Just walk now.
I try to calm my breathing. No need to freak out. Just because he was a little too close. But I swear he was looking right at me.
A brick wall gives way to a bank of narrow warped-glass windows. Our reflections are smears of color bobbling across, no way to separate one from two from maybe three.
And here, some sound is coming from Dorothy: a droning, rolling sound under her breath. Great-he’s stalking me, I’m stalking her, she’s fucking humming.
Footstep scuff right behind me. My whole body tightens.
A hand on my shoulder.
I spin, recoiling, and a scream chokes off at the back of my throat.
“Want to know what I’ve heard?” he says.
The guy’s right over me. Shaggy black beard and stocking cap, a missing tooth as he smiles. His eyes go over my shoulder in Dorothy’s direction.
“Sometimes stories are true,” he says.
He reaches to his neck, pulls a set of headphones over his ears. Tinny buzz of music like the hover of a fly.
And now he’s bobbing his head at me.
Crazy-omen-man likes rock and roll.
I step back. Turn, and Dorothy’s gone.
I get a panic kick to my gut so hard it runs a tingle out along my fingers. I scan desperate. Graffitied-up mailbox. Overturned shopping cart. I pound shoes to the corner. Dark, empty streets left, right, straight-no idea which way to go.
I go right. My eyes everywhere-in doorways, behind dumpsters, between parked cars. Panic turns so easy into anger-goddamn psycho headset freak-sometimes stories are true, like the one where the crazy bitch hunts down the old woman over nothing more than a ring.
Movement in the dark recess of a doorway. I lurch toward it, and there’s a man crouched, shirt off. I jerk back, turn. My eyes go out across the street. To fall on the figure over there in front of that boarded-up building, pulling open that rusted metal door.
Dorothy.
My heart is going at it hard-that panic and anger thing-it’s a beautiful drunk. Filling my head up like too much wine. Dorothy looks over her shoulder, and even from all the way over there, those twisted-ass eyes are right on me. Along my spine, my shoulders, the muscles tighten. She steps through the door, pulls it shut, and she’s gone.
I drag the door open.
All black in front of my face. The Old Town air is a hot breath on the back of my neck.
Don’t hesitate-just go. Into the black, and it swallows me up, and I’ve never felt such a goddamn thrill before. I inch toward an open doorway I barely see up ahead. Doing that whole hands-out-in-front-of-you thing. Don’t hear her humming or her bracelet clink. I step through this next doorway but something makes me stop. Something says
For a moment I just stand here in the dark. Feel the panicanger drunk coursing lush through me. I start forward again.
My foot comes down onto nothing.
Hands out, thrashing. Clutch crazy at some metal rail. Foot finds the ledge. Stand crouched. Breathe. Hands gripping hard. The black, receding and finding shape again, settles on the smoke-thread edging of the handrail, which traces down and down.
A distant sound comes up. Dorothy’s voice. A tune. A taunt.
One foot out to find a step. Next foot out. A creak under my shoe. The lower I go, the warmer it gets. Like the devil forgot heat is supposed to rise. The smell is just this side of rot. Turn at the bottom, eyes scanning the dark for her. Then I hear a sound like air forced through a tiny hole, something breathy and shrill. And a strange scuttling. Oh shit, no.
But the humming. Flat and faraway. And so I walk.
The room just goes and goes, thin and long-what, am I about to get shanghaied, are Kit’s pirates lying in wait? The only light comes down from cracks between the wooden beams overhead. Corridors converge, and I listen, and I turn. Keep going deeper in. Hot sweat down my back. Ceiling just above my head. Walls close. What the hell is this place? Darker now. Nothing but fissures in the wood to let in something feeble and dim silver like moon going through water.
The whole black floor seems to crawl-oh Christ. Something brushes my heel-body jerks. I stumble forward. On and on under the streets of Portland. I’ve lost the way out. All I can do is hold onto Dorothy’s voice and follow. Her Pied Piper song in this Pied Piper black.
Can’t stop, can’t breathe.
Because sometimes panic just turns into more panic, and sometimes stories are true, and sometimes you’re an idiot.
My foot comes down onto something soft.
Sick squirm under my shoe.
I choke in a gasp, stagger back. For a second I’ve lost the floor.
Then, as my shoe comes down again-solid ground-there’s a click and suddenly, light.
I’m in a chamber at the end of the line. Walls full of white Christmas lights. Hanging in swags like the piping of sweet on a birthday cake.
And all up and down and ceiling to floor: pretty jewelry.
At first I can’t make it out, it’s just an enormous, blurred luster. But bring it into focus, and it’s gold and more gold, like an Egyptian tomb-gold all pressed into the walls-gold and silver and the crazy shimmer colors of thousands of jewels. Mosaics of rings, overlapped bracelets, winding chains, strings of pearls. I reach my hand out to touch. Stop.
Directly ahead, Dorothy in her faded housedress and blue velvet hat is hunched, face close to the wall, hands working. Her humming is so low I barely hear it. She has a little tube of glue. She presses something into the wall. Face smattered with beaded light and twinkle, and she turns and looks at me and smiles.
Crooked eyes dip down. To the diamonds in my ears, the drapes of pearls against my chest.
The glint in her hand is my ring.
I don’t hear a sound from behind.
I don’t hear the swift of the baseball bat before it comes down.
LILA BY MEGAN KRUSE
When I saw Lila for the first time it was at the Tik Tok, at a quarter past 2 in the morning. I was there because I had this terrible loneliness in me and I couldn’t stand to be in my apartment, where the cars outside on Foster Road dragged their headlights over the thin walls. There was black mold on the shower curtain and the linoleum was peeling up and there was an ugly stain on the mattress. It didn’t matter; I slept on the sofa anyway.
I slept on the sofa and when I couldn’t sleep I sat in the Tik Tok near Powell Boulevard, watching the rows of clocks on the walls, and then Lila came in, late on a Friday night. She was tall, with rust-colored hair, and she looked like a girl I had known once, the daughter of someone who came to take care of my mother after her accident. The girl was my age and she had a puppy that she carried, with ragged, chewed-up fur, scratching its fleas and burying its head under her arm. I was eleven. I tied a red scarf around my head because I wanted to
