The Crowd

Past the Door at the End of the World is the Stalls: an old picture house's seats out in the dark, row after row of them, every one facing a screen two hundred feet wide. Some of the seats are taken.

The Audience

Forty of the seats hold grey people in good clothes gone the colour of ash, slack in their seats, their faces turned up to the screen, their mouths a little open, the picture flickering in their eyes, a ticket in one hand in their laps. They've been watching a long time. They don't look round (16 health each).

They hear you, though: a step near them, a block broken, a door. Then they get up, slow, a finger to their lips, and come for you, arms out, shushing, and the ones round them get up too. One that gets hold of you holds you where you are. Sneak and they don't hear you walk. Lose them and they go back to their seats, and sit, and watch.

Some of them carry a Ticket Stub. They can't carry the parasite.

The Ushers

Four of them walk the aisles, up and down, slow: tall, too thin, a maroon uniform with brass buttons and a little pillbox cap, white gloves, and no face (44 health each). Each carries a lamp and swings its cone of yellow light over the rows.

• If its lamp finds you ("The Usher's lamp is on you."), sneaking doesn't help: it sees, it doesn't hear. It puts a finger to where its lips should be, and the SHHH goes right through the house. Everyone sat near you gets up.
• It comes for you itself: it bashes you with the lamp, and if it gets hold of your collar ("The Usher has you by the collar.") it walks you back up the aisle toward the Door.
• Show it a ticket. Use a Ticket Stub on an Usher and it tears it in two and looks away ("The Usher tears your ticket in two, and looks away."). For a minute its lamp doesn't see you.

Now and then one drops its lamp (six times in ten). It always drops a Ticket Stub.

The Usher's Lamp

Held, it lights the dark round you. Used, it flashes: the Audience and the Ushers caught in it reel with their hands over their faces and can't do anything for a few seconds. It needs eight seconds to warm again. It also breaks the Crowd's Hush, and stops the Tuned in the Vault.

The Crowd

Step out onto the front aisle, under the screen, and the picture on the screen is you. Every one of the Audience gets up and comes down to the front, and goes into the heap of them, and it gets up: three men high, two great arms made of people, and at the top a knot of faces, every one of them looking at you, every mouth going. It has its own bar and its own music. It doesn't leave the front. It doesn't have to.

How it fights

• Reach: one arm of them swung across the front rows.
• Slam: both arms up and down into the floor. The ring of it goes out over the floor: jump it.
• Applause: its hands together, three times, and every clap a wall of air that throws you back.
• Shed: people come off it, get up, and come for you.
• The Hush (from two thirds down): "Quiet, please." A thousand fingers to a thousand lips. For four seconds anyone who moves, or strikes, gets hands up out of the floor holding them and pulling. Stand still. Or flash an Usher's Lamp at it: the house lights up and the Hush breaks. Keeping perfectly still through one earns Quiet, Please.
• Roar (the last third): every mouth at once.

How to survive it

• Get through the Stalls quietly first: sneak past the Audience, keep out of the Ushers' light, and keep a Ticket Stub or two for an Usher that finds you.
• Bring an Usher's Lamp to the front. It ends the Hush.
• Jump the slam rings. Stand back from the front rows when it reaches.
• Kill what it sheds before the people pile up round you.

Its end

Dead, it comes apart into the people it was, and they come apart into static, and the screen goes dark. What's left in the middle of it is the Last Ticket, for everyone who was there: "ADMIT ONE - THE VAULT". It's warm. On the back, in a thin black hand: THE VAULT. Bringing it down earns Standing Ovation.

Then the house is empty, but one seat in the front row is still taken. It's the Watcher.

He gets up, goes to the screen, puts his hand on it, tears it open and goes through, and it closes behind him to a seam of light down the middle of the screen. That earns Front Row. Hold the Last Ticket up to the seam and it opens into the Watcher's Vault, where the Projectionist is waiting.

The Hub's replay portal for The Door brings the Crowd back for another go (see the Hub).