Christopher Rice - The Vines

She sinks to her knees and runs her hands across the floorboards. They are cracked and jostled in places, but the damage isn’t as severe as she had thought. It seems as if the vines didn’t punch through them like a fist but instead somehow managed to flatten themselves in between the cracks, as snakes and rats do when they’re trying to fit inside walls.

They won’t need to do that this time.

She grabs a small gardening shovel and wedges its sharp tip into one of the thin cracks. After a couple seconds of prying, she’s pulled free a half-foot section of floorboard. She recoils instinctively, half expecting to uncover a swirling portal to the spirit world. What lies below, however, is glistening and densely coiled and appears to be very much of this earth. These growths appear fetal when compared to the vines that nursed from her wrist; they lack blossoms and leaves, and their general shape and enmeshed pattern remind her of old illustrated versions of Jack and the Beanstalk .

She spends the next twenty minutes removing as many floorboards as have been jostled loose by the previous night’s eruption. She tries, with each move, to strike a balance between the speed of a furtive late-night burial and the time her pursuer might need to catch up with her. It isn’t critical that he see her every move, just the final act, which includes removing several magazines she found in her trunk—now wrapped inside an old T-shirt—and placing them down under the floorboards of the gazebo as if they were an item of great and secret import.

She has set the bundle atop the coiled vines and is about to retreat altogether, when she realizes her next few moves might require a little test. She runs three fingers down the side of one of the slick vines. It reacts to her touch with a leisurely, serpentine slide that makes a moist, fleshy sound.

Still connected, she thinks. Still… mine?

There’s only one way to be sure.

She takes the shiny, barely used pruning shears from the toolbox and presses its handle until the blades open wide enough for her to drag one sharp edge across her left palm. The resulting wound doesn’t bleed as much as her wound the night before, but it’s enough. The first fat red droplets to hit the vine below are absorbed immediately, soundlessly, like water evaporating in a time-lapsed film. And then, as Caitlin holds her dripping palm out over the small shadowed cavern, the tip of one vine is lifting up into the air like a charmed cobra, and this time, because she is present and fully conscious, a delirious laughter overtakes her as she watches it twine gently around her bleeding palm, covering the wound, drinking from her silently and without effort. Her breasts are smashed against the gazebo’s floor, her hair draping her face, several locks of it blinding her right eye, but she fears any adjustment will disrupt this magical marriage of earth and blood.

When it is done, it is done. It untwines from her hand, and once again a flowing wound has been miraculously reduced to a vague rosy scar; this vine has the power both to drink and to heal, it seems. And then it is drifting back down to its former resting place. The night before, it took off in immediate pursuit of her husband, the man whose terrible betrayal was freshly seared into her soul, but now it lies motionless. Waiting? If so, then for what? Perhaps because her pursuer is not yet within her immediate vicinity. Maybe as soon as he gets close, as close as Troy and his little whore were to her the night before as they hurried off to the gardening shed…

She replaces the floorboards as carefully as she can, taking care to leave one conspicuously loose. She turns on the gazebo’s single lightbulb before heading back to the main house.

As she circulates through the mansion’s silent hallways—killing the lights, pausing to undress in front of the bedroom window, giving the appearance that she is retiring for the night—the gun is either in her right hand or within reach the entire time.

Once Spring House is in darkness, she stands in one corner of the master bedroom window, the four-poster canopied bed throwing a monstrous shadow on the wall beside her. She waits, listening to familiar ticking sounds of a great house cooling in the late hours of a night in the Deep South.

When her new friend appears, a low, lumbering shadow moving through the gardens toward the gazebo, Caitlin has to stifle a laugh. It’s as satisfying a moment as the gas station attendant’s terrified expression. Still, she gains control, reminds herself that she has work to do.

She grips the edge of the window frame, gazes down upon her intruder as he moves toward the gazebo, and tries to summon the same hatred, the same rage she felt when she watched her husband and his little slut rushing through the same garden.

The problem, though, is that the hate is nothing like she felt ( feels ) when she thinks about Troy and Jane. What has this man done to you? Really? I mean, except hop your fence and plant cameras in your yard? Does he really deserve the same fate as Troy?

These thoughts, and the cold fingers of regret they press against her strained heart, have distracted her from the silence outside. Indeed, she can only hear her own rasping breaths. No screams from the gazebo, and the guy’s still down on his knees, mimicking her earlier pose almost exactly, pulling up loose floorboards. The vines that slithered at just the hint of her touch, the vines she just fed for a second time, have not responded to her mental command.

She feels instantly, violently humbled, and is shocked to feel a hot sheen of tears in her eyes. But then a part of her leans into this feeling. She was moving too quickly. That’s it. She doesn’t even know who this man is, and she was so desperate to test the new powers available to her that she rushed into this with too much thoughtless hunger.

Magazines, she realizes suddenly, the word exploding in her mind like a bright flare. He’ll know it’s a trap now. I couldn’t think of anything better than magazines. And why should I have? I thought he’d be dead by now. Why isn’t it working? What’s different from last time? This new question reminds her of the one that glued her to the windowsill a few moments before: What has this man done to you? And as she turns that question over in her head, she can feel it shift just a bit, the emphasis changing. What has this man done to you ?

A voice that sounds surprisingly like her dead husband’s answers.

Not enough, sweetheart. Apparently not enough.

In a few seconds, her strange hooded intruder will realize he walked into a trap. He will know that he is alone with a frail young woman who has been playing tricks with his mind. Vines or no vines, Caitlin cannot have this, cannot be thought of as weak any longer, and so now she is running—out of the room, down the stairs, and through the front door—gun raised in one hand as if it has the power to part the shadows before her.

She creeps up on him silently. “Take it off!”

The guy doesn’t move. He’s found something down in the vines, and for a delirious instant she thinks one of them has snagged him, but he isn’t struggling, he’s digging. The magazines she laid as a trap have been tossed aside onto the floorboards next to him. “Stop!” she yells again, and this time his hands go up, while he stands straight and backs up at the same time.

“Stop moving and take off the hood.”

Gone are the hot tears of embarrassment. She is proud of the authoritative tone of her voice, at least, if not the wobbly aim with which she holds the tiny pistol on her intruder’s back.

But he’s still backing up.

“I said stop mo—”