It was sort of ridiculous, really. There was enough food there to feed a small nation. But there weren’t any plates to fill up, and there weren’t any utensils to eat it with. It looked gorgeous and it smelled incredible, but… there was something inert about it, something lifeless. There was no nourishment on that table, not for the body or for the spirit.

One wall was covered in a curtain. I started to pull it aside and found it responding to the touch, spreading open of its own accord to reveal a television the size of billboard, a high-tech stereo system, and an entire shelf lined with one kind of video-game console after another, complicated little controls sitting neatly next to each one. I can’t tell a PlayBox from an X-Station, but who can keep track of all of them? There are, like, a thousand different kinds of machines to play video games on. I mean, honestly.

“Um,” I said. “Hello?” My voice echoed quite distinctly—more than it should have, huge marble cavern or not. “Anybody home?”

There was, I kid you not, a drumroll.

Then, from a curtained archway there appeared a young man. He looked… quite ordinary, really. Tall, but not outrageously so; slender without being rail thin. He had decent shoulders and looked sort of familiar. He was dressed like James Dean—jeans, a white shirt, a leather biker’s jacket. The outfit looked a little odd on him, somehow forced, except for a little skull embroidered in white thread on the jacket, just over the young man’s heart.

Cymbals crashed and he spread his arms. “Ta-da.”

“Bob,” I said. I felt one side of my mouth curling up in amusement. “This? This is the place you always wanted me to let you out of? You could fit five or six of mine in here.”

His face spread into a wide grin. “Well, I admit, my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.”

“A gold fallout shelter, more like.”

“Either way, you get stir-crazy every few decades,” he said, and flopped down onto a chaise. “You get that this isn’t literally what the inside of the skull is like, right?”

“It’s my head interpreting what I see into familiar things, yeah,” I said. “It’s getting to be kind of common.”

“Welcome to the world of spirit,” Bob said.

“What’s with the food?”

“Butters’s mom is some kind of food goddess,” Bob said, his eyes widening. “That’s the spread she’s put out over the last few holidays. Or, um, Butters’s sensory memories of it, anyway—he let me do a ride-along, and then I made this facsimile of what we experienced.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “He let you do a ride-along? In his head?” Bob… was not well-known for his restraint, in my experience, when he got to go on one of his excursions.

“There was a contract first,” Bob said. “A limiting document about twenty pages long. He covered his bases.”

“Huh,” I said. I nodded at the food. “And you just… remade it?”