He wonders if he could live here. In Doc Hawthorne’s house. He wonders what it feels like to be Doc Hawthorne’s son. Does the kid call the old man up and ask technical questions about tough cases? He can picture them, the cheap bastards, both sitting in dark rooms, late in the evening when the rates are low, talking about people they’ve cut open and the things they’ve found inside.
The thought pumps Darcey up. He pulls himself out of the chair and bounces on the balls of his feet, looking around the room. He takes a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, opens a blade, and slashes across the seat of the chair. He’s never done anything like this on a job. He’s never even tracked mud into a house or dropped a cigarette. He feels flighty and unsure of himself. He hops up and down in place, tosses the army knife up and down in his hand. He turns and spits on a family portrait hanging on the wall. He picks up two figurines and smacks them together like cars on a wet highway. On an end table he finds a pair of reading glasses and tries them on. The room seems to bend. He takes them off, squats, and places them on the carpet, then stomps, shatters the glass, snaps the arms, grinds the mess under the toe of his boot.
He waits to hear Yuk Tang’s voice from upstairs, but he hears only movement, drawers being opened, things hitting the floor. Darcey walks to the piano and opens the key cover, sits on the stool as if he were about to play. He looks over the keys, then barely rests some fingers on them. No note sounds. He thinks about pressing down on the keys again, but hesitates. And then a thought hits him. He gets up from the stool and moves to the side of the piano. He tries to raise the top to look in, but it won’t budge. When he tries again, harder, his side of the piano swings away from the wall. The opposite side is hinged to the wall, making the entire thing a huge, bulky door.
Darcey puts his hand over his mouth and tries to think. What he wants to do is to grab Yuk Tang and start driving south. Secondary highways. Drive-through food. Dump the Jaguar in some thick southern forest, and pick up something common but fast. For reasons he doesn’t understand just now, he’d like to get hold of Scalley and break all of his straight new teeth.
Behind the piano is a hole in the wall. There’s imitation walnut molding that makes it look like a weird low window frame. It’s roughly three feet by three feet and it’s too dark to see what’s on the other side.
Darcey feels as if time is slipping away from him. He feels incapable of making small decisions. Suddenly, he can’t recall the layout of the downstairs of the house. Wasn’t there an open hallway on the other side of the living room wall? It’s like his brain is punishing him for lack of sleep. He would bet serious dollars that specially items are through this door, this window. He wishes there were a stranger here to give him direction. He wishes Mr. Rochelle would speak to him harshly. Throw money at him and order him through the hole.
And, as if he has received orders, he scrambles. He throws himself, off balance, onto the floor and through the opening. As if he were diving into freezing waters and couldn’t get an idea of depth. He stays on his hands and knees, wishing his heart would stop racing, but it’s no use. He’s so aware of the possibilities that lie in the next few minutes that there’s no chance of keeping calm and unimpressed. The trick here, he thinks, might be to avoid any extensive thought, to operate like some determined animal or tremendously reliable machine. The trick, most likely, is to avoid thinking about why or how he has come to be in this position.
He pulls his flashlight from his pocket and thumbs it on.
He sees books.
He is in a small compartment, a vault maybe, loaded with books. He shoots the light up and down the walls rapidly and sees shelf after shelf of books. His breath comes slowly as he turns, on his knees, in a circle. The room is about a six-by-six square box, lined on all sides by thick metal shelves. And the shelves are completely covered. Volume after volume. Most of them look very old and the words that he sees on some spines are written in foreign languages. He expects to smell a musty odor but there’s none. He moves into a sitting position and stays still, his legs tucked in as if he were about to meditate.
He knows he should get Yuk Tang but decides against it. He looks around trying to get comfortable with the vault, trying to notice as much as possible. Beyond books, there are a few other items: a golden bowl, or at least a bowl that once looked gold but now is tarnished and junky. It’s filled with letters and postcards and a magnifying glass. His flashlight reflects back at him and his heart pounds and when he follows the beam to a corner where the wall meets the ceiling, he sees a tiny window, no bigger than a half-dollar, and round. He stands carefully to look. The ceiling is only an inch or two above his head. The round thick pane has a syrupy look to it. Darcey puts his eye to the glass and can see the night sky, stars and light from the moon.
He knows he’s going to have to decide what to take soon and this bothers him. How can he know? He sits again in front of the gold bowl and notices, for the first time, candles on either side of it, secured in elaborate gold candlesticks. Automatically, he pulls out a butane lighter from his pocket and sparks the candles. The vault gets brighter. He starts to relax a little, then is startled by the idea of flames so close to all these books. But he can’t bring himself to blow out the candles.
He stares without really focusing at a wall of books. Darcey would never describe himself as a reader to anyone. Now and then he goes on a binge with the crossword puzzle books, tears through them with no problem, word after word and page after page. And occasionally he’ll read one of those Louis L’Amour westerns. Sometimes, a mystery. Espionage stuff. A fact that Darcey understands now is that he has never thought a great deal about books. He has never considered them a movable properly. He always thought stamps and wine were as weird as it got.
He reaches to a close shelf and starts taking down volumes and piling them next to his legs. They’re all heavy. Much heavier than he’d have bet. They don’t feel like normal books that he sees around. There are no illustrations on the covers. No pictures of the authors on the back. The bindings are all smooth and cold as if the vault were a refrigerator. He picks the books up, holds them, runs his hands over them, and reads the titles, when he can, off the spines.
There are two short, slim white volumes — Vortigern and Rowena and Henry II. There’s a pamphlet sealed in plastic called The Diagnosis and Treatment of Bibliophagia. Darcey thinks about breaking open the seal and taking a look. He thinks there’d be some great pictures in that one. He picks up The Courier’s Tragedy and Other Jacobean Revenge Plays and puts it down. Glances at More Astronomical Studies, R. A. Loke & S. John Herschel; Rappaccini’s Other Daughter by Auberpiner; The Life and Death of Og of Bason; Recipes and Cocktails for a New State by Ernst Toller. His eyes linger on Travels in North America: Quinsigamond by Chesterton, then he throws it to the side. He pulls a thick and tall volume called A History of Bitic Literature, Vol. 1, into his lap. He judges its weight and lets it slide to the floor. He tosses on top of it The Babel Catalogue: Argentina Ed., 1899. He breathes deeply and feels confused and nauseated.