Margot had already known what she would see there, but the actual presence itself was so much worse. She lowered her phone, her heart hammering. The screen still displayed the photo she’d taken. Twenty feet of bare, cold tunnel, and at its end, the outline of a deer skull grazing the ceiling, and the distorted glimmer of twisted metal beneath.

“Please, leave me alone.” She turned the bottle, letting drops of water fall across the compacted soil. Her hands shook so badly that the string of talismans rattled over her wrist. “Show me mercy. Leave me alone.”

The metal rang together as the effigy took another step nearer.

“I’m trying to do the right thing.” More water. She’d meant to conserve it, but her muscles had grown as tight as bow strings as she was racked by shivers. She couldn’t control the pour. “Please, let me have peace tonight.”

The metal rang out again and again. It seemed to be growing faster.

Margot couldn’t take it anymore. She clamped her thumb across the bottle’s top as she turned and ran.

Her pace was too fast. She couldn’t see the changes in the hall in time and hit a corner hard enough that her teeth rattled. Clumps of dirt rained down from above, and Margot hunched, fighting the overwhelming, primal urge to scream.

The metal chimed again and again, unyielding, unstoppable.

She shoved away from the wall. The passageway split. Margot chose the left side and pressed her phone against her chest, blotting out the light, hoping she might be able to lose the unnatural creature in the dark.

She stumbled as she put out her good arm, her fingertips tracing along the wall. Her breathing was loud, panicked. She only hoped the effigy wouldn’t be able to hear her under the chimes of its own hideous hide.

Blind but unwilling to slow, she pressed through the dark, feeling her way with her fingertips. They stubbed against wood, then grazed over stone, but she kept moving. The metal rang out behind her, closer than she would have liked, and she couldn’t tell whether the effigy had reached the turn yet.

Then her fingers touched something spongy. Soft. Fleshy. Margot jolted backward. She hit the opposite wall. Her panic was a living thing inside of her, choking her, as she turned the phone around to light the pathway.

One of the dead ones loomed out of the wall. He was entirely bald. Holes had been bored into his scalp, revealing a shallow layer of red flesh and then the white of his skull beneath. His jaw twitched, even as the black threads kept it sewn shut.

Only his chest, shoulders, and head were visible. He seemed to loom out of the wall, as though the dirt had spontaneously appeared around him midstep, trapping his arms and legs behind. The blind eyes stared at her, unblinking, black veins creeping in at their edges.