Burnsy kills the engine. All is silence. The ghost makes no sound as it moves toward them in a herky-jerky shuffle. It stares at nothing – the eyes are barely eyes at all, more like holes in an old tablecloth. The toothless mouth stretches open impossibly, the throat a black cave that keens with a faint moan that calls to mind a distant wind. The body is naked. The flesh pale, smooth like porcelain, the manhood a shriveled, crooked thing.

Burnsy hops off the quad. Skelly follows, her legs almost giving out.

He lifts the seat. From underneath he removes a flat metal shape – brass, ornate. He pulls up, and it pops into the shape of a hollow cube. Each piece looks delicate as a bird bone, all the little Byzantine brass bits tied together at junctions by fraying red thread. The corners of the box are little decorative skulls – human – with brass tacks for eyes.

“Soul cage,” Burnsy says, striding toward the ghost. He stops ten feet in front of it and waits, holding the cube up in his blood-blister hands.

Skelly moves to his side as the ghost continues inevitably toward them. She cannot repress a chill. Visions of death wash over her. She sees herself, dead by a hundred ways – hanging, burning, gunshot, drowning, plane crash even though she’s never been in a plane. She sees Lulu, her neck ripped open. Her own mother, dying in a hospital bed from emphysema – the gurgled whisper of a woman drowning in her own body.

Burnsy elbows her. The death visions break apart like old bread. “Getting near a ghost and staring it down does that to you,” he says, like he knows.

“Don’t know what you mean, jellybean,” she says, but even she hears the quaver in her voice.

“The soul is in the heart, in case you were wondering. That’s the core of us. Not what’s in our heads, but what’s felt in our hearts.” He holds the soul cage at chest level, and step-by-erratic-step, the ghost comes toward them. Burnsy doesn’t shove the cage at the specter but rather lets the specter walk up to the cage–

It disappears through the wraith’s chest.

The ghost freezes perfectly still – as if someone hit the pause button.

There’s an electric snap – the hard smell of ozone followed by a whiff of the grave.

The ghost’s mouth opens even wider. The eye sockets stretch and distort. Limbs stiffen and begin to elongate and then droop like wilting flower stems–

A scream rises from its mouth. This is the scream of a victim, a man about to be murdered, a woman watching her own child die, the sound not just of death but of great suffering and sorrow wedded together in one horrible howl.

Another electric snap.

And then the ghost is gone.

And the vision hits them like lightning.