Tracy bummed me a cigarette after some grumbling about my puss-ass being unwilling to go in and get the smokes, and how she stepped over that pink meat to get them, and I owed her some fucking favors, and this was a new pack besides, and none of her junk was in it. When I asked for the Zippo she’d found lying next to the cigarettes, she very cutely asked Would I like her to fucking smoke it for me too.

  I thought to mention my having carried her to a medical station to get well, but once the nicotine hit, and hit hard, I wasn't bothered by Tracy. And as if the nicotine buzz had encouraged it along, the Tenuate was kicking in too, curbing my headache and bringing a robotic sentimentality with its usual purpose. Even the dead-cat stink no longer bothered me.

  Without addressing the issue verbally, Tracy and I avoided shadows, even walking along small lines of light between fluorescents when we could still see our surroundings, just to be sure.

  She made no fuss over the white circle on her forehead when I showed it to her in the zippo's reflection. Tracy seemed a connoisseur of all things repression unless it was a blatant, surface issue that could easily be handled with anger, bullying, or those snake/chicken head movements and the accusatory north side finger, the wand and preemptive weapon before all hair was pulled and all bitches were slapped.

  There were pink Y's on the walls every ten steps or so. We found no more open doors, but when we winded the meandering hall to its end, we found a dark hole of stairway with an X and and elephant Polaroid beside it.

  “I don't want to go up there,” I said.

  “I know,” Tracy said. For a moment I thought we'd had our first true moment of commiseration until she said, “But that's cause you a fuckin pussy bro.” Then she went up the steps, disappearing into the black.

  I'd made it up the first set of steps when I thought Tracy was going to die from benzodiazepine withdrawal. The stakes here were less, my fear too recent.

  “Just run, Andy, fucking run and don't stop even if you feel …” I couldn't say ‘rummaging’ out loud. I ran, remembering the curve from the first set of stairs, preparing for it, and tripping when there was only wall where the landing and the curve should have been, all the pills in my pockets pattering to their bottle’s bottoms like the last drops from tree to roof after heavy rain. I landed on my ass and shouted, not from the pain—I could hardly fucking feel it—but because of the dark, and the overwhelming feeling that something was on the steps with me, and that it would start its rummaging, its bone-clacking, its light touch on the tip of a strand of hair.

  It got cold. I could not get up. My thoughts turned to Abby, on the playground at school, kids poking at her, asking why she'd gotten a tummy, and Abby didn't understand why she had a tummy now, how could she? She'd just been eating sweets because everyone let her have sweets because, no big fucking deal or anything, but both her parents were fucking out of commission, assumed dead, and so the foster family who'd taken her indulged in only one kindness—if you could call it kindness—for such girls as Abby, and that was an open cabinet of sugar where all the hits were ready to play, help you feel for just one second a little better about it all, and how nobody hugged you anymore, especially not today. Look what she's been through after all, she's so fragile, what if it makes her cry? Truth is, a hug would make her cry. She's crying now, about her tummy, and though she doesn't understand, the way the kids look at her tells her it's not praise. And no, the cousin didn't take her, the cousin has kids as it is, and the cousin in fact just got shut down as an unofficial, under-the-table kind of daycare, because a two-year-old almost choked on a rubber ball two weeks after ol’ Andy went missing, and Mom and Dad are gone, and there's nobody else but distant relatives who don't want anything to do with another damn kid.

  Rummaging. Digging holes. The singular clack of bones like hollow whittled sticks in an empty vale. The tusk brushing my shirt and sick shivering fanning out from the fissure.

  And then there was light. Like a Valkyrie in night, she flew from the black above, a flickering halo surrounding her fist, a small ember glowing with a pull on her Newport, illuminating lips pulling back from teeth as she slashed the Zippo down toward the creature that was no longer there, the tusk that no longer lightly caressed my chest, and I felt warmth again.

  But still could not move. Did not want to move. Wanted the rummaging, because now that it had taken me there to see my daughter, I could not come back.

  “Hey!” Tracy shouted.

  “N-n-n-n—“

  How could I leave her again now that I knew what was happening to her out there? Maybe the creature could send a message, tell her I was coming, that as soon as I found the exit I'd be coming to take her back, away from the wretched family drawing a paycheck on her existence.

  “Come on, man, ah shit!” The lighter went out.

  I smiled. “Please. Take me back to see her. Sh-show me what she's doing right now. Can you show her I'm here, that I'm coming? That I love her, that I’m sorry, like really fucking sorry?”

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  Flick, flick, flick. “Come on” Tracy said.

  “Please?” I said. I shook with tears and anticipation.

  Flick, flick, flick. Tracy found my bicep and her nails bit hard into it.

  “Ow!”

  “You don't come on, it's gonna be your fuckin face next. Or I'll leave you to it.” Flick, flick, flick.

  Light filled the space. I looked into Tracy's raccoon eyes. “She's out there. It … it showed her to me, Tracy. It can do that. It knows where she is.” I could feel my face twisting with emotion. “It knows where she is.”

