The Vines Page 15

  Then something brushes Clay’s face. He’s staring at one of them. It’s hovering inches from the tip of his nose, so black he could mistake it for a fragment of shadow if not for the buzz of its wings.

  Taletha sees it and lets out a strangled cry. The sense that the insect is staring into him—into his soul—is no more preposterous than any of the other horrors he’s just witnessed, and so Clay Lee feels his limbs go lax, feels a kind of surrender take him, and believes, in some fundamental and primitive way, that if he’s obedient during this examination, he will make it to the other side in one piece.

  And he’s correct.

  Whatever this creature is, it sees nothing in Clay that will satisfy its demonic hunger, and so after a minute of study it zips off into the shadows to join one of the several feasts now taking place in different rooms of the Hibiscus Inn.

  And for the first time Clay starts to see the larger pattern, not just the open doors and the U-shaped layout of rooms and parked cars all around him, but a kind of awful regularity to the skin-rending impossibilities blanketing the Hibiscus Inn.

  Taletha is still on her knees a few feet away from the car she just wrecked, out of her mind with fear but physically unharmed, trying to cough up a bug in her lungs Clay is sure she’s just imagining. But her rich, shifty-looking john, the same asshole who always made a point of avoiding Clay’s eyes when he scurried past the front office, was just turned into bug meat. And the man who just ran from room 5 and into some truck driver’s arms is Sidney Dautreaux. The guy works most of the year offshore, but he occasionally spends a night at the Hibiscus Inn so he can stick it to Lisa LaPearl, whose been married to that drunk Joseph Marigny for about five years now and doesn’t have the guts or the money to leave him. Clay saw Lisa and Sidney go into room 5 together after he handed Sidney the key not thirty minutes ago, but now there’s no sign of Lisa at all, just another furious buzz of insects inside the room she should have come running out of, screaming bloody murder. But she didn’t.

  She still hasn’t. She didn’t run and he can’t hear any screams—just more bugs.

  Because they’re eating her too.

  But not Sidney. Not Taletha. And not him.

  And that’s when it hits him, a conclusion so simple it feels like a strange, sudden comfort amid the surrounding horror.

  It’s the cheaters, Clay Lee thinks. Son of a bitch, they’re only eating the cheaters.

  30

  Blake wanted to go back to the main house alone, but Willie wouldn’t let him, and there was no leaving Nova there by herself. So the three of them are walking close together through the garden’s small maze of fountains and waist-high hedges when a sound comes from underneath the gazebo like mud being hurled into a wood chipper.

  The gazebo’s entire floor surges upward. Nova screams and throws her arms around her father. Willie raises his shotgun in a practiced grip. Silence falls. The gazebo now looks like it’s tilting atop a small lava dome, several feet above ground level.

  Nova’s breaths sound more like whimpers. Willie makes no move to lower the oily-looking firearm. He has changed from his silk dress pants into a pair of blue jeans, and the cartridge of shells makes an obscene bulge in his front pocket.

  “I thought you said it didn’t care nothin’ ’bout us,” Willie finally says.

  They’ve been frozen for a good five minutes, awaiting the next horrible event.

  “I said it targets,” Blake says. “That’s what I said. The vines, the bugs . . . they go after specific people and they all have to be guilty of the same—”

  The gazebo crackles. Willie straightens, raises the gun. But it’s just a dull clatter of floorboards falling into the pit, which is now a few feet deeper thanks to the sudden pregnancy of the surrounding walls. A few seconds later, the overhead light inside shorts out, its wires severed by the eruption.

  “It’s a process,” Blake says, once he has his breath back. “That’s what I said. Whatever this thing is, it’s a process . . .”

  “Somebody around here feedin’ blood to those vines right now?” Willie asks. “What’s all this . . . nonsense got to do with the process?” He jerks the shotgun’s barrel in the direction of the tilting gazebo.

  “I don’t know. The bugs, maybe.”

  “The bugs?” Willie asks. “The ones that took Caitlin?”

