Small World (30 page)

Her leg muscles were cramping. She slowed to a crawl and left the driveway, moving toward the wrought-iron fence, straining to see what might lie beyond it. A mild panic, or possibly the handful of nuts, knotted her stomach when she failed to discern anything beyond the fence itself. The need to know what lay beyond the boundaries of this small world kept her walking, though she told herself she needed to loosen the muscles that were protesting their sudden use. She blinked rapidly, hoping she had something in her eye that would presently, before she reached the fence, clear.

When she reached it, she touched it. Cold, not quite smooth, very distinctly what it appeared to be: iron. Her fingers traced the curleycues and uprights, the spear points, the bars and stylized flowers. They came away almost clean. Cautiously, she moved one hand between the iron tracery and beyond it. The tips of her fingers immediately encountered a hard, smooth, cold surface. Feeling through the gaps in the fence, she followed the wall she couldn’t see to the top of the fence and as far beyond it as a tall woman could reach. She leaned hard against it, and felt no give.

Staring very hard, not quite against it because of the intervening fence, she tried to see what it was made of and was startled to discern, abruptly, her own, scarily faint image. In anger and fear, she struck it with the flat of her palm. It did not care. She was the one who cried.

Turning from the fence after a moment, she crossed the grass back to the drive, blinking back the tears that now really did obscure her vision. Stumbling once or twice, she kept on going, because there was nothing else to do. At the bottom of the steps, she sat down. There had to be an explanation. If only she could stop screaming long enough to think clearly.

‘What’s wrong?’ Dolly rasped.

Leyna cringed. She was still teary-eyed, blinking fast to clear her vision but not really wanting to see the being who spoke.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

Hot breath blew over her as Dolly bent to scold. Instinctively, Leyna warded her off with her hands.

‘Lots of people don’t have such nice homes, you know. Lots of people don’t have lovely meals, like you do.’

Her great Hands were in motion overhead, like leather-winged birds of pre-history, with their enormous shadowy wingspreads. There was a grinding, groaning noise that Leyna had learned to recognize, the sound of a wall being moved.

‘Look at this!’ Dolly exclaimed in disgust. ‘What a mess! This room is a disgrace. It looks like pigs live here.’

A Hand swept down and seized Leyna around the waist with two fingers.

Her scream ended abruptly when she was dumped roughly onto the bed and had the wind knocked out of her.

‘I’m not your maid,’ the rant went on. ‘You just clean this awful-looking room up, and I mean right now. I worked hard to make this room nice. Special.
You’re
not anything special, you know. Not now, you aren’t. You just pitch in.’

Leyna sat on her knees, seeing the room as if for the first time. It
was
messy, much messier than she had left it. The tray had been overturned, spilling dirty dishes and the dregs of her last meal to the carpet. The bedclothes had been ripped from the bed. The towels she had hung on their bars in the bathroom were now a tangled heap in the bathroom doorway.

‘Get out of bed, you lazy cunt.’ A huge Finger flicked at her impatiently, catching the side of her head and knocking her backward.

She crawled away, crouched like a cornered animal in the farthest shadows of the bed-hangings. Her hair wild around her face, she screamed in a high, thin voice, ‘It’s not my birthday!’ Dolly chuckled. It sounded like a breaker at the ocean, rumbling over the rocks.

An hour later, the room was flawlessly neat. The spread was smooth and tight across the bed. The towels hung in precision ranks in the bathroom. The tray was washed, dried, and stacked with spotless dishes. Leyna had knelt on the carpet and picked up crumbs with her fingers, scrubbed at the stains of coffee dregs and grease and salad dressing with a washcloth, later washed and nnsed in the bathroom. Now she sat by the fireplace in a prissy little Brewster chair, the nearest available dunce seat, with its caned bottom, high turned arms, and rigid back. Her hands were folded in her lap, her face smooth and empty. The wall was raised and removed. Dolly stood there in its place, a new wall that flowed like drapery and breathed.

.‘I forgot,’ she said calmly, ‘to give you clean linen.’

