The Vines

by Christopher Rice

  On their way in, they bypassed the plantation house and its grounds, taking instead the gravel road right to Willie’s miniature house. Which means it’s not the only place left to look.

  “Nova. His truck isn’t here. He’s not here.”

  “Maybe he parked up at the main house?”

  “Which he never does.”

  “No . . . but if Caitlin asked him to, he would. Come on!”

  A few moments later he’s running after her up the same path they took earlier that afternoon, only now the cane field belonging to the neighboring farm is a curtain of shifting shadows beside them, the sounds of its rustling stalks easily mistaken for the careful footfalls of a predator sizing up its prey.

  Blake sees the gazebo first and reaches out a hand to stop Nova. The grounds are shadow-filled and so is the soaring plantation house. But the single lightbulb inside the gazebo is on, making it look like the tip of a boat dock on a dark, expansive lake. From this distance away, he can see some of the floorboards are missing, and what appear to be several magazines strewn across the dirt.

  When he starts for the gazebo, Nova lets out a small sound of protest and reaches out a hand to stop him, but he takes it in his and starts leading them across the garden. She follows, silenced by his determination that they stick together. He can feel her trembling slightly through her hand.

  “What the hell?” Nova whispers as they peer down through the gazebo’s missing floor. And Blake is surprised that despite her willingness to believe, Nova is more thunderstruck by the sight of the slick and impossibly large growths coiled below than he is. Maybe it’s some kind of denial mechanism, but Blake is fixated on the traces of recent human behavior all around them: the deliberately removed floorboards, the discarded red toolbox, the swirl of some sort of gold fabric wrapped up in the vine coil.

  When Blake gets down onto his knees next to the hole, Nova hisses fiercely, grabbing for his shoulder, but he brushes her hand aside and braces himself against the edge of the opening with one hand while reaching down into the miniature pit with the other. As soon as his fingertips touch the strange band of gold, he can tell it’s made of fabric. The thick, slick vines barely protest as he pulls it free of their coil.

  Nova goes silent, her hands rising to her mouth as Blake extracts the soaked and tattered necktie. He lifts it up toward the light overhead so they can both get a good look at it.

  It feels to Blake as if the simple act of holding this discovery aloft is required to draw the implications of the scene before them into a coherent picture. The vines—if that’s what they are—are too thick and large and fresh-looking to have recently been disturbed by a human burial. And why would anyone just shove this once-shiny gold necktie down into their moist lair? And could a human hand have forced it to entwine with them so efficiently?

  “Was this . . . ?”

  “He was wearing it last night,” Nova whispers through her fingers. “Troy. He was . . . That was his . . .”

  The eruption of music from the main house and Nova’s scream seem to come in the same instant. The song now rattling the windows of the parlor is upbeat and cheerful, and Blake can’t process the jarring transition at first. It feels like he’s just rolled out of bed to find himself standing on a busy New York sidewalk. But the lyrics are familiar enough to send a spear of anxiety through his sternum.

  The same Faith Hill song John Fuller would play when he called Blake late at night, when he was afraid whispering sweet nothings into the phone would be overheard by his parents, and so he let the music do the talking for him by turning the volume most of the way down and pressing the receiver’s mouthpiece right up to the stereo. Only a few people on earth knew John used to do that for him; Caitlin was one of them. And she is standing on the back porch now, a shadow silhouetted by a few dim lights she’s just turned on in the parlor behind her. He can’t see her expression through the shadows, but it looks like she’s waiting to see if they’ve noticed her.

  “Caitlin . . . ,” he calls out to her, and a few seconds later, she’s moving toward them.

  When she’s within a few yards of the gazebo, she says, “You should go, Nova.”

  “Where’s my dad?” Nova demands.

  “Not here. Seriously. You should go.”

