The Vines Read online

  “It placed me under your command.”

  Vernon aims the gun at Blake. A piss stain crawls down the right leg of his jeans.

  “I want you to stop,” Blake says. “If you’re under my command now, then stop!”

  “There is no stopping Virginie’s desire for freedom, and there is no freeing me from it until she is made flesh again. No matter what you choose, I will be returned to the soil, forced to await another opportunity to gain her freedom and mine, but with the knowledge I have acquired during this long night of consumption and enlightenment.”

  “Why don’t you have enough? Why haven’t you . . . enough to bring her back? You killed all those people at the motel, didn’t you? That was part of this.”

  “Caitlin’s rage killed those people.”

  “They were cheaters, like Troy. Is that it?”

  “She consumed the sin she sought to avenge. She is but one of my arms. She fed but one of my vines. You fed the other.”

  “No. You did. You stole my blood, and now you’re being punished for it!”

  “I am the prisoner of the vines, not their architect.”

  For the first time since this sickening dialogue has begun, Blake lowers his outstretched hand and decides to put his alleged power to the test a second time. Under his command, the countenance of Felix Delachaise collapses, and within seconds the mass of insects has formed a smooth, undulating blanket covering the living room ceiling. It looks like smoke from a well-fed fire, but the constant grinding song of its indistinguishable components belies the soft texture of the swarm’s new configuration. A configuration that resembles exactly what Blake envisioned for it only seconds before.

  Staring up at the blanket of insects overhead, Vernon seems to realize his gun will be useless against Blake’s newfound power, and when he lowers it to one side, the placid expression on his face reminds Blake of a patient who realizes she is close enough to death to abandon all fight.

  “Do it, Blake.”

  “No . . . ,” Blake says.

  “Come on, kid,” Vernon answers. His smile makes him look delirious, and Blake wonders if this is the way Vernon used to talk to his son. He wonders if, in a part of his mind that’s already separated from the body he’s offering up now as sacrifice, Vernon really is talking to John. If that’s who he sees standing across the wrecked room from him now. “No need to pretend for my sake. I know you want to. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? It makes perfect sense to give me to the—”

  “Shut up!”

  “You were a hero once, Blake,” he says, shattering Blake’s cozy notion that Vernon no longer knows who he is. “You could have left him. You could have just started swimming, but you tried—you tried to get my son free before he drowned. You really loved him, didn’t you?”

  “Stop . . . Please, just st—”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Yes!”

  “I see . . . Well, I didn’t,” he growls, but there are tears sprouting from his eyes and a childlike quiver to his lower jaw, and Blake can see it’s just a performance. “I wanted him to die. I wanted you both to die.”

  “That’s not true. You’re just saying that to make me—”

  “It is true. I thought you were sick, both of you. I thought you were both diseased.” But there is no rage behind these words, just tearful despair. “I wanted you both to die!”

  Blake realizes he’s shaking his head madly only when his neck starts to burn from the effort. Vernon is simply parroting the script Blake just gave him, that’s all—making himself out to be the monster Blake wanted him to be when he knocked on the front door.

  “You’re just saying that to make me—”

  Vernon hits one knee and grabs his gun before Blake can finish the sentence. There is madness in Vernon’s eyes beyond calculation or reason.

  Vernon fires.

  Blake hits his knees, feels the bullet whiz past his shoulder. The insects overhead don’t react to the gunshot itself; they are attuned only to the gunfire within Blake’s soul, and Blake is trying with all his might not to will Vernon’s death, not to end things in this way, no matter how tempting, no matter how easy it seems.

  Deafened by the gunshot, Blake doesn’t hear the gun hit the wood next to him, just sees it spinning away across the floor, and he doesn’t realize Vernon has lunged until the man’s weight comes crashing down on him.

  They hit the floor together in a tangle of limbs, catching one side of the glass coffee table on their way down. Ashtrays and magazines tumble across Vernon’s back, and the next thing Blake knows, Vernon Fuller’s got him by both shoulders and is slamming the back of his head against the floor. The words rip from him in a torrent of furious growls. In the air behind Vernon’s head, the insects fly in mad circles like shocked witnesses, powerless to intervene without Blake’s command.

