A thousand trinkets rattled as the effigy moved. Light flashed across spoons, across bones, across needles and sharp knives.

Margot tried to jolt back. Her socks, damp, slid on the wood in the same instant that Marsh lunged away, robbing her of her balance. She felt herself fall. She landed hard, her hand pressed over the phone, her legs unresponsive, her lungs unable to draw air as fear overrode her mind.

The body had been incorporated into the effigy in the most nightmarish way. The loops of wire that were supposed to hold the trinkets together now threaded through its flesh. Each movement pulled sharp angles in its skin as a thousand piercings were pulled taut. The arms stretched forward, run through with metal, hung with Witchety’s gifts, and it was hard to see where the wire ended and the flesh began.

A low, rippling bellow rose from behind the deer skull, and Margot thought that, behind the stitched mouth, the dead one must be screaming.

Margot’s voice died before it could reach her throat. She scrambled, legs and arms moving wildly, slipping on the wood. The mantra ran through her mind on a loop—Don’t panic, don’t panic—but she was well past that point, her head empty of everything save raw terror.

The effigy pulled forward, skin peeling up from bones with each shift, puckering as hundreds of piercing wires pulled on it. Bones and wood and talismans clinked. The heavy, closed-mouth bellow grew louder as it bent down to put its face above hers. The arms were coming to encircle her, and with a sickening jolt of horror, Margot knew what was going to happen.

She would be drawn into the web of metal, just as the dead one had been. Pierced. Threaded through. Torn to shreds inside the cold, cutting lines of steel.

One of her arms rose in a desperate effort to guard her head, and the metal pressed into her, and she felt drops of blood trail over her arm as the skin began to split.

Then the dead one jolted back. The gray eyes stared, wide and blind, toward the ceiling. Its bellow rose, reverberating inside its sealed mouth.

Margot scrambled another foot back. The pain in her arm registered but only dully, overridden by terror and shock.

The effigy was slow to turn. Its skin stretched. Rattles moved through the form as the accoutrements shook violently.

Marsh, eyes wild, fur spiked in terror, grappled with the dead thing. He’d bitten one of the corpse’s few exposed patches of skin: the back of its right leg. Skin and muscle tore as the dog’s teeth clamped down ever harder.

The effigy raised one of its arms, and Margot’s heart turned to ice. Angular shards of metal and the ends of wires radiated from the limb. And it was aimed at Marsh.