The Vines

by Christopher Rice

  Blake jumps when he hears footsteps outside. Nova is still.

  The screen door whines on its hinges, and a pleasant smell hits Blake. It can’t be anything as ordinary as cologne, he thinks. It must be the cloying musk of some impossible new creature composed of flowers and insects. But then Willie is standing in the living room with them. Something about him seems different, and Blake finds himself perfectly willing to accept the man before him as a hallucination.

  The smell of cologne is stronger now. The older man’s chest is heaving with frightened breaths, and Blake realizes Willie Thomas looks different because he is scrubbed and coiffed and dressed to impress. A powder-blue long-sleeved dress shirt, the top few buttons undone, showing off his shaved chest, silk pants the color of café au lait. He’s come from a night on the town, Blake realizes, and he looks like he’s had a good time. But one glance at his daughter and he’s down on one knee next to the sofa, stroking her forehead.

  Nova clutches his shoulder, but this isn’t enough to reassure Willie that his daughter still walks among the living and the sane. He grips her face in both hands, studies her as if the secret to her condition will be written in her sclera.

  “Where were you?” Blake asks.

  “She didn’t answer her phone. I was callin’ and callin’ . . .”

  “Your sister said you came here.”

  Willie shakes his head. “I got a lady . . . in N’Awlins . . . Nova, she don’t . . . I don’t like to talk about it in front of . . .” It’s clear Willie isn’t sure whether or not his daughter will hear these words even now. “I didn’t tell my sister where I was, ’cause I didn’t want her in my bidness . . . She jes thought I came back here, but I was at Dooky Chase with a lady. That’s all. That’s all . . .” His final words become a gentle cooing assurance his daughter can’t seem to hear.

  “Willie . . .”

  “What happened here?”

  “I—have you been to the house?”

  “No. No . . . I came right here. Then I saw your cars, so I—Mister Blake, what happened here?”

  Nova is crying silently. It’s her father’s voice, no doubt, and her father’s gentle touch. The feel of both have pulled her back inside her body, and while the return might be painful for her, Blake is relieved to see it.

  “Willie, I need you to tell me everything about this place. Everything you wouldn’t tell me today when we were in the shed looking at those holes.”

  He can see the resistance again in Willie’s furrowed brow, in the long and deliberate way he looks back at his supine daughter.

  “Spring House is falling apart, Willie. You don’t need to carry it on your back anymore.”

  “What did she do?” Willie whispers.

  “Nova? She didn’t—nothing. She’s a—”

  “Miss Caitlin. What did she do?”

  Only when his vision of Willie wobbles and splits does he realize his own eyes have filled with tears. He blinks them back, listens to his shallow breathing as if it is the gentle ticking of a clock and he’s all by himself, trying to meditate.

  “I ain’t got no secrets ’bout dis place,” Willie finally says. “It was like she said today in the shed. More of a feelin’ than much else.”

  “A feeling?”

  “Plants never act right ’round here. They move when you ain’t looking.”

  “Those are events, not feelings.”

  “Maybe . . . Maybe not. But they always happen when you ain’t looking, so it’s not like they can be proved. But what they gave me—dat was the feelin’.”

  “What kind of feeling?”

  “I ain’t never seen no lady in a white dress floatin’ over da yard or some slave draggin’ her sad old behind ’round the attic singin’ some kinda spiritual. But maybe . . . It makes me think, maybe ghosts, they don’t act like they do in the movies. They don’t jes move the dishes and the chairs when we ain’t looking. They move everything and everyone. They like air and water. ’Cause they everywhere is where they are. They in the ground, they in the leaves. They sideways and all through everything . . . and waitin’ to be fed.”

  Every monstrous surge that bore down on him over the past hour—from the vines that suckled his chest to the clouds of determined insects that literally carried away Caitlin’s soul—seemed possessed by a single predatory force, and Blake can think of no better description for it than the soft poetry Willie just whispered.

  “Miss Caitlin . . . she fed ’em, didn’t she?” Willie asks.

  Blake can only nod.

