Daria pulled the heavy steel door open, careful to leave the brick in place on the slim chance she wasn’t the last, the latest, and stepped inside. For a moment, it seemed even darker, despite the thin and yellowy incandescence from a bare bulb strung way up at the top of the stairs, 40-watt light at the end of the tunnel. She followed it up, her bass bumping once or twice against the edge of a step, her breath, her footsteps, close in the gloom. Finally, the door that Mort had painted in charcoal grays and chalky whites, hints of crimson, a ring of tiny winged skeletons, bone rattles clutched in bone fists, leering fetal grins, and “Baby Heaven” inscribed in the perfect mimic of tombstone chisel. Mort loved Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson, Tim Burton and Mexican folk art, and it showed every time he put down the sticks and picked up a brush or pencil.

Daria pushed open the gates to Baby Heaven, and there was warmer air and real light on the other side, the steamy hiss of radiators and rows of fluorescents suspended from the high ceiling, a couple of shadeless old floor lamps like tiny suns on gooseneck stalks.

And Mort, sitting behind his drums in the middle of the mostly empty room, framed in amps and completely absorbed in the business of rolling a more than respectable joint from the Ziploc baggie of pot balanced on his knee. He looked up, saw Daria and smiled his wide, perfect smile, flashed broad teeth stained dingy with tobacco and neglect.

“Daria,” he said, the way a chintzy magician might say “Presto-chango!” or “Abracadabra!,” and made a grand show of tipping his ratty baseball cap in her direction.

Theo, Mort’s girlfriend, latest true love of his life, was camped out in the permanently reclined La-Z-Boy chair halfway across the room, smoking and prowling through a stack of Duplex Planet and old Rolling Stone magazines. Theo had come down from Nashville late in the spring. She dressed like Buddy Holly with a stumbling hangover and claimed that she was an artist, although Daria had yet to actually see anything she’d painted or drawn or photographed. She wore her hair piled high in an oily pompadour, dyed so painfully black it sometimes seemed almost blue.