To The Shrine

One more couple in the club, Lois thought through the haze. The perfect cover. Rat and the reporter made a bee-line for the bathroom, but at the last moment veered off, the stagger in her step feigned as Rat herded the reporter headed to her target: the dark stairwell she had spied at the back of the club, far away from the noise of the dance floor and the crush around the bar.

It was time to get to the bottom of this. Literally.

The duo paused, Lois drunk act let her keep an eye on the muscled club-goers with the military haircuts that she had pegged as club security. For a moment, the coast was clear—and they dashed into the darkened stairwell and down the first couple of steps, before she flattened Rat and herself against the wall.

They panted. Her heart thumped in her chest as she strained her ears for sound of pursuit. When none came, she carefully pried off her heels. Not good to go down stairs in the dark with bare feet, but better than to break her neck in the attempt to navigate dark stairs in heels. Rat just watched her, eyes wide in the dark. They waited a tense moment, but no one came.

So they descended, and Rat led the way. Lois expected it to be cooler in the stairwell, but it was the opposite...a heat rose from above. She felt 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 stairs. Rat was always just ahead of her, black trenchcoat a part of the darkness. When they had passed the first turn, she took out her phone to provide a little light.

The stairs ran down twenty feet, and ended in a small alcove with an open doorway; the door long removed. Lois followed Rat around 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...

Rat crossed himself. Lois' phone flashed and clicked as she took pictures. She noted that the shrine occupied the end of a hallway, and there was the hint of light from the other end. She was about to head that way 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."