  “We ne—no. We need to talk,” Nova says. But her words are shaky, and the glances she’s casting between Blake and Caitlin’s approaching shadow suggest that she’d like nothing more than to take off running. “We need to talk about what’s going on here. I’m not letting my daddy come back here, unless I know what—”

  “I know you hate me, Nova. I know you always have. I know it never seemed like enough, the things I did for your father. For your family—”

  “For us?” she asks, angry at the insinuation. “What the hell are you—where is my father?”

  “—but trust me. I’m trying to protect you here. I am. Truly.”

  “There’s nothing you can protect me from, Miss Caitlin.”

  “Really? Want me to tell you what we did to those three boys who cornered you that day you were walking home from school? The ones that touched you even after you begged them to stop?”

  Nova is visibly stunned, lips hanging open like a grouper’s as she seems to mentally reach for the memory while recoiling from it in the same instant.

  “Sure, you’re a big girl now with a lot of opinions and college professors filling your head with all kinds of fantasies about how things are. About how they should be. But it wasn’t your father who walked those boys to the parish line and told them what would happen to them if they ever came back to Montrose Parish. It was mine. And he had friends with cop cars. So believe me when I tell you my family’s done more for you than you’ll ever know. And believe me when I tell you it’s time for you to leave.”

  “What about me?” Blake asks, taking a few steps forward, hoping to see the expression on Caitlin’s face. No such luck. But he can see the outline of the pistol she’s holding in her right hand. “Why do I get to stay?”

  Caitlin doesn’t answer, and the weight of her consideration sits over them all. Blake hears Nova’s sharp intake of breath, senses the start of a diatribe. “She’s got a gun, Nova,” he whispers. But apparently not quietly enough, because the next thing Caitlin says is, “I’ve got a lot more than a gun, honey.”

  There’s that hard edge again. What had she said to him then? All you know is flesh and bone. It’s not just hard; it’s confident, knowing, self-satisfied . . . three things Caitlin has never been in her entire life.

  “Fine. Come inside,” Caitlin finally says. “Both of you. Come inside and meet the man who really killed John Fuller.”

  23

  The attendant is still stewing over the rich bitch in the BMW X5 who told him to fuck off when he hears a sound like a fantail boat coming right up the highway toward the gas station where he works. The nearest fingers of swamp are too far from his little island of harshly lit concrete for a boat to sound this close. So he just sits there, blinking at the glare outside, cursing the way it masks the highway and the surrounding night sky.

  He’s about to leave the register and investigate when the sound gets abruptly—and violently—louder, like a chain saw revving up. It’s a buzz that reminds him of bee swarms he’s seen on nature shows, but there’s another undertone to it, a clicking that sounds almost like his mother’s press-on nails rapping against the edge of the table.

  If his mother were a giant and her nails the size of butcher knives.

  When the handle of the far gas pump is ripped from its holder and slams to the concrete, he figures the whole thing is a trick of the wind. But everything else outside is ghostly-still, and a few seconds later, he can make out the swarm of insects covering the fallen gas pump as if the rusted metal handle were coated in some sort of irresistible nectar.

  Within seconds, a veritable second skin of i
nsects coats the fallen pump. They’re coming so fast and furious from the darkness beyond the station’s island of light that he can’t actually see them. He can’t tell them apart either. Are they termites, roaches, cicadas? He’s had creatures of all shapes and sizes slither and dart across his outpost in the late hours of the night, but never something this immense and angry.

  Then they’re rising into the air in several slender fingers that seem positively elegant in comparison to the thickening mass below that gave them birth. He feels his jaw go slack and hears the magazine slap to the floor at his feet.

  An impossible shape is assembling beyond the glass, but one that seems vaguely familiar. It is like the finest of pencil drawings, only each pencil stroke has its own violent and barely controlled interior chaos.

