The Mirror Thief(145)
In the brass wastebasket next to the desk Stanley finds five or six crumpled pages that bear minute variations of the same sentence. He crumples them again, slowly, and places them back in the basket. Then he sags into the chair again, scanning the room.
The key is in a goddamn book; it’s got to be. Probably a book by one of the goddamn names on the f*cking list in his pocket, the list that Welles made, the list that’s smeared now, turned to mush by the rain. He wonders if he can spot the key just by looking—there’ll be a gap in the right book’s pages, or between its pages and its cover—but most of the spined-out volumes have others laid flat atop them; plus the bookcases all go clear to the ceiling, and Stanley isn’t tall enough to see the upper shelves. His eyes crawl along the spines, up and down the walls. Thousands of books. Which one?
He sits up. Then he rotates the chair, all the way around, and rises to his feet.
As soon as his fingers touch the frame of the old map he can feel it: the long sheet of glass that shields the yellow paper pivots on a small bump somewhere near its midpoint. Stanley lifts the frame, slips a hand under its lower edge, and finds the key hung in a little leather sheath just below what looks to be the island-city’s main plaza. He tugs it free, settles the frame in place. On the map’s surface an ornamental drawing of a muscle-bound god—nude, armed with a trident, mounted on a grotesque sea-monster—stares up at the spot where the key was, like he’d been trying all along to tip Stanley off, to give the game away. Thanks a ton, jack, Stanley whispers. Now you tell me.
At first he’s afraid the key won’t fit the lock. Then, of course, it does. The deadbolt slides with a low click.
Black curtains fill the doorway, flush with the inner wall. Stanley finds a gap, and parts them: abyssal darkness beyond, blacker than the curtains themselves. The weak green light cast by the desklamp seems unable or unwilling to cross the doorframe. Stanley can see an inch or two of wooden floor on the other side—same as the floor he now stands on—but nothing else.
He slips through. The curtains fall shut behind him. The room he’s entered sounds empty and big, much larger than Welles’s study. He waits for his eyes to adjust to the dark, and when they do, he still can’t see anything. He runs fingers under the drapes on both sides of the door but finds no lightswitch. Strange smells: sharp, sweet, cloying. Wrong somehow. Gooseflesh rises on his forearms.
He retreats to the study, finds a box of matches in the desk, strikes three on the doorjamb on his way back through. The pale flare of ignition barely reaches the walls: the room takes up the entire remainder of the floor. Stanley can make out low wooden benches a few paces ahead, a chandelier just past them, hung at his eye-level. Something big and shapeless beyond that, hung with colored drapes. White lines across the floorboards. Black curtains on the walls, all the way around. The ceiling is painted uniformly dark. Everything seems designed to devour light.
The matches burn down to his fingertips; he hurries to light more off their dying flames. The chandelier ahead is a real chandelier, not electric; Stanley passes between the two benches, stretches to light a candle, uses that one to light others. The rain is quieter, muted by the curtains, and by what must be an attic overhead. He wonders if he’ll be able to hear if someone comes through the front door downstairs.
Circles of yellow light appear on the ceiling, and the shape of the chandelier casts a fluttering web across them. The room’s furnishings all look antique, vulgar, made by hand. Stanley feels as if he’s slipped back in time, out of history, or into a history that nobody knows. Whenever he moves, the polished boards creak underfoot, singing like cricket-legs.
The shapeless thing at the room’s distant end is a massive canopy bed, its posts coiled and draped with sheer silks of red and black and gold. Fancy cushions litter the thick mattress; a pair of dark chifforobes towers behind. Stanley can’t look at it. He isn’t ready to think about what it is, or what it means. This has been a big mistake; he’s not sure yet how big. By now he knows he won’t find anything he’s been looking for in this room. But he needs to see it anyway. To get past it. To kill off something in himself that’s been hindering him, making him weak. Like yanking out a rotten tooth.
He looks down at the white lines under his feet, stoops to bring his light closer. Three triangles point toward him, away from a stepped wooden platform in the room’s right-hand corner. Small draped tables sit at the triangles’ tips, and each has something on it: a basin of water, vented metal cubes bristling with stick-incense, an upright black coffer covered by a veil. The platform and triangles are set at an odd angle to the walls, as if oriented by compass, not the slant of the shoreline. Everything seems precisely placed: distances calculated by ritual formulae. To the left is a small podium, set at the midpoint of concentric circles inscribed in concentric squares; the empty spaces between the orderly lines are crowded with writing in an alphabet Stanley doesn’t know: not Hebrew, or Russian, or Arabic, or Greek. He thinks of Welles on the beach, intoning that foreign phrase. A secret language. Something creepy little kids might make up.
Stanley sinks onto one of the benches. He’s dizzy; his breath sounds ragged in his ears. The candle in his hand tips as he leans forward, and drops of liquid wax spatter the floor: clear, then white. He counts the steady splashes, then loses count.
The platform in the corner has objects on it—red candles, brass dishes, dried flowers, a book, a painting of a black tree with runes labeling its branches—but Stanley can’t get interested in any of it. It’s too obvious a trap: not a trap that Welles has set for him, but a trap that Welles has fallen into. The book does not lead here. It’s time to get this over with.