by Hamill, Ike
“I’ll be lucky if I hear from him by September,” Brad said to the ceiling. “On the other hand, I don’t have to work until September, if I don’t want to.”
Despite the lower hourly rate, Phil’s insistence on overtime and weekend work netted Brad a huge windfall for June and July. He always kept a decent financial cushion to weather the lean times. Now he had enough money saved to coast for a year without another contract; not that he would ever indulge himself to such a degree.
Brad intertwined his fingers behind his head and leaned back farther.
“What if I just quit?” he asked nobody. “What if I just fax over a picture of my middle finger? Phil can get one of the Prague guys to finish up this mess. Sure, it will take him three times as long, but they only charge half as much. He’ll be a hero until they figure out the Prague guys don’t know jack shit about their data.”
Brad closed his eyes and tried to imagine what his life would actually be like if he quit. He always pictured a perfect life—he would have time to work on the house, clean up the yard, or maybe meet some new people in town. But he knew better. Between jobs he always obsessed about money and trying to find a new job. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy a stress-free life; it would make him anxious.
He shifted his weight and dropped his fingers to the keyboard. In a few minutes he figured out how to fax his estimate to Phil.
“Now I just have to wait,” he said to the monitor. The clock on his computer read half-past ten. “Looks like a good day for a pre-lunch walk.”
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
BRAD STARTED DOWN the path looking at his feet. This time he wanted to be careful where he stepped. Remembering his encounter with the mystery vines over a month before, he wore his hiking boots and jeans. A clicking sound ahead made him stop and look up. He stood, still a hundred yards from the place where the vine had wrapped around his leg, and listened to the clicking.
The clicking was loud, and sounded like it came from up on the hill. Whatever it was clicked about twice a second, then sped up to several times that rate, and then slowed again. Brad almost felt hypnotized by the rhythm. He started forward again, keeping his focus on the clicking. Nobody ever came back here except Brad. Even in hunting season, people didn’t stray this far. Dragging a deer a mile through thick woods didn’t appeal to the local hunters.
One year a neighbor he’d never met came to the door and asked Brad to unlock the gate so he could get his deer out to his truck. That was back when Karen had still been alive and married to Brad. She stood behind him as he talked to the hunter on the porch.
Wearing an orange hat and camo shirt and pants, the man had introduced himself and then explained his request, “I’m wondering if you can unlock your gate so I can haul out my deer.” The man stood drenched in sweat despite the cool November day.
“Boy,” Brad said, “you look like you’ve been dragging that deer for half a mile.”
“No,” the hunter laughed, “not quite that far, but it was quite a haul.”
“So, less than half a mile?” Brad asked. He felt Karen’s hand on his back. The hand might have meant “good job,” or maybe just “back off.” He didn’t know.
“Maybe a few hundred yards, I guess,” the hunter said. His smile faltered.
“So a quarter of a mile?” Brad asked.
“Look, if you could just open the gate, or maybe loan me the key?” the hunter asked.
“I’m just asking because our property extends at least a half mile in every direction from that gate, unless you took the deer across a road,” Brad said. “And since we spent the better part of five hundred dollars putting up signs every fifty feet, I would assume you know—we don’t allow hunting on our property.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” the hunter said. “I didn’t see your signs, and I didn’t mean to hunt without your permission.”
“Understood,” Brad said.
“But I’ve got a deer right on the other side of your gate. I certainly won’t hunt your land again, but what do you want me to do? Should I just leave it there, or are you going to let me through the gate?”
“I tell you what,” Brad said. “You can haul it back around our fence, or you can leave it there and I’ll have the game warden come collect it.”
The hunter left, furious. The confrontation didn’t give Brad any satisfaction.
Brad recalled his anger as he stood listening to the clicking sound. He didn’t even realize he’d stopped moving. The confrontation with the hunter had been years before, but he’d seen it play out right before his eyes, like a movie. He wanted to turn around and go back to the house. He forced his feet to move forward, up the hill, towards the clicking.
When Brad reached the edge of the clearing, the clicking noise stopped. It had been loud enough to echo off the trees to his left. After the clicking stopped the normal noises of summer began again. Birds sang, the occasional early cricket chirped, and squirrels rustled through the underbrush. Had it been his imagination that those sounds were absent during the clicking? Brad couldn’t decide.
The vines had spread since he’d been there last. They now covered the entire cleared area and stretched across the path where it picked up on the other side. On his left, he saw the vines curling up the trunks of the trees. Some trees were nearly choked with vines. The leaves looked brown on these trees—they wouldn’t live to see another spring. Pink and purple flowers stood out on the vines, but none were close enough for Brad to inspect. These vines were too long to cross. If they acted like the one he’d seen back in June, they would wrap all the way up to his neck, he figured.
Brad thought about going to town, to the garden center with the big greenhouse. They would know what the vine was, and probably how to kill it. He pulled his gardening gloves from his back pocket and crouched, grabbing the smallest vine near his feet. When he tugged on the vine, it immediately constricted, like a boa, on his gloved hand. Brad slashed at it with his knife, cutting off about a foot. He put his gloved hand in a plastic bag and pulled off the glove and vine.
