Escape!

Lois hesitated, as she stared at the Black Door. She had a solid lead, now, but going in blind would be foolish. Better to come back—during the day, maybe with Jimmy in tow—than to head in alone. The reporter hiccuped, then started to look for a way out.

The freight elevator was a no-go: the panel where the buttons should have been were a gaping rectangular hole in the cement. Vandalized, probably. The club-goers probably called for it upstairs when they needed it.

Lois scanned the garage to her left. The darkness beyond the light shed by the fluorescent bulbs was impenetrable: she'd have to navigate by the light of her cell phone, and that was if she could find the entrance and get out that way.

To the right, however, was a hallway—what was left of whatever was down here. Fire regulations would demand, at minimum, a set of stairs in case of fire, so that if the elevator went out people could escape—if Lois could find that, she'd be back upstairs, and out of here in a jiffy.

She hiccuped again, a little dizzy. The drinks and the heat told on her. Sweat dripped down her ribs, into the jacket tied around her waist. Her lips felt dry, but she moved slowly down the hallway, so as not to make too much noise in her heels. The phone was held out in front of her, screen a bright rectangle that dimly illuminated the hallway. It ran for about twenty feet, then turned. Lois took the corner and froze.

Light from the screen reflected on a swollen stone belly, rudely etched with a spiral, played on pendulous breasts, a gross, deformed lump of a head, hips that flared wider than the shoulders. The squat idol was of light green stone, the belly about the size and shape of a basketball. Lois snapped a picture, then shifted the phone. The idol rested on a roughly rectangular stone platform; behind it, the bare concrete wall had been painted with a black mural, like the one that surrounded the door. Phallic tentacles disappearing into biomechanical mouths, cunts. There was a sub-theme of bulbous growths, like bunches of grapes...yet each one, Lois saw, was a shadowy spectre of a fetus, like an ultrasound caught in spraypaint, bunches of them all together.

At the foot of the idol, and all around it were...offerings. Lois saw burnt out black candles, scattered wads of money in tight cash bands, the dried leaves of dead flowers, strings of used condoms, hung up, their dead weight cargo listless yet symbolically potent, small copper bowls of liquid, smaller stone fetishes of phalluses and vulvas, bottles of rum and vodka, and a gray scatter of bones...

Lois' phone flashed and clicked as she took pictures. The final flash caught the edge of a red reflective strip, and she stopped to regard it, eyes wide to adjust to the light. To the right of the shrine, almost hidden by the darkness and the strands of condoms and black sheet that had been hung from the ceiling was the hint of a fire exit. Lois parted the sheet, and the phone's light fell on the black emptiness of a stairwell. The fire stairs!

She was about to take the stairs when her eyes caught a familiar bottle. Lois hiccuped again, and almost instinctively reached out. It was grey plastic, with a hand-written label marked "XXX."