Christopher Rice - The Vines

When Nova embraces him, Blake is so startled his next words leave him. She holds to him so tightly he feels as if his bones are going to crack, as if in a fit of childish anger she’s convinced she can literally armor him against the forces she knows will come for him soon. Willie has moved in a few steps closer, as if he too thinks that by closing the circle there’s something they can do. He holds back, though, as if knowing that the gesture would be just that: a gesture.

“You ain’t gonna run?” he asks Blake.

“Where would I go? She took one of those flowers all the way to New Orleans and those… things, they still came for her. Right here, they got her.”

“Maybe they can’t go much farther,” Willie offers, voice trembling. “Maybe you could outrun ’em if you tried.”

“I don’t think so,” Blake whispers.

“You don’t think so?” Nova cries, pulling away from him. “What the hell does that mean? You don’t wanna think so. Is that it?”

Willie and Nova stare at him the same way he’s seen a thousand distraught relatives stare at a doomed loved one in the ER, and it’s more than he can handle.

Blake hears Nova’s footsteps behind him as he races through the study and then the front parlor toward the open back door. Then she falls into step with him as he stalks toward the gazebo.

“The bugs, they were normal until they got Caitlin, right?”

“I don’t know, Nova. I don’t—”

“You do know! They were normal when they came down through the widow’s walk in a big cloud. They were still just bugs. They only changed after they tore her apart.”

The red gardening box is still upended a few yards from where the gazebo now sits atop a baby Indian burial mound. His eyes search the grass for the pruning shears Caitlin slashed him with. Because the gazebo’s light had shorted out, the lights from the main house throw Blake’s and Nova’s shadows across the gazebo’s frame, making it look even more ruined than it actually is.

“We can get them before they get you, is what I’m saying, Blake. We can put you somewhere safe and use you like bait. Then we can blow the fuckers up. We’re all from Louisiana here. We know how to kill a bunch of bugs, for Christ’s sake!”

“Blow them up? Just like we burned the flower in there?”

Blake picks up the shears and tests them in one hand.

“Don’t do this!” Nova shouts, and that’s when Blake realizes she thinks he’s about to stab himself through the heart, end his own life before a cloud of possessed insects can do it for him. But that was never his plan—he knows exactly what he needs to do for the first time since getting that panicked early-morning call from Nova.

So he doesn’t kill himself—he jumps into the pit instead. He’s not prepared for the darkness below. It’s deeper now and the bed he’s landed on is softer, thicker. Overhead Willie’s footsteps punch mud, and he joins his daughter’s dark silhouette over the opening.

“Blake?”

At least he finally stopped calling me Mister Blake, he thinks. He’s startled by the bitter laugh that rips from him. The vine he’s pulled up in one hand is about as thick as his wrist. When he starts cutting, he half expects the slick tentacle to fight back, maybe try to pull his arm out of its socket. He doesn’t care. He’s marked for death anyway. If anything, a bad injury might force Willie or Nova to put him out of his misery, and maybe that would be better. Better than what he’s planning.

But the vines don’t fight back. It’s too dark to see if they’re bleeding in some way, but he doesn’t feel any moisture on his fingers aside from their slick outer coating. The very flesh of them is parting like bread dough under the shears, just like it branched off into two different structures before traveling through the mud in pursuit of John’s killers.

“Back up!” Blake shouts. As soon as Willie’s and Nova’s silhouettes leave the shadowy opening above, Blake tosses the three-foot section of vine he’s hacked free up through the hole. Then he crawls out after it.

On his feet now, Blake picks up the piece of vine in both hands and studies it. When the beam of Nova’s flashlight hits it, Blake sees what he can already feel: both ends are curling gently around his hands, like an affectionate but lazy cat seeking attention.

The flashlight blinds him when he looks up, and he’s glad he can’t see their faces. He doesn’t want to see the man he used to be dying in their eyes.

“You ain’t even gonna try to live?” Willie asks quietly.

“Your daughter’s right, Willie. She’s always been right.”

“How’s that?”

“This place is cursed. Get the hell away from it. Either run like hell or burn it to the ground… or both.”

He takes off running in the direction of Willie’s house before either Nova or Willie has time to process these parting words. As he runs, Nova screams his name, her voice growing hoarser by the second. But the sounds of her screams recede. She’s not following him and neither is her father.

His car is still parked in front of Willie’s house, and this seems like a blessing given how much the earth has moved all around him in just an hour. Once he’s inside and behind the wheel, he sets the vine down on the passenger seat. By the time he’s managed to pull his shirt off over his head, the vine has crawled snakelike over the gearshift, hungry for his touch once again. So Blake takes it with both hands and raises it to his bare chest. Whether it’s the simple warmth of his skin or the hot pulse of his blood beneath, the vine likes what it feels. It adheres to his flesh without biting him or stinging him or in any way breaking the skin. He wonders if it’s drinking from cuts too small for him to see, but nothing about its feel is similar to the terrible suckling it inflicted upon him in the pit. This is sensual and gentle, the way one end is crawling half over his shoulder, the rest of it snaking down over his abdomen. Then, careful not to disturb it, Blake slides his shirt on and tugs it down over his new, otherworldly secret with the gentle hesitation of a nervous parent swaddling a newborn.

Nova stares at the empty field where Blake had merged with the shadows and then vanished. The Maglite in her hand rises and falls with her long, deep breaths, causing the halo to sway across his leg like a lantern rocking in a steady wind. The silence that now blankets Spring House feels cloying, deceptive.

“Naw,” Willie finally says, and it’s more of a groan than an utterance. “Now where’s he goin’, baby? Where the hell is he goin’?”

For years Nova suspected her father of harboring a greater love for the Chaissons than he did for his own family, and assuring herself this love was nothing but self-loathing and a deep-rooted sense of inferiority did nothing to assuage her jealousy.

But now Nova can see that her father is a man who has tied his sense of self-worth, his very sense of security, to his ability to keep the people around him united and content. And he’s just failed. For the first time she understands this controlling desire within him. She feels compassion for his desperate need to knit a community together of the nearest available candidates and wrap it around himself to stave off the terrible fear that life is just a mad riot of other people’s unquenchable appetites. It took paying witness to hell on earth for Nova to get it, but she does. For the first time, she can see it.

Her father turns and meets her gaze through the soft glow cast by the flashlight she’s now aiming at his waist to avoid blinding him. “I don’t know… I don’t know what to do, baby girl. I jes don’t…”