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“For what?” Zach asks.

“I’m going to pull the fire alarm.”

Now I feel bad. “Won’t that kind of ruin the party?”

“Eh, not for too long. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner everyone will be able to come back inside and sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’” Caralora disappears to retrieve her coat; Zach and I still have ours slung over our arms. He is about to say something when a brain-piercing alarm overrides every thought except get out of here now.

Caralora beckons us toward the back of the hall. The Fat Babies are conferring, uncertain whether to bring their instruments. The crowd claps their hands over their ears. They grab their coats, then file wearily into the cold. The bartenders lock the cash register. We duck into the ladies’ room and stand on the toilets with the stall doors closed. I think I’m going to be permanently deaf from the ringing. Caralora peeks out into the main room, gives us the nod, then slips out. We follow her. The trap door is behind the bar. C-lora heaves it open. All I can see is a dark void and a few steps. I wish I’d worn sneakers. “Come on,” she says, or at least that’s what she might be saying if I could hear her. We all turn our phones to flashlight apps and descend gingerly. Zach pulls the trap door shut, and the din of the fire alarm is mercifully muted.

Down in the tunnel, I immediately lose my sense of direction. Zach hunts for a light switch, finds it. We squint in the sudden brightness. The tunnel has a gray cement floor and walls lined with boxes of booze, conduit, cables. It’s not at all romantic. Zach tries to use his phone as a compass, but the reception is poor. We walk in the only direction that hasn’t been closed off.

After a few minutes, the fire alarm goes quiet. We pass musty side rooms, an abandoned men’s room full of disconnected urinals. Finally we come to some stairs. They lead to a locked steel door.

“What do you think?” I ask. “Is there any way out of here besides the Green Mill?”

“That’s where Shake, Rattle and Read used to be,” Caralora says. “It’s a fancy liquor store now.”

“I could pick the lock?” I suggest.

“Nah, we’re looking for something else,” Caralora says. “Apparently, there’s a way into the Uptown Theater.”

“Seriously? Sez who?” The Uptown Theater has been closed since 1981; it’s always on the verge of being restored to its former glory. I’ve never been in it. I feel giddy at the idea—it’s Chicago’s most famous ruin.

“Sez my urbex friend, Donna. And you.” Caralora doesn’t like to talk about Donna. I sometimes wonder if they are more than friends; the one time I met Donna, they seemed awfully chummy. Caralora has done a lot of urban exploring, but she likes to go up, onto rooftops, cranes, fire escapes, not down—she’s a little claustrophobic. “She sent me some photos, here.” The first photo is of a roughly sketched map of the tunnels; the second shows a hole in a wall; the next shows a small, cell-like room with a caved-in ceiling.

“I wish we’d known,” Zach says. “It looks like we’re going to need rope.”

“We’ll be okay,” C-lora says. “Alba promised.” I feel a little queasy when she says this, but I take some comfort from it, too. We keep walking, trying to find the hole. “It should be right about here. No, that’s a pile of boxes. Oh, wait.” We push the boxes aside and there’s the hole. It’s jagged and filthy with dust, cobwebs and damp. I give Zach my coat and pull Mama’s dress off over my head. Both Zach and Caralora say, “Whoa, Alba—”

“What? I’m not going to ruin this dress and get yelled at.” I crouch next to the hole and shine my phone light through. “Yeah, we’re in the right place. Ugh, spiders.” I can see that I’m going to ruin my stockings, but I can’t be bothered to take them off.

Zach and Caralora strip down to their underwear. Zach is wearing blue-striped boxers, which pleases me. He’s very lanky, not too hairy. He catches me staring at him and grins, and I feel a sudden warmth from my crotch to the top of my head. There’s something about his smile that just does it for me. Caralora folds her dress neatly. She’s wearing a black lace slip. I’m impressed by how much softer she is, now. Her body still sends a thrill of recognition through me, but her transformation is sublime; she is the bewitched prince who was really a princess all along, and now the magic words have been spoken, and here we are, our true selves, standing in our underwear in a tunnel, in the last hours of the old year. We all keep our shoes on.

I crawl through first, then Caralora, then Zach. We try to pull the boxes back into position to camouflage the hole, so we won’t give away Caralora’s urbex pals. “Peh,” C-lora says, spitting spiderwebs. We brush ourselves off and shine our phones around: we are in the small room with the collapsing ceiling.

Zach points upward—there are soft footsteps above us. We turn off our lights and stand still in the dark. The footsteps come to a halt, and then there’s a series of noises that are hard to identify; something hard being set down, and then some nearly inaudible bumping almost on top of us. Someone shines a light through the gap in the ceiling. We look like we’re in a prison break movie, just before the scene where the convicts try to scale the wall and get gunned down in a hail of bullets.

A woman whispers, “Hey, guys.” My knees almost buckle.

It’s me. Of course.

“Alba. Jesus. My life just flashed before my eyes,” Zach says.

“Hush,” my other self murmurs. “There’s a security guard around somewhere. I brought a ladder. Here.”

Zach grabs the feet of the ladder, positions it carefully and steadies me as I climb up first.

When I poke my head through the hole, I see the dim outline of my naked self, lying on her stomach on the tarp-covered floor. She’s holding the ladder with one hand and a flashlight in the other. “Why . . . ?” I ask her.

“The floor is rotted out. I’m afraid to stand on it. Be careful.”

I pivot off the ladder and onto the cold, gritty floor, catching my stockings on the rough edges of plaster and wood. I crawl away from the hole until I’m confident enough to stand. Caralora hoists herself up vigorously, as though she’s getting out of a swimming pool. Zach follows more cautiously. He gives my other self his coat, and she gratefully accepts it. “That’s the third time this week I’ve given you my coat,” Zach says. I look at Other Alba, but she shrugs; she doesn’t know about the second time, either. We all put our clothes back on, which feels a little anticlimactic.

My eyes have adjusted to the low light. We’re in the lobby of the Uptown Theater, behind a row of massive, ornate columns. At one end of the room are two curving staircases that join at a mezzanine; at the other end is a three-story wall of windows underneath drapery and plywood that cover them almost to the top. It feels like a church without pews, this vast faux palace, this Sleeping Beauty of Cinema. It hasn’t been asleep for a hundred years, yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me to come back here in 2081 and find it exactly as it is now. There are dozens of buckets set out to catch drips; blue tarps cover large swathes of the floor; there are ladders, tools, scaffolding; everything seems suspended, waiting.

Zach helps Other Alba pull the ladder up and return it to its place. “I don’t know why we’re bothering,” she says. “You can see we’ve been here; the dust on the floor is as thick as snow. We’re leaving tracks.”

“It seems polite,” Zach says.