He couldn’t quite make himself switch off the flashlight. There seemed to be no need. In the right-hand wall were several doorways; he was sure one led to the secret entrance. If the thieves fled, he’d be able to hear which doorway they were using.
He crept along the passage. Shadows of dangling plaster moved with him. The first room was bare, and the color of dust. It would have been built as a dressing room, and perhaps the shapeless object, huddled in a corner and further blurred by wads of dust, had once been a costume. In the second deserted room another slumped, arms folded bonelessly. He had a hallucinatory impression that they were sleeping vagrants, stirring wakefully as his light touched them.
There was only one movement worth his attention: the stealthy restless movement he could hear somewhere ahead. Yes, it was beyond the last of the doorways, from which—he switched off the flashlight to be sure—a faint glow was emerging. That must come from the secret entrance.
He paused just ahead of the doorway. Might they be lying in wait for him? When the sound came again—a leathery sound, like the shifting of nervous feet in shoes—he could tell that it was at least as distant as the far side of the room. Creeping forward, he risked a glance within.
Though the room was dimmer than fog, he could see that it was empty: not even a dusty remnant of clothing or anything else on the floor. The meager glow came from a window barred by a grille, beyond which he heard movement, fainter now. Were they waiting outside to open the grille as soon as he went away? Flashlight at the ready, he approached.
When he peered through the window, he thought at first there was nothing to see except a cramped empty yard: gray walls which looked furred by the dimness, gray flagstones, and—a little less dim—the sky. Another grille covered a window in an adjoining wall.
Then a memory clenched on his guts. He had recognized the yard.
Once as a child, he had been meant to sneak into the Gents’ and open the window so that his friends could get in without paying. He’d had to stand on the toilet seat in order to reach the window. Beyond a grille whose gaps were thin as matchsticks, he had just been able to make out a small dismal space enclosed by walls which looked coated with darkness or dirt. Even if he had been able to shift the grille he wouldn’t have dared to do so, for something had been staring at him from a corner of the yard.
Of course it couldn’t really have been staring. Perhaps it had been a half-deflated football; it looked leathery. It must have been there for a long time, for the two socketlike dents near its top were full of cobwebs. He’d fled, not caring what his friends might do to him—but in fact they hadn’t been able to find their way to the yard. For years he hadn’t wanted to look out of that window, especially when he’d dreamed—or had seemed to remember—that something had moved, gleaming, behind the cobwebs. When he’d been old enough to look out of the window without climbing up, the object was still there, growing dustier. Now there had been a gap low down in it, widening as years passed. It had resembled a grin stuffed with dirt.
Again he heard movement beyond the grille. He couldn’t quite make out that corner of the yard, and retreated, trying to make no noise, before he could. Nearly at the corridor, he saw that a door lay open against the wall. He dragged the door shut as he emerged—to trap the thieves, that was all; if they were in the yard that might teach them a lesson. He would certainly have been uneasy if he had still been a child.
Then he halted, wondering what else he’d heard.
The scrape of the door on bare stone had almost covered up another sound from the direction of the cinema. Had the thieves outwitted him? Had they closed the double doors? When he switched on the flashlight, having fumbled and almost dropped it lens first, he couldn’t telclass="underline" perhaps the doors were ajar, but perhaps his nervousness was making the shadow between them appear wider than it was.
As he ran, careless now of whether he was heard, shadows of dead gaslights splashed along the walls, swelling. Their pipes reminded him obscurely of breathing tubes, clogged with dust. In the bare rooms, slumped dusty forms shifted with his passing.
The doors were still ajar, and looked untouched. When he stepped between them, the ceiling rocked with shadows; until he glanced up he felt that it was closing down. He’d done what he could in here, he ought to get back to the shop—but if he went forward, he would have to think. If the doors hadn’t moved, then the sound he had almost heard must have come from somewhere else: perhaps the unlit cinema.
Before he could help it, he was remembering. The last weeks of the cinema had been best forgotten: half the audience had seemed to be there because there was nowhere else to go, old men trying to warm themselves against the grudging radiators; sometimes there would be the thud of an empty bottle or a fallen walking stick. The tattered films had jerked from scene to scene like dreams. On the last night Lee had been there, the gaslights had gone out halfway through the film, and hadn’t been lit at the end. He’d heard an old man falling and crying out as though he thought the darkness had come for him, a little girl screaming as if unable to wake from a nightmare, convinced perhaps that only the light had held the cinema in shape, prevented it from growing deformed. Then Lee had heard something else: a muttering mixed with soft chewing. It had sounded entirely at home in the dark.
But if someone was in the cinema now, it must be the thieves. He ought to hurry, before they reached his shop. He was hurrying, toward the other branch of the corridor, which led to the exit doors. Might he head off the thieves that way? He would be out of the building more quickly, that was the main thing—it didn’t matter why.
The doors wouldn’t budge. Though he wrenched at them until his palms smarted with rust, the bars didn’t even quiver. Wind whined outside like a dog, and emphasized the stuffy mustiness of the corridor.
Suddenly he realized how much noise he was making. He desisted at once, for it would only make it more difficult for him to venture back into the cinema. Nor could he any longer avoid realizing why.
Once before he’d sneaked out to this exit, to let in his friends who hadn’t been able to find their way into the yard. Someone had told the usherette, who had come prowling down the central aisle, poking at people with her flashlight beam. As the light crept closer, he had been unable to move; the seat had seemed to box him in, his mouth and throat had felt choked with dust. Yet the panic he’d experienced then had been feeble compared to what he felt now—for if the cinema was still guarded against intruders, it was not by the manager’s daughter.
He found he was trembling, and clawed at the wall. A large piece of plaster came away, crunching in his hand. The act of violence, mild though it was, went some way toward calming him. He wasn’t a child, he was a shopkeeper who had managed to survive against the odds; he had no right to panic as the little girl had, in the dark. Was the knot that was twisting harder, harder in his guts renewed panic, or disgust with himself? Hoping that it was the latter, he made himself hurry toward the auditorium.
When he saw what he had already noticed but managed to ignore, he faltered. A faint glow had crept into the corridor from the auditorium. Couldn’t that mean that his eyes were adjusting? No, the glow was more than that. Gripping the edge of the archway so hard that his fingers twitched painfully, he peered into the cinema.
The gaslights were burning.
At least blurred ovals hovered on the walls above their jets. Their light had always fallen short of the central aisle; now the glow left a swath of dimness, half as wide as the auditorium which it divided. If the screen was faintly lit—if huge vague flattened forms were jerking there, rather than merely stains on the canvas—it failed to illuminate the cinema. He had no time to glance at the screen, for he could see that not all the seats were empty.