“Well,” she said reasonably, “unlock the door, then, and let’s find out.”
So I unlocked the door, and dragged the heavy thing open, and led the way down the stairs. The only light was a bare bulb oh the wall beside the door, which I switched on on my way by.
It was dusty down there, and jam-packed full of junk. Edna took one side, and I took the other, and we searched for sharp implements not covered by dust.
We’d been looking maybe three minutes, when all of a sudden there was a shattering of glass and the light went out. I spun around, just in time to see and hear the door chunk closed. And then, in pitch blackness, the sound of the bar being dropped into place, and the lock-bolt slamming home.
And there we were.
You couldn’t see a thing in there, not a thing. The lone door was heavy and solid, and it fit into the jamb without a crack showing. There was even a step up at the threshold, against which the bottom edge of the door nestled as snug as lovers in a clinch. The walls on all four sides were simply wooden slats in front of concrete block foundation or packed earth. The ceiling was the reinforced floor of the stage.
Not only was there no light, there was no sound. Beneath the thick stage floor, with the addition of the drop cloth and carpet atop that, we were effectively muffled off from the world. We could hammer on the door if we wanted, but no one would hear us. The bar kept the door absolutely snug against the jamb, so there was no vibration. It was thick heavy wood, and when hit it gave off only a dull thud, which you could barely hear ten feet away.
In the first few seconds after the door slammed shut and the light went out, there was only silence and blackness and astonishment and terror. Then I heard a faint bumping sound to my left, and a trembling hand touched my arm, slid down it, grasped my hand.
I could hear her breathing, rapid shivering breaths. I reached out toward her, involuntarily straightening up, and cracked my head against the ceiling. I swore, and she started to giggle, and I grabbed her and held her tight, because the giggling wasn’t because anything was funny, it was just the prelude to screaming.
Gradually, the trembling left her body, and in the darkness I stroked her hair and murmured her name and silently cussed myself for a thousand different kinds of fool for letting her get into a spot like this.
He meant us to die here. The theater was closed, no one would be coming over for days, not until Einstein relented, and that wasn’t the most foreseeable of futures.
There was no food here. There was no light. And there was very little air.
We would suffocate in this dungeon before we’d starve. And we might go crazy and hurt ourselves in the darkness before that.
“Edna,” I whispered. “Sweet Edna. Darling. Edna.”
Gradually, she calmed, and finally she answered, whispering, “Andy! What are we going to do? Oh, Andy, what are we going to do?”
“Light,” I said. “Light first, and then we’ll be able to think better. I’m going to let you go now. Is it all right? Just for a second, I’ve got to find my matches.”
“All right,” she whispered. There was no need to whisper, but I understood why she did. I had to fight the same urge myself.
I released her, and took out my matches, and lit one. First, I smiled with what I hoped was reassurance at her pale face, and then I counted the matches still in the folder. Twelve.
“There ought to be candles down here,” I said. “Something that will burn, anyway. I’ll hold the match, you look.”
That was part of it, of course, part of the way to kill us. If we just stood there in the darkness, sooner or later we would die. So we had to act, we had to more. And every motion, every step, every movement of an end table or opening of a carton, swirled the dust into the air, choking us. Every match we lit — and every candle, if we found any — used up the air that much faster. Every act we made used up our energy and our strength that much sooner.
We found the packet of birthday cake candles on the tenth match, just as it was beginning to burn my fingers. I lit the eleventh, and we found a cracked china plate, and lit the candles, one by one, setting them in their own wax drippings on the plate. We lit four candles, and then we could see. With four candles left.
Birthday candles burn fast. In that stale dusty air, they also burned low. We were on the second four before I found two larger candles, stuffed away in the bottom of a carton beneath a lot of maroon drapery. They were large red Christmas candles. We lit one of them, and blew the little candles out, and then we looked around to see if there was any way to save ourselves.
To begin with. I hied to get more air into the room. There were a couple of rusty cavalry sabers down there. I took one of them and jabbed it down against the line where the door met the step. I finally managed to jam it down in, but when I applied leverage, trying to separate door and step just a fraction of an inch, the saber broke and I went reeling back down the stairs. So that wouldn’t work.
It was hot in there, and my mouth was already parched and dry. I couldn’t seem to get enough air in my lungs. Edna’s breathing was loud and ragged, and we were both stiff and cramped from having to stoop constantly under the low ceiling.
With the candle, I studied the door and the walls. The only place that seemed even remotely possible was the wall to either side of the stairwell. These two triangular sections were, with the door itself, the only part of the room above ground level. On the right side, the wall separated us from one of the dressing rooms. On the left side, it separated us from the auditorium.
The auditorium side was impossible. The proscenium wall, of which this was a part, was concrete block faced with plaster. That left the other side, leading to the dressing room.
The local businessmen who’d bought this place and paid for the conversion of it to a theater had done too damn good a job. They’d been afraid of a fire, or of the building collapsing, or any sort of disaster like that that would have reflected on them in the community. So the conversion had built solidly.
This wall separating us from the dressing room — separating us from life — was a three-quarter inch thickness of plywood nailed to two-by-four uprights and supports, with another three-quarter inch thickness of plywood on the other side forming the wall of the dressing room. And it was the only possibility.
I made Edna sit down, to conserve her strength, and I took the other saber and started to poke with it at the wall. I knew I couldn’t cut through the wood with a lousy tool like that, so what I tried to do was dig out the nails holding it to the two-by-fours. They were finishing nails, countersunk.
I kept at it and kept at it, and the saber was just too big and awkward. I threw it away in disgust finally, and Edna got to her feet, saying, “Should I look for something else? Something better?”
“Anything, for God’s sake. With a sharp point on it, and short enough to handle.”
We both searched, and I’d just run across a little wooden box containing lots of spools of thread and two pairs of scissors when Edna said, in a funny rising sort of a voice, “Andy?”
I looked over at her. She was staring at something in front of her. “What is it?”
“Andy, please?”
I went stumbling over doodads and whatsits to her side, and looked where she was looking.
Do you remember the Raggedy Ann doll, with the triangle eyes? There was Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, and down among all the other junk in the prop room was a Raggedy Ann. Looking at it, for a minute I became Raggedy Andy.