  Tracy put her free hand on my cheek. “I know, Andy. And if you wanna get to where she is, you gotta come with me. I don't know if you remember how lighters work, but at some point this shit gonna run out, then all you're gonna have of her is the rummaging.”

  “Don't say it,” I whispered.

  “You want to get out and find her?”

  I nodded. Her warm hand was bringing me back to my stalwart amphetamine-alertness. I wasn't sure I'd ever cried on speed before.

  “Come on,” Tracy urged me. I reluctantly followed.

  The steps, it turned out, curved left and not right. The glow ahead had a different tone than the fluorescent flicker I'd grown accustomed to. Tracy let the lighter go out as we neared, and she took her half-cashed Newport out of her mouth and tucked it into the corner of mine. I pulled hard and coughed the smoke out.

  The different light I'd seen on the steps was an emerald-glowing skyway stretching far to a middle intersection and then continuing on to the other side where a giant building—which I could not see the top of—loomed in billowing indigo mist. I saw the other paths led to the same monolithic structures, all just as infinite as the building we'd come from.

  Hanging in the air directly above us were the pink, fleshy, eyeless bodies of more anthropomorphic horrors in Cirque Du Soleil stasis surrounded by Polaroids too far away to make out. Above the many rabbit-men and elephant-men and bird-men—yes, bird-men—were more emerald skyways, two, I counted, before that indigo mist obscured the rest—but from the height of the buildings I guessed there were more, like the eternal reflection of two mirrors set vis-à-vis.

  Tracy betrayed a gasp.

  Below was only black.

  “Were there more steps?” I said. The Y on our original building had that same elephant Polaroid tucked into it. Avoiding the shadow spilling from the steps, I moved to pluck the picture free and chanced a meager glance inside the maw. The shadows seemed to call to me: Abigail.

  I kind of skipped back to Tracy. She had eyes only for the floating fleshies above, lighting another Newport, popping another morphine, hesitating, then another two. She swallowed dryly. “I'm not going back in to find out. And you ain't neither.”

  I stared into the black stairway. “What the fuck,” I said.

  “We gotta stay out of the fuckin dark. Almost had you.”

  “It knew my daughter's name, Tracy,” I said. “It knew where she was, what she was going through. The kids make fun of her tummy because she eats too many sweets because she lost both her parents and she's all alone and the foster family doesn't give two shits and neither does the state, and—“

  “Hey!” Tracy said, crouching to meet my downcast eyes, snapping fingers in my face. “You can't fuckin believe it, man! You can't fuckin believe it. You're some motherfucking food to that thing, aight? Food. That's all.” She raised her eyebrows and folded her arms like it was plain as her nose. “The shit you sayin sounds just like some shit my old man used to say to get me to stick around. You gettin fuckin played by the dark, motherfucker, and that's all there is to it.”

  I could not believe her. But I tried. I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the pill bottles, tossing a couple more Tenuate down my throat. If you can’t believe it, take drugs.

  “You better watch that comedown,” Tracy said. “Just as bad as the fuckin rummagers.”

  We walked. There were no guard rails to either side of the emerald skyway, which brought on a great sense of vertigo, and at times it seemed the path narrowed, and I swayed. Tracy had a cat-like poise about her, and I enjoyed seeing her in literally a different light.

  “Thanks,” I said. The space, despite its size, was dead, and my voice dropped right to the floor. “I do owe you.”

  “Yeah, well you can make it up by helping me find another light.” She briefly glanced above to where two fleshies’ hands were almost—almost—reinacting Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Her chin snapped down.

  We reached the center where the paths crossed and I thought of an X, the level we were supposedly on.

  “Which fuckin way,” Tracy said.

  I considered with Tenuate-enhanced vision and Tenuate-enhanced indecision.

  “I always go right,” I said. “Avoid all stop lights.”

  Tracy turned on me, and I thought she was going to call me a fucking idiot or something, but all she said was, “Me too,” then went right. I followed after. “You ever been somewhere so big?” she said, looking up.

  “I don't know if I've even heard of a place this big,” I said. “I kinda stuck around Jacksonville after high school, was raised here—there, I mean—and the closest thing I got to ‘big’ was Austin, Texas where I went to a … big hospital.”

  Tracy grunted. “Chicago gets big. Standing at the bottom of the Sears Tower, you get the fuckin jumps in your guts, but that”—she pointed up to the black structure ahead of us—“is pretty fuckin far from jumps in your guts.”

  “Oh yeah? Tracy's got a feeling. What is it?”

  “Fucked up,” she said.

  I could see from the doorway that the steps went down as well as up. Next to the doorway on the black building's wall was a pink W with a hawk Polaroid stuck behind it. Tracy and I shared a look and I pulled the Polaroid free:

  Four paths to ending the creatures you were. The moon nears on all sides within the Tower of Black Eyed Angels, but on which face will its light shine? Take comfort, creature. This building is for the hawk. The building across is for the bat. The third is for the star-nosed mole. The building where you were birthed is for the elephant.