  “I always thought it was magic, not ghosts. The way the flowers here would move and dance. And I thought it’d be good, Mister Blake. I thought it’d be a good thing for her . . .”

  “For who? Caitlin?”

  Instead of answering, Willie cups Nova’s forehead, and Blake realizes the her in Willie’s last sentence must be his own daughter, Nova. Somehow the magic in the soil here would be good for Nova, but how?

  “Caitlin . . . ,” Willie says quietly, but his attention is focused on his daughter, and Blake feels like the mention of Caitlin’s name is just Willie’s attempt to distract him. “Where’s Caitlin?”

  “Gone,” Nova answers, in a clear and steady voice that sounds free of both tears and shock. And then she begins to tell her father what happened.

  29

  In room 14 of the Hibiscus Inn, Taletha Peterson distracts herself from the dry and passionless thrusts of her latest customer by doing a mental inventory of the cars she passed on her way in. In her mind’s eye, she tries to re-create the scattering of pickup trucks parked around the motel’s sad, lightless swimming pool and its wilting chain-link fence. The battered Nissan Sentra, the one with the faded SAVE OUR LAKE bumper sticker, is probably her best bet if things go south. Too bad she can’t remember exactly where it is.

  She’d wager her stash the car belongs to Clay, the quiet, pimply kid who works the graveyard shift and always smells like bug spray no matter how much body powder he uses. Hell, maybe the body powder is what makes Clay smell like that white pickup truck that used to belch through Taletha’s old neighborhood late at night, rank smoke billowing from the pipe in back, smoke that sent spiny buck-moth caterpillars tumbling to the hood of her mother’s car. Or maybe Taletha’s just too damn sensitive, which is what her daddy always used to say right before he’d mess with her. She’s sensitive when it comes to smells, that’s for sure. She prefers the men in her life to smell like nothing at all. That way they’ll be easier to forget.

  Clay’s a nice guy. Clay lets her bring johns to empty rooms as long as she slips him a few twenties every now and then. Twenties, not fifties. And not hand jobs like most of the motel managers she works with. There was a time in Taletha’s life when a man had to do more than not demand sex for favors for Taletha to consider him a nice guy, but that’s a hazy period now, so far from this dingy motel room that it’s a distant country. A faraway land beyond vast, deep lakes dug by a glacier named Phil, a drummer who took her for everything she was worth—which wasn’t much—but not before treating her to the first suck of lung-burning, head-clearing bliss from a glass pipe.

  Where the hell was that Sentra parked? Close to the front office so Clay could keep an eye on it? It’s only been ten, maybe fifteen minutes since she walked past the thing, her latest customer, Mr. Lawyer Pants McUptown, hot on her heels and smelling of whiskey, and still she can’t place that damn car.

  If she could shut her eyes maybe, try a little astral projection, or whatever her sister used to call it. But Lawyer Pants—on his first visit, he said his name was Charles, but that was probably bullshit—is taking her missionary, and with each graceless thrust he stares down at her with the pained intensity of a man trying to take a dump.

  She remembers another vehicle parked outside, one of those mini-RVs you can rent these days, the kind with the rental company’s logo painted in b
right, cheery letters along the side, letters that seem to scream, Been out of my element for months! Please rape and murder me!

  But Taletha doesn’t know if those things have an alarm, so the Sentra’s going to have to be her fail-safe. If for some reason things go to shit inside this mildew-smelling little room with its plaid curtains and growling window-unit air conditioner, she’ll run for the Sentra and kick its rear bumper hard enough to set off the alarm.

  Sometimes that’s all it takes. Sometimes the alarm is enough to freeze a psycho where he stands, the belt still raised over one shoulder or the gun she didn’t notice aimed at her disappearing shadow, his head still swarming with sick-fuck ideas he didn’t have the balls to mention when they were arranging a price. And sometimes that’s not enough, sometimes a few people will have to pop out of their rooms first. And then other times, times she wants to forget, she just has to run like hell and grab for the nearest handful of rocks. But whatever the case, a car alarm in the middle of the night has saved Taletha Peterson’s ass (and her face and her breasts and her fingers) on more than a few occasions.

