Cupping the slightly damp velvet cloth where her breath had moistened it, Yvonne crawled through a gap at the edge of the dust-covered area. Looking down, she saw the clearly outlined five fingers, the blank space shaped like an arm, and the radiating contours blown open by a fit of coughing. It was unmistakably the outline of a person lying face-down.
She thought it might be a clever servant who had played dead and escaped by sheer luck, or someone the things had dragged away. But the outline was too complete, its edges too clear, with no sign of struggling or movement. It looked more like some force had lifted the person whole into the air, then made them disappear.
With no time to dwell on it, she squeezed through the gap between two chairs and tucked herself beneath a table. She wiped the sticky dust from her skirt, pinched her nostrils shut to stifle a sneeze, and held it in until her chest and throat ached.
An irregular, reef-like shadow dragged itself between the forest of table and chair legs, quivering as the flames flickered. It passed through a patch of light close by.
She almost felt that if she reached out, she could touch the texture of fungal clusters and corpses fused together in that shadow. Even the uneven flagstones seemed to soften and swell as it passed, their hard rocky patterns rippling and trembling.
But that was only an illusion of light and shadow. Once it had passed, everything was as it had been.
It was almost less convincing than a ghost story told to scare children. At least a ghost could catch a child hiding under the bed, couldn't it? These things couldn't pass through walls or see through them.
She set off again, crawling beneath