She paused and listened. There was no sound of movement in the dining room, and she craned her neck to look down through one of the large plastic panes, searching the area: the creature was nowhere to be seen. She had not noticed the play pipes that covered the ceiling before climbing up into them, but now she saw the extent of them, with no end in sight, and no way down. The playset she had climbed to enter the tunnels was utterly destroyed. How am I going to get out? She cast her eyes helplessly over the maze, tracing the paths she could take, and suddenly she saw it: the ball pit where she had thrown the baby crawlers was across the room, and it had a canopy made of climbing rope that stretched fifteen or twenty feet above the floor. The tube went directly over it. Jessica took a deep breath and crawled farther out into the room, bracing herself. She made it to the first turning point, and suddenly the pipe shook. She paused, but the structure shook again, and again. The light was being obscured from below her, and Jessica looked down.

The unskinned skull grinned up at her with yellow eyes, suspended below as if out of nowhere. The head swiveled sideways and elevated up and over the plastic tunnel. Jessica looked up in dread, and saw the body of the creature right above her, its limbs wrapped around the tube like a monstrous squid seizing a ship. She stifled a scream, and her heart skipped as she fought not to hyperventilate. The fox head lowered to eye level and snapped beside her, and she screamed and shied away; her hand hit the plastic floor between the support beams and the segment fell straight down. Jessica clamored back before falling with it, and quickly took a corner, heading off to a new direction. The fox head swooped upward in a blur and vanished.