House of Mirrors by Andrew Pyper

Author:Andrew Pyper [Pyper, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443422260
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

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We smudged out of town, the station wagon lolling at every curve on exhausted suspension. My mother rolled down her window and let in the sound of tires breathing over warm pavement. The air that entered was damp, and carried the caky-sweet smell from the plant mixed with roadkill skunk.

We took the concession road east to where our house was. There were no lights on except for a flash of blue television light from the front room, but I knew it didn’t mean that my father was home because it was always on, with the volume turned down to almost nothing but loud enough to speak to me at night and lull me to sleep with bursts of studio audience laughter.

She drove past the two cement horse heads at the end of the gravel lane without slowing down. Didn’t turn her head, didn’t speak, breathed steadily through the narrow corner of her mouth so that the tip of her cigarette glowed orange every few seconds like a railway warning signal.

“We’re going for a drive,” my mother whispered, more to herself than to me. The green dashboard light turned the shadows on her face into comic-book exaggerations. “That’s what we’re gonna do. Just go for a drive.” She lit a cigarette, cried and laughed and spat and put her hand on my leg and blew smoke out her nose. For the moments she closed her eyes I kept my own eyes open and stared straight down the road, imagining that she could see where she was going through me so long as I sat still and didn’t blink.

At the corner of the headlights’ beam animal eyes flashed out from the dark trees. I ached to turn around to see if they would come along with us, urge us to pull over so they could guide us into the woods where they could teach us to survive in the wild. But I did not turn or move, kept my eyes on the highway’s centre yellow lines as they were one by one swallowed up under the car’s blunt hood. I did not turn or move, knowing that without the light in their faces the animals were invisible at night, and that they liked it that way. I did not turn or move, already certain that nothing in the living world would ever do anything for us but turn its head just long enough to watch us pass.

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