The Vines

by Christopher Rice

  “So . . . ,” Nova finally says. “What did Jane Percival say?”

  Blake knows his next words will amount to a kind of surrender, that much of what other people have regarded as his defining courage sprang from his belief that he had survived one of the worst blows life could deliver. But now, suddenly, the rules about what life can hurl at you have been suspended, and he hesitates, scared of what this could unleash. He knows, though, something has already been unleashed—both in 1850, and now it’s happening again for some reason—and if he stays silent, it will amount to a betrayal, of Nova and her father, whose lifework is Spring House and everything that rises from its soil.

  “She said the vines are coming for us all.”

  The eighteen-wheelers lumbering past outside seem hollow and insubstantial, their great tires skating across a line between air and earth that seems perilously in doubt. The waitress comes to refill their water glasses, but something about the tense energy coursing between the two of them causes her to recoil wordlessly, retreating behind the counter and shooting a hasty glance in their direction, as if she has mistaken the stunned silence between them for the calculation of armed robbers preparing to strike.

  Then Nova’s cell phone rings, and she is digging in her backpack for it, and she’s uh-huhing her way through what sound like pleasantries on the other end, and Blake is wondering if, just as the revelation that Santa Claus was a myth killed the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and a host of other childhood fantasies for him, this current revelation and its spreading, unavoidable implications are opening a doorway that will admit more than one impossible guest.

  Then Nova shoots to her feet and cries, “What do you mean he went back there?”

  19

  The gas station is an island of light beside the two-lane blacktop. Caitlin turns into it at the last possible second, even though her BMW X5 has over half a tank, more than enough to get her to Spring House and back to New Orleans.

  The attendant looks up from his magazine behind bulletproof glass, face shaded from the sodium-vapor lights by the bill of his John Deere baseball cap. When she goes to put her credit card into the reader, she sees that there isn’t one and is reminded that she’s not in Uptown, but several miles up the west bank of the river from Luling, where the population is sparse and one fuel-and-run could take away half a day’s business.

  “Pay first,” comes the attendant’s voice through the speaker overhead.

  Instead, Caitlin stands next to her shiny black SUV, the gas pump frozen in one hand. She figures she has only minutes left, so she opens the gas tank anyway and begins unscrewing the cap.

  “Pay first, ma’am.”

  Just then, the sedan that’s been following her for a half hour blows past the gas station. It’s hard to keep track of its continued speed in the darkness, but a few moments later she sees the sedan’s brake lights flash on, angry red eyes trailing away around the bend in the highway up ahead. Slowing. Calculating. Waiting?

  “Pay f—”

  “Fuck off!” Caitlin roars. She’s staring at the attendant before she realizes she’s whirled on him. The undeniable astonishment in his expression at such full-voiced fury coming from so delicate a woman chases away any remorse she might feel over her outburst, replacing it with bone-deep satisfaction.

  When she nods and smiles, the guy begins reaching for something under his desk, without taking his glazed eyes off her. Whether it’s a gun or an alarm button, she’s not sure. And now that she’s confirmed she’s still being followed, there’s no need for her to linger.

  Fifteen minutes later she is traveling up River Road when the sedan’s headlights appear in her rearview mirror again.

  20

  “I’m not getting this,” Kyle Austin says.

  “Spring House, her plantation,” Mike says. “That’s where she’s headed.” Kyle is still sitting at Scott’s desk, watching the green-flared quadrants on the computer screen that show various angles on Caitlin Chaisson’s now-empty house.

  Mike’s voice sounds tinny through the prepaid cell phone. Scott has given up trying to overhear, and now he’s headfirst in the kitchen pantry, probably getting ready to stress eat or make some kind of protein shake with five shots of bull adrenaline and a methamphetamine chaser.

  “I mean, I don’t understand why you’re following her. The house on St. Charles is just sitting there, empty. Shouldn’t we make a play?”

  “A play?”

  “For the tape.”

