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It was instantaneous and terrifyingly wrong. The hit stung as nothing she had felt before. None of the euphoria promised by the dealer. Like talons of some gestated monster hidden within the depths of her brain. Now fighting to escape the shell of her head. The flashes of light, the shrieking in her ears - again and again it scrapped to get out. She couldn't breath, her mouth was sick with the taste of iron. She folded as a paper doll to the sidewalk beneath her. It was coming, a crescendo of agony – an eternity of grief within one crushing moment. Pain, blackness, the dread of the empty to come. She gasped up for one last look at the world. Perlin blinked but that was all the time it took. They said that lot had been empty for years. Leveled and fenced by an unremarkable combination of mold infested plywood, rotted two-by-fours and cheap white wash. A sagging, ugly boundary adorned here and there with patches of chicken wire. Papered with banners for long faded rallies, film festivals, escort services, essay writers and forgettable indie bands. A surface of rusty staples whose ecology may, in the eons to come, give rise to a whole new technical civilization descended from a strain of C. Tetani. Within this perimeter, nothing much save a waste of property levies. There were the scattered mounds of cracked grey soil like barrows here and there. There were the weeds with tree-like aspirations. There were the shattered left overs of unauthorized parties. And, of coarse, there were the throw always from many an anonymous tryst. A faint echo of the lot's nefarious past. Back then, the locals always said, “back then”, the lot had been a Byzantine warren. A centre for flea bitten commerce of various levels of legitimacy – none fully. In places more flea than commerce. In others more fly than by-night. Two city blocks crisscrossed by shifting alleyways of illegals, pushers, rats, contraband, scams, lice and prostitutes. The fumes of wasting organics scrubbed only by the acidic scent of ozone. Atmospheric tang spawned by strung up metal cob webs bearing illicit power from the subway below. And all, in the finest tradition of unregulated enterprise, tax free. The authorities were pressed to clean it up. But after years of 'finding efficiencies' within the public trust, the police had better use of their meager resources protecting more respectable districts. The blocks at Yonge and Bloor were kept at bay by an uneasy truce. As long as nothing leaked out, the law put up with the embarrassment. And the requisite legal authority to lance such a tumor would open the door on other supposedly respectable places. Local politics had their truces to maintain too. Then came a hot, hot summer - that much everyone agrees. But what of the year? And how did it happen? Some said there had been a fire sparked by the bad wiring. Others claimed it was a flood erupted from failing sewers. The experts speculated a catastrophic series of structural failures – the infrastructure was poorly made and long neglected. The more fanciful blamed the rats for finally purging the lot of its vermin. And others acclaimed the so called 'heroin addicted, man eating' black flies for making life unbearable there. For most it did not matter, the cancer was remitted. The lot was cleansed and the walls kept it that way. A generation later it was another hot, hot summer. And one kilometre to the south her agony was relentless but Perlin was not dead. Though she might have wished it. Seconds lingered as hours. Her senses drowned in the grit of cheap municipal cement. And the shadow looming over the city where the lot had just been. Heavy, darker than the night sky around it. In her fear and confusion she believed that it had come for her. Death gazed down at Perlin from towering heights with cold and merciless eyes. And her junkie expertise - acquired during a short, sad life - told Perlin that the dark tower was no hallucination.

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