She pulled the phone out of her pocket with shaking hands. Its beam of light trailed over the shovel, laying at her side. The passageway continued to her left and to her right. Opposite were rough stone walls. Farther along, though, the tunnel changed to bare dirt, crumbling and uneven.

An arm hung from the soil.

Margot’s mouth was dry. She held still, her light fixed on the shape, not daring to move.

The limb emerged from the wall at waist height and hung down, bending at the elbow, so that its old, cracked fingers grazed the floor. It was old. Gray. The fingernails were overgrown and caked with dirt.

Margot stomped her foot on the floor. Echoes traveled down the tunnel in both directions. The arm didn’t move.

She crept forward, holding the holy water in her cast hand and the light in her other. The flesh was sallow and wrinkled. The soil around it didn’t look disturbed. It was as though it had grown there, like a root pressing out through the damp ground.

Margot reached out and touched the forearm with her index finger.

It was as cold as the grave. But it wasn’t dead. At her touch, the arm twitched, then abruptly writhed back, withdrawing inside the hole, the long nails inches from Margot as it moved.

She flinched back, her teeth clenched as her heart thundered. The light shook as she tried to focus it on the arm-sized hole in the wall.

Something shifted inside. Against all wisdom, against all better judgment, Margot crept forward again.

A mass of flesh writhed behind the hole, twisting, squirming. It came to a halt with a blanched white eye fixed in the opening, staring out at her.

Margot’s hands shook as she fought to remove the cork from the bottle. She tipped it, letting just a drop fall outside the hole. “Please forgive the intrusion. Let me pass in peace.”

The face didn’t shift, but the eye twitched to follow her movements as Margot backed away. She retreated to the square of light beneath the open trapdoor and picked up her shovel, tucking it back under the arm with the cast. Her whole body felt clammy and sick. She did her best not to look back as she continued along the passage, away from the thing inside the dirt.

The path led downward. Long stretches of bare soil pressed in at either side, sometimes interrupted by wooden supports, sometimes torn open by heavy, tangled roots. She found an offshoot to the right and followed it, only to find her way blocked. The tunnel had collapsed, clumping soil and rocks larger than her body filling the space. She turned back.

What am I hoping for here?