  “Yeah . . . but this might be more interesting.”

  “Interesting. We’re going for interesting now. What does—”

  “Don’t be such a little bitch, Austin. She’s on the move, alone, at one in the morning—”

  “So what, man?”

  “So rather than looking for a needle in a goddamn mansion, I could maybe see if she’s covering up something about her fucking husband that we could use to get the tape out of her. You get me?”

  “We’re not detectives.”

  “We’re not murderers either, but that’s what everyone will think if she ever wants them to.”

  We’re not? Kyle thinks.

  Across the apartment, Scott seems to have produced his own answer to the question needling Kyle’s brain. He hasn’t been rooting around in the pantry for protein powder or energy drinks. Instead, he’s set a giant gun case on the counter from which he has removed maybe the largest handgun Kyle has ever laid eyes on. It’s a 500 Smith & Wesson Magnum, so long it looks like it would be impossible to aim with one hand. Kyle’s seen videos of the things online blowing the shit out of cinderblocks with a single bullet. Handgun hunting, they call it.

  Scott’s got a cocky half smile on his face until he sees the expression on Kyle’s.

  “Story of my fucking life,” Mike growls. “Tell you what, how ’bout you kids just sit back and I’ll clean up the whole mess, and when I’m done I’ll bring you a pretty hat you can wear to church with the other ladies.”

  Mike Simmons hangs up on him before he can answer, and then it’s just Kyle, Scott, and the cartoonishly large gun sitting on the kitchen counter like a prop from a comic book. And Kyle Austin thinks, Maybe you should be the one cleaning up the mess. You’re the one who whacked Fuller with the goddamn pipe.

  Scott’s expression is suddenly pale and distant, and for a second Kyle is afraid he’s about to be punished with an ass-whipping for not being visibly excited about Scott’s insanely large firearm. But Scott is staring past Kyle, at the computer screen and its night-vision views of Caitlin Chaisson’s mansion. And then Scott is walking slowly across the apartment, and when Kyle sees the giant handgun left all by itself on the kitchen counter, he has a mad urge to dash for it, as if it might be snatched up and wielded against them by a mentally imbalanced ghost.

  “What the . . . ?” Scott finally whispers. And Kyle is forced to turn his attention away from the abandoned gun to the computer screen.

  What he sees there at first appears to be a trick of shadows until he realizes there’s only one concrete, physical explanation. One glass wall of the second-floor solarium is either gone or mostly shattered. He can’t see the broken glass, but he can see the clouds of insects now swirling freely through the solarium’s interior like a compact tornado. The cloud looks three times larger than he first thought. It looks like the bugs have knocked over some sort of appliance that’s now short-circuiting. The whole scene looks like a miniature version of a transformer gearing up to blow in a violent thunderstorm. In the split second before each pulse of light overpowers the night-vision lens with sickening intensity, Kyle glimpses a density of insects to rival the clouds of Formosan termites that used to shut down Zephyrs baseball games when he was a kid.

  “Did they—did those bugs . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle says. “I think they broke the goddamn window.”

  The next flash is fi
erce, far larger than the ones before, so bright Scott leaps back from the computer screen, one arm going up to shield his eyes. But Kyle can’t force himself to look away, because there was a shape to this explosion of light that the other pulses lacked, a brilliant, brief silhouette of a form that looked halfway human as it made its way through the tumbles of hovering insects like a propulsion of fierce white dye.

  But the image is so brief Kyle is able to dismiss it as a trick of the eye. What he can’t dismiss is the gaping, jagged hole in the solarium’s glass wall that the flash illuminated in full for the first time. And now the clouds of insects are streaming through it and taking to the night sky, so many of them it looks as if they weren’t just filling up the solarium but the entire house.

  21

  There was a brief period in the more recent history of Spring House when Caitlin’s mother entertained the idea that she would do some of its gardening herself, and the tools she purchased for this endeavor—and even used on perhaps two or three different occasions—are still in a gleaming red box inside the gardening shed, right where she left them years before.

