The Vines Read online

  When the creature screams, the sound is so deafening Blake’s hands fly to his ears. He hits the dirt floor knees-first. In time with the terrible intermingling cries, two tendrils of insects fly from the creature’s half-formed nostrils, tumbling across the empty interior of the shed, bouncing over bare shelves before flying through the cracks in the ceiling and walls.

  Shedding. It’s the only word Blake can think of to describe what he’s witnessing—the lavalike transformations of skin and bone, the entangled screams, the sudden rocketing skyward followed by the eruption of insects from the creature’s nose. It’s just as Willie said: all the spirits within this creature are fighting for control. All traces of the man he glimpsed seconds before are gone now, and when the creature flips and lands on all fours on the floor a few feet away, Blake finds himself staring into Caitlin’s eyes. The rest of her body is a spindly, shuddering mess of naked pale flesh, and her great yawning mouth has no lips, just ragged borders of skin that flap like rubber casing around an air duct.

  “Caitlin!” Blake screams.

  The eyes meet his, the same eyes that greeted him when he came to in the hospital room after being beaten by John’s killers, the same eyes that turned to him in agony and despair when the bugs came for her. Even as the rest of the body shudders and molts and transforms, the vestiges of Caitlin’s spirit stare out at him from this impossible war between flesh and dueling spirits.

  The sound of her name, and the familiar voice that just screamed it, intensifies Caitlin’s hold on the hovering riot of flesh and bone. Blake has the sense that he has just called Caitlin further into being, and he doesn’t know if that’s what he wants.

  The creature rises, but without the same mad propulsion with which it rocketed to the ceiling only moments before. Caitlin’s long nose begins to take shape on the creature’s face, her eyes—too large to be human but still distinctly hers—widen and grow even larger, and the vague outlines of human lips resolve around the edges of her yawning mouth. Birdlike breasts swell on her chest. He sees her legs for the first time, which dangle behind her like broken tree limbs.

  “Caitlin?” Blake asks.

  “AmIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIpretty?”

  The words sound like whale song filtered through the same grinding buzz of insects that has terrorized them for most of this long, awful cycle of slaughter and rebirth.

  “Let her go!” Nova screams.

  When Blake looks over his shoulder, he sees Willie and the other men holding Nova back. Their combined effort has dragged her several feet away from the door to the shed.

  Blake looks back to the spirit. More of Caitlin’s features now dominate the otherwise misshapen face. Her eyes burn with a familiar rage.

  “Caitlin . . . please . . .”

  The spirit’s eyes meet his.

  And Blake is speechless. Please . . . What could he say to her? What could she reveal to him that would help him to make the choice he knows comes next?

  Show me. Show me you have learned something in death. Show me you have become something better than the self-loathing and the rage that have delivered you to this state and set this nightmare free upon the soil. Show me, Caitlin. Show me you are worth saving. Show me why I shouldn’t destroy you with the new power that has been placed in my hands.

  Her answer is the same mad, rhythmic plea: “Ammmmmmmmm IIIIIIIIIIIIII prrrrrrreeeeeeeettttttttyyyyyyyyyyy?”

  And he cannot answer. Is this death? he thinks. Is this what we become at the moment of our death, not our purest form, but our basest self?

  From outside the shed, Nova Thomas screams, “Let her go, you bitch!”

  The lips vanish from Caitlin’s mouth. Once again it’s a yawning dark hole, and from it pour two heavy flows of insects, blacker and thicker than any of the earlier eruptions—their constituent parts too tiny to make out, their sound a smooth buzz compared to the night’s previous swarms. And as they evacuate the body, Blake watches in astonishment as her skin darkens until it’s a light shade of mocha. The limbs become slender and proportional, delicate even. For a few seconds, it appears the great tide of black spirit matter leaving her has also caused the dirt floor to swallow her. But she is simply shrinking down to human size. Her black skin glistens; her delicate facial features are defined enough to give her an expression of astonished surrender as the bugs leave her.

