The room was reminiscent of an army bunker, with its stifling confines and its drab cinderblock walls. It also looked as though it hadn’t been properly cleaned since the analogue age.

Hyacinth was standing in wait between two towers of stacked plastic bins, an unnerving smile staining her face. She turned and wriggled herself down the tiny row, then crouched down, her shadow now stretching amongst those flickering trails of multicoloured light.

Rhiannon manoeuvred through the maze of detritus to find her hostess squatting before a tiny hatch door that was set into the wall just above floor-level.

“Come see,” cooed Hyacinth. Politeness (and, if she was being honest, the curiosity of the unknown) moved Rhiannon toward the open doorway, but as soon as she was able to see the room and what it contained, this curiosity instantly twisted into fear.

The illumination guttered from a lanky strand of Christmas lights, which had been wound about the beams that served as the thick bones of the house itself. Insulation bulged between the wooden beams; pink as lung tissue, fluffy as candy floss. The floor of the crawlspace was but a single board that stretched from the doorway to the far end of the hatch like a ship’s fatal plank.

And it was there, upon that long runner of unsanded pine, that Rhiannon saw the body. It was as large as life and its presence among the festive bulbs was confusing, uncanny, terrible, and yet, irrefutably, shockingly, just…there.

The figure was slumped at the back of the room. Its head was swollen, and its eyes were shimmering, bulbous things. The mouth was gaping but expressionless. It was dressed in a dingy leotard that lent its body the lumpy, colourless appearance of bagged flour.

Hyacinth pulled herself through the crawlspace opening and proceeded to slither across the long plank, toward the crumpled form.

“My grandfather built him,” she explained. “He helped my family flourish during the Great Depression. We’ve looked to him ever since.” Hyacinth fussed with the figure while she talked, adjusting its posture like a fretting mother would with her child, pushing the cobwebs from its head using the heel of her longish hand. “I’d be lying if I told you that we’ve always benefited from his words, but really, it’s a matter of interpretation. That’s the art of it. Are you familiar with Sortes Sanctorum? It’s divining one’s fortune through a seemingly random flip of the Bible page. Great-grandfather was a believer and he taught my grandfather. But grandfather took it beyond the gospels. He felt that the great pattern was everywhere, in all things at all times. So he devised this.”