  Caitlin carries the box, along with a flashlight—the biggest and brightest she can find—to the gazebo, taking the long route through the middle of the gardens so as to give her pursuer time to catch up. She doubts she will hear his car approach, although he (she assumes it’s a he) doesn’t strike her as the most professional of night stalkers, as evidenced by his own arrogant over-the-shoulder wave to his own planted camera. Still, she has one goal and one goal only. To get him to visit the gazebo. Alone.

  She sinks to her knees and runs her hands across the floorboards. They are cracked and jostled in places, but the damage isn’t as severe as she had thought. It seems as if the vines didn’t punch through them like a fist but instead somehow managed to flatten themselves in between the cracks, as snakes and rats do when they’re trying to fit inside walls.

  They won’t need to do that this time.

  She grabs a small gardening shovel and wedges its sharp tip into one of the thin cracks. After a couple seconds of prying, she’s pulled free a half-foot section of floorboard. She recoils instinctively, half expecting to uncover a swirling portal to the spirit world. What lies below, however, is glistening and densely coiled and appears to be very much of this earth. These growths appear fetal when compared to the vines that nursed from her wrist; they lack blossoms and leaves, and their general shape and enmeshed pattern remind her of old illustrated versions of Jack and the Beanstalk.

  She spends the next twenty minutes removing as many floorboards as have been jostled loose by the previous night’s eruption. She tries, with each move, to strike a balance between the speed of a furtive late-night burial and the time her pursuer might need to catch up with her. It isn’t critical that he see her every move, just the final act, which includes removing several magazines she found in her trunk—now wrapped inside an old T-shirt—and placing them down under the floorboards of the gazebo as if they were an item of great and secret import.

  She has set the bundle atop the coiled vines and is about to retreat altogether, when she realizes her next few moves might require a little test. She runs three fingers down the side of one of the slick vines. It reacts to her touch with a leisurely, serpentine slide that makes a moist, fleshy sound.

  Still connected, she thinks. Still . . . mine?

  There’s only one way to be sure.

  She takes the shiny, barely used pruning shears from the toolbox and presses its handle until the blades open wide enough for her to drag one sharp edge across her left palm. The resulting wound doesn’t bleed as much as her wound the night before, but it’s enough. The first fat red droplets to hit the vine below are absorbed immediately, soundlessly, like water evaporating in a time-lapsed film. And then, as Caitlin holds her dripping palm out over the small shadowed cavern, the tip of one vine is lifting up into the air like a charmed cobra, and this time, because she is present and fully conscious, a delirious laughter overtakes her as she watches it twine gently around her bleeding palm, covering the wound, drinking from her silently and without effort. Her breasts are smashed against the gazebo’s floor, her hair draping her face, several locks of it blinding her right eye, but she fears any adjustment will disrupt this magical marriage of earth and blood.

  When it is done, it is done. It untwines from her hand, and once again a flowing wound has been miraculously reduced to a vague rosy scar; this vine has the power both to drink and to heal, it seems. And then it is drifting back down to its former resting place. The night before, it took off in immediate pursuit of her husband, the man whose terrible betrayal was freshly seared into her soul, but now it lies motionless. Waiting? If so, then for what? Perhaps because her pursuer is not yet within her immediate vicinity. Maybe as soon as he gets close, as close as Troy and his little whore were to her the night before as they hurried off to the gardening shed . . .

  She replaces the floorboards as carefully as she can, taking care to leave one conspicuously loose. She turns on the gazebo’s single lightbulb before heading back to the main house.

  As she circulates through the mansion’s silent hallways—killing the lights, pausing to undress in front of the bedroom window, giving the appearance that she is retiring for the night—the gun is either in her right hand or within reach the entire time.

  Once Spring House is in darkness, she stands in one corner of the master bedroom window, the four-poster canopied bed throwing a monstrous shadow on the wall beside her. She waits, listening to familiar ticking sounds of a great house cooling in the late hours of a night in the Deep South.

