Small World (26 page)

She had stayed in houses like this, in Virginia, New York state, New England. Eighteenth-century manor homes, signified by the dimensions of the rooms, the moldings, the decoration, tributes to :he Enlightenment. Big houses, they were carefully preserved or restored by hefty chunks of cash. Real, awesomely expensive, and "•ell-made antiques furnished them. Washington alone was full of houses like this, the residences of every' type of top-level politico, legislator, bureaucrat, high-court justice, lawyer, special pleader, diplomat—the list went on forever. And she knew, personally and

professionally, so many of them.

Why would she be in one of their houses, and which one might it be? It had that familiar quality to it that might mean she had been in it in the past, at least once, but it might also mean that it was just another example of a type of house she had been in too frequently. So tasteful, so Colonial, so boringly careful. She was stuck with the thought that it was possible she knew this house better than she could remember. If she had injured her head, she might have knocked loose pieces of memory that might or might not come back. It was only too likely that the mystery was in her silly head.

She closed her eyes, resting them. A slight headache, not worth working up an advertising fantasy for, brought on by hunger as much as too much thinking about her situation. Onward and probably downward. If this trek was going to be worth the energy expended on it, there had better be food at the end of it. Leaving the lights on, she left the room. A vague defiance stayed her hand from the light switch.
Let mine absent host turn the goddamn things off,
she thought,
or send His monstrous butier, the Hand. If I leave them on, perhaps He will notice that I'm here.

The next door gave onto a broader hall and an elevator in a brass cage. After turning on all the wall sconces, she summoned the elevator, which creaked ominously downward from somewhere above her. Waiting for it, she noted nervously, as if to distract herself, that the hall was furnished with a pair of pier tables, lovely Federalist pieces, supporting expensive bric-a-brac. A single Aubusson runner covered most of the dark wood floor. A chased brass umbrella stand with a walking stick in it occupied one corner; a rubber plant half as tall as herself squatted in another.

The elevator arrived and its doors opened with a rattle. Suddenly her mouth was dry
—it was too much like an open mouth
—and sweat trickled in her armpits. She gave herself a mental shake and stepped firmly into the cage. It settled abruptly and she grabbed the handrail inside convulsively.

The panel inside read
1-2-3-4,
but there was no indication of which floor she presently was on. Concentrating, she guessed the second floor because that was a place where bedrooms were likely to be located. She pushed 2, thinking if her guess was right, nothing would happen and she would make another choice. But she had guessed wrongly; the doors rattled shut, and the elevator lurched downward. Above her, machinery ground painfully. She remembered then, the horror story she had read on her honeymoon. About a haunted hotel, with an elevator that ran itself at night. Empty. It was like this one, an antique curiosity.

She told herself she was being silly, giving into the jim-jams, on the strength of fiction. It wasn’t as if the elevator in the Overlook Hotel had really existed, really been haunted. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to touch the cool satiny brass of the doors. They smelled like brass; she didn’t have to rub her nose on them to know that. They were real. This was just an elevator, a box on a pulley.

It was a very short trip. The elevator lurched to a stop almost as soon as it started. Apparently she had traveled one floor down. She looked through the brass grill into darkness. Her fingers lingered near the plate, wanting to push
3
and return to known territory. But the hollow in her interior, and a growing uneasiness about the elevator persuaded her to continue. She would brave the secrets of this floor because she had no choice. Stepping out carefully, she waited for her vision to adjust to the lack of light.

Waiting, she thought affectionately of her apartment. Furnished monastically with a narrow bed, carpeted in low-pile navy blue that climbed the walls to the blank white ceiling with its transparent plastic squares covering chaste fluorescent tubes, it had few secrets. The self-indulgence of an enormous closet, invisible when its doors were closed, was one. She told herself she had to keep her duds somewhere.

