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Tittering like bug wings buzzing was the response, and the lights scattered to find little nooks to rest in. I was pretty sure the ghost lights were not, in fact, bugs. But what they actually were, I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to let them do their job. Some things weren’t worth picking at the edges.

It took a few tries to strike a spark from the fire steel, but once I got it, the ember nibbled happily on the wood that served as my torch, routing the shadows and banishing them into the deeper pockets of the hallway.

I found more torches in inlaid holders on the walls and lit them all. Goose was none too pleased with this but settled at my ankle as I took in the crumbling hallway around us.

“This must have once been part of the palace,” I whispered down to him, setting my hand on his head, seeking the idle comfort the connection offered.

The portion of the area was not large, maybe forty feet long and ten feet wide. The walls were plastered, painted what looked to be a soft green with dark wainscot woodwork that had discolored with time. What looked like it had once been perhaps a stairwell down to this level had a collapsed ceiling full of rubble. A portrait of a woman had at one time presided over it, the ghost of her outline swallowed by the ravages of time, kept us company as I searched for a way out.

At the far end, the plaster of the wall was crumbling, revealing the barest hint of slatting behind it. Beyond that slatting, I could feel the soft breath of clean air.

“Here, Goose. Here. Can you fit through that?” I asked, calling him over to the fist-sized hole in the plaster and the finger-width slats. Goose examined the hole and huffed. “I’ll take that as a no. Okay. Maybe if I opened it up some more.”

I set to work, snapping a leg off the console table and using it as a hammer. It was slow going. Though the wall was older than it had any right to be, it devoured three full legs before I had a hole large enough for both Goose and I to fit through. My hands ached, blisters and abrasions having cut into the soft flesh somewhere around the second leg.

I prayed silently to all the Fae gods I could remember the names of that, when I began pulling and levering at the slats to break them open, the whole palace wouldn’t come down on my head. One by one, the ancient dry boards came apart like the ribs of a long-dead beast.

Goose, for all his help, busied himself with chewing on the broken pieces of leg I had chucked behind me.

“This will have to do, Goosey. And you better have a plan after we get through this because I have no clue what’s on the other side or where we go from here. But I’m exhausted, and my hands are starting to bleed.”

Why I was talking to a smoke dog was beyond me, but it made me feel less alone in this uncertain darkness.

Goose made his way through the hole with no issues, as expected, but I eyed it dubiously.

Before Rictus, I’d have been able to slide through that with no issues at all. But with the extra padding and curves on the body that housed me, I wasn’t confident in it. I did my best to pull through, stretching and contorting my way slowly through the hole. A jagged board caught my back and tore open one of the freshly healed slashes, and I hissed in pain, falling from the hole a few feet to . . . carpet.

Soft, luxurious, woven carpet was beneath me. Dust did not jump up to assault me for my audacity. The scent of must and age did not linger here. But something cold did. Something cold and angry with my intrusion. The air frosted with my panted breaths, and my hair steamed with my body heat.

Goose positioned himself in front of me, pushing me back into the corner as he snarled.

The sound of his threat was deep, loud, and terrifying. It rumbled the pebbles around me, making them rattle against the bare stonework off the edge of the carpet.

I wish I hadn’t left the torch in the other room. I wish I hadn’t fallen in, and I wished I had looked where I was going. Blind faith had never been one of my follies, but here I was, shivering in an unnatural cold as I wedged myself into a corner, Goose protecting me from some unseen threat in the darkness.

Something hard tapped, scraped, and slid along the stonework. The sound bounced around the frozen, dark passageway and rattled into the collapsed hall behind us.

Goose responded to it with a bark that was less of a dog bark and more of a tiger roar punctuated by the snapping and gnashing of his massive jaws. His entire body rippled with anger and deadly purpose, strung on a single thread of a leash.

The sound broke the stillness again and then was deafened by the carpet as it slid with the thing’s movement.

Goose launched himself into the darkness, melting into it as if he had never been there. Only the sound of his jaws snapping, his roaring growl, and the strange screeching and chittering filled the hollow dark as I cowered in the corner.

“Fuck this,” I whispered as the battle in the hidden darkness raged on. “Little ghosties!” I called into the hole and hummed a few bars of “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

They came streaming in, filling the cavern with their ghostly blue light.

I should not have done that. I didn’t want to see what was playing out before me.

Goose was no longer the massive tame dog but an amorphous blood-spattered black beast that streamed and flowed like an avenging river destined to drown its foe. A creature that was part rose bush, part spider was battling him near the edge of what looked like a steep drop off into the abyss. The two circled and lashed out at each other.

“Hang on, Goose,” I whispered, struggling against the boards of the slatting.

My hands screamed in agony, fought against the abuse I was visiting upon them, as I strained to pull a length of the wood from the wall. I had only managed to pry a small sliver of iron from the door, and I had no clue if it would work like it had with The Raven. But I had hope. I had hope and not much more because luck was never on my side.

I tumbled back as the spider landed a painful blow to my friend, who whimpered in the dark.

“Fuck you. No one hurts Goosey boy! You ugly fuck!” I screamed at the spider. It turned, bloodred roses blooming in its face as eyes over forearm long fangs. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I hate spiders. I hate them so damned much!”