  Suddenly Lawyer Pants flips her over like she’s a sack of potatoes, slides one arm under her waist, and pulls back until she’s on all fours. She’s afraid he’s sensed how far she’s slipped from her own body, from their passionless rutting, but she also needs to give him a gentle little reminder—doggy style’s cool but the backdoor’s off-limits. But before she can address either issue, she’s distracted by a dark flutter in the lamp’s frail glow. Suddenly Mr. Lawyer Pants is back inside of her—the traditional way, thank God—and Taletha is staring at the giant bug that’s just landed on the man’s wedding ring.

  Last time the guy took care to stuff the little gold band in his jeans pocket before he stripped down. But tonight he’s drunk, so he left it out on the nightstand. It looks tiny and insignificant now, but maybe that’s because the bug resting on it is about the length of Taletha’s index finger.

  . . . and it’s staring at me. These words shudder through her, bringing unwanted life to parts of her body she instinctively knows how to deaden before every trick. If it were any bigger, she would figure it was a Halloween toy some jerk was controlling with a string. But it’s just big enough to be . . . wrong.

  And the color, a black so deep she finds herself groping for the right word to describe the shade. It’s a word that seems fancy, but she’s heard it before a bunch of times throughout her life, just not to describe a damn bug. Black as night. Black as . . . lava. Obsidian. The color of cooled, frozen lava. Despite its size, the bug is so black its individual features are impossible to discern, except for the two forelegs that rest atop the gold band, whisking slightly back and forth as if they’re kissing the metal. She’s seen squirrels that are like this, so accustomed to humans they’re not afraid of them. But a bug? This thing is perched, birdlike, patient, positively studious.

  “What are you?” Taletha whispers. But she’s loud enough to cause the man on top of her to jerk and go still.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he curses.

  His feet hit the carpet, and as he stumbles toward the nightstand she can’t tell if he’s as bothered by the bug’s wrongness as she is, or if he just wants the damn thing off his precious little ring.

  Taletha has pushed herself halfway across the bed by the time the man swats at the insect as if it were just a housefly. It takes to the air, its wings each filled with a glistening pattern that looks like oil floating on water. Then the bug is gone.

  Taletha says, “Where did it—”

  Lawyer Pants makes a sound like he’s been kicked in the chest. Lightning bolts of pain seem to shoot through the man’s body as he stumbles backward across the room. And Taletha is as stricken by his gape-mouthed silence as she is by his shuddering and by the tears sprouting from his eyes. The stuttering groans that rip from his chest sound like some little kid’s parody of monkey sounds.

  The bug is gone. Taletha can’t see it anywhere.

  It must be clamped between the guy’s hands, which are still clasped in front of him even as his back slams to the wall.

  Blood pours from between the man’s fingers. His hairy legs crumple under him like windless flags. Once his ass hits the carpet, his arms go lax too—his hands unclasp and that’s when Taletha sees the gaping red hole in his right palm. He crushed it, she thinks. He crushed it and it stung him, and now he’s dying.

  But the hole is too big for a stinger, and she didn’t remember it having a stinger to begin with, and . . .

  Then the bug flies toward her out of the man’s open mouth.

  Clay Lee’s uncle has owned the Hibiscus Inn for thirty years, and because Clay is not a reader, he gets a panicky feeling in his chest when his uncle talks about the days when all the TV stations used to sign off around midnight with some recording of the national anthem, leaving whoever was stuck behind the motel’s front desk with a pile of magazines and some shitty paperback novels.

  Clay is relieved those days are long gone. Clay is relieved that the television people finally came to their senses and realized that there is another America out there, an America of men and women who have to spend the graveyard shift behind a desk and need round-the-clock reruns of stupid cop shows and repeats of the ten o’clock news or else an unexpected late-night customer will walk in on them playing with themselves and then they’ll have to explain the whole thing to their mother and maybe get fired by their uncle.

