The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [107]
The jostling of Lydia’s car woke me. Until now the roads we’d driven on had been smooth and clean, but now we were rumbling over a tiny dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Lydia’s small car banged and shuddered down the road. Bits of dirt and gravel crunched and popped beneath our tires. We were moving slowly, crawling. I looked at Lydia. Her shoulders and face were scrunched up with concentration. She was having difficulty seeing what was in front of us, stretching her neck over the dashboard and squinting to discern a hint of the road in the dark. I looked out the window. I couldn’t see a thing. Only sheer absolute blackness. We may as well have been in outer space for all I could make out.
“We’re almost there,” Lydia half-sighed to me, as I sat up and smeared the drowse from my eyes. The car rattled and lurched up the steep unpaved mountain road in the dark. The headlights spat a cold white light on the dirt ahead of us, and behind us the brake lights of our car pulsed dim red light into the darkness. The car shuddered, the engine struggled. The headlights briefly illuminated a parabolic wooden sign, whose capital letters were rustically fashioned from sticks, which arched over the road from one roughly hewn upright log to another. We passed beneath the arch. Soon Lydia’s car came to rest beside a big metal gate in the middle of the road. She stopped the car but did not turn it off. She dug around in the glove compartment for something, found it—a little scrap of paper on which she’d written something—got out of the car and walked up to a little blinking box to one side of the gate. She did something to the box, and the gate moaned open before us. She got back into the car and continued to drive us up the thin dirt road. Eventually the car came to a stop in a wide flat area right in front of a massive and complicated house. We got out of the car with our suitcases. It was late. A few of the lights in the house were on, and there was a light on above the giant wooden doors in the front of the house. A row of lamps lined a long stone path that led from the place where we parked up to the doors of the house. Other than that, there were no other buildings, and no other lights around for miles. All around us were hills, dotted with patches of sparkling white snow that sloped upward and became dark mountains. Above us, the night sky swarmed with stars, so much of the universe’s twinkling smoke and dust—it was at once beautiful and terrifying. It looked just like the curvilinear ceiling of the planetarium in Chicago, except without the glowing outlines of all the beasts and gods and monsters that the constellations were supposed to represent drawn helpfully in the spaces between the stars.
The wheels under our suitcases grumbled along the stone path that led from the driveway to the giant double doors of the house. Lydia knocked on the doors. They winged open and we were met by a squat and sleepy-eyed older woman with curly brushed-iron hair who carried herself with gravity and austerity. She guided us upstairs to a guest bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. We were utterly exhausted, and we fell asleep at once, even in these unfamiliar environs, without any ceremony.
Lydia and I awoke the following morning, showered in the adjoining bathroom, dressed from our suitcases, and went out to explore the house. The house was vast, bright, and silent. Hand in hand, we wandered through the impeccably clean wood-floored and white-walled hallways. There was a lot of art on the walls. The excessive bigness, brightness, and cleanliness of the house made it a pleasant but strangely unhomelike place to be in. A giant upside-down cone of a chandelier hung from the high ceiling over the cavernous living room, which was made entirely out of real deer’s antlers linked together in a thorny