  “Yeah, the way they left . . . it was like they were headed somewhere. Maybe whatever they’re doing is causing that. I don’t know. It’s all connected. That’s all I know. It’s connected . . .”

  Blake is only a few feet from the main house when he sees a crystalline pulse of light reflected in the front parlor’s chandelier.

  He stops in the doorway, hoping to absorb every detail of the room before he crosses the threshold.

  The holes in the floor are just like the ones they saw in the shed earlier that day, only with splintered rims. The story of Mike Simmons’s vain struggle against the vines is written in a long trail of drying black bloodstains that move from the varnished hardwood just inside the doorway to the Oriental rug. But here again is evidence of the vines’ precision, of their ability to punch through solid objects with preternatural efficiency. These surgical details remind Blake that it was really Kyle Austin’s body that tore gaping holes through each floor, from the widow’s walk on down, not the vines themselves, and suddenly the urge to vomit returns with eye-watering vengeance.

  So he focuses on the flower that emerges gracefully from a splintered hole in the middle of the floor. It’s a vital, fully powered version of the one he saw in Caitlin’s solarium that evening. A perfect match with Nova’s description of what she saw in the shed right after Troy vanished. The pulses of bright light that flush its white petals seem to have no beginning, end, or specific center, and Blake can’t discern a specific rhythm. They are not mere bioluminescence; they are a presence, a glow that looks powerful enough to float free of the plant structure itself.

  He’s half-afraid that he’ll be hypnotized if he stares at them for too long. But that would be a charm compared to the other vicious capabilities of these plants, so he doesn’t force himself to look away.

  He blinks madly and wonders if the chandelier overhead is devolving into hallucination, but the bugs dappling its crystals appear solid and shaded and real. The profusion seems unholy, but the participants are everyday creatures, nothing like the winged black monsters that exploded throughout the foyer after Caitlin was consumed; these are cicadas, houseflies, and moths. And he wants to believe it’s the chandelier’s soft glow that’s drawn them here, but he knows this is just his desperate desire to cling to the last vestiges of an ordinary world.

  It’s the flower they are drawn to, the same glowing, impossible blossom onto which Nova is now emptying an entire can of lighter fluid. Willie’s expression suggests a collision of urges: should he lower the gun and pull his daughter back, or should he keep the firearm at the ready in case all hell breaks loose?

  Over one shoulder, Nova says to Blake, “Back up! Now!”

  Blake moves away as far as the doorway to the back porch. Nova pours a thin trail of lighter fluid several feet out from the blossom. The massive white petals glow unapologetically despite having been doused. She flicks off the child safety on the fireplace lighter in her left hand, brings the tiny, focused flame to the puddle of fluid at her feet.

  The fluid ignites in a single, blink-fast whoosh. The flames are instantly sucked up and over the flower and into the air above.

  Nova rocks back off of her knees, her butt hitting the floor with a hard thud. Willie jumps back a step.

  The bugs explode from the crystals in a frenzied cloud.

  The flames, which have become a single arc of blue and orange, race up the outline of some vague and previously invisible shape that fills the air above the unmarred blossoms. A hint of a face or a silhouette, Blake can’t tell. But it’s ther
e for a second, and then all of it’s gone, like the fire has been consumed by the air itself, and save for a scorch mark in the spot where Nova first touched the lighter to the fluid, there’s no evidence of her attempt to destroy the flower at all.

  All of it happens so fast Blake’s attention ends up on the bugs again. A swirl of blue fire just ignited below them like a giant Bunsen burner, and it still wasn’t enough to force them into full retreat. They had moved, agitated, but now they close over the chandelier again, a buzzing, swirling testimony to the draw of whatever dark power resides within the blossom’s undisturbed glow.

  When Blake leaves the room, Nova and Willie don’t move, and he figures they’re still stricken by the pale suggestion of a ghost that was briefly illuminated by Nova’s unsuccessful attempt to destroy the flower.

