I’ve got to hide, he told himself.
The opening works on two levels; literal and figurative. Literally, the man must hide because he has been coerced into signing a confession to a crime he did not commit and he is introduced as he has escaped the clutches of the law. By the end of the story, the opening line is revealed as ironically symbolic: by hiding from the police in the sewer, he ultimately learns things about himself that empower him to hide no more.
he had signed it to end his pain
Why would an innocent man put his name to a confession of a crime he did not commit? Because by the time he was ready to sign it in order to stop the cops from beating it out of him, he was so out of his mind that he never even stopped to read it to find out what crime he was now admitting guilt to.
He placed his eye to a keyhole and saw the nude waxen figure of a man stretched out upon a white table.
The world underground is a dark, nightmarish place, but the surreal quality always turns out to be a perceptual blip in the reality of the world above. What seems an infinitely more grotesque image to the man peeking through the keyhole turns out to be merely the macabre revelation of an undertaker’s lab for preparing the corpse for display in a coffin. Horrifying, yes, but in no way otherworldly.
No, it was a not a doorknob; it was a small circular disk made of stainless steel with many fine markings upon it.
Another perceptual hiccup turns out to be much less horrific. During his navigation through the sewer, he learns that a little manual labor can clearly away bricks which connect the world above and the world below. The reward for breaking through the bricks on one occasion is a severely constricted view into a room. He can’t see much, but he soon realizes that what seemed to be just a doorknob is actually a combination dial that opens up a safe. All he needs do is watch while the disembodied hand comes into his view again to turn the dial and provide him with the combination and everything can change.
“You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things.”
Going underground is a revelatory experience for the man. He learns many new things as a result of the enforced change to his perspective of viewing. Armed with the truth, his final confrontation with the police is far different from his initial one, from his perspective at least. Unfortunately for him, he neglects to take into consideration the fact that the perspective of the cops remains as it was when he aboveground.
