Christopher Rice - The Vines

Blake wonders if there is a lesson there, and more important, will it still be there, ready for him to wipe the dirt from it and study it more closely should this madness ever come to an end.

He wants to play music, but he’s afraid it will drown out the approach of monsters.

He wants to hold her again, but that might upset her, and the only thing he’s sure of right now is that he can’t bear any more of Nova’s screams. So he leaves her on the sofa in her father’s tiny house while he sits on the footstool a few feet away, trying to ignore the fact that he’s rocking back and forth like a senile person who only feels at home on park benches.

Nova’s eyes are slitted and vacant. Her fetal pose is that of a thumb-sucking toddler, only her hands are balled against her chest and trembling. Blake fears there’s a very real chance Nova Thomas might not come back from all this. It’s an irony so cruel as to be vicious—she was the one who tried to convince him something terrible had awakened underneath Spring House, after all.

Blake jumps when he hears footsteps outside. Nova is still.

The screen door whines on its hinges, and a pleasant smell hits Blake. It can’t be anything as ordinary as cologne, he thinks. It must be the cloying musk of some impossible new creature composed of flowers and insects. But then Willie is standing in the living room with them. Something about him seems different, and Blake finds himself perfectly willing to accept the man before him as a hallucination.

The smell of cologne is stronger now. The older man’s chest is heaving with frightened breaths, and Blake realizes Willie Thomas looks different because he is scrubbed and coiffed and dressed to impress. A powder-blue long-sleeved dress shirt, the top few buttons undone, showing off his shaved chest, silk pants the color of café au lait. He’s come from a night on the town, Blake realizes, and he looks like he’s had a good time. But one glance at his daughter and he’s down on one knee next to the sofa, stroking her forehead.

Nova clutches his shoulder, but this isn’t enough to reassure Willie that his daughter still walks among the living and the sane. He grips her face in both hands, studies her as if the secret to her condition will be written in her sclera.

“Where were you?” Blake asks.

“She didn’t answer her phone. I was callin’ and callin’…”

“Your sister said you came here.”

Willie shakes his head. “I got a lady… in N’Awlins… Nova, she don’t… I don’t like to talk about it in front of…” It’s clear Willie isn’t sure whether or not his daughter will hear these words even now. “I didn’t tell my sister where I was, ’cause I didn’t want her in my bidness… She jes thought I came back here, but I was at Dooky Chase with a lady. That’s all. That’s all…” His final words become a gentle cooing assurance his daughter can’t seem to hear.

“Willie…”

“What happened here?”

“I—have you been to the house?”

“No. No… I came right here. Then I saw your cars, so I—Mister Blake, what happened here?”

Nova is crying silently. It’s her father’s voice, no doubt, and her father’s gentle touch. The feel of both have pulled her back inside her body, and while the return might be painful for her, Blake is relieved to see it.

“Willie, I need you to tell me everything about this place. Everything you wouldn’t tell me today when we were in the shed looking at those holes.”

He can see the resistance again in Willie’s furrowed brow, in the long and deliberate way he looks back at his supine daughter.

“Spring House is falling apart, Willie. You don’t need to carry it on your back anymore.”

“What did she do?” Willie whispers.

“Nova? She didn’t—nothing. She’s a—”

“Miss Caitlin . What did she do?”

Only when his vision of Willie wobbles and splits does he realize his own eyes have filled with tears. He blinks them back, listens to his shallow breathing as if it is the gentle ticking of a clock and he’s all by himself, trying to meditate.

“I ain’t got no secrets ’bout dis place,” Willie finally says. “It was like she said today in the shed. More of a feelin’ than much else.”

“A feeling?”

“Plants never act right ’round here. They move when you ain’t looking.”

“Those are events, not feelings.”

“Maybe… Maybe not. But they always happen when you ain’t looking, so it’s not like they can be proved. But what they gave me—dat was the feelin’.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“I ain’t never seen no lady in a white dress floatin’ over da yard or some slave draggin’ her sad old behind ’round the attic singin’ some kinda spiritual. But maybe… It makes me think, maybe ghosts, they don’t act like they do in the movies. They don’t jes move the dishes and the chairs when we ain’t looking. They move everything and everyone. They like air and water. ’Cause they everywhere is where they are. They in the ground, they in the leaves. They sideways and all through everything… and waitin’ to be fed.”

Every monstrous surge that bore down on him over the past hour—from the vines that suckled his chest to the clouds of determined insects that literally carried away Caitlin’s soul—seemed possessed by a single predatory force, and Blake can think of no better description for it than the soft poetry Willie just whispered.

“Miss Caitlin… she fed ’em, didn’t she?” Willie asks.

Blake can only nod.

“I always thought it was magic, not ghosts. The way the flowers here would move and dance. And I thought it’d be good, Mister Blake. I thought it’d be a good thing for her…”

“For who? Caitlin?”

Instead of answering, Willie cups Nova’s forehead, and Blake realizes the her in Willie’s last sentence must be his own daughter, Nova. Somehow the magic in the soil here would be good for Nova, but how?

“Caitlin…,” Willie says quietly, but his attention is focused on his daughter, and Blake feels like the mention of Caitlin’s name is just Willie’s attempt to distract him. “Where’s Caitlin?”

“Gone,” Nova answers, in a clear and steady voice that sounds free of both tears and shock. And then she begins to tell her father what happened.

In room 14 of the Hibiscus Inn, Taletha Peterson distracts herself from the dry and passionless thrusts of her latest customer by doing a mental inventory of the cars she passed on her way in. In her mind’s eye, she tries to re-create the scattering of pickup trucks parked around the motel’s sad, lightless swimming pool and its wilting chain-link fence. The battered Nissan Sentra, the one with the faded SAVE OUR LAKE bumper sticker, is probably her best bet if things go south. Too bad she can’t remember exactly where it is.

She’d wager her stash the car belongs to Clay, the quiet, pimply kid who works the graveyard shift and always smells like bug spray no matter how much body powder he uses. Hell, maybe the body powder is what makes Clay smell like that white pickup truck that used to belch through Taletha’s old neighborhood late at night, rank smoke billowing from the pipe in back, smoke that sent spiny buck-moth caterpillars tumbling to the hood of her mother’s car. Or maybe Taletha’s just too damn sensitive, which is what her daddy always used to say right before he’d mess with her. She’s sensitive when it comes to smells, that’s for sure. She prefers the men in her life to smell like nothing at all. That way they’ll be easier to forget.

Clay’s a nice guy. Clay lets her bring johns to empty rooms as long as she slips him a few twenties every now and then. Twenties, not fifties. And not hand jobs like most of the motel managers she works with. There was a time in Taletha’s life when a man had to do more than not demand sex for favors for Taletha to consider him a nice guy, but that’s a hazy period now, so far from this dingy motel room that it’s a distant country. A faraway land beyond vast, deep lakes dug by a glacier named Phil, a drummer who took her for everything she was worth—which wasn’t much—but not before treating her to the first suck of lung-burning, head-clearing bliss from a glass pipe.