  Not Clay. On a job he can never quit unless he wants to get kicked out of his mother’s house, Clay has round-the-clock entertainment, and that’s why when he hears a loud crash followed by a car alarm, he assumes it’s coming from the episode of Law & Order: SVU he’s been struggling to follow for a half hour now. But the folks on the idiot box are standing inside a morgue talking over a dead body. Not a car in the shot. In fact, it’s been several scenes since anyone in the episode has actually gone outside at all.

  Headlights flash in the front office’s glass wall, winking out a mad accompaniment to the bleating alarm. At first Clay thinks they belong to a car that’s stalled out on the highway. Then he realizes they’re a reflection, a reflection of his car.

  The first thing he sees when he bursts from the office is the open door to room 14 clear across the parking lot, the dull glow of one of the lamps within. Then he sees one of the lounge chairs from beside the swimming pool resting inside the shattered rear window of his Sentra. Someone’s thrown it so hard it’s sitting half-in, half-out of his car, and that someone has to be Taletha, because she’s down on all fours, back rising and heaving, the sounds coming out of her a mixture of retches and sobs. He’s not sure whether to run to her or from her, and the battle between these urges freezes him in the office’s door.

  He’s calculating the cost of the broken window and trying to recall the last time his mom nagged him to renew his insurance policy when he hears a sound louder and more grating than Taletha’s wheezing. It seems to be coming from room 14, and it makes him think that the only thing worse than forking over a bunch of dough to fix his own shit car will be the amount of free overtime he’ll have to give his uncle if one of the rooms gets destroyed on his watch.

  He’s almost past Taletha when she reaches out and grabs the leg of his pants with a clawlike grip. “Don’t,” she gasps. “Don’t go . . . over there.”

  He shakes himself free, confident whatever’s buzzing away inside room 14 won’t be as impossible to deal with as some meth-head hooker who just wrecked his ride.

  He’s about ten paces from the doorway when he sees what at first he thinks is a ghost. But it’s not. It’s a man, a man he glimpsed only minutes earlier as he walked across the parking lot with Taletha, only now this man is standing by himself in the middle of the room, arms spread in a lazy-looking parody of a crucifixion, and it takes a few minutes for Clay to realize the man is hovering several feet above the floor. The force that seems
to suspend the man is what’s distracted Clay, rendering him as mute and paralyzed as a pilgrim at Lourdes. They have to be bugs, but they are blacker than any bug he has ever seen, and there is an elegance and organization to their cyclonic swirl that almost masks the horror of the scene. And in the all-encompassing grip of this swarm, the man’s body is being eaten away with such speed and precision that not a single drop of blood hits the carpet below, and in another few moments, he will be gone. Ground away, rubbed out.

  From within the cold, expanding prison of his shock, Clay wonders if the bones will be all that’s left at the end of it. If they’ll fall to the carpet in a dry tumble, and if out of respect for the man, he should wait for this awful moment.

  Behind him in the parking lot, a man is screaming now. A man who’s left the door to room 5 open behind him as he races for the highway. The lamp inside has been knocked to the floor during the man’s escape, but Clay can see what, from this distance, appear to be tiny droplets of black circling through the entire room, a cloud just like the one inside room 14.

  Still down on all fours behind his Sentra, Taletha places her palms against her open mouth, brings them away, places them against her mouth, and brings them away, and he realizes she’s been doing this ever since Clay shook his leg free of her grip.

  She must think they’re inside of her, but Clay knows they aren’t. Clay knows if they wanted her, she’d be dead already. Because these things, whatever they are, they don’t fuck around and they don’t feel the need to hide.

  The man who burst from room 5 is standing in the middle of the highway now, waving his arms at nothing. Clay wonders if one of the swarms got him, if he’s trying to wave them away, but his movements are still his own, and when a truck swerves to avoid him before slamming on the brakes, he sees the man is untouched, unharmed, just like Taletha. Just like him. And when the driver of the truck steps out, shouting obscenities, the man collapses in his arms, bawling like a baby.