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.
Stanley comes to his feet, staggers a little, crosses the big room. A sour tightness rises from his belly—he tastes it at the back of his throat—but he keeps moving forward. The canopy bed looms plushly, flanked by two ankle-thick candles on huge brass sticks; behind it, between the two chifforobes, Stanley spots a low dainty vanity backed with a tarnished mirror. He sniffs the air, prods the red velvet comforter with a fingertip. Suspended over the mattress is a second mirror, bigger and newer than the first, parallel to the floor, hung from the bedposts by four even chains. Stanley’s own upturned face greets him there, childlike and frightened; he looks away, then spots himself again afloat above the dresser, a dim ghost wasted by the smudged and blistered silver.
His foot bumps something under the dustruffle and he stoops to pick it up: a hospital bedpan. He sets it on the comforter, opens one of the chifforobes. A few weird costumes hang inside—outlandish, almost obscene—along with ordinary blouses and sweaters and skirts, nylon stockings and black leotards, faded summer dresses, girlish brassieres and briefs. Cynthia’s room.