  When her new friend appears, a low, lumbering shadow moving through the gardens toward the gazebo, Caitlin has to stifle a laugh. It’s as satisfying a moment as the gas station attendant’s terrified expression. Still, she gains control, reminds herself that she has work to do.

  She grips the edge of the window frame, gazes down upon her intruder as he moves toward the gazebo, and tries to summon the same hatred, the same rage she felt when she watched her husband and his little slut rushing through the same garden.

  The problem, though, is that the hate is nothing like she felt (feels) when she thinks about Troy and Jane. What has this man done to you? Really? I mean, except hop your fence and plant cameras in your yard? Does he really deserve the same fate as Troy?

  These thoughts, and the cold fingers of regret they press against her strained heart, have distracted her from the silence outside. Indeed, she can only hear her own rasping breaths. No screams from the gazebo, and the guy’s still down on his knees, mimicking her earlier pose almost exactly, pulling up loose floorboards. The vines that slithered at just the hint of her touch, the vines she just fed for a second time, have not responded to her mental command.

  She feels instantly, violently humbled, and is shocked to feel a hot sheen of tears in her eyes. But then a part of her leans into this feeling. She was moving too quickly. That’s it. She doesn’t even know who this man is, and she was so desperate to test the new powers available to her that she rushed into this with too much thoughtless hunger.

  Magazines, she realizes suddenly, the word exploding in her mind like a bright flare. He’ll know it’s a trap now. I couldn’t think of anything better than magazines. And why should I have? I thought he’d be dead by now. Why isn’t it working? What’s different from last time? This new question reminds her of the one that glued her to the windowsill a few moments before: What has this man done to you? And as she turns that question over in her head, she can feel it shift just a bit, the emphasis changing. What has this man done to you?

  A voice that sounds surprisingly like her dead husband’s answers.

  Not enough, sweetheart. Apparently not enough.

  In a few seconds, her strange hooded intruder will realize he walked into a trap. He will know that he is alone with a frail young woman who has been playi
ng tricks with his mind. Vines or no vines, Caitlin cannot have this, cannot be thought of as weak any longer, and so now she is running—out of the room, down the stairs, and through the front door—gun raised in one hand as if it has the power to part the shadows before her.

  She creeps up on him silently. “Take it off!”

  The guy doesn’t move. He’s found something down in the vines, and for a delirious instant she thinks one of them has snagged him, but he isn’t struggling, he’s digging. The magazines she laid as a trap have been tossed aside onto the floorboards next to him. “Stop!” she yells again, and this time his hands go up, while he stands straight and backs up at the same time.

  “Stop moving and take off the hood.”

  Gone are the hot tears of embarrassment. She is proud of the authoritative tone of her voice, at least, if not the wobbly aim with which she holds the tiny pistol on her intruder’s back.

  But he’s still backing up.

  “I said stop mo—”

  He spins and lunges at her in the same instant, his arms out. She sees the glint of something in his right hand and before she can process whether or not it’s a weapon, she fires, and in the muzzle flash she watches her husband’s blood-encrusted gold watch tumble from the intruder’s hand and fall to the earth at her feet.

  Just like the man she has shot.

  22

  “He’s not here, Nova.” It’s the fifth time Blake has said it, but Nova keeps searching the little house as if her father might be cowering in the few inches between the wall and the back of the sofa or curled up inside the tiny kitchen pantry.

  “Maybe he’s been and gone?” Blake offers.

  But Nova just shakes her head and keeps up her futile search, and Blake is sure she isn’t as frightened for her father’s well-being as she is furious he broke his promise. Which might be the reason he’s not answering his phone, he thinks. After their conversation a few hours before and the events of the past twenty-four hours, everything seems possible, none of it good. Willie ignoring his daughter’s wrath is the best of the scenarios Blake can conjure.