  “Die, you faggot! Die!” Vernon roars. “It should have been you! It should have been you. I wanted you to die!”

  It’s not true. None of it’s true and Blake knows it. But the gunshot hasn’t worked, and so now Vernon has to make Blake believe he’s willing to kill him. Now Vernon must convince Blake there’s no choice but to sacrifice him to Felix Delachaise’s hungry, winged minions. And then, even as it feels like he’s still debating this terrible question, something inside of Blake gives way. Amid the racket all around them—Vernon’s growls, curses, and slurs mingling with the steady whine of the bugs covering the ceiling—Blake can’t know if he’s whispered the words aloud, but he certainly thinks them.

  Take him . . .

  The insistent buzz throttles down into a deeper, throaty-sounding whine, and a column of insects flies into Vernon’s open mouth, lifting him several feet into the air, where the remainder of the cloud closes in around him and the raw material of his human form is peeled away from him quickly and bloodlessly.

  Blake hits the floor knees-first, then goes over, the sobs ripping from him but impossible to hear over the angry roar above. The sound changes again, from a riot of motorboats to a flock of chain saws, and a few of the little monsters clatter off the floor on all sides of him before rejoining their brothers and sisters overhead. But when Blake looks up, a blinding light seems to spread across the entire house, reflected equally off the shattered glass doors and the mirrors above the television, and suddenly he is raising both arms, as the buzz-saw sound of the insects is replaced by something that sounds more like a man’s rageful scream.

  34

  When he sees Blake approaching down the front walk, the black man standing guard on the front porch of Spring House takes a few steps forward, his hand drifting to the gun at his hip. But his expression remains fixed and stern. The sight of Blake, scratched and bleeding, his shirt torn in a dozen different places from Vernon Fuller’s last, desperate attempt to make Blake believe he was trying to kill him, can’t hold a candle to whatever this man has just witnessed.

  “Willie? Nova?” They are the first words Blake has uttered since his conversation with a ghost, and before the man can answer, there’s a scream from somewhere behind the house that causes him to flinch, but just slightly. This isn’t the first time the man before him has been subjected to the strange intermingling of voices joined together in a high, sharp cry, almost like train wheels coming to a sudden, grinding halt.

  “You Blake?” the man asks. His voice trembles, and so, Blake sees, does the hand resting tentatively atop his gun. Now Blake recognizes him as one of Willie’s good friends, part of the usual crew Willie conscripted to work Caitlin’s parties over the years. His fear is palpable, and the closer Blake gets to him, the more he can see the man’s injuries are much like his own: claw marks that look like they were left by a human across his right forearm, bruises on his face and neck.

  The early morning light splashes the tops of the oak trees overhead, and soon the extent of Spring House’s injuries will be reve
aled to the day. One section of banister and railing on the widow’s walk has completely collapsed, right at the spot where Kyle Austin was pulled straight through the roof by the vines.

  Not the vines, he corrects himself. Felix. Felix Delachaise. Felix, who is now . . . what, exactly?

  The soaring front windows are shattered, as are all the slender ones framing the front door. The columns nearest the door are flecked with the impacts of the swarm that carried away Caitlin Chaisson’s very essence, her very soul. And in the middle of it all stands a proud, terrified black man whose last visit to the place was to serve rich white people, and who is now trying not to betray that he has just borne witness to things that have perverted his view of reality.

  “Willie says if you came, I was to bring you inside,” the man says.

  Blake nods, and follows him from a polite distance, hoping that allowing him to take the lead will settle the man more firmly in his skin, and settle his mind once again.

  The foyer is still a ruin, only now that portrait of Felix has finally tumbled from its perch, the canvas speared on one corner of a chest of drawers.

