Christopher Rice - The Vines

“Yeah, the way they left… it was like they were headed somewhere. Maybe whatever they’re doing is causing that. I don’t know. It’s all connected. That’s all I know. It’s connected…”

Blake is only a few feet from the main house when he sees a crystalline pulse of light reflected in the front parlor’s chandelier.

He stops in the doorway, hoping to absorb every detail of the room before he crosses the threshold.

The holes in the floor are just like the ones they saw in the shed earlier that day, only with splintered rims. The story of Mike Simmons’s vain struggle against the vines is written in a long trail of drying black bloodstains that move from the varnished hardwood just inside the doorway to the Oriental rug. But here again is evidence of the vines’ precision, of their ability to punch through solid objects with preternatural efficiency. These surgical details remind Blake that it was really Kyle Austin’s body that tore gaping holes through each floor, from the widow’s walk on down, not the vines themselves, and suddenly the urge to vomit returns with eye-watering vengeance.

So he focuses on the flower that emerges gracefully from a splintered hole in the middle of the floor. It’s a vital, fully powered version of the one he saw in Caitlin’s solarium that evening. A perfect match with Nova’s description of what she saw in the shed right after Troy vanished. The pulses of bright light that flush its white petals seem to have no beginning, end, or specific center, and Blake can’t discern a specific rhythm. They are not mere bioluminescence; they are a presence, a glow that looks powerful enough to float free of the plant structure itself.

He’s half-afraid that he’ll be hypnotized if he stares at them for too long. But that would be a charm compared to the other vicious capabilities of these plants, so he doesn’t force himself to look away.

He blinks madly and wonders if the chandelier overhead is devolving into hallucination, but the bugs dappling its crystals appear solid and shaded and real. The profusion seems unholy, but the participants are everyday creatures, nothing like the winged black monsters that exploded throughout the foyer after Caitlin was consumed; these are cicadas, houseflies, and moths. And he wants to believe it’s the chandelier’s soft glow that’s drawn them here, but he knows this is just his desperate desire to cling to the last vestiges of an ordinary world.

It’s the flower they are drawn to, the same glowing, impossible blossom onto which Nova is now emptying an entire can of lighter fluid. Willie’s expression suggests a collision of urges: should he lower the gun and pull his daughter back, or should he keep the firearm at the ready in case all hell breaks loose?

Over one shoulder, Nova says to Blake, “Back up! Now!”

Blake moves away as far as the doorway to the back porch. Nova pours a thin trail of lighter fluid several feet out from the blossom. The massive white petals glow unapologetically despite having been doused. She flicks off the child safety on the fireplace lighter in her left hand, brings the tiny, focused flame to the puddle of fluid at her feet.

The fluid ignites in a single, blink-fast whoosh. The flames are instantly sucked up and over the flower and into the air above.

Nova rocks back off of her knees, her butt hitting the floor with a hard thud. Willie jumps back a step.

The bugs explode from the crystals in a frenzied cloud.

The flames, which have become a single arc of blue and orange, race up the outline of some vague and previously invisible shape that fills the air above the unmarred blossoms. A hint of a face or a silhouette, Blake can’t tell. But it’s there for a second, and then all of it’s gone, like the fire has been consumed by the air itself, and save for a scorch mark in the spot where Nova first touched the lighter to the fluid, there’s no evidence of her attempt to destroy the flower at all.

All of it happens so fast Blake’s attention ends up on the bugs again. A swirl of blue fire just ignited below them like a giant Bunsen burner, and it still wasn’t enough to force them into full retreat. They had moved, agitated, but now they close over the chandelier again, a buzzing, swirling testimony to the draw of whatever dark power resides within the blossom’s undisturbed glow.

When Blake leaves the room, Nova and Willie don’t move, and he figures they’re still stricken by the pale suggestion of a ghost that was briefly illuminated by Nova’s unsuccessful attempt to destroy the flower.

In the ruins of the small study just off the foyer, beneath the ceiling destroyed by Kyle Austin’s speared body, Blake finds the second blossom, a mirror image of the first, just as vital, just as illuminated, a slender thread of fierce beauty amid the dangling Sheetrock and overturned leather-tufted desk chair. Lining the holes in the ceiling are more regiments of hypnotized insects. They’re gathering here around this blossom as well.

Blake stumbles into the house’s grand foyer, because here there is no wreckage or debris or veins of june bugs and flies dappling the walls or the great chandelier. Just a tilting portrait of Felix Delachaise on the wall overhead, with his high-domed forehead and lips so fat they appear to be peeling away from his mouth, and the fresh memory of Caitlin’s dismantling. As realization breaks over him, Blake reaches for the doorknob because the only thing he can think to do is run. But from behind him comes Nova’s voice, as clear and decisive as a whip crack.

“You said no.”

She’s standing in the door of the study. Behind her, Willie stares down at the second blossom with a vacant, glaze-eyed expression.

It feels like he’s breathing through a straw, but Blake manages his next words carefully, as if he were speaking to a mentally handicapped patient. “Those bugs are going to… I don’t know… react with those flowers, and then they’re going to turn into something like what—”

“You said no , Blake.”

“I know what I said, Nova.”

“Well, it has to mean something. It has to. She forced it on you. She manipulated you; she overwhelmed you. She dragged you out there, and even then, even then , Blake, you said no. You made a choice. That’s got to mean something.”

“I don’t think she gives a shit,” Blake whispers.

“Caitlin?”

“No. Not Caitlin.”

“Then who are you—”

“Virginie. Virginie Lacroix.”

They’re standing a few feet apart now. Willie watches them from the doorway of the study, the shotgun leaning against the door frame in a final gesture of surrender to the powers at work all around them. In another few minutes, Felix Delachaise’s portrait will probably slip from its hook and crash to the floor, and then his furrowed brow will make it seem as if he’s angry at being dropped and not struggling to process what happened to Caitlin Chaisson, which is how he looks right now.

“I’m talking about the ghost of a slave who can make plants grow and die with her bare hands. I’m talking about the woman I saw when I smelled that flower. All of this, it’s—it’s Virginie …” He turns to the gardener. “You’re right, Willie. She’s sideways and all through everything and waiting to be fed. And now she has been. She got Caitlin’s blood, and now she’s got mine and she’s going to do the same thing to me she did to her.”

“You don’t know that!” Nova screams, but her building hysteria tells him she believes every word that’s just tumbled from his mouth in a mad rush. “You don’t know what any of this means.”

“I know what I can see . And I see a process. I see a pattern . And it’s starting all over again. I don’t know how long I have. A few hours, maybe. A day. But they’re going to come for me, Nova. They’re going to come for me, and they’re going to… take me too.”