Shapes move in the half-light. Gobbo-shapes. Some squat and plump, others with sagging chests, scurrying about on bony arms and knobby legs. The smoke climbs up sheer walls, walls unexpectedly straight for this place – the Great Below, a land of craggy caverns and twisting tunnels, of slanted walls and jagged teeth.

This is one of their temples, she thinks.

On the walls, gobbo faces are carved into and out of the rock: broken teeth and howling mouths, crumbling noses and cratered cheeks. The eyes, though, the eyes are always cast downward. Looking to something far below.

To the carvings on the floor, maybe. The floor is marked with long, dark, lean shapes, winding around the piles of the bones and bodies. Like snakes encircling wrists, like ropes around necks.

A moan. Behind her. Skelly almost cries out, almost weeps in shock–

A man’s voice: “Shhh. Shhhh. If they see you’re awake, they’ll come.”

She turns. Sees someone else here atop the pile of bones. Sprawled out, half-covered by dead animals. It’s an old man in an MTA uniform. Half his face frozen in a palsy, the eye sagging in its socket, the mouth drooping like a melting clock in a Dali painting.

“Who… who…”

“I’m Walt Meyers… I… I work for–”

“The MTA.”

“Right. The uniform.” A wet, humorless chuckle. “I did maintenance. On the tracks. I… I’ve been here a couple weeks.” His breath is a damp wheeze. “I don’t feel great. Think I’m on the way out. You don’t want them up here. They… they did things.”

He lifts his arm. A couple bones rattle. The uniform is torn under the armpit and–

Eggs. She knows what they are. She’s heard the stories but never seen them up close and now she wants to cry out, maybe throw up. They’re like frog eggs she used to see as a kid when she’d stay on her uncle’s farm in Jersey. They had a creek, and there in the creek she’d see these globby, translucent eggs that almost looked like frog eyes. Dozens of them clustered together in the water, the tadpoles inside visible and twitching.

These are like that. But bigger. The things inside aren’t tadpoles. They look like fat grubs pulled out of a tree or up from a sickened lawn. Bulbous and without limbs.

Grubs. Baby gobbos.

“I got ’em here and got one behind the ear–” He turns his head and there, on the palsy side of his face, a single egg covers his whole ear. When he moves it quivers like a Jell-O mold. “And a half-dozen between my legs, too. They… they broke my knees. Snapped ’em when I tried to get up and run. You can’t run. You can’t hide.”

Tears weep from his one good eye.

“We have to get out of here,” she tells him.