There was minimal furniture: the bar, a modular sofa, a hidden stereo system, a single shelf of hardcover books, all weighty tomes :i great literature, with one each in Chinese and Russian, signaling that she was not a jumped up actress but a serious r-erson. There were no plants for she found few houseplants worth their keep and was allergic to cut flowers. She didn’t like cats and thought it cruel to keep a dog in a city apartment. That left small _nd necessarily caged animals for companionship and a touch of the vulnerable.

After ruling out birds as too messy and fish as hard work and temperamental, she settled on a pair of female gerbils. They turned out to be pesky little beasts, given to midnight noises, nearly constant pooping, and squirming attempts at escape, whenever she cleaned their cage. Once they achieved sexual maturity, they took to fighting with each other, bloody battles that eft their cage smeared with gore and littered with bits of tails. At last, sickened by one such tiny night-war, she gave them to the daughter of the building supervisor.

The one really striking piece of furniture in her apartment was an Irish hunt table that had been a wedding present from her husband. It seated ten around its glossy mahogany oval and was invaluable for entertaining, being not only functional but a clear statement that she had excellent taste and could afford it.

There were no pier tables, no commodes, no end tables, no glass coffee tables. She loathed small tables. Her husband’s family possessed houses full of tables, underfoot at every turn, like kids or harems of small dogs. Perhaps they knew something she didn’t know about the intrinsic value of small tables. Maybe the damn things were as good as gold in a pinch, but to her, being rich was simply the Curse of Tables.

In the near dark outside the elevator, she sensed that she was in another hall, some kind of foyer. She thought she could discern a railing, as if on the landing of some stairwell. Moving along the wall, she felt for a light switch. It was a long and unrewarding grope, in which she became intimate with a stretch of brocade wallpaper and the moldings. She reached a comer and turned it, flailing desperately. Then made contact with a new surface, solid wood, paneled like a door. Her hand flew instinctively to knob level, swept the width of the door, and found the cool brassy sphere. She let out the breath she had not even been aware she was holding in one sour hiccup. The knob turned easily. At least the door was unlocked. She pushed it slowly open. She licked salty perspiration from her upper lip. The sense of trespassing was very strong now; she felt like a little girl exploring her mother’s dresser drawers, or listening in the dark of night outside her parents’ bedroom door.

Once through the door, she explored the nearest wall until her fingers encountered a plate, a cold ceramic rectangle, studded with nice, round, ribbed buttons. Rheostats. Grinning in triumph, she pressed them all at once.

The lights came on at their highest settings. Small suns like flashbulbs exploded in her now dark-accustomed eyes. She crouched, flinching away from something she could not name, but feared as much as death. Her heartbeat seemed enormously loud in the cavernous hall illuminated by a series of chandeliers and from standing candelabra as tall as young saplings ranked along the walls like guards. Walls of white marble rose from a white floor. The pillars, also of white marble, and as big around as a big man’s chest, reached to the white ceiling. It was blinding. Except for the red carpet that ran the length of the room, it was as cool and chaste as a mausoleum. It made her shiver, curled up in the corner, barefoot in her sheet.

She knew then, looking down this hall, why she was possessed by deja vu, why the other bedroom copied Lincoln’s, and her own, she realized, the Queen’s bed room. The place was a ghost of the White House. She had been in and out of that ark often enough to see immediately what this was meant to be. The fear left her, to be replaced with puzzlement. It made her a little dizzy to think about it. Or perhaps she was dizzy from lack of food. She could not think about this crazy duplication now. She had to locate food, keep her body and soul together, never mind her free-floating mind.

Walking slowly down the hall, she glanced into the entrance foyer that mocked the North Entrance of the White House. It was bizarre, seeing it empty even of the guards who should be sitting near the private staircase. Except the private staircase wasn’t :here, either. It just didn’t bear thinking about. She pushed through the door at the other end of the hall, wandered through another short hallway where there was a massive staircase in dark wood. Knowing what was on the next floor, at least in part, she felt she could ignore it, for the time being. She was sure there was no kitchen up there, anyway. It didn’t make sense, on the basis of A'hat she knew.

