Christopher Rice - The Vines

When Caitlin screams his name again, it’s as if the bugs themselves are absorbing her voice, amplifying it while also filling it with a great and inhuman rattle. And when she peels herself off the wall, arms batting wildly at the air all around her, Blake sees that she is literally losing her very matter to them, that as they pull free from her skin, mirroring her every action now at various distances from her body, they take more and more of her with them. There is no blood, no tearing of flesh. But they are consuming her. As she stumbles wildly toward the top of the grand staircase, they are devouring her.

“Blaaaaaaaaaaake!”

There is almost none of Caitlin Chaisson left in the scream. It is, rather, the voice of this terrible, all-consuming cloud of insects so tightly joined to one another it’s impossible to tell what species they’re composed of. And they are transforming Caitlin into something that is more writhing, desperate spirit than person, while ignoring Blake altogether. He literally does not exist for them.

At the top of the grand staircase, what remains of Caitlin inside the cloud loses its footing and goes over, and the swarm adjusts perfectly as Caitlin’s vaporous remnants tumble down the stairs, losing skin and flesh and bone on their descent so that halfway down the stairs, the matter inside of the swarm looks more like an abstract, animated sketch of Caitlin Chaisson’s fall than an actual person somersaulting down unforgiving wooden stairs.

At the bottom step, all traces of Caitlin the human are gone. It is only at that moment that the swarm lifts into the air, organizing itself beneath the swinging chandelier. A sudden, dizzying uniformity sweeps through each tiny member, and now there is a clicking and clattering of pincers and thicker, heavier wings. Each place within the miniature cyclone of insects Blake directs his attention, he sees bigger and more formidable creatures, flashes of stingers and antennae. But they’re all moving so fast, it’s impossible for him to get a detailed picture of a single one—they seem to exist only as a whole. Their buzzing sound has deepened from an outboard’s high-pitched whine to something that sounds more like a motorcycle’s growl.

Blake is about to fire at them. Maybe they’ll come after him, but he doubts it after the way they’ve been ignoring him. At the very least, it will disperse them. At the very least, it will give him something to do other than stand there, dumbfounded, emptied of recourse or any frame of reference for what he’s seeing, the gun in his hand now as powerful and protective as a fingernail clipper.

And then they’re gone.

It takes Blake a few seconds to see where they’ve gone to, and the effort requires him to stumble halfway down the grand staircase until he can see the hole that Kyle Austin’s body— not Kyle, the vines; the vines broke that hole —punched through the ceiling of the first floor. The more organized swarm of newly enlarged, otherworldly insects has spirited away up through the opening in the widow’s walk floor.

His vision blurs and blackens around the edges at the same time. He hears the gun falling barrel over butt down the stairs, feels a vague distant sense of alarm that it might fire, but it doesn’t. It lands at the bottom with a hollow-sounding thud. Hollow and useless against these new terrors of the night.

Left foot, right foot, breathe. Left foot, right foot, breathe.

It’s a mantra one of the senior nurses taught him after he first started working in the ER. She’d assured him it would come in handy after the first serious trauma case was wheeled in, an accident victim so hopelessly mangled her appearance in the emergency room was more of a grim formality than a first step toward recovery.

Left foot, right foot, breathe. Left foot, right foot, breathe.

There was a trick to the little saying he learned only later. It was meant to distract you from how shallow and stunted your breathing was by giving it the weight and duration of a single footfall. A normal breath should take two steps, not one. But by saying all three of them in rapid sequence, by giving them all the same illusory value and duration, you tricked yourself into believing you weren’t edging on a state of shock. And so that’s what Blake Henderson is doing now.

Nova is in the kitchen washing her hands at the sink, and for a second it’s possible to believe that she has somehow missed the whole thing. That she was watching television in the other room as some otherworldly force tore through the floor of the house, devouring flesh and bone, then retreating before a cloud of furious insects collected and absorbed Caitlin Chaisson as if she were a cloud of smoke. But there is steam billowing from the sink that says the water is as hot as it can go, and the bottle of soap she just used is lying on the floor next to her, and as Blake approaches her slowly, he can see her chest rising and falling, her slack, her lips sputtering with each strained breath.

“Nova?” he whispers.

And she jumps at this soft, unobtrusive sound as if it were a gunshot. Suddenly her hands are beside her head as if his slight utterance is something she must physically contain, something she must beat back before it reaches her ears. “I would like a… I w-would like a… I would like a…” Tears are spitting from her eyes. Her tone, though, is brittle but casual, as if she were about to ask him to pour her a glass of iced tea. It’s one of the worst cases of shock he’s ever seen, replete with repetitive gestures, hyperventilation, and a half-formed question that can’t find its latter half.

This has been a survival skill of his for as long as he can remember, to avoid full impact of a trauma by pouring himself into concern for someone else’s well-being. No matter who it is: a lover, a family member, a patient. Anyone nearby. Anyone at all. And now he and Nova are stitched together as only survivors of the wretched can truly be.

“Nova…,” he whispers again.

She cocks her head to one side and hisses, as if he’s just done something dangerous and it’s too late to stop him but she can’t quite bring herself to look away. Then, she’s shaking her head, and the sounds are in her throat now. No words, just stunted groans that might turn into sobs if he keeps at her, keeps doing little things to draw her back into the terrible present.

“I would like a… I would…”

Like a what? he wants to ask her. A Bible? A gun? A Valium?

There’s only one thing he has for her, so he gives it to her fully. When she feels his arms close around her, she starts to scream and her knees go to the floor and he goes with her, holding her to him as the shudders feel like they’re coming from her bones, and then there’s a terrible shrill clarity to her words as she screams, “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

He knows better than to answer. Instead, he adjusts his pose so that he’s kneeling before her, without freeing her from his embrace. As her screams turn to sobs, he rocks her, knowing full well that he is using the deafening evidence of her hysteria and her terror to avoid his own, that he welcomes her screams because they drown out the memory and the implication of the last words he said to Caitlin before she was taken, swarmed, eaten —each word fires through his head like a cannon blast: I said no. You asked me what I wanted and I said no.

They sit like this for what feels like forever, but Blake knows that it’s not nearly enough time—that there will never be enough time to get over what’s happened here tonight. But they have to move, and she’s stilled a bit, so he slowly lifts her off the floor. She doesn’t resist, and without thinking, he’s collected her in both arms, bride-over-the-threshold-style. He carries her out the back door and toward the small but welcoming shadow of her father’s house in the distance, and it seems as if all those hours in the gym trying to armor himself against another assault by shadows has strengthened him only enough to carry a girl lost to terror across a dark and muddy expanse, beneath which an unknowable evil, freshly sated, now slumbers again.