he got there, the pocket of stillness had been swallowed up by the undulating crowd.