I think I did not quite lose consciousness. I was aware that I had fallen to the earthy ground, with Shorty and Vivian bending over me. My head was roaring; I was bathed in cold sweat. Then I began to feel better, trying to sit up, with Shorty's arm holding me.
"You're all right now, Bob? Can't you speak?"
"Yes. I—guess so."
Whatever had happened which had brought me here when an instant ago, it seemed, I was walking alone by the park, none of us could imagine. The identical experience had happened to Shorty, to Vivian La Marr; and to Peter Mack, and J. Walter Blaine.
"But—where are we?" I demanded, when in another moment I was strong enough to struggle upright in the crimson glowing darkness.
"Damned if we know," Shorty said. It seemed a sort of underground grotto. I could begin to make out its rocky walls and ceiling now, with that glow like a crimson phosphorescence streaming from them. One by one my companions had found themselves here. Blaine was the first. Then at intervals it seemed as though the wall across the grotto had opened and Shorty, Vivian and Mack came stumbling in, standing an instant, dazed, and then falling, as I had fallen, almost in a normal faint.
"No way of getting out of this damned place," Shorty was saying. "The rock-wall over there moves like a door, but we haven't been able to open it."
How much time had passed since we were stricken with this weird thing, none of us could guess. Suddenly I was startled. My clothes were too big for me. My body felt thin; I had lost twenty or thirty pounds. And in the dim crimson glow now I could see Mack, Vivian and Blaine fairly well. All of them thinner than I remembered them, with faces drawn and haggard and big glowing smouldering eyes. And we men had a growth of beard.
Weeks could have passed! Vivian laughed lugubriously as she met my startled stare. "De-glamorized," she said. "I feel like a lost alley cat." She was clad in a thin, summer street dress. Her lush lissome curves were gone so that it hung drably on her. The vivid artificial blonde hair was darkish at the roots; it fell in a tangled mass to her shoulders. Her makeup was gone; her lips pallid. "We're all about starved to death, if you ask me," she added.
"He brought us food a while ago," Blaine put in.