  The shape is over five feet tall now. And in its details he can see the woman’s skinny neck and sloping shoulders. The rest of her is a mix of suggestions, as if the bugs have latched on to lingering threads of soul and dead skin and made the best version of her they possibly can. Then the shape turns its hollow head in his direction, and he sees writhing knife slashes suggesting the woman’s wide, furious eyes and her snarling mouth. And with a voice that consists of a great swelling and fragile modulation of the grinding chain saw sound coming from the entire cloud, the ghost composed of insects snarls, “Fuck off!”

  Then, as if in response to the attendant’s strangled, terrified cry, the cloud disperses, and he sees the tail end of the thick fingers as they take to the night sky beyond the gas station’s lonely glare, and the ghostly impression of the girl in the BMW X5 has departed on a swarm of tiny wings.

  24

  The first thing Blake sees in the front parlor is Caitlin’s iPhone glowing in the dock atop one of the antique end tables. The dock is connected to the stereo speakers throughout the first floor, so her phone must be the source of the Faith Hill song that’s threatening to knock him into the past. There are bloody fingerprints on its screen.

  Caitlin adds to them by turning the music down, and in the ensuing quiet he can hear Nova breathing next to him. The rush of blood in his ears gradually takes on the rhythm of a desperate, deafening pulse. It seems his every thought, his every breath, is now devoted to assuring himself that Caitlin has completely lost her mind and slipped into a world of self-inflicted violence and delusions.

  Then he sees the overturned wing chair, the bloodstained sofa cushions in a tumble on the floor. This evidence of a recent struggle guides his attention to the fat man crumpled in a fetal position on the floor next to the flipped-up edge of the Oriental rug, the same man Caitlin is now standing over. She’s also pointing a gun at his head. The man’s black outfit looks like a trick-or-treater’s idea of a cat burglar costume, save for the silver duct tape that binds his ankles and wrists.

  Compared to the man, though, Caitlin is a mess, her hair a clawed and uneven tangle, her left cheek bleeding from scratch marks. Despite these injuries, she seems radiant with feral energy, while the man at her feet is pale and wheezing from extreme blood loss.

  It doesn’t matter that Blake doesn’t recognize the man at first, because there is enough recognition and guilt in the man’s pain-widened eyes for both of them. Just the sight of his expression alone is enough to collapse Blake’s self-assurances that Caitlin’s slipped into a world of utter lunacy.

  Which means that this man is somehow connected to John’s murder . . . and Blake’s life for the last ten years has been nurtured by a lie.

  Nova’s hand comes to rest on his elbow. He’s not sure if she’s frightened or trying to comfort him, and it doesn’t matter. He is grateful just for her touch.

  “You don’t remember him, do you?” Caitlin asks. And it takes Blake a second to realize the question is directed at him. Before he can manage a response, Caitlin says, “Of course you don’t. The last time you saw him he was wearing a mask.”

  “Listen,” the man wheezes. “Please . . . listen . . .”

  “His name is Mike Simmons,” Caitlin says. “We went to high school with him, Blake. And, boy, did he fuck up. He assumed I was in on it, you see. So after I caught him in the yard, he started making me offers. And he said too much. Way too much.”

  “In on it? What’s happening?” Blake whispers. “Just . . . tell me what’s happening.”

  “There’s a tape, you see. A tape of this bastard and his friends leaving the scene of John’s murder. Troy had it. He stole it from a security system in one of the homes along the levee that night and kept it from the homicide detectives while he framed the wrong men for the murder. Troy Mangier, our hero, he had it for years. And he used it to blackmail this . . . piece of shit and his pals. When they heard he’d gone missing, he”—and she emphasizes who she’s talking about by kicking the wounded man in the stomach—“put my house under surveillance and started following me.”

  Blake feels as if his gaze is shrinking to a pinpoint somewhere above the man’s body and just below Caitlin’s chest. He is breathing through a straw and there is a tingling weightlessness throughout his shoulders and upper back that makes him feel as if the top half of his spine has gone molten.

  “This is him, Blake,” Caitlin says, her voice just above a whisper. “This is the man who killed John Fuller.”

