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Two days later, Vic hears her mother mention Mr. Eugley on the phone. She says he relapsed with alcohol after three years and is going to quit his job. Until this trip, Vic treated her gift as a daydream that creates a hole that only affects her when she goes through it. Now she knows that Mr. Eugley saw her, which means the Shorter Way is real. She goes back to the bridge and tells it that it fell into the water when she was eight. Then, she asks the bridge to help her find someone who will help her feel sane. Inside the frame is the spray-painted word HERE, next to an arrow pointing to the other end of the bridge. She hears the static and feels the pressure as she crosses. When she looks at the bats hanging from the ceiling, so sees that each of them has her face. When she exits, someone shouts for her to watch out.

A 20-year-old woman in a fedora is asking if Vic is okay. She says that watching the bridge arrive was like watching a photo develop. The woman has a stammer, which grows more pronounced as she tells Vic that she was waiting for her. She says her name is Maggie and that they’re in an Iowa city called Here. She is a librarian and says she can help Vic.

The librarian’s name is Margaret Leigh, but she goes by Maggie. Maggie is an orphan who sometimes sleeps in the Poetry section. They go into the book vault and then exit into an office. There is a gun and a fish tank with a koi swimming in it. The gun looks realistic, but the pistol is a paperweight. Its base says, “PROPERTY: A. CHEKHOV” (138). As Maggie cleans the scrape on Vic’s leg, Vic sees that the fish tank is filled with Scrabble tiles on the bottom, with only the letters F I S H. She notices that Maggie is wearing earrings made of Scrabble tiles with the letters F and U.

Maggie says something similar happens to her with the tiles, as that which happens to Vic with her bike. Maggie also heard static when she knew Vic was getting closer. Her tiles spell things to her, bridging the gap between questions and answers.

She shows her that day’s letters. The tiles spell, “THE BRAT HAD LUNCH TO RIDE F T W T” (144). Maggie then explains the concept of what she calls an inscape, which is an access point that links realities together. She says that she and Vic are strong creatives, and strong creatives can bring the two worlds together if they have the right implement. She says that the bridge is real when Vic is on her bike. It is her inscape. Maggie puts her arm into the Scrabble bag up to the shoulder, an impossible depth to Vic, because it looks like a magician’s trick. However, it works because Maggie is reaching into an inscape.

Now a selection of tiles says, “THE BRAT COULD FIND THE WRAITH” (147). Maggie tries to make Vic promise she’ll never try to find “him,” although she doesn’t specify whom she means. The pain in Vic’s left eye worsens. Maggie notices and says that she knows of another strong creative whose legs would go numb if she stayed too long in her inscape. She eventually grew paralyzed.

Maggie says that her stammer came with the use of the tiles. She says the Wraith is the knife of an old man who uses children like a vampire. He leaves kids in his inscape. Two years prior, the tiles alerted her about a Russian girl, Marta Gregorski, who disappeared from Boston. She says the man needs a helper the way Dracula needed Renfield. However, the tiles also never give her proper names. Back at the bridge, Maggie gives Vic her earrings, as well as a piece of paper that contains more detailed explanations of the inscapes. Vic rides back across the bridge.

Vic is walking up a hill with limited vision in her left eye. She hears her father asking where the bike is, and she remembers the bats screaming when she fell off the bridge. She is covered in blood and her temperature reaches 102 degrees over the next 24 hours. She hallucinates the car called the Wraith and wets the bed. On day two, she walks outside naked for five minutes without realizing she left her room. On the third day, she wakes to hear her father saying he can’t find her bike. Her mother says it’s the best scenario. She says she heard Vic saying she rides it to find death during her delirium.

Vic knows another bike won’t serve as an inscape, but she still has the earrings and Maggie’s paper. She knows that she will eventually believe that she was wrong. The earrings are her anchor. She reads the poem on Maggie’s paper as her parents argue about going away for the summer.

Chapter 16 contains the text of the Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame.” Maggie told Vic that Manley is the one who coined the word inscape.

Marta Gregorski, the Russian girl who disappeared, was a chess talent mentored by Gary Kasparov. A Hilton clerk saw Marta and her mother get into a black car. It was not the car they had called, because their driver, Roger Sillman, never saw them. Sillman remembered someone knocking on his window, but the rest of the night is gone. He could only tell the FBI that he remembers hearing the word gingerbread that night, and he had dreamed about his mother’s cookies.

In November of 1991, Rory McCombers got in a black car at his dorm’s parking lot. The driver Rory’s father had sent was passed out less than a mile away. Like Sillman, he remembers nothing. He had woken up in the trunk of his own car. Neither child was seen again.

Chris McQueen, Vic’s father, leaves when Vic starts high school. Vic has a new bike but never rides it. She doesn’t focus on school and tries to lose herself in any possible distraction, including drugs and alcohol. One night, her mother is crying and says Chris isn’t coming home. Vic blames her mother, but she says it’s because she is no longer 24. She tells Vic that was the age of the last woman Chris had cheated with. Vic takes her bike to the entrance to the Shorter Way and throws her bike off the bridge. She walks for a while, then falls asleep under the highway.

On May 9, 1993, Jeff Haddon takes his dog for a walk. He owns a car dealership and notices the Rolls-Royce outside Nancy Lee Martin’s house. He watches Nancy and her daughter, Amy, get into the car, which he thinks has Christmas music playing inside.

In May of 1994, 10-year-old Jake Christensen disappears in Philadelphia. His driver is found with sevoflurane in his system, which caused his heart to fail.

In 1995 it is Steve Conlon and his daughter, Charlene. Months later, her mother, Agatha, answers the phone and hears a children’s choir singing The First Noel. She thinks she hears Charlene, but there is no record of a call reaching her house. These disappearances will not be connected until Vic’s encounters with Manx.

Linda walks in on Vic and a boy named Craig Harrison, and both have been drinking. After an argument, Vic leaves. When Vic gets home, her possessions are gone. Linda says she must earn them back. She found condoms, the drug ecstasy, and cigarettes. Vic takes the ecstasy to get her through the nights. She says she and Craig haven’t had sex, but Linda doesn’t believe her because she read Vic’s diary, which says she and Craig slept together. Vic can’t convince her, but it is true that they only fell asleep together. arrVic leaves after calling her mother an “ugly” person, which she heard her father say once.

Vic has only seen her father once in a year. She had fought with his girlfriend, but she calls him now, unsure of what else to do. He says she must go back home. Vic hears his girlfriend in the background, telling her father that Vic can’t come there. Vic keeps walking in the rain rather than go back to her mother.

Vic sneaks into her house through a basement window. She falls asleep in a chair and wakes in the morning to the sound of her mother on the phone with her father. She goes back to sleep rather than go upstairs to comfort Linda.

When she wakes, the house is empty. She goes upstairs, takes an ecstasy tablet she had hidden, and watches TV. In the basement, she finds the Tuff Burner, hidden behind boxes. She can’t exactly remember why she thought it had been lost, but she recalls odd fantasies of riding the bike and finding lost items. She rides the bike to the Merrimack and smiles at the thought of how worried her parents are. Then she rides into the wooden frame of the bridge and sees the spraypainted words: “Sleigh House.”