spread of fruits and vegetables and side dishes of every kind.
It was sort of ridiculous, really. There was enough food there to feed a small nation. But there weren’t any plates to fill up, and there weren’t any utensils to eat it with. It looked gorgeous and it smelled incredible, but . . . there was something inert about it, something lifeless. There was no nourishment on that table, not for the body or for the spirit.
One wall was covered in a curtain. I started to pull it aside and found it responding to the touch, spreading open of its own accord to reveal a television the size of billboard, a high-tech stereo system, and an entire shelf lined with one kind of video-game console after another, complicated little controls sitting neatly next to each one. I can’t tell a PlayBox from an X-Station, but who can keep track of all of them? There are, like, a thousand different kinds of machines to play video games on. I mean, honestly.
“Um,” I said. “Hello?” My voice echoed quite distinctly—more than it should have, huge marble cavern or not. “Anybody home?”
There was, I kid you not, a drumroll.
Then, from a curtained archway there appeared a young man. He looked . . . quite ordinary, really. Tall, but not outrageously so; slender without being rail thin. He had decent shoulders and looked sort of familiar. He was dressed like James Dean—jeans, a white shirt, a leather biker’s jacket. The outfit looked a little odd on him, somehow forced, except for a little skull embroidered in white thread on the jacket, just over the young man’s heart.
Cymbals crashed and he spread his arms. “Ta-da.”
“Bob,” I said. I felt one side of my mouth curling up in amusement. “This? This is the place you always wanted me to let you out of? You could fit five or six of mine in here.”
His face spread into a wide grin. “Well, I admit, my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.”
“A gold fallout shelter, more like.”
“Either way, you get stir-crazy every few decades,” he said, and flopped down onto a chaise. “You get that this isn’t literally what the inside of the skull is like, right?”
“It’s my head interpreting what I see into familiar things, yeah,” I said. “It’s getting to be kind of common.”
“Welcome to the world of spirit,” Bob said.
“What’s with the food?”
“Butters’s mom is some kind of food goddess,” Bob said, his eyes widening. “That’s the spread she’s put out over the last few holidays. Or, um, Butters’s sensory memories of it, anyway—he let me do a ride-along, and then I made this facsimile of what we experienced.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “He let you do a ride-along? In his head?” Bob . . . was not well-known for his restraint, in my experience, when he got to go on one of his excursions.
“There was a contract first,” Bob said. “A limiting document about twenty pages long. He covered his bases.”
“Huh,” I said. I nodded at the food. “And you just . . . remade it?”
“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “I can remake whatever in here.” He waggled his eyebrows. “You want to see a replay of that time Molly got the acid all over her clothes in the lab and had to strip?”
“Um. Pass,” I said. I sat down gingerly on a chair, making sure I wasn’t going to sink through it or something. It seemed to behave like a normal chair. “TV and stuff, too?”
“I am kinda made out of energy, man,” Bob said. He pointed at the wall of media equipment. “You remember me broadcasting to your spirit radio, right? I’m, like, totally tapped in now. Television, satellite imagery, broadband Internet—you name it; I can do it. How do you think I know so much?”
“Hundreds of years of assisting wizards,” I said.
He waved a hand. “That, too. But I got this whole huge Internet thing to play on now. Butters showed me.” His grin turned into a leer. “And it’s, like, ninety percent porn!”
“There’s the Bob I know and love,” I said.
“Love, ick,” he replied. “And I am and I’m not. I mean, you get that I change based on who possesses the skull, right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“So I’m a lot like I was with you, even though I’m with Butters, because he met me back then. First impression and whatnot, highly important.”
I grunted. “How long do we have to talk?”
“Not as simple to answer as you’d think,”