Time seemed to halt for Rhiannon as she faced the thing and planned her escape. The angled beams forced her to crawl like a slug. She tried to push herself back toward the hatch.

She felt the draft and heard the slam of the hatch door as Hyacinth sealed her in. There was the recognizable clunk of a lock being fastened, followed by the roar of heavy things being dragged, both of which rendered the crawlspace door immovable.

She kicked at it, hammered at it until the heels of her hands began to swell. All the while the cheery lights continued to flash, and the endless babble of Hyacinth’s advisor mounted.

Rhiannon’s joyous moment of inspiration that came when she thought of using her cellphone to call 911 turned black and came crashing down around her when she realized that her purse had slipped off her shoulder during her struggle on the stairs.

Her screams shredded her throat but roused not so much as a sound from beyond the door.

Some time later, the Christmas lights went out and the only the illumination that remained was the mannequin’s endlessly spinning eyes and the amber glow of its fabric mouth.

*

Three days and three nights passed before Hyacinth finally deemed to unlatch the crawlspace door. But by then Rhiannon had shed all conceptions of time and lost every ounce of will, strength, resistance. Like Lazarus, she slinked, broken but alive, out of the open hatch door, a living creature from a stifling crypt. Some Logos, some obscure alchemy of sound and isolation, had altered her world. It was powerful enough to transform Rhiannon’s tomb to womb, potent enough to spore her back among the living, her head brimming with messages. She felt as though her skull was on the verge of cracking, erupting like a volcano, so gigantic was this fresh knowledge.

Hyacinth had been keeping vigil. Her tiny form was propped upon a scuffed wooden stool and she held a burning white taper in her hands. The melted wax ran down in rivulets, splattering upon the already waxy skin of Hyacinth’s unsteady hands. Rhiannon looked at her face, so ghastly in the candlelight.

She looked past Rhiannon. The sight of the effigy lying broken and silent inside the crawlspace did not faze her. She returned her gaze to Rhiannon.

“Yes?” she whispered. “Yes, please…speak.”

Speaking just might relieve some of the unbearable pressure in her head. Rhiannon opened her mouth, but for what purpose? Was she going to scream? To beg for pity?

She heard a voice resounding in her skull, could feel words shaking over her palate, but the statements she was making bore no resemblance to the ones she was trying to make. Many of the words were from languages of which Rhiannon had no knowledge. Some of the sounds were not even words but were instead almost musical: the blurt of a trumpet, the pluck of a cello string.