The Miniaturist (3 page)

Jennifer peered down at the dress. Nothing. It was white, stainless.

"Maureen?"

Jennifer stood in the middle of the room. A noise. She snapped her neck in the direction of the window. That woman, that cat-eyed woman. She scratched at the window as her face, fading in and out of the faint light thrown by the oil lamps, shifted and changed, bones moving under the skin, mouth lengthening, until she was no longer the cat-eyed woman; she was the spitting image of the one live person Jennifer had only ever seen in mirrors-herself.

It was then that the dress began to burn. The sleeves cinched in tight, the waist, the neck, making her gag. The seams, already prickly, intensified their irritation until she felt like her arms were being torn open by a serrated knife. The woman in the window was scratching and scratching-no, in fact she was beckoning.
Come here. Come here.

She ran in her bare feet through the dark living room and out the door. The snow was as cold as the burning sensation inside her dress; impossible to determine which was more painful, or differently painful. It was too much of one thing, too much of another. Still snow fell from the sky and whipped around her in bundles that looked like bodies and then people-a hovering parade of women in white dresses closing in on her from both peripheries and moaning like a chant, an incantation, an expression of antique, weary misery. The women whisked her up the hill, up and up behind the house through an empty zone in the trees, and her feet were so cold, so senseless, that the air felt no different from the frozen ground. She was running through space now but the women stayed with her, they spiraled around her like twisting bedsheets as she dropped and dropped and dropped.

She awoke in an attic. She knew it was an attic because of the unfinished ceiling, the rafters, the steeply pitched roof. The wall to her left was all brightness, a huge window. It hurt to look at it.

Jennifer was achy; she was surprised to find herself wearing a plaid kilt and a green sweater, a pair of hard brown shoes that numbed her feet. She descended the stairs into a gaudily wall-papered hallway, empty save for a table and a black phone.
I'll call Maureen
, she thought, but the phone receiver wouldn't come free of the cradle; the two were fused together, one piece of metal, clumsily painted. There were no numbers on the dial.

She walked down the main staircase into a living room, where a fake fire, made of sharp bits of orange construction paper, "burned" in the fireplace.

"Hello?" Jennifer called out.

No answer. She walked through a study, lined with books that were also fake-the shelf was a single strip of painted spines. She called out a second time. The house appeared deserted. At least, she thought it was deserted, until she entered the kitchen. A man sat at the table, reading a paper. There was a grapefruit on a plate, a cup and saucer. A woman stood by the stove wearing an apron, a dress with a flared skirt, ugly brown shoes similar to Jennifer's. She was frozen in place, stirring a pot. There was no smell of food.

"Excuse me," Jennifer said. No one said anything. Nobody moved. She crept closer to the woman by the stove. Her hair fell over her face. Jennifer moved closer, put a hand under her hair, lifted it free-and screamed.

The cat-eyed woman stared at her pot blankly, her lips frozen in a half smile. Jennifer backed away, shaking. She backed right into the breakfast table, knocking it over. The wooden grapefruit spun away; the coffee cup, glued to its saucer, lay on its side, its coffee contents perfectly intact.

Oh, God,
Jennifer said to herself,
Oh, my God ...

Her father stared at the space where his paper had previously been. Beyond him, a wall of glass stretched from door to ceiling. Jennifer ran to the glass, pressed her hands against it. The view was wavy, uncertain, distorted as though through a magnifying lens. She was looking into another house, a giant house, a house that struck her as vaguely familiar, but she couldn't be certain because her brain was overcome by a fossilized feeling of rictus, as were her arms and hands. She righted the table, retrieved the wooden grapefruit, the cup and saucer, returned the paper so that it was again directly beneath her father's gaze. Tired now, scarcely able to move, she dropped beside her father and waited, for eternity, to be served breakfast.

scanned from the pages of
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Storie