  In the ruins of the small study just off the foyer, beneath the ceiling destroyed by Kyle Austin’s speared body, Blake finds the second blossom, a mirror image of the first, just as vital, just as illuminated, a slender thread of fierce beauty amid the dangling Sheetrock and overturned leather-tufted desk chair. Lining the holes in the ceiling are more regiments of hypnotized insects. They’re gathering here around this blossom as well.

  Blake stumbles into the house’s grand foyer, because here there is no wreckage or debris or veins of june bugs and flies dappling the walls or the great chandelier. Just a tilting portrait of Felix Delachaise on the wall overhead, with his high-domed forehead and lips so fat they appear to be peeling away from his mouth, and the fresh memory of Caitlin’s dismantling. As realization breaks over him, Blake reaches for the doorknob because the only thing he can think to do is run. But from behind him comes Nova’s voice, as clear and decisive as a whip crack.

  “You said no.”

  She’s standing in the door of the study. Behind her, Willie stares down at the second blossom with a vacant, glaze-eyed expression.

  It feels like he’s breathing through a straw, but Blake manages his next words carefully, as if he were speaking to a mentally handicapped patient. “Those bugs are going to . . . I don’t know . . . react with those flowers, and then they’re going to turn into something like what—”

  “You said no, Blake.”

  “I know what I said, Nova.”

  “Well, it has to mean something. It has to. She forced it on you. She manipulated you; she overwhelmed you. She dragged you out there, and even then, even then, Blake, you said no. You made a choice. That’s got to mean something.”

  “I don’t think she gives a shit,” Blake whispers.

  “Caitlin?”

  “No. Not Caitlin.”

  “Then who are you—”

  “Virginie. Virginie Lacroix.”

  They’re standing a few feet apart now. Willie watches them from the doorway of the study, the shotgun leaning against the door frame in a final gesture of surrender to the powers at work all around them. In another few minutes, Felix Delachaise’s portrait will probably slip from its hook and crash to the floor, and then his furrowed brow will make it seem as if he’s angry at being dropped and not struggling to process what happened to Caitlin Chaisson, which is how he looks right now.

  “I’m talking about the ghost of a slave who can make plants grow and die with her bare hands. I’m talking about the woman I saw when I smelled that flower. All of this, it’s—it’s Virginie . . .” He turns to the gardener. “You’re right, Willie. She’s sideways and all through everything and waiting to be fed. And now she has been. She got Caitlin’s blood, and now she’s got mine and she’s going to do the same thing to me she did to her.”

  “You don’t know that!” Nova screams, but her building hysteria tells him she believes every word that’s just tumbled from his mouth in a mad rush. “You don’t know what any of this means.”

  “I know what I can see. And I see a process. I see a pattern. And it’s starting all over again. I don’t know how long I have. A few hours, maybe. A day. But they’re going to come for me, Nova. They’re going to come for me, and they’re going to . . . take me too.”

  When Nova embraces him, Blake is so startled his next words leave him. She holds to him so tightly he feels as if his bones are going to crack, as if in a fit of childish anger she’s convinced she can literally armor him against the forces she knows will come for him soon. Willie has moved in a few steps closer, as if he too thinks that by closing the circle there’s something they can do. He holds back, though, as if knowing that the gesture would be just that: a gesture.

  “You ain’t gonna run?” he asks Blake.

  “Where would I go? She took one of those flowers all the way to New Orleans and those . . . things, they still came for her. Right here, they got her.”

  “Maybe they can’t go much farther,” Willie offers, voice trembling. “Maybe you could outrun ’em if you tried.”

  “I don’t think so,” Blake whispers.

  “You don’t think so?” Nova cries, pulling away from him. “What the hell does that mean? You don’t wanna think so. Is that it?”

  Willie and Nova stare at him the same way he’s seen a thousand distraught relatives stare at a doomed loved one in the ER, and it’s more than he can handle.

  Blake hears Nova’s footsteps behind him as he races through the study and then the front parlor toward the open back door. Then she falls into step with him as he stalks toward the gazebo.

  “The bugs, they were normal until they got Caitlin, right?”

