“No, sir,” I say, keeping my grip. “I don’t think that’s your wife.”

He stares at me like I’ve spoken in another language, so I repeat myself, emphasizing every word. “Sir, I don’t think that’s your wife.”

He shudders and then this time looks, really looks, at the figure waiting for us at the end of the tunnel.

It doesn’t move. The screaming has stopped. It stands there watching us, waiting for our next move.

“It’s not Elena,” Leo whispers, finally understanding. “What—what—”

The dark figure screams again, and this time it sounds inhuman. It is a horrendous, earsplitting shriek that shakes the cave, sending bits of stone scattering down upon us from the ceiling.

The shriek is followed by strange crackling sounds, like that of twigs and dead leaves being trodden underfoot.

Hemslock jerks his flashlight toward the noise, illuminating a face.

Or what should have been a face.

A large, cavernous mouth takes up the whole of what should have been eyes, nose, ears—it’s a Venus flytrap of a mandible. Something like hair snakes around its head, but the similarities end there, because it moves like every lock is alive. The skin is a brownish gray stretched thickly over bone—if it is truly bone that keeps it upright.

It wears something that could pass for clothes, likely a memory of what Elena Gries used to wear, yet in the next instant shifts into a bareness that has nothing to do with nudity. More branches twist and braid together to create a human form. Makahiya leaves wrap around its shape; they open to reveal eyes within the center of its flowers, lidless and bulging, gazing back at us.

The light catches it again. Something slides out of its mouth, far too long to be a regular tongue.

The figure seems to stretch for one long second—its shape extending toward the ceiling, distorting and lengthening—before it drops to the ground on all fours, arches its back, and crawls toward us, shrieking. Its movements are jerky, crackling—but it’s fast. Too fast.

I haul Gries with me as we flee down to the tunnel where the group is waiting. Hemslock’s bodyguards have all drawn their weapons, and for a moment I think they might start shooting while we are still within their line of fire.

We hit the floor just as the thing dogging our steps jumps again, before Hemslock’s bodyguards start firing.

Their bullets catch the creature squarely in the stomach. It flies backward, crumpling into a heap on the ground.

“Move!” I can hear Hemslock yelling. He grabs me by the arm and hauls me up, watching one of his guards do the same for Gries. Goatee is already through the tight passageway, squirming desperately to scrape himself through the narrow space. Hemslock shoulders his way through with lesser difficulty. Gries is next, and then me, the sounds of gunfire as the bodyguards continue to unload on the creature still ringing in my ears.

We are back in the first cavern, where the stick figure drawing of the Godseye gazes down upon us. Goatee isn’t waiting—he’s already racing for the exit, stumbling slightly, splaying his flashlight frantically around him without looking where he is going. The historian and the researcher are frozen, goggling at us.