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trash swept into the corners of the room. The partygoers had hustled off the squatters, then taken a broom to the place, tried to spiff it up. It smelled like piss anyway. An ancient condom was spaghetti-stuck to one wall.
    “You guys couldn’t have sprung for, like, a banquet hall?” I mumbled. The marble floor hummed beneath me. Clearly all the action was happening downstairs.
    “We’re not exactly a welcome convention,” the guy said. He had a young, fleshy face with moles. He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool. “Plus this building has a certain … ambiance. One of the Tallmans blew his brains out here in 1953.”
    “Nice.”
    We stood looking at each other, his face shapeshifting in the gloom. I couldn’t see any obvious way to get downstairs. The elevator banks to the left were clearly not working, their tarnished countersall frozen between floors. I pictured a workforce of ghost-men in business suits waiting patiently to start moving again.
    “So … are we going anywhere?”
    “Oh. Yeah. Look I just wanted to say … I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sure even after all this time … I just can’t imagine. That’s like, something out of Edgar Allan Poe. What happened.”
    “I try not to think about it much,” I said, the standard answer.
    The guy laughed. “Well, you’re in the wrong place, then.”
    He led me around the corner and down a hallway of former offices. I crunched broken glass, peering into each room as we passed: empty, empty, a shopping cart, a careful pile of feces, the remains of an old bonfire, and then a homeless man who said
Hiya!
cheerfully over a forty-ounce.
    “His name’s Jimmy,” the kid said. “He seemed OK, so we let him stay.”
    How gracious, I thought, but just nodded at Jimmy. We reached a heavy firewall of a door, opened it, and I was assaulted by the noise. From the basement came competing sounds of organ music and heavy metal and the loud hum of people trying to yell over each other.
    “After you,” he said. I didn’t move. I don’t like people behind me. “Or, I can … uh, this way.”
    I thought about retreating right then, but the nastiness reared up in me when I pictured this guy, this fucking Renaissance Fest
juggler,
going down and telling his friends:
She freaked, she just ran away! And
them all laughing and feeling tough. And him adding:
She’s really different from what I thought she’d be
. And holding his hand up about yay-high to show how little I’d stayed. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou, I chanted, and followed him.
    We walked down the one floor to a basement door plastered with flyers: Booth 22: Hoardin’ Lizzie Borden! Collectible items for sale or swap! Booth 28: Karla Brown—Bite Marks Discussion. Booth 14: Role Play—Interrogate Casey Anthony! 15: Tom’s Terrible Treats—Now serving Jonestown Punch and Sweet Fanny Adams!
    Then I saw a grainy blue flyer with a xeroxed photo of me in one corner: Talk About a Bad
Day!
The Kinnakee Kansas Farmhouse Massacre—Case Dissection and a Special, Special GUEST!!!
    Again I debated leaving, but the door flung open and I was sucked inside a humid, windowless basement crowded with maybe two hundred people, all leaning into each other, yelling in ears, hands on shoulders. At school once, they showed us a film strip of a grasshopper plague hitting the Midwest, and that’s what I flashed to—all those goggling eyes looking at me, mouths chewing, arms and elbows askew. The room was set up like a swap meet, divided into rows of booths created from cheap chain-link fencing. Each booth was a different murder. I counted maybe forty at first glance. A generator was barely igniting a string of lightbulbs, which hung from wires around the room, swaying in uneven time, illuminating faces at gruesome angles, a party of death masks.
    On the other side, Lyle spotted me and started arrowing through the crowd, leading