  “I don’t know, Nova. I don’t—”

  “You do know! They were normal when they came down through the widow’s walk in a big cloud. They were still just bugs. They only changed after they tore her apart.”

  The red gardening box is still upended a few yards from where the gazebo now sits atop a baby Indian burial mound. His eyes search the grass for the pruning shears Caitlin slashed him with. Because the gazebo’s light had shorted out, the lights from the main house throw Blake’s and Nova’s shadows across the gazebo’s frame, making it look even more ruined than it actually is.

  “We can get them before they get you, is what I’m saying, Blake. We can put you somewhere safe and use you like bait. Then we can blow the fuckers up. We’re all from Louisiana here. We know how to kill a bunch of bugs, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Blow them up? Just like we burned the flower in there?”

  Blake picks up the shears and tests them in one hand.

  “Don’t do this!” Nova shouts, and that’s when Blake realizes she thinks he’s about to stab himself through the heart, end his own life before a cloud of possessed insects can do it for him. But that was never his plan—he knows exactly what he needs to do for the first time since getting that panicked early-morning call from Nova.

  So he doesn’t kill himself—he jumps into the pit instead. He’s not prepared for the darkness below. It’s deeper now and the bed he’s landed on is softer, thicker. Overhead Willie’s footsteps punch mud, and he joins his daughter’s dark silhouette over the opening.

  “Blake?”

  At least he finally stopped calling me Mister Blake, he thinks. He’s startled by the bitter laugh that rips from him. The vine he’s pulled up in one hand is about as thick as his wrist. When he starts cutting, he half expects the slick tentacle to fight back, maybe try to pull his arm out of its socket. He doesn’t care. He’s marked for death anyway. If anything, a bad injury might force Willie or Nova to put him out of his misery, and maybe that would be better. Better than what he’s planning.

  But the vines don’t fight back. It’s too dark to see if they’re bleeding in some way, but he doesn’t feel any moisture on his fingers aside from their slick outer coating. The very flesh of them is parting like bread dough under the shears, just like it branched off into two different structures before traveling through the mud in pursuit of John’s killers.

  “Back up!” Blake shouts.
As soon as Willie’s and Nova’s silhouettes leave the shadowy opening above, Blake tosses the three-foot section of vine he’s hacked free up through the hole. Then he crawls out after it.

  On his feet now, Blake picks up the piece of vine in both hands and studies it. When the beam of Nova’s flashlight hits it, Blake sees what he can already feel: both ends are curling gently around his hands, like an affectionate but lazy cat seeking attention.

  The flashlight blinds him when he looks up, and he’s glad he can’t see their faces. He doesn’t want to see the man he used to be dying in their eyes.

  “You ain’t even gonna try to live?” Willie asks quietly.

  “Your daughter’s right, Willie. She’s always been right.”

  “How’s that?”

  “This place is cursed. Get the hell away from it. Either run like hell or burn it to the ground . . . or both.”

  He takes off running in the direction of Willie’s house before either Nova or Willie has time to process these parting words. As he runs, Nova screams his name, her voice growing hoarser by the second. But the sounds of her screams recede. She’s not following him and neither is her father.

  His car is still parked in front of Willie’s house, and this seems like a blessing given how much the earth has moved all around him in just an hour. Once he’s inside and behind the wheel, he sets the vine down on the passenger seat. By the time he’s managed to pull his shirt off over his head, the vine has crawled snakelike over the gearshift, hungry for his touch once again. So Blake takes it with both hands and raises it to his bare chest. Whether it’s the simple warmth of his skin or the hot pulse of his blood beneath, the vine likes what it feels. It adheres to his flesh without biting him or stinging him or in any way breaking the skin. He wonders if it’s drinking from cuts too small for him to see, but nothing about its feel is similar to the terrible suckling it inflicted upon him in the pit. This is sensual and gentle, the way one end is crawling half over his shoulder, the rest of it snaking down over his abdomen. Then, careful not to disturb it, Blake slides his shirt on and tugs it down over his new, otherworldly secret with the gentle hesitation of a nervous parent swaddling a newborn.