Then he searches the house. He grants cursory attention to the ground floor—pump shotgun under a dustruffle in the tidy master bedroom; weird sculptures in Synn?ve’s cluttered studio, adipose blobs, skinless and shapeless, like organs without bodies—but Stanley already knows what he really wants to see.
Upstairs in Welles’s study, he throws the bolt on the big barred door but finds the internal deadbolt still locked. He steps back to look at it. There’s probably something downstairs in Synn?ve’s workroom that’ll knock the lock off or pry it open, but that seems inelegant, amateurish, and Stanley isn’t sure he has time for it anyway. Besides, he has a feeling Welles keeps a key stashed close by.
He checks the obvious places first: the undersides of the desk and the swivel chair, the drawers and the backs of the drawers. The desk is still unlocked, the two pistols within easy reach. Welles doesn’t lock up his guns, but he keeps that big black door locked. Cynthia’s room, he called it. Bullshit.
Stanley opens drawers and closes them. Every time he bends down he smells the bandage on his leg; he still hasn’t taken the time to change it. Every time he sits up his vision swims, he gets lightheaded. He feels like he’s running a fever. Outside, the wind gusts; cold rain hisses against the windows and the french door.
After a while Stanley sits in the swivel chair and leans back and thinks. Trying to imagine his way into Welles’s big pipesmoked body, into his swelled head. He’s not having much luck. He runs his fingers along the edge of the desk, lingering in the spots where the wood is worn, the finish faded. The letter he found last night—the one from the hospital in Washington—lies open on the desktop, and it looks as though Welles has started to draft a response:
Naturellement any man possessed of a modicum of reason and intellectual courage is compelled to be anti-Jew, and anti-Christian as well— —hardly the greatest but surely neither the least of the Nazi errors manifested itself in superficial Wotanism and a lack of serious understanding of their Germanic forebears’ pagan wisdom.
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 fucking 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.