The Fire Curtain — hints

Walking the building, which is the job. Four things decide everything after 8.41 and all four are findable in this act: the card in your pocket, the draught on the stage, the gas batten in the flies, and the door at the foot of the gallery stair.

read card. It is four lines and it is the entire fire model and it does not change. Rule three is the one that will catch you out later.

Stand on the stage and examine the draught. In at the stage door, across the boards, up the flies, out at the lantern — because the lantern is open. That is the best possible arrangement and it is already the one you have.

Go up from the foyer and look at the door at the foot. Then ask the manager about it. He does not hesitate and he does not lie, and there is genuinely no law against what he has done.

When you have found all four and gone back to your box.

Nothing that changes the draught. The fire is high, in a chimney, with a hole in the roof over it. That is the best position this building will be in all night and it is already the one you are in.

No. The game will refuse you once and quote rule three at you, and then it will let you, and you will have turned eighty tons of hot gas round and pointed it over the footlights.

Four tons of dry stock cloth behind a sliding door. Six seconds to shut it. It is the single most valuable six seconds available to you tonight and nothing in the game tells you to do it.

The lever is in your box. It seals the stage off from the house and it cannot be raised again from the stage side, and there are two hundred people on the stage side — who are already going out the stage door, which the iron does not stop. The game says all of that before it lets you.

One branch off a two-inch main against eleven hundred pounds of size-painted canvas. Try it once so that you know.

Correct. Nine hundred people, one foyer, six leaves that open inward, and a locked stair.

open the leaves — all six, hooked back. Forty seconds, and nobody has ever done it during a performance in the history of this building.

You cannot. One man, a good lock, a good frame. ask cheshire about the gallery — he stops talking in the middle of a foyer and gives you the key, and says something you will be asked about in four weeks.

One group, once, if you are standing in the room with them. call them to the street. They go out the way they came in unless somebody they can see and hear tells them otherwise.

Two hundred more, coming down two curved stairs into the back of the pit — which is where the six hundred already are. Nothing can be done about that and it is worth going up to see.

Ask Bella Hoskins. She has counted four times and got ten, and she will tell you the name, where that child goes, and one thing you must not do when you find her.

Ask Wardle. He will not order you in and he will not ask you to go, and he will tell you exactly what the smoke layer is doing and how many minutes that is.

Not in the dressing rooms — but search them first, all three tiers, because being certain is the job. Then the understage, and then the room behind it.

Four hundred feet of pipe under a burning stage, and nobody has thought of it in eighteen minutes because everybody has been busy. It takes four seconds.

The corridor has the stage door propped open at the end of it and there is air in the bottom two feet. From the understage that is one move. From the bridge room it is two, and the game warns you three times before that matters.

Nothing burns. A fair coroner asks you one question that is not in your deposition, and four things are true, and you can say any of them under oath.

Cheshire in the corridor, who has sat at the end of a bench for six days waiting to be asked about a door. Bella Hoskins, who told them about the deal stair. The coroner, who will tell you what he intends to say about the iron.

You have not got enough of what it rests on. A coroner will take an unsupported answer apart in two questions, and then the one chance anybody had to put a locked door into a public record is gone for good.

None. The locked door is true and puts a man in the dock for something that was not a crime. The batten is true and is already in the record and is about nothing. Blaming yourself is true and is not the whole truth and the coroner will know. And the times, in order, with no opinion, is exactly what the office asks for.