Lon bent low to inspect the glow, reaching, then suddenly withdrew his hand. “What are we looking at here? A serious ward? A warning?”

I examined the markings. They weren’t anything I’d seen, but on closer inspection, they followed a familiar pattern. “I think it’s just a deterrent. A trick to keep people out. Move away.”

We shifted positions. I tried to open the door myself, but my hand wouldn’t grasp the handle. What a clever spell; I wished I knew how to do it. In order for us to get inside, I’d have to short it out. I retrieved a short stick of red ochre chalk from my jacket and drew a sloppy circle around the handle, then marked it with three sigils. I would’ve preferred to use a better spell, one that required kindled Heka, but we were sans electricity, so I had to use simpler magick. I mumbled a dissolving spell and spat on the sigils. The red ochre markings crackled with a brief flash of light, then popped and died. The old pink haze disintegrated.

I stood and started again to open the door, but Lon’s arm hooked around my waist and pulled me backward. “Let him do it.”

Hajo balked. “You paid me to dowse, not lay a red carpet down for you.”

“Open it.” Lon wasn’t asking.

Hajo muttered to himself but complied as Bob scooted closer to cower behind me. I think he was sniffing my hair—probably still experiencing lingering effects from Hajo’s vassal suggestion—but I was too anxious about finding dead bodies to care.

The door creaked open and a foul, musty odor wafted out. We turned our heads away and moved back, waiting several moments for the stench to dissipate. This couldn’t be good.

The golden arc from Lon’s flashlight drifted over a square, windowless room. A bulky piece of broken conveyor machinery with several cranks and ceiling exhausts jutted out from the left, taking up a third of the area. Near the far wall, sketched onto the floor, I could just make out a row of mandalas: holy squared circles. Large ones. They are most commonly found in Buddhist and Hindu spiritual art, filled with delicate patterns and used for meditation and trance induction to focus energy. The outer circles of these were much simpler in design. But it was the size that caught my attention: three or four feet across. Inside the outer rings, a strangely patterned square was drawn, then another smaller circle inside the square. Four simple sigils rimmed the outer boundary. None of it was chalked. The designs were etched into the concrete. Serious stuff.

“I need to look at the symbols,” I said.

We moved as a unit and stepped inside the room.

“Stay here and guard the door,” Lon instructed Bob.

“In the dark?”

Lon dug a silver Zippo out of this pocket, snapped open the cover, and flicked it on. “Don’t lose this—it’s vintage. Speak up if you hear anything coming.”

“Oh, God,” Bob mumbled breathlessly, accepting the lighter with fearful reluctance. The blue-and-yellow flame bounced up and down in time with the Earthbound’s shaking hand.

“The spell on the door was old,” I assured Bob, putting a steady hand on his elbow. “No one’s been here for years.”

Lon picked up a rusted piece of piping off the floor, shook off cobwebs, and gave it to Bob. “Just in case.”

Bob whimpered.

We left him at his post and walked toward the mandalas. My stomach twisted as I counted them. Seven. Probably not a coincidence. And when I stepped closer and got a good look at the first one, I mentally changed that “probably” to a “definitely not.”

They weren’t charged—no Heka glowed within the lines—but, like the pink spell on the door, there was something achingly familiar about the patterns around the inner square of the mandalas. I knew it well. Change the square to a triangle and you had practically the same markings that were painted beneath each of the tables in Tambuku.

“Binding magick,” I whispered to Lon.

The magical artwork surrounding the mandalas was unique. Each of the four sigils was drawn with clean lines, and all were scored with letters in a sophisticated, evolved alphabet that wasn’t earthly.

I squatted and looked closer. “Something Æthyric, maybe.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lon mumbled.

No sign of old blood, Heka, bones, or anything else around them. I took out my phone and snapped a quick photo of each one, trying not to think about terrified kids being held here. If there were such things as ghosts, as Jupe stubbornly believed, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than their being trapped in a place like this for eternity.

Lon shone the light around the room after I’d finished taking pictures. “I don’t see any remains.”

“That’s because the thread’s not connected. Those are clean.” Hajo pointed to the far side of the conveyor machinery, away from the mandalas. “The thread ends over there.”

My heart sped up as we treaded across the room. Hidden from view between the wall and a broken machine, an oblong oval stretched across the cement floor—not carved like the mandalas, but drawn with a dark pigment.

Outside the oval was more of that strange alphabet from the mandalas.

And inside the oval was a single skeleton.

An adult skeleton. Not a child.

The arm and leg bones lay in a pattern that suggested the body had been splayed out. The skull was still connected. In the middle—where the torso should have been—a pile of splintered bones radiated in a rough circle, as if a bomb had gone off inside the body. A dark spatter stained the concrete beneath, stopping abruptly inside the edge of the oval. No trace of any clothing whatsoever.