Occasionally, in the quieter sequences, an extraneous sound from the real world would interpose itself between Gretelfar and the bright shadows as they leaped out at her - the whine of a police siren starting up on the Esplanade or a tight bundle of screams drifting in from a plummeting roller-coaster across the road at Luna Park. One such intrusion reminded her momentarily of the strange dream she had had the night before. She had been one of many amorphous entities existing in limbo somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth. The place in which she existed was a rectangular area of dim grey light surrounded on all sides by a thick, almost tangible darkness. She and the other bodiless beings inhabiting the place had floated endlessly, since the beginning of time, around and around each other, never touching, and taking particular care to avoid the edges of their ghastly world, instinctively aware that beyond those boundaries lay some unimaginable horror from which there could be no return. There were unspoken memories of times when one of their number had come too close to the edge, and had disappeared into the darkness. And this time it was her turn. She had drifted too far from the centre, had lost her balance and was being sucked relentlessly into the darkness, destined to fall forever through the void. At that instant she had awoken with a scream, and had even allowed a prayer to escape her lips before she recovered and wiped the sweat from her brow, breaking away the cobwebs of her nightmare.
The distant shriek of the Big Dipper lasted little more than a second, but this was sufficient time to recall the terror she had experienced at the moment of waking and the relief she had felt at the comforting sight of the familiar cracks in the ceiling and the specks of dust dancing in the thin rays of light streaming from beneath the window blind. Her only reaction now was an involuntary shudder as her mind returned to the screen in time to read the next subtitle. Curling her legs up into a foetal position she sank into the delicious amniotic blackness of the theatre.
Hypnotised, she barely noticed the shuffles behind her as yet another couple, finding the film had not lived up to the expectations aroused by their program notes, stood up and left the theatre.
It was only when a body a few seats from her own slowly lifted itself and squashed rudely past her that she was distracted from her trance and found herself unable to recapture it. Her mind began to wander out through the walls of the theatre, over the screaming roller-coaster, over the deserted sands of St Kilda Beach where the ghosts of summer bared their backs to the winter sun, over the waves, out to the endlessly surging sea to escape once more through an opening in the horizon.
Returning with a sudden jerk to her curled-up body, Gretelfar realised she had missed a subtitle. It had disappeared irretrievably into the emptiness leaving no echo, no trace of existence behind it.
Gretelfar felt a cold blankness deep inside her, and made a hasty decision. She reached out and grasped the sides of the screen with each hand, took a deep breath and drew herself into the brightly patterned two-dimensional world above her, almost tripping over a subtitle as she disappeared among the coloured shadows, leaving the warmly pulsing auditorium behind her.