Deficiency

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 Paige Thorndyke paused just inside the entrance of the Underground. The Underground is a perfect name for this dance club, she thought disdainfully. The stairway descended a full flight below the sidewalk, and the moment she opened the door to the lobby she was greeted by a musty odor that reminded her of what the basement at home smelled like, especially when the humidity was too high and everything had that dank, awful, redolent odor. Whether intentional or not, the walls here were just as poorly lighted and looked like raw cement. She crossed the small lobby in which two pumped-up wannabe television wrestlers strained their undersized tuxedos at every seam. As if they were really passing judgment on her qualifications to enter, they nodded their approval, each man's neck bulging like a pinched inner tube. Neither smiled. They looked as if they had superglue smeared around their lips, keeping them from relaxing. Paige hesitated as she approached the second set of doors, but as if some modern-day Satan was watching her and pushing buttons, the doors opened automatically with a dramatic swish, giving her the feeling she had indeed descended into a region of Hades and was now being sucked into its belly. Inside, the dance hall resembled an inferno -- the blazing pink and blue, red and yellow lights flickered over the crowd and up the pink stucco walls. The dance floor itself was a layer of glass beneath which a ruby-tinted liquid flowed, giving the revelers the sense that they were dancing on a stream of wine or blood. The fog generated by dry ice twisted and knotted above and around them, spinning a web of smoke that gnarled and curled like a snake slithering into itself.

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