The long-legged blonde with a tattoo of St. Jude on her left arm staggers into the abandoned building, stumbles across a long dark hallway, and descends the stairs into the dimly lit basement. She knocks on a wooden door. Someone looks through a peephole. Slowly, the creaking door opens.

She enters the House of the Dead, a subterranean candy store with a cornucopia of mind-altering drugs. The laconic guard with one eye, an empty socket and a piece in his right hand, mutters, “Okay,” and lets her pass.

She scurries down the corridor like a rat in a maze approaching its coveted reward. At the end of the passageway she turns left and collides with The Ghost, a skeletal albino in charge of the drug den.

“Whatya got for me, Laura?”

She hands him the money.

“You need a fix, Laura,” he says maliciously, as he glances at her convulsive body and trembling hands. “Go sit in the corner and wait.”

*

After she shoots up and mellows out, she smokes and ingests a smorgasbord of poisons. Nikki, the androgynous necromancer, slithers up to her. Looking up at the pretty sorcerer with lapis lazuli eyes, she whispers, “Come back another time, darling. Don’t feel like talking to the dead now. Just chilling.”

“Of course, sweetie. But how about a quick Tarot reading?”

Gazing quizzically at the adept magician, she asks, “How much?”

“For you, me lovely princess, in this beautiful moment, here and now in the House of the Dead, it’s free.”