  Virginie . . .

  Blake is so astonished by the slave woman taking proper form before him, he has paid no attention to the gathering cloud above. Within its dark swirl, a towering and ghostly impression of Caitlin Chaisson has taken shape. Her mad, pupil-less eyes are focused on the astonished gathering just beyond the shed’s open door.

  Did Virginie Lacroix summon some great reserve of strength and wrest control of her resurrected body from Caitlin’s spirit? Or did Caitlin leave her in a divine rage over Nova’s last slur? Has Caitlin chosen this form because it will better allow her to tear Nova apart?

  There is no mistaking the hatred in the spirit’s—Caitlin’s—eyes. The wall around the shed door shatters. A tide of wet, cold air blasts across Blake’s neck. He glimpses Willie hoisting Nova off her feet, one of his arms around her waist, the other holding his shotgun, and the terrified assemblage scrambles desperately up onto the back porch. Then Blake gives Felix Delachaise his first command since ordering him to consume Vernon Fuller.

  “Take her!” he cries. “Take her now!”

  At the last second, when it’s clear they won’t be able to outrun the mad ghost made of insects, Willie drops Nova and spins on the advancing spirit, raising his shotgun. Nova’s ass slams to the floor of the porch so hard her teeth knock together. But the pain is a dull, distant thing as she stares death in the face.

  Nova is ready to die. The rage has left her, and she is filled with a sudden and total comfort over the fact that she will die in defiance of the spirit’s rage—of Caitlin’s rage. She only wishes the men would leave her to her fate. Not her father. But Sam and Allen. Because this is not something they invited on themselves.

  These thoughts are halted by the sight of Blake standing just inside the shed’s ruined front wall, a silhouette through the dark gauze of the furious approaching insects. But his hands are at his sides, his fingers splayed, animated, it seems, by an intense power.

  The first column of them comes zipping over the roof of the house, glowing so brightly their violent interior light isn’t dimmed in the slightest by the rising sun. They are like fireflies that appear out of thin air itself, and they tear through Caitlin’s raging, advancing spirit in a fierce bright line, like shrapnel shredding a plane’s fuselage. The first column is dotted by white flapping wings, as is the second, which flares across the cracked, shifting roof of the shed before blasting into Caitlin’s remnants from behind. It looks as if they are cleaving and incinerating the tiny monsters in the same instant. Compared to what they are attacking, these new luminescent winged saviors move with determination and grace, making a sound like a saw cutting cleanly through wood.

  And there’s no mistaking Blake’s pose, his posture. If he isn’t driving these things, he has summoned them somehow. How else to explain his confidence, his stillness, and the steadiness of his outstretched hands?

  It made a difference, that I said no. You were right, Nova. It made a difference.

  But the battle isn’t done. The remaining floating tendrils of Caitlin’s mutilated spirit rise, struggling to reassemble. But the fierce blue invaders—they are either dragonflies or the spirit world’s imitation of them—are penetrating these columns, matching their every duck and weave until the last dark remnants of Caitlin Chaisson’s spirit are being chased skyward, toward the lightening sky and its tufts of clouds.

  Only when a silence falls does Nova realize how high the last evidence of this battle has ascended.

  She rises to her feet, stumbles down t
he back steps, eyes skyward, searching for any last remainder of the spirit that almost devoured her. But they are gone, and as the last few sparkling flecks of power Blake called forth wink out in the sky overhead, she sees he has gently closed the fingers on each hand.

  And then the watery silence is pierced by a new sound, a sound that in any other circumstance would be alarming enough to elicit at least a grimace from one of the stunned people staring skyward. But in this garden of ruin, it is a comfort. It is full of promise. It is the sound of a woman crying with the confusion and pain of one newly born.

  AFTER

  The letter finds him in a small town in Arizona called Superior. A few months after he left New Orleans, a stray rock shattered the windshield of his motorcycle, and when he pushed it by both handlebars into the nearest auto body shop, he found himself surrounded by a ghost town cradled in a vast, dry valley, with a boarded-up main street he recognized from various films about the sad and lonely Southwest.

