animals. Crispin reads three paragraphs about this saint, learning nothing, except that any feast honoring the man probably doesn’t include meat.
He doesn’t consciously turn to July 26, the night of Mirabell’s migraine and the eve of her departure for Paris. He stares at the two-page spread for a while before he realizes what he has done.
This day in July is the memorial of Saint Anne and Saint Joachim, the parents of the Virgin Mary. He reads about them but is only further mystified.
Two nights later, he dreams of Nanny Sayo and Harley. The two are on Harley’s bed. The boy wears pajamas. Nanny is in pajamas and a red silk robe. She’s teasing Harley, tickling him, and he’s giggling with delight. “My little piglet,” she says, “my little piggy piglet,” and between his giggles, Harley oinks and snorts. She tickles him mercilessly, until he says, “Stop, stop, stop!” But then at once he adds, “
As September unravels toward October, Crispin once in a while remembers this little nightmare, and sometimes he thinks that it was a scene from real life before he dreamed it, that he actually chanced upon Nanny tickling Harley. Perhaps he has forgotten the event itself in favor of remembering it as a dream, because the real moment was too disturbing to consider. But that seems unlikely.
Day by day he spends more time alone, in part because Harley has concocted a silly fantasy about little people who live in the house and who are as elusive as the cats. In fact, the white felines have now become “little cats” to Harley, though he never previously said that they were small. Inevitably, a seven-year-old kid can from time to time be an annoyance to an older brother, and this is one of those times.
On September 29, the feast of the archangels, more than two months after Mirabell went off to France with the butler, Minos, and Mrs. Frigg, Crispin thrusts up in bed with a cry of terror, but his nightmare, whatever its nature, dissolves from memory as he blinks himself awake.
During the morning, hour by hour, his sense of dread grows. He feels that, having awakened from the dream, he is nevertheless in some sense still asleep and that he must now rouse himself from a waking dream in which he has indulged too long.
He eats breakfast and lunch, but the food has little taste.
He tries to read, but the story bores him.
He finds himself in the sewing room, staring at the place where he discovered his mother and Proserpina kissing. He does not know how he got here.
He stands at a library window, watching the traffic on Shadow Street. When his legs begin to ache and he consults his wristwatch, he is surprised to discover that he has been standing there for more than an hour, as if in a trance.
Everyone he encounters on the household staff seems to look at him with barely suppressed amusement, and he becomes convinced that they are whispering about him behind his back.
Shortly before three o’clock, a still, small voice inside him speaks of the miniature room. He realizes that this voice has been whispering to him all morning, but he has rejected its guidance.
Overcome by the conviction that he should be the best sneak that he knows how to be, that he must not let anyone know where to find him, he first loses himself from all the servants. And then, certain that he is unobserved, he makes his way to the third floor by the least-used staircase.
The immense scale model of Theron Hall looms over him. Never before has this exquisitely wrought miniature seemed ominous, but now it threatens as any haunted house in any horror movie ever made.
He half expects storm clouds to form under the ceiling and thunder to roar from wall to wall.
He first intends to ascend the ladder and study the structure from the highest floor to the lowest. But intuition — or something more powerful and more personal — draws him to the north side, where he has to bend down slightly to peer through the window at that end of the main hall on the ground floor.
Upon entering the room, when he switched on the overhead lights, all the lights in the model came on as well: intricate nine-inch-diameter crystal chandeliers that are three feet across in the real house, three-inch-high sconces, blown-glass lamps as short as two inches and stained-glass replicas as tall as six.
For a moment, everything in the thirty-five-foot hallway — which, end to end, is 140 feet in the real house — looks exactly as it always has, and as it should. Then movement startles Crispin. Approaching along this corridor is something low and quick.
Two somethings.
A pair of white cats.
Each cat might be a foot long in real life, but three inches here. They are too lithe, too fluid to be mere mechanical creations. On a flurry of paws, they ripple toward him, but abruptly they cross the hall and disappear through the open doors of the drawing room.
Electrified, fully awake as he has not been in weeks, Crispin quickly circles to the west face of the miniature mansion, finds the drawing room, and discovers two snowy cats, no bigger than mice, on the window seat, peering out at him through the tiny panes of the French windows.
13
December 3, the last night of Crispin’s thirteenth year, his fourteenth ahead of him if he can survive it …
Boy, girl, and dog take the elevator down from the fourth to the second floor where, among other temptations to the wallet, waits the toy department.
Unable to be price-competitive with discounters like Toys R Us, Broderick’s stocks exotic and expensive items not found elsewhere but still moves the more ordinary items at Christmas by making of the toy department a wonderland of highly decorated trees, animated figures, snow scenes, and ten thousand twinkling lights. The space given to this department triples with the season, and many people in the city consider it a tradition to visit the display after their children have moved away from home and even if they don’t have grandchildren to spoil.
Even seen by flashlight, with the leaping reindeer stilled and the capering elves frozen in place in the fake snow, this world of toys is nevertheless impressive. This year, the marvel at the center of the department, the thing that Amity has brought him here to see, is a scale model of the department store.
Broderick’s has commissioned nothing so ambitious as a quarter-scale rendition. Instead, it is forty-eighth- scale, one quarter of an inch to one foot in the real structure. Nevertheless, the model proves to be sufficiently immense to delight children and adults as well. Crispin is a child, Amity an adolescent, both of them adults by virtue of their suffering, and they are charmed. Even Harley rises up with his forepaws on the support table and pants with apparent admiration. The detailing is not as impressive as the obsessive workmanship in the miniature room at Theron Hall, though it is so well done that it’s magical in its own right.
This approximately eight-foot-square reduction of Broderick’s is not the sum of the display. Instead of a glass globe, it stands within a thick Plexiglas case that is filled with a mixture of water and something else, Amity knows not what. She does know where to find the switch that operates it, however, and when the tank lights, it also fills with falling snow that settles slowly through the fluid before being recycled to the top by a pump.
As the night now casts snow down upon the true Broderick’s, so snow falls upon the model, and the real and the fantastical are one. They are always one, of course, but seldom so obviously as here and now, when the modelmakers’ creation and the Creation of which the modelmakers are themselves a part are synchronized to suggest, inescapably and powerfully, that the world is potentially a place of harmony if only harmony is wanted and sought.
They stand in silence awhile, and then Amity says, “Seems to be a sign, don’t you think?”
Crispin doesn’t reply.
