I rattled the doors. Kicked them. Pounded on them, yelling, but they would not budge. They were locked from the other side, as they were, by the Janitor, every night at eleven.
As I continued my vain attempts at forcing those wretched doors open, I was bound by instinct to look over my shoulder repeatedly, scared out of my mind from imagining that the phantom was skulking around in the darkness, mere inches from me, covertly revelling in my frustration.
I am all his, until he decides to finish what he started. I think, and it sends shivers down my spine. Clearly he had planned it all from the start, the wicked criminal. He knew when the doors would be locked at night, and by that knowledge he had trapped me.
But luckily I still had one final resort he must not have taken into account: the Luxury ball dangling at my hip, that contained Alexis!
At least it would have, were it the real thing.
I squeeze the ball but nothing happens, and the realization hits me like another swing from the phantom's thorned arm.
"Oh! Merde!" I curse aloud, and discard the useless hollow wooden prop in a fit. The real Poke ball, I remembered, I had left in my dressing room before the last performance of the evening. And of course the trouble with that was, between me and the basement tunnels existed a black void - the phantom's domain - any journey through which I was reluctant to risk.
My stomach growled audibly with hunger as if I weren't in enough anguish already, as I sat, acting like the gros bébé that my mother always said I was, slumped against the wall with tears streaming from my eyes.
In my defense, I submit to you that I was crying not only from the physical pain (granted the pangs of hunger and searing wounds ardently refused to be ignored), but pain I felt from newly hatched thoughts, that all of what I had been put through tonight may have been easily avoided.
Would things have been better, I asked myself, if I had not been so quick to attack the phantom? After all, he - malodorous in his decomposing state, with the mechanism through which he spoke affixed to his neck gruesomely - had said he meant me no harm. But was it really no wonder I reacted the way I did? He was hideous! But even so, what if I had never thrown a tantrum at the sight of Margaux drinking, in the first place?
A sharp clicking noise, as if a heavy switch had been turned, jars me out of my thoughts.
Suddenly a large, square box of light fills the blank space above the stage, and I have to shield my eyes.