The cellar was even dustier than the pottery room. On all sides were racks of bottles of every colour, shape, and size, from amphorae larger than Sue down to tiny vials the size of her little toe. Jason took a wine bottle, eased out the cork, and sniffed. He raised an eyebrow.

“What is it?” Sue asked.

“I’m not sure, but it smells like a cross between plums and aviation fuel,” he said.

“Well, at least it sounds like we’re in the right place,” she said. “Put it back. Old booze is supposed to be priceless; if Michelle yells at us, we can tell her we found her stupid treasure.”

At the far end of the cellar was a wooden door, this one in much better condition than the one above had been. She tried it: unlocked. It slid open silently. Past it were three more stone steps leading down into a dirt-floor corridor that forked and zigzagged out of sight in both directions. They hesitated.

“This looks like a good way to be lost for days,” said Jason, “while Jill comes around and bricks us in.”

Sue rummaged in her bag and produced a piece of blue chalk. She scribbled a five-pointed star on the wall in front of them.

“Come on,” she said.

“Urgh,” he said, but he followed her. “If she does brick us in and we’re starving to death, I get to eat you.”

“That’s fair,” she said.

As they went along, Sue drew arrows pointing back to the entrance, although they stuck to the left-hand wall and didn’t really need them. There was a sweet earthy smell, and the sound of dripping water. It steadily grew colder; they had the feeling they were going downward. After a minute, they came to the first coffin.

It was in a little alcove in a three-way junction. The coffin was slightly longer than Jason was tall, and it was bright red with pastel green spots. They stopped to stare.

“,” said Jason. “Blind shot in the dark here, do you think Jill painted this?”

Sue bent over and swiped a finger along the surface. “No dust. It’s recent.”

“I’m really starting to not like her. Hey, what are you doing?”

Sue had dug her fingernails into the cracks under the lid. “Seeing what’s inside, duh.”

“See,” he said blandly, “this is the difference between men and women. When a man sees a coffin, his first thought is something other than to desecrate it, but if it’s a woman, there’s no stopping you. Personally, I think it’s hormonal.”

“It’s probably the single clearest example of the sexes having different psychology,” she said with a nod.

She got the lid up and off, and it thudded to the floor. Sue and Jason leaned forward and shone their lights into it. Inside was a yellowed skeleton wearing a plastic lei and a broad-brimmed velvet hat with a purple ostrich feather.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” he said.

Sue ran her fingertips over the teeth. “Welp. I’m not really sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this. It definitely feels real.”

“Can we just put the lid back on and go?”

“This uncanny valley stuff is probably why clowns are so terrifying,” Sue mused. She and Jason took one end of the lid each and clumsily handled it back into place. “Jill might be training to become one.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” he said with a shiver.

“Are you afraid of clowns?” she asked, surprised.

He gave her a look of please don’t make me explain the joke.

They passed another coffin, painted pink and strewn with tinsel, and another in red and yellow. A Siamese cat sat on this last one, busy washing its thighs. It briefly paused as they approached, then went back to work.

The hallway turned and opened up to a huge cavern, so wide that their flashlight beams couldn’t reach the far walls. They were on a short ledge. Slightly higher than them, stalactites hung from the ceiling; far below, there was dark water, still and smooth as ice.

“Wow,” Sue breathed.

Jason found a pebble in the ground and threw it as hard as he could; it arced through the air for long seconds before vanishing into the water with a barely audible splash.

“Okay, even I’ll admit that this is pretty cool,” he said.

“It’s freezing,” she replied. She breathed out a puff of air, which obligingly condensed into fog.

“Yeah, about that. This platform is just dirt. If it collapses and we fall in, we aren’t getting back out. Let’s come back with the others and some spelunking gear.”

They turned around and kept walking.

The hall forked and twisted around on itself, and Sue drew more arrows. Presently, they came to a double doorway made of thick wood, with runes carved into the top and bottom.

“This is it,” she said, excited. “Come on in!”

Through the doors was a wide circular room full of supplies and weapons. Along one end was a cluster of barrels, crates, and tins of nonperishable food, plus what looked like a well that had to connect to the aquifer. On the other end was a long rack laden with swords, muskets, ammunition, modern automatic guns, and a huge number of polearms with spikes in random-looking places. Around them were various tools, from flashlights to crowbars to car batteries, plus one final coffin in neon blue, pink, and green.

Jason approached the weapons rack and checked the automatics. They were loaded. “Sue. I think we’ve just passed the threshold where we can keep pretending that Jill is harmless.”