The light switches to the next room, on her left, were easy to f nd in the spill of light from the huge Cross Hall. Pushing them, she turned the knob on one half of a pair of double doors. She walked through into what was obviously a dining room. Leyna didn’t notice the handsome draperies in the windows or the mirror doss of the table. The flowering of the chandelier and the riooming carpet went unnoticed. First, she saw the fruit bowl on the table, part of a rococo surtout-de-table that had been abbreviated into a more elegant center-piece. The colors of the fruit gleaming in the gold,.reflected in the mirrored base of the ?urtout which was like a filigreed tray, glassed at the bottom, and gold on its base and sides, left her weak in the knees. The warm rruit colors were almost the only colors in the room, with its white * alls, gold fixtures, gold and silver flowered carpet, and dark *ood furnishings. And the scent of apple, banana, pear, grape, and orange started saliva in her mouth, obliterating any other odors in the room as surely as the fruit colors drew the eye from the cool decoration.

She snatched a Red Delicious apple from the bowl. Touch

should have told her, for the weight, the density, the surface were not right, but she was Very hungry. Perhaps her senses were unreliable. Food. She bit into it greedily, thinking she would like it very much if the juices ran down over her chin. One bite was enough.

She sprayed the mouthful of scented dough over the glossy wood of the table and hurled the false apple against the wall. It exploded softly, showering the carpet, leaving a smear of lipstick red on the white wall. She spit little bits of dough all over the carpeting, and then the smalL amount of spittle she could summon. The taste and texture of the stuff was like scum on her teeth, and she couldn’t get it out.

The tears came silently, dripping into her mouth with their salt taste. A guttural moan escaped her and then rose in a wail. She seized an orange and a banana in either hand and pitched them at the portraits on the wall. The grapes, more apples, oranges, and pears followed until the bowl was emptied and the room spattered with bits of dough and smears of color on the white and gold surfaces.

She sank into one of the high-back upholstered chairs and slumped over her hands. They made lousy pillows, all knots and bones, and were almost thin enough to see the grain of the wood through. They confirmed the trouble she was in. The tears were utterly undammed. She descended into pure misery.

Roger, on his way back from a pee, decided to look in on her. He was trying to tie the strings of his pajamas pants, almost impossible in the dark, half-asleep, when he backed into the dollhouse room.
Pee and a peek,
he mumbled to himself, chuckling at his own wit, and stopped in his barefoot tracks. The half-tied strings of his pajamas were totally forgotten. There were lights on in the Doll’s White House, not just in her bedroom, but all over.

‘Oh, shit,’ he murmured.

Instantly, he,decided not to wake Dolly. He would see that everything was all right. Tell
her
about it in the morning.

First, he took his promised peek into Leyna’s bedroom. He didn’t expect to find her there and she wasn’t. The bed looked like an army of whores had staged battle games in it. The lights led him, like a path of big fat breadcrumbs in the moonlight, to her.

But it was no relief to find her. Huddled up in a chair in the State Dining Room, her sobbing was distressingly audible, a faint hiccuping sound. It had been a serious mistake not to have gotten speakers and cameras in, he thought. Now he would certainly frighten her if he spoke, adding to her upset.

Please,’ he whispered.

She sat up and stared around her, poised to scurry away like a small animal.

Please.’ He kept his voice soft and gentle. ‘What’s wrong?’

There was no response. She just sat there, fixated on his eye that peeked at her through the window. He waited. Patience, he told himself. That was how the cat got the mouse.

He studied what he could see of the room. The broken pieces of ersatz fruit puzzled him. Then he understood.

‘You’re hungry!’ he exclaimed, forgetting about frightening her.

She moaned and shrank away from him.

The Eye blinked rapidly and went away. She wanted to run and hide before it came back. But it would find her, she was sure of that, and she was so tired and hungry. Maybe it would feed her. The thought evoked a mad chortle. She was certain that hunger caused these hallucinations of Giants and their Parts. And her delusions of Giants, in turn, fed her. She could make nothing of it. Insanity.