  And then the screams come again. Not as piercing or devastating as the final wail he heard inside Vernon’s house as creatures under Blake’s command consumed the man. This sound has a more frustrated, aspirational quality. More like an engine trying to start up, an engine composed of several different high-pitched and desperate voices. And this time, it’s followed by a great crash.

  All evidence of the devouring of Mike Simmons has been scrubbed from the giant front parlor, and through the open back door Blake sees Willie’s back. He is seated on the top step, rocking gently back and forth with his hands crossed over his stomach. Flanking him are two other men, also friends of Willie’s he recognizes from having worked various parties over the years, both armed, both gazing out at the ruined gardens before them with vacant, thousand-yard stares and small blood-dappled injuries on their arms and faces.

  The spot where the gazebo once stood is now a yawning crater lined with great withered leaves. The crater is twice as deep as it was when Blake jumped down into it to cut free a section of vine just hours before. It appears as if a single event drained the life from all the impossible plant structures that had been pushing their way through it for a day, and now they’re strewn about the crater, fossilized remnants of a recent event. Much of the garden has been destroyed by what look like the claw marks of a great winged beast struggling to take flight. It makes Blake long in an almost nostalgic way for the small upsets and upended fountain Nova pointed out to him the day before.

  The screams rend the air again.

  They’ve come from the shed, where a cloud of black insects puffs through fresh cracks in the roof and walls. Something slams into the shed’s front wall from inside, and that’s when Blake sees Nova. His first thought is that she’s dead and for some reason they have chained her by both wrists to the door of the shed. The exhalation that comes from him turns into a defeated-sounding moan, which causes Willie to glance in his direction and then shoot to his feet when he sees it’s Blake. And by the time Willie has grabbed him by his shoulders, Blake sees Nova is very much alive, gritting her teeth. When the door behind her bucks from the impact of some powerful force within, Nova rears up, feet planted on the soil, upper back sealed to the door, turning herself into a human doorstop.

  “Second swarm never came back,” Willie’s whispering, with the speed and breathlessness of someone nearly mad. “First one, one that took Caitlin, came back right after you left. Bet it killed all those people at that motel first. Then it came back here, went straight for the gazebo. But the second one. The second one . . .”

  Blake knows what Willie is asking. Did Blake manage to outrun them, or have the bugs yet to catch up to him?

  “It’s over,” Blake whispers.

  There’s another series of screams from the shed, another impact against the walls that causes Nova to let out a startled bark and lift her butt up off the ground to straighten her bound arms.

  “It ain’t over,” says one of the men next to him.

  Blake is having trouble finding his words. “Why did you—”

  “We didn’t do that,” Willie says, gesturing toward his daughter. “We had a deal. We had a plan. We was gonna kill whatever was born out of that damn thing, whatever came out of the gazebo we was going to blow it to hell, set it on fire, anything we could do. We wasn’t gonna let it loose on the world, that’s for sure.” The smell of kerosene hits Blake, and that’s when he sees the small trenches they dug around the gazebo, trenches they never managed to light, otherwise Blake’s eyes wouldn’t be watering from the fumes. “But it looked like some slave woman, and that’s when Nova . . . that’s when Nova took the chain we was gonna use if we had to tie whatever it was down, and she chased it into the shed, and she did that to her wrists and swallowed the key.” Tears sprout from Willie’s bloodshot eyes, and the arm with which he’s been gesturing wildly to his daughter flies to his mouth.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Blake says quietly.

  The absence of fear in his voice startles him as much as it does the other men. When he steps down off the porch, he hears one of them following and figures it’s Willie.

  Nova is staring down at her lap as he approaches, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths, her narrowed eyes and tense jaw a study in strained concentration amid terror. When she sees Blake standing a few feet away, what appears to be a drunken smile passes over her face.

  “Hot damn,” she says, her voice hoarse from a night of screams. “Hot damn, look who made it.”

  “What are you doing, Nova?” he asks as gently as he can.

  “Just giving it some time, that’s all. Because that’s all she needs. Time.”

  “It ain’t a she!” Willie barks. “It’s all sorts of people in one. It don’t know what it is.”