  The bike is a Honda ST1300, new and easy to fix, and the Navajo who runs the auto body shop on the edge of town had no trouble getting the replacement parts right away. But within hours of arriving in Superior by accident, Blake was seduced by the stark solemnity of the place. After a few nights at the nearest motel, he looked into renting a trailer on the edge of Queen Creek. He believed, perhaps foolishly, Superior’s vast emptiness would give his nightmares enough space in which to roam so they wouldn’t crowd him come sunrise.

  So far, he’s been right.

  The website for the local chamber of commerce tries to make a big deal out of the town’s geographical location. Superior sits on a dividing line between Arizona’s three predominant landscapes: Sonoran Desert to the west, mineral-rich valleys and plateaus to the south, mountain ranges to the east. On the map he’s managed to draw in his mind after half a year of exploring the region on his bike, the eastern half of the state is covered in a giant DO NOT ENTER sign, its letters dripping red ink. Because with mountains comes denser foliage, even in Arizona. Just the thought of a branch dangling in the air behind his neck causes him to shudder and ball his hands into fists.

  He spends most evenings sipping Coronas on the back steps of his trailer and watching the sunset paint the jagged rock faces at the edge of town with deep shades of blood orange and merlot. These rocks and the surrounding arid landscape give him strength, he is sure of it. Enough strength to keep from being frightened of the rattlesnakes that often gather atop the rocks beside the creek. They are fellow confused travelers, that’s all, barraged with stimuli that must—to their limited senses, at least—seem supernatural in origin. And besides, the earth under Spring House confronted him with far more determined and calculating sources of fear than some sluggish reptile living out a monotonous ritual of feeding and slumber.

  When the letter reaches his doorstep, Blake is not surprised; he uses fake IDs in most circumstances to avoid leaving a trace that could connect him to any of the rare but extraordinary events throughout the Southwest for which he and his shadow, his guardian angel—his ghost—are responsible. But the bike is still in his name. He’s left this one connection to his previous life in place so that his father’s sister might be able to track him down should her health fail as quickly as that of her siblings.

  And then there’s Nova.

  He isn’t familiar enough with her handwriting to know if she’s the one who wrote his name and address on the envelope. There is, however, a slight hint of her perfume, just strong enough to make him wonder if she scented the letter on purpose. A warning, perhaps. Or proof that she was truly responsible for whatever it contains.

  Even though he has no presence online himself, Blake has used library computer labs to check in every now and then on the legal status of the Chaisson estate. Alexander Chaisson installed a combined clause in the trust allowing for transfer of ownership to a board made up of Caitlin’s cousins in the event of her disappearance or severe mental incapacitation. And the trust’s definition of a disappearance—four months without any verifiable communication between Caitlin and the trust—could be established in considerably less time than the seven years required for a declaration of death in the state of Louisiana.

  If Caitlin’s cousins have balked at the idea of Spring House passing out of the trust and into the hands of the gardener’s only daughter, there was no mention of it in the press. Perhaps, like Willie, Caitlin’s relatives had always sensed menace lurking there. Sideways, all through everything and waiting to be fed, as Willie had put it.

  Or perhaps they had no interest in inheriting the last place Caitlin’s husband was seen alive. One thing was for sure: Caitlin’s disappearance had enriched her family to a significant degree. In fact, while most other families would have spent their time at the police station demanding that their loved one be found, Caitlin’s family had spent that time at their lawyers’ offices arranging for the speedy transfer of her vast wealth.

  In the fading light, Blake settles down onto the trailer’s back steps and tears open the envelope. But before he can bring himself to begin reading the cursive on the pages within, he thinks, once again, that perhaps it’s time to buy himself some folding chairs or maybe an outdoor chaise lounge of some kind—that maybe he really will stay here long enough to justify more than a trailer and the few sticks of furniture inside. And then he searches the property for any traces of Felix’s ghost.