  “No!” The man’s scream is fluid-filled and lashes his gaping mouth with spittle. “No. No. We didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t know about the pumping station. We didn’t know . . . the water. We didn’t know the water would . . .”

  Nova lets out a stunted groan. She tightens her grip on Blake’s elbow just as he begins to sink to the floor. When he lands in the chair she’s steered him into at the last moment, he finds his casual, seated pose to be almost sacrilegious, and so he bends forward and places his face in his hands because it feels like it’s going to fall off him, along with the rest of his skin and anything else designed to armor his soft, interior parts.

  He sees Troy, the handsome uniformed officer, giving interview after interview on TV, describing the arrest of Xander Higgins and Delray Morrison in precise, professional detail. He sees the man grilling steaks on the pool deck at that condo high-rise in Pensacola where they all spent a weekend together after Troy and Caitlin first started dating, when the man’s installation in their everyday lives, their lives beyond tragedy, seemed like an inevitable comfort for them all, a selfless hero assuming his rightful place. Frank Sinatra croons from the nearby stereo, and the sugar-white beach looks even more fierce and brilliant than usual beneath a sky piled high with gray storm clouds that drench the watery horizon but not the shore. And Blake sits on a lounge chair, knowing it will make for a perfect memory someday, the kind you take off the shelf and write poems about when your life has stalled out, when you’re lonely and older and working too hard—the music and the barbecue smoke and Troy’s hair and powder-blue polo shirt dancing in the hot wind off the Gulf, the great towering clouds that from this distance are all visual drama and no real rain, and Blake feeling confident that if Caitlin could land someone so handsome and brave, then surely someday he’d find someone who’d make him feel the way John could have if he’d been allowed to live.

  And the whole time, there was a tape. A tape of John’s real killers that Troy had hidden somewhere. There was a tape when Troy had turned from the grill that afternoon and sung along with Old Blue Eyes as if Blake were his only audience member in the theater in his mind. There was a tape as the clouds sailed from east to west and the music soared and Caitlin called down from the balcony overhead to ask them how much longer until the steaks were done. The whole time, there had been a tape. A tape that condemned two innocent men to early deaths.

  And now Blake can see how Troy could gamble for hours every weekend and never lose his apartment or his shirt. But a tape like that, how long can you use it before one of your victims cracks? So he’d gone after Caitlin years later, the wealthiest young woman he’d ever come acros
s in his years as a lying, duplicitous bastard. Even better, she was always tethered to a best friend who was sure to see Troy as a hero, sure to help Caitlin overlook any missteps Troy might take in the first days of their courtship.

  And suddenly no one seems knowable, every promise the seed of a betrayal, and Blake is making sounds into his palms that don’t sound quite human as Nova grips his shoulders from behind. Because never before has the full weight of something come crashing down on him quite like this, with the force and precision of the lead pipe they struck John across the head with that night.

  Blake feels a feathery sensation against his fingers and opens his eyes through tears to see Caitlin crouched on her knees before him. She’s taken both of his hands in one of hers, but in the other she still holds the gun. And behind him, Nova has stiffened. She’s watching their captive now that Caitlin has turned her back on the man.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did it this way, but I wasn’t expecting you, and I was planning to . . . Never mind that. I’m not sorry. I’m glad you’re feeling it all at once. I’m glad that you’re not shutting it out, denying it. Sometimes you can be too smart for your own good, Blake. Sometimes it’s important just to feel things, even when it’s rage. Especially when it’s rage.

  “You can’t . . . explain to someone that the world is not what they think it is. They have to see it for themselves. They have to learn it for themselves. I mean, look at me. You came to me with all those people who said they’d seen Troy in the casinos, and I refused to believe you. And what was my reward? I walk in on him fucking some whore at my own birthday party. And what do I do? I run out to the gazebo and I grab a champagne glass and I slash my wrists and I get ready to die. But instead, something else happens. Something comes up from the earth, and it drinks from me, Blake.