LITMIR.BIZ

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you, Molly—if you please.”

      Maria took it and then proceeded majestically on her way through the foyer. Just as she neared the Circle staircase, the manager came out of his office at the base of the stairs and closed the door behind him decisively.

      Gerald Lincross was not just the manager of the Langhorn Cinema; he was the owner as well. A man in his late forties, he was to his patrons merely the medium-sized smiling man with the half-bald head who welcomed them in—and out—in his faultless dress suit and crackling white shirt front and collar. His remaining hair was black and curly, while his features were somewhat pointed and the mouth flat, seeming more so because of false dentures which fitted too far back. Always he was smiling, always deferential, with concern for the welfare of his patrons—regular and casual—always peeping out of his round and somewhat childlike blue eyes.

      “Good evening, Mr. Lincross,” Maria greeted him, pausing.

      “Why, Miss Black....” He came and shook hands with her. “How are you? Chilly weather, eh? To be expected, near to Christmas.”

      “Yes,” Maria agreed, then she changed the unoriginal conversation. “Frankly, Mr. Lincross, I am not intrigued by your choice of a film for the first half of this week. Love on the Highway sounds like a filler to me. I could have sworn I saw an advertisement for Death Strikes Tomorrow.”

      “You did,” Lincross acknowledged, smiling. “It should have been here for Monday, yesterday, and tonight, but at the last moment the renters changed it. Just one of the trials of the business, you know. I’m making do with Love on the Highway, and I expect I shall hear about it from my patrons—if they are as observant as you, that is.”

      The patrons were now coming in steadily. As they streamed past to Stalls and Circle, Lincross inclined his shoulders back and forth like a mechanical doll and wore a permanent smile.

      “Well, Mr. Lincross, I will leave you to your duties,” Maria remarked.

      He did not answer. His attention had apparently been caught by a big man in a grey overcoat and soft hat coming in through the main doorway with a little swarm of people in front of him. He was tall enough to be visible over the heads of the people preceding him.

      Suddenly Lincross turned and noticed that Maria had raised one eyebrow at him questioningly. “Forgive me, Miss Black,” he murmured. “Just a thought that occurred to me.... I must see Miss Thompson immediately.”

      He bowed briefly to her then hurried to the doorway leading into the Stalls. Maria shrugged to herself and started the long climb of the Circle stairway. Halfway up, where the stairs took a sharp left-hand turn, was a polished door marked STAFF ROOM ONLY—PRIVATE. Maria went past it to the left where yet another private door leading to the projection-room was sunken into the wall. So she continued up the last flight of stairs into the Circle.

      “Good evening, Nancy,” she greeted, as the pretty blonde girl tore the admission ticket in half. “Still on the treadmill, I notice.”

      “A girl must live,”’ Nancy observed, with uncommon philosophy, then reached for the ticket of the man following Maria.

      She went across to her usual seat in the third row from the front, left block, and settled herself with her umbrella standing up beside her, her right hand clamped firmly on its handle. As usual her attention was centred on the incoming people.

      A friendly buzz of conversation, unintelligible but distinct, made itself apparent over the Sousa march thumping from behind the green-and-gold curtains covering the screen. Floodlights of amber and mauve flickered across those curtains, worked most dispassionately—had the audience but known it—by a spotty youth in overalls in the projection room.

      Smoke rose in increasing density to the ventilator grille stretching across the gently arching ceiling. It was a very wide ventilator, painted yellow to imitate gold and the filigree designed in diamond shape. It stretched from wall to wall like a gilded chasm in the roof. Farther away, over the area occupied below by the Stalls, were two smaller ventilators, circular and perhaps two feet in diameter. Behind them fans whirred to suck out foul air....

      Maria lowered her eyes from an absent survey of the ventilators to a big man in a grey overcoat and soft hat. He walked slowly down the white-edged steps to the front of the Circle, took his half-ticket from Nancy Crane, and then lumbered along to the seat in the exact centre of the row—A-11. With a clatter the risen people on the row sat down again, and the big man took off his hat and laid it carefully on the plush-topped rail in front of him.

      Beyond noting that he had thinning grey hair and a face, in profile, of uncommon strength, Maria paid no more attention to him, though back of her mind she remembered that she had seen him coming in at the foyer doorway. Not that it signified, only...well, he was different, somehow, and possessed such an air of power and sombre purpose.

      CHAPTER TWO

      When Fred Allerton entered the winding-room at the top of the stone steps leading to the projection-room itself, he was still on edge. He came into the wide, stonewalled room filled with its electrical equipment and transit cases with the corners of his mouth dragged down.

      He glanced about him to satisfy himself that the electricity rectifier for the arc lamps was working normally, and that the switch controlling the big fan in the auditorium ceiling was in the ‘On’ position. Then he looked to the far end of the room where, under a bright lamp, Dick Alcot was winding film from spool to spool with the tired air habitual to him.

      “Everything okay, Dick?” Allerton asked; then he frowned as he looked at the workbench. “Say, where’s that old house telephone I had lying about here? Seen it?”

      “Not for some time....” Dick Alcot turned and clamped lean hands down on each of the spools to stop them rotating. The film tightened between them and lay like a band of glass under the light.

      “Funny,” Allerton mused. “Maybe I put it in the cupboard or somewhere....”

      Alcot wiped his hands on a rag and then lounged forward. He was a fellow of average height, twenty years old, prided himself that he was devoid of emotion, and admitted his regret that he had married at nineteen. In appearance he was nondescript, with lank black hair which insisted on dropping a forelock over his left ear, rather prominent grey eyes, and a face deathly pale either from constant indoor work or incipient anaemia. As the second projectionist most of the work fell on him, but believing it was a sign of a weak mind to show annoyance, he never complained. Anyway, he and Fred Allerton were the best of friends.

      “You don’t look too happy, Fred,” he commented. “That telephone will be knocking around somewhere....”

      “’Tisn’t that,” Fred interrupted. “I’m afraid of some trouble that may bring in the police....”

      “Hell! The police? Why? I thought our fire regulations had been approved.”

      “Not that,” Allerton growled. “Something else.”

      Without explaining further, he left the winding-room and slowly mounted the four stone steps into the projection-room itself. As usual it was gleaming cheerily, the concrete floor stained deep red and highly polished. It had a friendliness all its own. Valves glowed brightly on the sound-reproducing equipment, meter needles quivered on their graded scales. On the wall were two notices—one ordering NO SMOKING, and the other exhorting operators to save their carbon stub-sheathing for salvage.

      Allerton looked about him absently, mechanically checked the silent projectors already threaded for the evening performance; then he walked the five-yard distance to the separate steel-lined enclosure where lay the record cabinets, slide-lantern, and floodlight controls.

      In here sat Peter Canfield, his fingers playing over a small switchboard. At each movement the lights on the curtains in the auditorium changed colour. Peter Canfield had done this job for a year now, and being a youth of sixteen without any real ambition whatever, would probably go on doing it until the crack of doom.... Big for his age, his fresh-complexioned face covered in adolescent spots,

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