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daydream. Later he found it a vital component of his survival mechanism, especially at school when the stammer marked him as an outcast. Now here, ten years later in the Luxor, his mind really took flight. There was a potent quality here in the atmosphere that fueled his imagination on mind-blowing journeys. So he sat there alone in the abandoned building in total darkness. And night after night, Ellery Hann got comprehensively out of his head.
        For a hundred years the Luxor's walls had absorbed tobacco smoke, liquor vapors and cologne, adrenaline and superheated pheromones of generation upon generation of Chicago's youth. Now the brickwork exhaled their exotic perfume. Ellery's bloodied nostrils sifted the aroma of cigars smoked when Buster Keaton still performed for adoring cameras and F Scott Fitzgerald sat writing his first novel. There was the phantom hint of cigarettes spiced with marijuana and cloves from when nascent hippie bands played here in 1965. Greatly attenuated vapors reduced to nothing but a molecular trace rose from the wooden floor. They carried faraway echoes of beer spilt in a riot when Splinter Davis boxed here in 1917.
        There was the tang of prohibition spirit when a Chicago gangster hired the hall for his daughter's wedding in 1931. Embedded in those scents lay the trace of a cocktail spilt in the days when you'd hear the hits of The Ramones and The Sex Pistols first playing on the radio. In the final set of some forgotten heavy metal band, during a howling guitar solo, a string broke and cut the guitarist's right cheek. In his mind's eye, Ellery saw the dime-sized brown mark on the stage where the blood had beaten the industrial cleaner. All the scents blended into one.
        Piquant aroma flowed over Ellery like a spirit of awesome power. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply. The pain from the punches could no longer reach deep enough into his brain to hurt him. In his imagination he walked a path along a fast-flowing river. Cool air played on his face. The hissing of the water played a mysterious song for him. Ahead lay a forest. The branches of the trees were contorted in weird shapes.
        Fungus sprouted from the trunks. Beyond the forest, hills rose toward crags where blades of rock thrust upward out of the ground. Moving faster along the path, Ellery sensed a growing excitement. In this place he was free. There was no one to insult him. No one attacked him or hurt him. He created this world with the power of his imagination. He ran through the forest his mind had extruded from nothing. His blood surged in his veins. He tingled with the sheer power of his creativity What else did he want in this forest? Birds with ten-foot wingspans-no make them twenty-foot spans. Above him vast birds the size of jet fighters glided through the air, calling across the treescape. The sky boiled with clouds. This was the weather he loved most. Passionate weather that was full of fury and thunder and lightning. Ellery whooped with triumph in the world he'd created.
        Now he wanted animals. Big, big animals with pelts of rough red fur. And he wanted them as big as woolly mammoths. But he didn't want grass eaters. He wanted carnivores that used their ten feet of curving tusk to tear open the bellies of their victims. And he wanted the trunks to suck the blood from the screaming men and then spray it so a red mist filled the air.
        Ellery got what he imagined. Meat-eating mammoths hunted down screaming men in the forest. The men he recognized. They had the faces of the gang that had beaten him earlier that night. Now he watched huge beasts with shaggy pelts of copper hair pursue the men, trample them into the dirt and shit on the forest floor, then rip open their chests with the points of massive tusks.
        This dream was so vividly powerful Ellery could smell moist soil beneath the trees and lick the dew from the leaves to quench his thirst. This was his world. He'd built it