It’s not liberating, this feeling. Her life does not flash before her eyes. She is, in fact, married to the moment. Married to every scraggy rock that passes within inches of her skull, bound to every rough-rimmed pothole the quad drops into, fixed permanently with the air in her face and the bite of the goggles around her eyes and the skitter of roach-rats and cankerpedes as they flee before the coming four-wheeler.

Once upon a time, she fancied herself a tough bitch. Now she’s not so sure.

At least she isn’t pissing her pants. Small favors and all that.

The tunnel twists. It pulls hard right; tires grind on loose stone, spraying gravel against the wall like buckshot. Then a serpentine left – before curving right again.

Suddenly – whoosh – they’re out of a tunnel and into a wide-open cavern, a massive sepulchrous chamber with twisting salt columns that look like piles of melting soft serve peppered with ice crystals. The ceiling looks melty, too – colors like paint melting. But that’s not what truly draws her eye and lends this cavern a graveyard vibe.

The room is home to what must be hundreds of statues.

No. Not statues. Skeletons. Put back together. Rearticulated. Made to stand up. Hollow-eyed skulls tilted on bowed spines so they are forever staring down.

At first she thinks they’re children, but as soon as they pass one and she sees the deformation of the bones, the bulbous off-shape of the skull, she realizes:

These are goblin skeletons.

As if she were not afraid enough.

Burnsy must sense her fear – maybe in the way she grabs him tighter. He shouts back at her, “Goblin graveyard! Don’t worry! They fear their own dead – won’t come near the place!” The quad winds through the bone garden. Then he yells, “Hold on!”

They hit a skeleton. It bursts. Bones rattle around them. Something that might be a knucklebone pops off the front of her goggle.

She’s about to scream at Burnsy, but then he points–

“There! There!”

A flickering shape at the edge of the bone garden. Pale. Human. Walking forward, toward a tunnel. The shape blinks in and out of existence. Erratic and intermittent, a light switch flipped on, off, on, off by a mischievous child.

A ghost.

She’s never seen one. She knows they’re down here, but unless you’re looking for them, they tend to be invisible. Just foggy shapes at the periphery of one’s eye.

But they’re looking for this one, and so there he is.

Burnsy revs the engine, and the four-wheeler lurches ahead of the flickering specter. Then he cuts the brakes and spins the quad around as it stops. Skelly’s stomach, trailing behind, suddenly comes plunging back into her body. A wave of nausea mitigated by a spike in adrenalin damn near knocks her flat.