Small World by Tabitha King Page A

was a funny painting; just the woman’s head and shoulders, life size, with hardly a brushstroke visible. The colors were translucent, filmed over the canvas. It gave Roger the spooks.
    He hauled himself out of the sweet embrace of the sofa and looked out a big window at the city, spread out like a canival midway, far below him.
    The maid came back with his beer, poured into a glass and presented on a silver tray. She looked down her nose at him. He ignored her and took the beer. It didn’t taste American, but it was beer okay. He sipped it happily, reflecting happily that the maid could sneer all she wanted. She was serving the beer; he was drinking it.
    The lady returned, dressed in different clothes. She had swapped her tailored suit for some funny material that Roger could only fumble to name, a shimmery loose thing that sort of went with the room. She asked if the beer was acceptable and offered him a cigarette, out of a little silver box shaped like a vampire’s coffin. Roger was amused; someone’s little joke about coffin nails. He was also relieved. He was running low. supplying her with his butts. Politely, he accepted one but he didn’t figure he would ever catch up with her.
    They didn’t talk much for a while. He finished his beer and she did in another cigarette and there they were.
    ‘Would you like to see the dollhouses?’ she asked.
    He jumped up, relieved. ‘That’s what I’m here for, ma’am.’
    ‘I wish the Doll’s White House was here,’ she fussed, leading the way.
    It wasn’t as big a room as the living room. There was a whole wall of glass and no conventional furniture at all. Two large dollhouses on what appeared to be specially constructed tables filled two corners. A half dozen boxes containing single suites of furnishings hung on the walls. The middle of the room was dominated by a great empty plain of a table.
    Dorothy Hardesty Douglas skirted the empty table, avoiding even looking at it.
    ‘This is the Gingerbread Dollhouse.’ She touched the roof on her left gently, and then gestured, like a stewardess pointing out the exits, across the room. ‘That is the Glass Dollhouse.’
    The Gingerbread House was a re-creation of one of Roger’s favorite fairy tales. Each Christmas, he ordered a gingerbread house, usually faked from plastic or cardboard with a little edible trim, from one of the catalogs that peddled cheese and smoked sausages. It was supposed to be his contribution to the Christmas decorations, but he often left it sitting on the coffee table until Easter.
    This was the best he’d ever seen. Even the ones blueprinted in his mother’s women’s magazines didn’t come near it. It was about four feet high and constructed of wood that had been painted to resemble gingerbread, frosting, and candy. The trim seemed to have been molded or carved into the most pleasing and whimsical arrangement of candy canes, gum drops, and assorted other goodies.
    There was a cage suspended near the hearth. Roger was delighted to see the little wooden boy inside, a fair-haired kid in shorts and a hand-knitted sweater, a little ragged at the elbows. His little cheeks were flushed with the mock fire in the fireplace nearby and his eyes glittered, with the reflected fire, or with terror. A girl was chained to a table leg and sat cross-legged and morose on the stone-flagged floor.
    The witch was not at home, in any of the four rooms, up or down. Not in the low attic of the cottage, hung with arcane herbs and lined with colored glass bottles of unidentified substances, or in the bedroom where black robes and pointed hats hung on pegs, and the four-poster’s canopy was woven with the night sky. Nor in the kitchen, where the children waited, with plates of cookies near at hand, fresh from the brick oven alongside the open hearth. Nor in the smaller room, for which Roger had no name, where the floor was drawn with mystic patterns, and there were no
    furnishings, except a cheval mirror.
    Roger