Sue went over. “That’s … okay, wow. You’re right. We’ll finish up here and go right back.”

“Finish up?” he repeated incredulously. “Sue, that girl was out of her mind, and now we know she has a stockpile of military hardware. She probably has more somewhere else. We’ve got to warn the others and get out of here, now.”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“Do you really want to bet we have a minute? We can come back any time, but not if she blows a hole in one of us first!”

Sue moved some clutter from the centre of the room, shoving a stack of tins and a large box of hammers out of the way to make a clear space. “I told you, I’ve got to do this. If you really want, you can go back, and I’ll follow once I’m done here.”

Jason ran his hands through his hair. Why must she be so stubborn? “No way am I going off on my own, and no way am I leaving you alone. You … argh, fine. Let’s do this.”

“Great,” she said. She began drawing a circle on the ground. “I’ve got a journal in my bag, and a drawstring pouch with a bunch of reagents. I prepped everything ahead of time. All we need to do is finish the binding circle, get a body, and do the incantation. The journal has a page bookmarked, which has a full diagram for this circle. I’ll need that; I don’t know it by heart.”

Jason rifled through her bag and found a blue paperback Pokémon diary. He opened it to the bookmark; there was a circle with baroque, geometric patterns around it. “What do you mean, get a body?” he asked, although he didn’t really want to know the answer.

“Spirits can’t interact with the real world directly, so they need a body to animate. That’s why I was checking the coffin before. Try that one over there.”

He took a moment to weigh the pro of getting things done faster against the con of being complicit, and heaved a sigh of defeat. He was in deep enough already.

Without complaining any more, he went over to the coffin and lifted its lid. Inside was a slim, dark-haired girl of about eleven, wearing a white shroud.

“Wow, someone had a good mortician,” he said. “She’s definitely much more recent than that other one. I wonder how she died.”

“That’s what we’re about to find out,” Sue said.

He lifted her out of the coffin, as gently as he could manage. “Weird that she isn’t fancied up like the other one was,” he mused. “Even though this is Jill’s hideout.”

“Maybe Jill put those accessories into the coffins as she went, but she ran out halfway,” Sue said, not looking up from her work. “It could even be her idea of marking her way.”

Jason shrugged and carried her to the circle. “I guess. Where do I put her?”

“Inside the circle, please. Make sure she doesn’t scuff the chalk.”

He laid her down, and Sue finished transcribing the circle around the girl. She double-checked it against the original.

“Looks good,” she said. She picked up the drawstring bag, pulled out three chunks of red rock, and pressed them into his hand. “All you need to do is this: when I give the cue, throw these into the circle. Try not to hit her.”

“Ready.”

Sue pulled out another six stones. “Go.” He threw the rocks. “Thrice to thine,” she dropped in three of hers, “thrice to mine,” she tossed the last three, “and thrice again, to make up nine.”

There was a flash of white light.

Jason rubbed spots from his eyes and looked. “What happened? She isn’t moving. Was that just magnesium or something?”

Sue looked around, puzzled. “No, this isn’t a prank. You know me, I’m way too lazy to put in this much effort just to troll you. Hey, can you hear me?” she asked the girl inside the circle.

The girl yawned and sat up, stretching. “Mm. I’m not the spirit, though.”

“Huh,” said Jason. “Apparently séances are real. That’s new.”

“Do you know why it didn’t work?” Sue asked, crouching down so she was at eye level with the girl.

“This room is warded against undead,” she said. “You awoke her, she came, she bounced off the wards. She’s outside now, looking for some other body to use.”

“Are you telling me,” Jason said, “that one of those skeletons out there is walking around, animated by a long-dead spirit that we brought back, and we can’t control it? And it’s a skeleton, so it could play dead and we wouldn’t know which it was until it jump-scared us from behind?”

The girl blinked her honey-coloured eyes. “Skeletons don’t have muscle tissue. They’re useless. She’s going for one of your friends.”

Sue and Jason exchanged glances.

“Okay,” she said, “now let’s hurry back and warn them.”

“Great idea,” he said, then, to the other girl, “It’s not safe here, not with that on the loose, not to mention Jill. You should come with us.”

The girl yawned. “Don’t worry about me.” She stood up, stretched, and climbed back into the coffin, lying on her front so as not to put weight on her dragonfly wings.

“Are you sure?” Sue asked.

“Come on,” said Jason, moving for the exit. “She said not to worry about her.”

“Right,” said Sue, and they left to head back to the surface.