Brad was still crouched down on his haunches when he heard the click again. It sounded just once. He moved only his head and looked up. He couldn’t see anything unusual. Trees, bushes, vines—tons of vines, a big rock, and clear blue sky.
Click—he heard it again.
Brad’s brow furrowed as he scanned the clearing again. Something was out of place. The rock—what was that giant gray rock doing over near the far tree line? He and Karen had cleared every inch of the pasture themselves. He would have remembered a big stately boulder at the edge of it. There was another problem with the rock—it didn’t have vines draped all over it. Everything else he could see was covered by the creeping menace. Only the rock sat unmolested.
He wanted to get a closer look, but didn’t think it wise to try to cross the vine patch. From where he stood, it looked like a truly horrible idea. Just one of those vines had incapacitated his bare leg a month and a half before, and it only measured a few feet long. Now the vines were piled in a tangled mess, looking waist-deep in parts.
Brad backed down the path until he found a clear patch of alders. He struck out on a course tangential to the edge of the clearing, hoping to circle around through the woods to the other side. A couple dozen yards later, he was stopped by the vines again. A swath of vines, about ten feet across, passed through the trees. Some curled up the trunks to choke out the low trees, but most just piled on themselves to form a little river of vegetation. Brad swung the bag containing the glove and piece of vine back and forth and considered his options.
He followed the vine river for a while, away from the clearing. It didn’t show any signs of petering out.
The clicking started again: click, click, click, click-click-click-click, click, click, click. Brad turned and listened. It was almost soothing. He reached out to steady himself on a tree and nearly put his hand on a curling vine.
Brad thought about his grandfather, Grandpa Joe. Grandpa Joe was a logging
man until he started working as a surveyor for the state. By the time Brad was old enough to spend his summers with Grandpa Joe, the old man retired, but still cut firewood as a hobby. He used to take Brad out in the woods with him when Brad would visit.
Grandpa Joe always cut with his four foot bow saw, and delimbed with a razor-sharp axe. Joe carried the saw over his left shoulder and the axe in his right hand, so Brad carried the small chainsaw. Grandpa Joe called the chainsaw “Justin.”
“Why do you call the chainsaw Justin?” Brad asked one day.
“Same reason I keep it in a case,” Grandpa Joe said.
“Why’s that?” young Brad asked.
“I don’t intend to use it, but I have you bring it along Justin Case,” Joe said.
Grandpa Joe smiled at Brad when he saw that Brad finally got the joke. The old man could bring down a tree and have it bucked into perfect, four-foot segments before most people could even get their chainsaw started. And Grandpa Joe moved almost silently through the woods. The only noise you’d hear would be when he crashed the next tree to the ground.
Brad blinked several times and snapped himself from the memory. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his free hand. He felt like he’d been asleep on his feet. The clicking stopped again.
“Am I crazy, or did you get closer to me?” Brad asked the vine river. He pulled his phone from his back pocket to check the time.
“What?” he whispered. For some reason the clock on his phone read one in the afternoon. If it was right, somehow he’d spent over two hours on his twenty minute walk.
“Jesus,” he whispered. Movement drew his eyes to the right. On the tree a few feet away, blossoms opened up on the curling vine. They started from the tip of the vine and opened one at a time down its length. To Brad it looked like the world’s slowest fireworks display. They were a plush, throaty blossom, reminding Brad of Morning Glories. The flowers alternated in color: pink, purple, pink, purple. The ones down near the base of the tree were larger than the ones at the tip of the vine, which were almost at eye level.
Brad backed up two steps without taking his eyes off the strange flowers. He pulled out his utility knife, thinking he should get a sample with flowers on it, but then changed his mind. Those vines hadn’t been there when he zonked out. What if he was just one more hypnosis away from being enveloped by the vines? He tore his gaze away from the pretty flowers and scanned for a good exit route.
He could feel his heart beating faster. It had been so long since Brad really felt fear, it was almost nice. The fear felt like a leftover emotion from childhood; something he wasn’t sure he would ever experience again so completely. There’d been an adrenaline rush the time the woman at the gas station almost backed into his car, but no real fear. Brad fed into the emotion, wanting to keep it going. He started walking.
The vine river spread out—Brad walked almost directly downhill to get away from them. His direct route back to his road had been flanked. After a minute of picking his way through the woods, the vines around Brad started to peter out. His pace slowed until the clicking sound started again. It was still coming from up the hill, from his clearing, but it brought Brad’s fear back with a rush. He started to run downhill through the woods, back towards his house.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
BRAD DROPPED HIS latest vine sample back at the house and grabbed his binoculars from the laundry room. He hauled his biggest ladder from its hooks on the outside of the garage and headed for the big pine trees down near the pond. His property sloped down from the new pasture out back, and then up from a gully to the house. From the ladder, he thought he might be able to get a look at the pasture.
He propped the ladder just below a cluster of branches and started climbing. Way off in the distance, he could still hear the rhythmic clicking.
“Music,” he said to himself. For a second, he tried to fish the earphones out of his pocket while he stood on the ladder, but then he changed his mind and climbed back down.
