Bella doesn't need to close her eyes - she's all but blind down hear, pointing the blunderbuss back towards the stairs or, more specifically, away from your voice. Confronted with the obstructing double doors, you make do; using a roll of wadding cloth to bundle up a thick line of gunpowder and jam it in the crack between door and stone frame. You light the cloth and hustle with Bella to the corner, out of the arc of the blast and put your fingers in your ears.

As the blast goes off with a heavy bang, the flash lights up the skeletal swordsman descending the stairs to resume his post. The gust from the blast buffets his ragged rainment a little, but does not otherwise bother him - but seeing you and Bella, the lower mandible flaps and chatters in long-dead outrage; and lacking his spiritual enemy, he breaks into a run toward you.

But a rewarding thump of the door beyond falling inward as its rusted out hinges give way gives you hope. You feared the blast might just push out a corner of the door, forcing you and Bella to crawl - which would have been disastrous with a stabbing skeleton at your back! - but you rush around and crouch through the smoke, and the obstructing beam that was barring the door until its bracket was knocked loose by the burst moments ago, too.

Another cellar; more wine casks, and a slop that leads to a deeper, cooler area where cheese must have been left to age. The door and its bar must have been here as a kind of panic room, permitting the occupants to retreat into the cellar and lock themselves in while looters took what they wanted from above and moved on without endangering what is most precious. The door was not breached, until you came - but it seems to have failed in its job all the same.

Curled up on the ground by one of the winecask racks are a pair of skeletons; both in the crumbling remnants of night gowns; one skeleton smaller than the other. But you barely have time to observe them; you pull Bella off to the side and into cover behind one of the racks, as your pursuer clambers through the breach after you. Only it seems to have ceased pursuit - you heave the sword clattering to the ground and, looking back around the edge of the rack, see the upright dead man gazing down on the two remnants on the ground, nestled into each other in dead. You watch its skull loll on its neck as if hanging his head in defeat, or misery; and then the walking dead man lowers himself to the ground, careful not to disturb the other skeletons, and lays with them with a bony arm gently crowded over them.

A moment later, he is not alone in this strange reunion: the spirit, once horrific and ghastly, fades into visibility and grim luminescence overlooking the skeletal trio, permitting Bella to gasp at the spectacle by that light. Now, the spirit looks tired, and miserable, and mournful; and like a man climbing into bed to go to sleep, he gets down on his hands and knees, and then settles precisely into the bodily arrangement of the skeletal warrior that preceded him. The spook-light goes out; and everything goes quiet. And then a sound like a great heaving exhalation rushes from the house, and the grumbling creak of wood as a structure only partially subject to the rules of physical reality surrenders itself completely; and then quiet again.

And waiting a few moments to make sure nothing else befalls you and your friend, the next sound is less terrible - Signore Cestié in the cellar on the other side of the door, calling your names; a bobbing lamp's light preceding him.

"Taalia! Bella! Taalia! Bella!"