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 tell: 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.
Perhaps they were only a few heaps of rubbish which were propped there—heaps which he hadn’t been able to distinguish on first entering. He had begun to convince himself that this was true, and that in any case it didn’t matter, when he noticed that the dimness was not altogether still. Part of it was moving.
No, it was not dimness. It was a glow, which was crawling jerkily over the rows of seats, toward the first of the objects propped up in them. Was the glow being carried along the central aisle? Thank God, he couldn’t quite distinguish its source. Perhaps that source was making a faint sound, a moist somewhat rhythmic muttering that sounded worse than senile, or perhaps that was only the wind.
Lee began to creep along the front of the cinema, just beneath the screen. Surely his legs wouldn’t let him down, though they felt flimsy, almost boneless. Once he reached the side aisle he would be safe and able to hurry, the gaslights would show him the way to the gap in his wall. Wouldn’t they also make him more visible? That ought not to matter, for—his mind tried to flinch away from thinking—if anything was prowling in the central aisle, surely it couldn’t outrun him.
He had just reached the wall when he thought he heard movement in the theater box above him. It sounded dry as an insect, but much larger. Was it peering over the edge at him? He couldn’t look up, only clatter along the bare floorboards beneath the gaslights, on which he could see no flames at all.
He still had yards to go before he reached the gap when the roving glow touched one of the heaps in the seats.
If he could have turned and run blindly, nothing would have stopped him; but a sickness that was panic weighed down his guts, and he couldn’t move until he saw. Perhaps there wasn’t much to see except an old coat, full of lumps of dust or rubble, that was lolling in the seat; nothing to make the flashlight shudder in his hand and rap against the wall. But sunken in the gap between the lapels of the coat was what might have been an old Halloween mask overgrown with dust. Surely it was dust that moved in the empty eyes—yet as the flashlight rapped more loudly against the wall, the mask turned slowly and unsteadily toward him.
Panic blinded him. He didn’t know who he was nor where he was going. He knew only that he was very small and at bay in the vast dimness, through which a shape was directing a glow toward him. Behind the glow he could almost see a face from which something pale dangled. It wasn’t a beard, for it was rooted in the gaping mouth.
He was thumping the wall with the flashlight as though to remind himself that one or the other was there. Yes, there was a wall, and he was backing along it: backing where? Toward the shop, his shop now, where he wouldn’t need to use the flashlight, mustn’t use the flashlight to illuminate whatever was pursuing him, mustn’t see, for then he would never be able to move. Not far to go now, he wouldn’t have to bear the dark much longer, must be nearly at the gap in the wall, for a glow was streaming from behind him. He was there now, all he had to do was turn his back on the cinema, turn quickly, just turn—
He had managed to turn halfway, trying to be blind without closing his eyes, when his free hand touched the object which was lolling in the nearest seat. Both the overcoat and its contents felt lumpy, patched with damp and
