As she made her way up the centre aisle she heard the voice again. This time it was more distinct. A stream of muttered nonsense, like the rambling of a fever. It could only be coming from the back of the stalls. The rear seats were arranged beneath the dark saucer-shaped overhang of the dress circle. To reach the exit she had to pass through to the back. No other door on this level was open.
Tanya was not easily intimidated. She was fit and strong, and more than a match for any crazy drunk who had wandered in from the street. But suppose it wasn’t a drunk? What if someone meant her harm? She had enemies. All successful people did, it was the underside of victory. Some of the adulatory fan mail she received bordered on obsessive. Suppose she had a secret admirer who turned out to be mad, like that girl she had worked with in Milan?
Tanya paused at the shadowed edge of the centre aisle, unsure what to do.
But there was really no choice. She had to leave through the rear stalls doors or remain in the building, retracing her steps and passing through the labyrinth of unlit corridors that led to the dressing rooms. It was time to remember who she was, the star of the only big production to be opening in the West End since war broke out, the show’s number one dancer, not some gutless chorine. She marched forward into the red plush darkness, and found the rear doors padlocked.
Her nerve did not fail. She returned to the proscenium and climbed up into the wings, making her way around the slip and following the few lights which, oddly, appeared to have been left on for her. They provided her with a runway, a direction back into the building.
If there was another exit apart from the stage door, which Stan always locked as he left, Tanya had yet to discover it. She’d heard that there was a separate side entrance especially reserved for royalty, but was not sure how to reach it. The air grew colder the further she ventured from the stage, and the trickle of sweat between her shoulder blades dried like a sliver of frost. She could no longer hear the voice, and began to wonder if she had imagined it. This part of the building ran below ground level, but a goods lift waited just ahead of her. The cage was up above, and as she summoned it she fancied she heard a fresh movement in the flies, like the dragging of a sandbag.
The cable wheel trundled into action. The lift creaked and started to descend.
Darkened theatres did not usually frighten Tanya. She had spent half of her life in them, and the stories of ghosts walking across balconies after the audience filed out were just colourful fables that enhanced the reputations of their houses. Even so, tonight seemed different. Her stomach was tinged with the poisonous acidity she usually experienced before the first public performance of a new piece.
It was then that she felt the touch, cold fingers on her right shoulder, a light tap that caused her to cry out in alarm. But there was no one to be seen. From somewhere above her came a distinct footfall—thump—then silence. Tanya pulled back the trellis door and jumped into the lift cage. She had just managed to shut it when the muscles in her legs stopped holding her up, and she fell heavily forward.
Her head brushed against the wooden side wall as she dropped onto her knees. She wondered why she was having such difficulty moving. She felt too tired to reach up and press the ground-floor button. Trying to control the tic of a rogue nerve in her calf, she lay sprawled across the floor of the lift, her mind pitched into panicked possibilities. Suppose it was a stroke, like the one her mother had suffered? Her career would be obliterated in a heartbeat. She forced herself to consider her options. Could she crawl over to the brass button panel and find the alarm?
Her legs were insensate, as if they had been injected with cocaine. What now? It became hard to think, or to feel anything at all, just numbness, blessed numbness. Someone was touching her useless limbs. She could definitely feel something cold gripping her ankles, but what was it? How could anyone touch her without opening the trellis door? She listened to the rasping breath and longed to turn her head, but her muscles failed to respond. Something was clutching her hard now, pulling at her feet. A feeling came at last, cold metal scraping her toes. Her legs were being moved, her body pulled and twisted so that her head slid onto the floor, forcing her to look up at the ceiling. What the hell was wrong with her feet?
They were sticking out of the cage. Whatever it was that had taken hold of her had pulled her feet between the staves of the trellis, so that her ankles were resting on the crossbars. She was alone now, left in this graceless position, trying to imagine a way out of an absurd predicament.
This is how people die, she thought. A bomb falls on the building, the bricks close in around you and you’re trapped until someone can dig you out. This is my worst fear made real. My mother alone in her kitchen, trying to call for the maid, attempting to reach the telephone in the hall. I should have been there for her instead of rehearsing, always rehearsing. Now it is too late.