Bone Gap by Laura Ruby Page A

silvery mist. Older than Bone Gap itself, the cemetery had a couple of stones dating back to the early 1800s. Once, Miguel had surveyed the rows and rows of stones and said, “Everyone looks the same when they’re dead.” But Finn didn’t think that was true. Each stone was different. Some of the older ones canted crazily, like crooked teeth, the names and dates eroded from decades of sun, wind, and snow. The more recent stones were polished granite in various colors. Dark gray, black, and, in the case of Mrs. Philander “Muffin” Gould (1903–1982), Pepto-Bismol pink.
    But now the silvery mist muted all the colors of the grave markers, the uneven ground dancing with strange shadows. The mare stopped, letting them survey the stones, the willow tree dangling its fingers over the rooftops of the two small mausoleums, the dusky grove of poplars beyond.
    â€œSpooky,” murmured Petey.
    â€œHmmm,” said Finn, who had discovered that if he turned his face a little bit, his lips would brush her hair.
    â€œLook!” breathed Petey, and he glanced up and saw one ofthe shadows flickering, gathering scraps of moonlight and cloud to assemble itself into a vague shape that drifted over the tops of the stones.
    â€œAre you seeing this?” Petey said.
    â€œYes.”
    They watched the shape glide through the still air, passing so closely that Petey shivered. The shape slipped out of the cemetery and into the darkness beyond.
    â€œWas that a ghost?” said Petey.
    â€œA cloud, probably. Fog,” said Finn.
    â€œI think it was a ghost.”
    â€œMaybe it’s going to Miguel’s house. Maybe it’s hungry.”
    And maybe it was a ghost, maybe it was hungry, but if it was, the mare wasn’t troubled. She ambled past the cemetery to the unclaimed land beyond. The field should have had rich green grass springing up around the horse’s knees, it should have been wild with bluebells and violets and larkspur, bayberry and lily and clover, but the field burned gold in the thin light of the moon, and Finn wondered why the grass and the flowers seemed to be dying. Surely that was a trick of the eye or the mind or the fact that Petey Willis was warm against him and smelled like a million things you’d want to eat and this was jumbling his thoughts, confusing him, making it hard to pay attention to anything but her.
    The mare trotted across the golden field and into a deep still forest, a forest that Finn didn’t remember. Crickets whirred and owls hooted and the ground crunched under the horse’s feet.They seemed to be at the mouth of a very long path through the dark wood, a path through a wood that he had never seen before.
    â€œWhat is this place?” Petey said.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    And he didn’t. But the mare seemed to know, as she seemed to know so, so many things, too many things for a horse to know, and she moved from a walk to a trot, a trot to a gallop. Finn drew his forearms in tighter so that they brushed against Petey’s waist. If she thought he was getting too close, she didn’t say. She didn’t say anything about his lips in her hair, or the fact that his breathing had gone ever so slightly ragged.
    And then the trees blurred as the mare ran faster and faster. At first Finn tried to keep an eye on the path in front of him, but it was too dark and the horse was running too fast. He tried to keep his eyes on the moon, but it blazed too hot and too whitely bright, and it etched its image across his vision. He looked around, but what he saw made no sense—trees bleeding into clouds, and the clouds parting for winged lions carved from stone, and the stone lions charging down a staircase made of glass, and the glass shattering into fire.
    The mare ran all the way through the forest and out the other side, and suddenly the sounds of the forest were replaced by the crashing of horseshoes on rock. The mare thundered