  Nova ignores her father’s cry, blinks madly, and tries to study Blake closely.

  “So what’d you do, Blake? You outrun them?”

  “No.”

  “Burn them?”

  Blake shakes his head. “Where’s the key, Nova?”

  “She swallowed it,” Willie wails. “I tol’ you. I’ll cut you free, girl. I’m gonna get an axe and cut you free if you don’t stop this—”

  “I don’t have to stop nothing!” Nova’s rage is pushing her voice past its limits. She is oblivious to the sliver of drool dripping from one corner of her mouth. “You just have to wait. You just have to put your guns down and wait, Daddy!”

  Her outburst silences them but not the tumult inside the shed. Now that he’s close enough, Blake can hear what sounds like the persistent flight of some trapped winged creature. The roof jumps, and then a sidewall, and then the door.

  “Seriously,” Nova says. “Seriously . . . how are you . . . alive?”

  “You were right.”

  “About what?”

  “It made a difference. That I said no. You were right, Nova. It made a big difference.”

  “Well, good.” The smile that breaks across Nova’s face brings tears to her eyes; his words were a ray of sunshine in a long nightmare of seemingly impenetrable darkness. And he feels himself smiling as well, and then he’s blinking back tears too. “Well, that’s real good, Blake.”

  “Yeah. It is . . . I hope.”

  “It’s her, Blake,” Nova whispers, jaw quivering. “It’s Virginie.”

  “It’s not her!” Willie roars.

  “It’s her,” Blake says quietly.

  They both stare at him as if they’re sure that whatever he’s just experienced outside of Spring House has endowed him with this knowledge and the confidence with which he has expressed it. But for Willie it’s still not enough. “Then she’s evil. Then she’s the one who killed those boys! She’s the one who took Miss Caitlin and went to that motel and kill
ed all those poor people. They in her now, those people. They in her now!”

  “Blood gets spilled every time a baby’s born,” Blake says. “It doesn’t make the baby evil.”

  “Does that thing sound like a baby to you?” Willie asks.

  What happens next comes so quickly neither Nova nor Willie has time to process it. There’s a brief flash of light that moves so fast Blake is confident he’s the only one who saw the trail it made as it swept from behind him and across Nova’s wrists. And he was able to see it only because he was expecting it. Then Nova’s wrists slip free of the chain that’s been cut in half. Its heavy links fall to the mud on either side of her with wet thuds; the broken padlock tumbles free, and suddenly she is lowering her arms in front of her in disbelief.

  When Blake extends his hand, she takes it in a daze. He lifts her to her feet, and the door to the shed swings open behind her. Once he’s tucked Nova behind him, Blake steps forward into the darkness.

  35

  Willie and his men must have emptied the shed of most of its supplies before the creature inside emerged from the ground. Whatever the thing is, it’s down on all fours like a dog, its bent, misshapen limbs shuddering. The pale morning light falls in thin slats across its back, which appears to be changing color with liquid speed. He can make out two contrasting skin tones, one after the other. First he sees the same rich brown of Nova’s and Willie’s flesh, then, a few quivering seconds later, the pale and red-blotched skin tone of some white person. They pulse across the thing’s outer shell in alternating waves, each with the same brilliance as the luminescence Blake saw in the death-marker blossoms Nova could not burn.

  The creature rockets toward the ceiling. For a second, it looks as if the thing has propelled itself skyward on its hind legs. But they are long and tendril-like, incapable of supporting the creature’s full weight. The head, which Blake sees for the first time, is vaguely human in shape, but the features are a riot of indecisive transformations, undulations involving musculature and bone. And now the head is thrown back on its long neck, gazing upside down at Blake from the ceiling with wide, expectant eyes and a yawning mouth. The face of a man is there for an instant, a man Blake doesn’t recognize—someone from the motel, he figures. But then it leaves like a reflection on water that’s been sliced by a skipping stone; the eyes ripple and are gone, leaving socketless caverns of molten bone.