A Hand hovered in the room, dropping a pile of folded bed and bath linen in a small heap on the carpet. With one Finger, she hooked up the spread from the bed and tore apart the neat tucks and corners. The towels were ripped from the bars and strewn over the room in a small tornado of damp cloth. Leyna ducked but not fast enough; the wet cloth caught her once, squarely in the face, as it was centrifuged from the Finger. This time Dolly iaughed from her belly. It was like a train screaming in a tunnel. The war had commenced.

Late in the afternoon, she woke. She had slept on the top of the spread, but Dolly had not returned to inspect the bedroom again. Her bladder was full and she was hungry.

She had been without plumbing recently enough so that she had no doubt that happiness was a dry bladder in a working bathroom. Almost cheerfully, she made for the bathroom and sat down. It struck her then she hadn’t menstruated in some time. She had r>een nearly due when the accident happened. She supposed the trauma had caused her to miss one period. Surely now that she was better her cycle would begin again. When she stood up, with this female matter of no small importance on her mind, she pulled up her pants with one hand and pulled the chain with the other. The toilet flushed with the satisfying waterfall of the overhead

tank.

What would she do when she did menstruate again? There was none of what her husband mockingly called feminine equipage in this bathroom. She would be compelled to ask for what she needed, a prospect that made her stomach ball with dread. It was bad enough to have those Eyes peeking at her while she slept, dressed, ate, and eliminated.

She stooped to wash her hands, splash water over her face, and fill a glass of water from the tap. Her mouth was dry with sleep; her thinking thick and muddily resentful. Abruptly the water slacked off when the glass was half full, and then, with a discolored dribbling, failed altogether. She turned both faucets to their most open position. Nothing.

Curious, she checked the toilet bowl. There was water, but it was disconcertingly low. She nibbled at the interior of her lip thoughtfully. Absent hosts make awkward landlords. Who to complain to when the water stops? So much for the little business of her menstrual cycle. Not that there was anyone she could complain to about the missing flux of blood, either. But the everyday plumbing of this house was more important than her monthly plumbing.

‘Shit,’ she muttered.

She belly-flopped onto her bed. An orange would assuage her thirst for the moment and boost her energy as well. She selected one idly and made a small hole in it. Sucking it dry, she was as amused by the shriveling of the orange in its skin as she had been by the same trick, taught to her by her father, when she was a kid.

While she sucked, she considered her plumbing problems. Water was not some magical juice of the pipes through which it flowed. It had a source, a domestic source, such as a well, or a reservoir, or else a connection with city mams. Racking her brains, she could recall only one bit of knowledge about the White House water supply. It was not drawn from the city supply but from reservoirs, filled by tanker trucks from Virginia springs. It was a useless piece of information. She wasn’t in the real White House. However uncanny a copy this place was, it was all too obviously a reproduction. Certainly Matt Johnson and his cohorts had not suddenly abandoned the Executive Mansion for her exclusive use, nor torn down their precious ugly offices in the wings on the way out.

Leyna was bored. She hadn’t done a damned useful thing in days, other than cleaning house for the Great Bitch. Dropping the desiccated orange back into the fruit bowl, she determined she would give herself a quick course in plumbing. She might find a blockage, a leak, some explanation of the mysterious disappearance of the water. Nevermind that it had stopped as suddenly as it had started. It didn’t bear thinking about. Action was the thing. She went looking for tools.

Padding down silent corridors and stairways to the domestic offices in the basement story of the house, she felt her skin crawl with the emptiness of the place. Passing the elevator, which she avoided using now that she had strength enough for the stairs, was a special trial. She wondered if it would help to whistle, as for a graveyard.

The institutionally ugly cupboards in the warren of rooms devoted to the baser needs of the mansion yielded one mean wrench and a cutting blade of the type she recalled from college art classes. The blade was strangely out of place, but potentially useful, at the veryJeast as a fruit knife. She turned up a drawer of linen napkins, helped herself to one, and used it to wrap the blade, setting it aside to take with her when she finished. The wrench in her hand evoked a sudden feeling of competency, efficiency, in-chargeness. She began a futile search for access to a water system. There were rooms for ironing, washing, polishing the goddamn silver, but no suitably obscure entrance to a musty cellar full of engines for heating, cooling, and plumbing. No dusty grimy tanks to explore, with one ear listening for strange sounds in the gloom.

