Christopher Rice - The Vines

But she can see it. It lies a few feet from the back steps. From this distance, in the halo of light from the gazebo, it looks almost like a patent-leather shoe with a bright shiny buckle. And that only makes her think of the tie—Troy’s necktie—they just pulled from the vines, and now Blake is down there, down there alone and silent and—

“Hey!”

Mike Simmons is draped across the doorway between the front parlor and the back porch, his wrists still bound and pressed between his chest and the floor. He’s inch-wormed most of the way there on his side, and the exhaustion, pain, and exacerbated blood loss has left his jaw slack, his mouth drooling. He’s the color of milk, his bloodshot eyes ringed with purple.

“Those—they’re my friends,” he wheezes. “She was calling them… threatening them. I heard her…”

After scanning his prone, trembling body to make sure he isn’t bluffing, that he’s still bound, Nova spins away from the doorway, banishes a thought about whether or not bullets could pierce the porch wall behind her, and yanks her cell phone from her pocket. She finds Blake’s number.

Gun. Halfway btwn gazebo n house.

“She did this all wrong,” Mike wheezes. “See… we can figure this out… She’s crazy…”

Her phone vibrates, flooding her with relief.

Doesn’t matter.

“Those are my friends,” the man whines. “Please. I can talk to them and—”

“It doesn’t sound like they want to talk,” Nova says.

“No, no, no. Listen —”

“Shut up!” Nova hisses. But she can’t take her eyes off the phone.

Why???

Somewhere outside, in the great sea of darkness, a man is screaming. Mike jerks and goes still, eyes wide, drool puddling on the floor under his chin. Nova fights the urge to leap to her feet. But it’s not Blake. The sound is too far away. It must be coming from the same darkness the bullets came from, the same rain of gunfire that’s imprisoned her on the house’s back porch, and unlike the crazed sounds Jane Percival made the night before, this frenzied, blubbering eruption carries the sounds of sheer struggle as well as agony. And now she and Mike Simmons are both silent, the victims of a terrible unwanted connection as they are reduced to audience members for this symphony of pain. This is not the sound of a fight gone wrong, or a knife wound, or a gunshot to the leg. This is the sound of someone being—she feels her lips mouth the final word— eaten .

Her phone vibrates in her hand with Blake’s response.

Vines gone.

“Scott,” Mike whispers. Fear and resistance have left his voice. He lets his head drop to the floor so hard his forehead knocks against the threshold.

She can’t tell if he’s crying or laughing. What’s obvious is that he doesn’t feel the sudden, violent shift of the floorboards beneath them, doesn’t hear the rattle that courses through the wall behind her in response. Or he just chooses to ignore these things, just keeps his head pressed to the floor because his wrists are bound and there’s no way to cover his eyes with his hands like a frightened little boy.

Then he retches like a cat trying to cough up a hairball, and suddenly he is rising up and off the floor.

His wrists, still taped and bound, peel out from his bloody chest and dangle in the air below him as he is righted and lifted at the same time. For a moment or two, it looks like he is levitating. But by the time his bound ankles rise several inches into the air, he is hovering at a right angle to the floor, and through the blood covering his sternum, Nova can finally make out the slick, dark tentacle that has torn through the man’s stomach, then laced itself back through a hole in his throat, venting the breath from his screams.

Behind his head, a great blossom unfurls. It is a giant, cartoonish version of the flower Nova glimpsed in the spot where Troy Mangier’s body should have been. The massive petals contain the fierce luminescence of another world as they open to swallow Mike Simmons’s head.

When Blake hears footsteps running in the direction of the gazebo, he is sure he’s waited too long, that he should have sprung from his hiding place and made a leap for the gun as soon as the terrible screams stopped. But he was too dazed by the sudden, silent departure of the vines that held him prisoner only seconds before, the way they branched off in two different directions, separating from each other cleanly, without the tearing of skin or the snapping of stalks, moving soundlessly into the soil, leaving him with the undeniable impression that the energy animating this life-form didn’t obey the physical laws of this world as much as it indulged them.

Still flat on his back in what is now an empty, muddy hole in the earth, Blake reaches up with one hand to grab the nearest loose board he can reach without revealing himself. He draws it to his chest in both hands. Only then does he realize the long gash across his chest has healed almost entirely from the vine’s patient suckling. Inside the tear in his polo shirt is a vague rosy scar that looks months old.

The footsteps crunch past the gazebo in the direction of the house, past the spot where Nova dropped the gun. Blake leaps to his feet, board raised like a baseball bat, and sees the silhouette of a man racing toward the house’s kitchen door. There is nothing tensed or predatory about the man’s pose as he runs. It’s too dark to see if he’s armed, but he doesn’t hold his arms in front of him as if he’s aiming a gun. He’s just running like hell.

Blake sees the gun right where Nova said it would be. By the time he has it in hand, the man has disappeared into the house.

I’m not chasing him… yet. But something is.

Inside the grand and deeply shadowed house, he hears thundering footsteps on the staircase, someone so desperate to get distance between himself and the ground he doesn’t care who hears his noisy ascent. The footsteps get louder when he hits the second floor. Doors are being thrown open. He’s trying to get higher… The widow’s walk.

By the time Blake reaches the second-floor landing, the man is racing up the short wooden staircase to the small platform atop the house’s roof, the door swinging open behind him. Blake tears through it, taking the steps at an angle so he can keep his balance without lowering the gun.

And then, in an instant, he’s reached the top, and now it’s just him and the crazed, mud-smeared stranger under a star-filled sky. The roof feels like a raft floating on a sea of oak trees. Beyond the canopy of huge branches covering the front drive, River Road is a ribbon of black hugging the base of the earthen levee yards away, and just beyond the levee’s dark swell, the blazing lights of a containership glide by on the river.

The man spins in place, gasping. Blake wouldn’t be surprised if he waved his arms at the ship for help. But instead he searches the roof, which slopes gently away from them on all sides. There is no angle from which he does not fear an attack; Blake and Blake’s new gun appear to be the least of his concerns.

He looks vaguely familiar, this wheezing, terrified stranger, much in the same way Mike Simmons was. Blake sees football team photos hanging on the walls of his high school. Rows of little faux gladiators down on one knee, clad in brilliant-white practice jerseys and pretentious scowls. They have been close before, he and this man, Blake is sure of it. Within inches of each other, in fact, during an encounter in the dark on another, more distant levee, this one on the shore of a massive lake, a spot where the prayers and intimate whispers of two frightened but very much in love young men named Blake and John lingered.