Brad talked to himself while he hooked the earphones up to his music player—“Just in case. Justin Case. Maybe if I can’t hear you, I won’t get hypnotized? Worth a shot.” He found some classic rock to act as his soundtrack for his little spying mission.
Even at the top of the ladder, he was still a little lower than the clearing on the far hill, but he had a pretty good view. The branches he leaned on were covered in sap, but they felt more stable than trying to balance on the ladder. Brad propped his elbows on a branch so he could stead his hands for the binoculars.
He could see a portion of his overgrown road and the vine-covered clearing. The strange rock sat dead center in the clearing.
“I thought you were closer to the trees,” Brad said to himself. He couldn’t hear himself over the music. He glanced around, suddenly self-conscious and certain he’d see new vines climbing up the pine tree, or even the ladder itself. The drums on his music dropped into a low, steady beat. Brad thought he could hear the clicking beneath the beat.
With the binoculars at maximum magnification, his view jittered with each small movement of his hands. It almost looked like the rock was moving, but he couldn’t tell for sure. Brad switched back and forth between looking through the binoculars and pulling them down to squint over the distance.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The breath steadied his hands. That’s when he figured it out—the rock wasn’t moving; it was spinning. It spun very slowly, clockwise. One of the bumps on the right profile of the big boulder slowly melted as it moved to the left. It took several minutes, but eventually he saw the same bump appear on the left side.
Brad hung the binoculars around his neck and fished his cell phone out his pocket. He turned off the music and ran through the contact list until he found the name he wanted. He started to dial and then changed his mind. Brad put the phone away and climbed down the ladder.
Once he stood safely on the ground again he dialed his friend.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
“THANKS FOR COMING over so fast,” Brad said.
Brad walked his old friend Stavros back towards the pine tree where the ladder still stood against the tree.
“You sounded pretty panicked,” Stavros said. “Besides, I was just watching the crew dig up the culverts down by the fire station.”
Stavros Orestes acted as the Code Enforcement Officer for Kingston. Technically, Brad’s property was in Kingston Depot, which had a completely separate town government and a different enforcement officer, so Stavros was only there unofficially.
“Honestly? I’m a little freaked out,” Brad said. “Something strange is going on in my back forty.”
“Yeah, I heard. Apparently something so strange you wouldn’t even give me the slightest clue on the phone,” Stavros said.
“Wait, stop,” Brad said, “do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Stavros asked.
“That clicking noise. Way off in the distance, do you hear it?” Brad asked. It was obvious to Brad, but he knew exactly what to listen for.
“I hear a thousand things clicking,” Stavros said. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Never mind, you’ll hear it better from the ladder anyway,” Brad said.
He walked his friend across the back yard, around the blackberry patch, and down to the big pine tree where his ladder stood.
“Here, take these,” Brad said, handing the binoculars to Stavros. “Look straight across this way, over at the clearing at the top of the hill.”
“What am I looking for?" Stavros asked.
“The whole thing is covered in a weird kind of weed, but you’ll have to see it up close. Look for the rock in the middle of the clearing,” Brad said.
“Okay,” Stavros said.
Stavros Orestes wore his casual work clothes—cargo shorts, hiking boots, and a short-sleeve chambray shirt. He was accustomed to getting dirty during the course of the day and had no objection to climbing a ladder or a tree. He held t
he binoculars in one hand and quickly climbed the ladder with the other.
“I see the clearing, but no rock,” Stavros said.
“It might not be in the middle anymore,” Brad said.
Stavros lowered the binoculars and looked down at Brad, who stood on the ground looking up.
“Say that again?” Stavros asked.
“Just keep looking,” Brad said.
Stavros scanned the clearing for a few minutes before descending and handing the binoculars back. Brad couldn’t stand it—he climbed up and verified the rock had disappeared.
“I didn’t think it would move that fast,” Brad said. “I was looking at it right before you showed up.”
“So it’s not a rock?" Stavros asked.
“I would have sworn it was,” Brad said, “except it was rotating.”
Stavros spun his finger in the air.
“No,” Brad said, “not rolling, on a vertical axis. Clockwise. Like this.” Brad demonstrated, making a stirring motion with his own finger.
“That’s definitely not normal,” Stavros said, smiling. “You’ve got your rolling stones, and your stationary ones. Those are usually the only two types. Why don’t we just walk up there and you can show me where it was?”
“I think it might be dangerous,” Brad said. “I think vines try to hypnotize you so they can eat you.”
“Not to be an ass or anything,” Stavros said, “but you’re feeling okay, right? Not too much stress with your job or anything lately? Any dizziness, change in medication?”
“Come inside,” Brad said. “I’ll tell you the whole story and show you a piece of vine.”
Brad walked Stavros into the kitchen, relating all the details as they walked. The plastic bag with the vine lay on the counter. Brad’s hands shook a little as he dumped the bag out on the counter. He expected it to be empty; for the hunk of vine to have disappeared just like the last one. The glove fell out, but nothing else came out of the bag. He turned it inside out and let out a relieved breath when he found the piece of vine clinging to the bag.