  He knows they are with him always, and as if to remind him of this, they will often appear right at the edges of his vision even when he has not called them, bright-blue fireflies flickering in and out of visible life in the blink of an eye. He has driven his bike down many desert roads beneath vast, deep domes of stars, believing himself to be utterly alone, only to have them appear on all sides of him like excited dolphins chasing a ship. Rarely does the face of Felix Delachaise appear in their swirl or swarm, and usually only in those moments when Blake orders them into violent service in defense of someone who needs it. But they are always there, always at his service—a weapon and a shield. Without their omnipresence, he would never have the courage to ride a motorcycle at all, not after witnessing the terrible aftermaths of over a hundred motorcycle accidents during his years working in emergency rooms. If their recent behavior is any indicator, they are perfectly capable of catching him before the asphalt does.

  Felix is capable, he corrects himself.

  Blake summons them now, and they appear in a thickening, swirling column above the flowing creek, well out of sight of the road and the nearest neighbor thirty yards away. Their fierce blue light dapples the rushing, frothing water as the sun sinks deeper to the west and the edges of night begin their long trip across the dry valley floor. He can’t face the past alone, not the sweet smell of Nova’s perfume, not whatever request or news her letter might contain, and so he asks them to stay, luminous, swirling, and close, as he finally begins to read, and they obey his command without asking for a drop of his blood or a memory of his rage.

  Dear Blake,

  Daddy says I should give you your space, that you will come back in due time if that’s what is meant to be. So I will have to ask his forgiveness, as well as yours, for tracking you down in this way. But please know that I have no intention of telling others where you’re living. Along those lines, I ask you to destroy this letter as soon as you are finished reading it, as events here have forced . . . or maybe I should say allowed . . . us to return to lives that seem normal, at least on the surface. (That’s why I wrote it by hand, BTW. So nobody could steal a piece of my history if they stole my computer.)

  To be honest, I expected more of a fight from Caitlin’s family, and it has saddened me in ways I never could have predicted to see how little love they have for her. I wonder, Blake, if you were perhaps the only person who ever truly loved her. But then I remember her parents and the attention they paid to her. It always seemed to me like love. But maybe that’s just because it came wrapped in
such glittering packages.

  I think about her a lot, Blake. I think about her because I wonder how much of her was truly inside that . . . thing that came at me across the garden. There is a part of me that wants to know if a desire for my death was truly a part of her and if it came out in its purest form because she had been separated from her body. My father tells me these are foolish things to wonder about. He says the thing that Caitlin became was no thing at all, and so it doesn’t matter. And maybe he’s right.

  What matters is that I never got a chance to thank you before you left. I saw what you did. I saw you make a choice, a choice that saved my life, and possibly my father’s life and Allen’s life and Sam’s life. You could have hesitated. You could have tried to find out how much of Caitlin was still left, instead of saving my life the way you did. But you didn’t, and for that, I will be in debt to you always.

  I hope you decide to come back. There are things Daddy didn’t see that night, things he doesn’t understand, things you and I saw together, and so I will always feel connected to you, even though you have been changed (literally) by everything that happened and maybe that means you won’t be able to live as normally (sort of) as we do. As we try to, I should say.

  Spring House is mine now. I have a plan for it, but it is, in part, a plan that requires your approval. Here goes.

  I would like to give part ownership of the house to the Lost Voices Project. I would like to put the slave quarters back and for there to be some sort of museum on the property, maybe something outside where the garden used to be. Something that shows the faces of the slaves who worked and died here. Something that shows all of history and not just the parts needed to rent the place out for weddings. But it doesn’t feel right to invite people I care about, people like Dr. Taylor, onto this property without warning her in some way. And by warning her I mean giving her some kind of sense of what happened here that night . . . because it might happen again. I’m not sure that’s a possibility, but I’m not sure it’s not a possibility either.