Nothing But Bones

22: The Bone Zone

Darkness swallows her. The chasm, like a gaping maw; the hands pushing her further, peristalsis in action. She only falls for a moment— enough time to twist her body and try to lessen the impact of landing on a giant pile of bones.

It hurts, the fall, but the pain in her tailbone fades quickly. Checking herself over reveals zero serious injuries. She stands up, on top of the mound of bones, to look out at the terrain around her. The mound itself is no masterwork; it's haphazard and simply the largest of many.

Scanning as much as she can in the dim lighting, she realizes that Boris has constructed a strange pocket dimension with a sky painted with the colors of twilight. How much power did it take to create this? He had shown her he was powerful already, but this is something else. Something bigger. Something she wishes she could do. The bounds of the plane seem to stretch off into infinity, but the plane itself seems empty, with the exceptions of the bone piles and the swaying blue grass.

A crashing noise off to her left startles her out of immediate fascination. She jumps a little, like she does when a door opens without warning. It dislodges some bones that slide down the side of the pile like loose scree on a mountainside. After a moment, she sees the transformed Dingus pop up from a smaller pile of bones and look at her, steam puffing out of his nostrils. She breathes a quick sigh of relief. At least he's okay. The only question is where everyone else ended up.

"Get the fuck off me!"

At the yell, she snaps her head to the side and spots Elton, half-submerged in loose bones and fighting off the upper half of a skeleton beast trying to climb its way up his fallen body. Kepler tosses a weirdly long leg to the side as he scrambles back to Elton.

There's her answer. He's here. He's fine. Tiff's sure of it: he's going to be fine. The best thing to do here is try to find a way out.

"Just stay calm!" she calls, over her shoulder.

Sure, Boris could do it (could open the dimension where he stores his bones like a little freak), but she'd rather not wait for yet another mirror to free her. There's another option, then. The Tiff Sheridan classic: brute-force portals back to places she's been before. Watch out, Mrs. Whatsit; she's about to wrinkle spacetime again.

It might not work, she knows; she's only ever tried it in the Mortal Realm. It didn't work when she tried it in Dreaming. It might require some sort of tweaking, then. Furthermore, the only portals she knows how to make are weak, unstable, and temporary. They also have a habit of dumping her in places she doesn't want to be, like dozens of feet above the ground or in moving traffic. It's better than waiting, though. It's better than being at his mercy.

She crouches down, assessing what she has and what she would need. She has a knife somewhere in here, she's sure. Didn't she pack that old Girl Scout pocket knife she got from Ms. Fullmore's yard sale?

Tiff remembers, with a groan, that she took it out so she could pry open the stuck parts of the radio. It's on the floor in her room at the Beaverdell Hotel.

So no knife. Fuck. She knows the safety pin in her ear isn't going to cut it, either. It's about the intention and symbology of the instrument.

Still searching through her bag, she calls, "Hey, Elton? Do you have a knife?"

He looks up at her through the sweat glistening on his face. "A knife? I'm busy here."

He tries to kick the skull of the half-skeleton clawing up his body, but misses wildly. A long arm rears back and swipes Elton across his chest. Bone claws rip his shirt and open several long slashes across his chest. He screams in pain, but the claws are gone soon enough. Dingus dives in from the side, rips the creature away, and readily disposes of it. Bones char in the hound's mouth; cancellous bone steams with every scorching crunch.