Disappointed, she returned to the kitchen. Turning on the faucets in one of the enormous porcelain sinks, she was not surprised when they were as dry as the ones in her bathroom. She dipped to her knees and examined the pipes under the sink. A couple of taps with her trusty wrench established that they were empty. Following them to the wall, she noted that they entered the wall at a slightly upward angle. It was puzzling. The angle would create a sure trap, a certain blockage in a kitchen sink, even to the eyes of an amateur.

Of course, this was a singular kitchen, absolutely spotless, utterly empty, and obviously as virginal as a busload of nuns. Where her daily bread was coming from, she could only guess. Staffing a mausoleum like this would be a problem for anyone less than the government. Her meals were evidently catered.

She shied away from the subject quickly. She knew perfectly well her meals had been delivered on several occasions by Giants. But they were figments of her disordered imagination, the dreams of illness and trauma. She had to presume that perfectly ordinary human beings brought her the grub on silver trays. It was her brain that put them in Dolly-masks and blew them up into monsters.

She carried the wrench and the linen-wrapped blade back to her bedroom. After hiding the blade between her mattresses, she emptied the fruit bowl onto the bed. The bowl might come in handy in the bathroom, to catch the dregs in the pipes.

She banged and wrenched for an hour under the bathroom basin, trying to move the joints of the pipes. At last she threw down the wrench in frustration and sent the bowl spinning against the wall with a quick kick. It clanged hollowly and came to rest with an enormous dent in the side. The pipes under the basin were apparently empty, anyway.

Her fingers were sore and grimy. She looked at them with distaste. Her nails were a mess, a disaster. She would have to find a pair of scissors or try the art blade, ugh, on them later. But first she was going to have a try at the water tank over the toilet. If there was anything in it, she would have it to drink in an emergency.

The connections to the porcelain tank separated easily. It was surprising that they had not sprung a leak. The threads in fact were damp; moisture beaded the joints. She positioned the bowl underneath and was rewarded with a pint or two of rusty looking water, mostly from the pipes above the tank, rather than from the tank itself. The pipes emptied themselves with a gassy gurgle and were silent. She stored the bowl of water in the wardrobe, out of sight.

It had given her an idea about where the water supply might be located. But first she needed a rest; she damped the end of a towel and cleaned her hands and nails as best she could. That left her with nothing immediate to do but with a definite thirst, and a growing desire for something besides fruit to eat. She’d like another steak. Or a nice ham sandwich. Or a coffee yogurt.

The room was growing dark. She switched on lights, made up the bed to a military neatness, and plumped the pillows. Her hands itched. She was conscious of their grimy second skin and tried hard to ignore it. She studied herself in the wardrobe mirror.

Tangled hair, a smudge on her nose. Her jogging shorts hung loosely on her stringy muscles. Her sole perfume was the stale sour scent of her own sweat.

‘Ugh, ugh, ugh.’

She would have spit at herself had she any spittle to spare. She stretched out on the bed, beat. Climbing to the top of this craz>

house, where the water had to be, would have to wait until the light came again.

In the morning she breakfasted on fruit. She could feel a canker forming in her mouth and her bowels were painfuly gassy. She used the toilet; she had to. Then she started upstairs, looking for the water.

Out of breath, dirty, slimed with her own sweat, she came out onto the roof after a long, fumbling search. A white tank stood at the other end of the roof. She trudged to it, becoming gradually aware that it was semitransparent. She could see the waterline; it was three-quarters full. It was a long rectangle, lying on its long side, and its corners were blunted. One end was squarer than the other; when she investigated, this end appeared to be nearly flat, except for a pair of symmetrically placed dimples. The other end was very gradually tapered and ended in a blocky device that clearly controlled the flow. The stopcock was huge; Leyna had to straddle the neck of the tank to obtain leverage, and then tore most of the skin off her palms moving it. The pipe that descended from the stopcock into the roof let out a reassuring burp and the water in the tank began to burble.