Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

But Pa saw my face and trailed off, and soon he began to snore, and I was left alone to fret over his riddle. Now I think we must be very near to this milky white grove, and I am grateful for the dark sky and the snowflakes on Nore’s reins — because there is no time for me to dismount and wander into the rows, to prove my guess right or wrong.

Forgive us, forgive us , I think as I race Nore past the Yotherses’ bleak dugout, where the empty window frame leers on, and snow swirls in lovely patterns.

We detour five miles around a carmine streambed filled with ice, where dozens of black snakes draw S shapes like a slow, strange current, spooking Nore; and afterward I’m no longer sure of our direction. Like us, the sun is lost. The temperature continues to fall. We come upon a dam I’ve never seen, the Window rattling like a saber against Nore’s belly.

“Oh, God, where are we, Nore?” I coax her up a low hill, and it’s around then that the blizzard hits.

The wind attacks our naked skin like knives; I can nearly hear Ma’s voice in it, calling me home. But I’m too brave to turn the horse around, and anyhow I wouldn’t know which way to go. White octaves of snow shriek from the tallgrass to the great descending blank of the heavens. “Go, go, go,” I moan into Nore’s ear, wanting her to decide. A part of me is already at the Florissants’, warming up by the fire, sharing a meal of drumsticks and cider and biscuits with the Inspector. Their title drying on the kitchen table. “Well, sir,” I tell him, “we did have a little trouble getting here, but it was certainly worth the risk …” A choke-cherry branch cuts my left eyelid, and the eye fills with blood. The more I rub at it the denser the red gel gets. Outside of my mind I can barely see. We go flickering through the snow, until it becomes difficult to say which colors and temperatures are inner or outer weather, where one leaves off and the other picks up. I tighten my knee’s grip on the Window frame. When Nore breaks into a gallop I drop the reins and grab her neck. Snow is eating our tracks: when I look back, it’s as if we no longer exist.

She shoots through the tempest like an arrow for its target, and I think, Thank God, she must smell a barn —but when her jaw jerks around, I see that ice coats her eyes. She’s been galloping completely blind.

I am sure we’re being punished — I should never have unwrapped the Window, not even for one second. Snow pummels us with its million knuckles. “Oh, my darling, oh, poor darling,” I tell Nore — I don’t recognize my own voice anymore; Peter would caw with laughter if he could hear my tone, my father would be sickened—“Nore, my sweet one, my love …” Tender words pour out of me, my grandmother Aura’s words, the kind I haven’t heard since she spoke them on the cousins’ rose sofa in Blue Sink, and I wish I could use them like a compass needle to lead me back.

I grab ahold of the bridle and tug Nore forward with the wind at our backs, blowing more snow in on gales. I think of trying to guide her by the reins, but the snow’s banked too deep to walk. Nore’s sides heave, covered in freezing lather. Her eyelashes are stiff. I can’t feel my toes inside my boots.

The horse keeps going blind, and I can’t stop it — the ice coating the dark circles of her purply-black eyes. She moans whenever I attempt to pry and crack them clear. The reins wriggle snakily down her back and she jumps sideways. Hatred shivers along her spine; I’ve got one eyelid in a pinch when she peels back her lips and tries to bite me but misses and rears. As if in slow motion I watch the Window coming loose, thumping against her side in the snow-furred burlap; I feel myself rolling, falling out of the saddle and somehow beneath her churning hooves, reaching up as the Window slides slantwise, one point angled at my chest — and then I’m lying in the snow with the Window in my arms, stunned, watching as Nore disappears.

Now I understand: this is a nightmare. She flies into the white heart of the storm while I pant all raggedy in the drifts with the Window hard against my chest, sucking my frozen thumb. Screaming turns out to be an agility I’ve taken for granted; “Nore,” I try to shout, but hear nothing. For one moment more I can see her running: a black match head tearing against a wall of snow. It’s a wonder the gales don’t catch alight and burn.

Mr. Inspector, sir, I hope you’re stuck in the weather, too. And, Mrs. Florissant, do not let us hold you up for dinner, please eat, and should you spy a man through the open socket in your wall, won’t you tell him that I’m lost …

Suddenly I realize what I’m holding on to — did I shatter it? I’m terrified to look. (What I see instead is Louma’s skeleton in dust, my fingers threading through the open sockets in her skull.) As I pry at the burlap I learn something surprising about my future, something I hadn’t guessed: If the Hox glass is in pieces, I won’t ever go back home. I’d rather die here than return to our dugout without it.

Oh, Father, thank you —it’s intact. I push my palms down the smooth length of it twice before sealing the burlap, then roll onto my back. High above me the black sky withdraws forever into an upside-down horizon — not a blue prairie line but a cone of snows. Wind wolves go on howling. Each of my eyelids feels heavier than iron, but sleep isn’t what’s beckoning me; the snow is teaching me a deeper way to breathe: long spaces open up behind each inhalation, followed by a very colorful spell of coughing. There’s blood on the back of my hand — I knocked loose several teeth when I fell. One is lying near my left eye in its own smeary puddle. Snow falls and falls. Tomorrow, I think, the thirsty sod will drink this storm up, guzzle the red runoff from my chin. Acres of gold wheat wave at me from the future: March, April.

Hold on to your claim , Pa hisses, and I wipe my eyes.

What am I supposed to be doing out here again? Where am I taking the glass? And wasn’t there a horse? For the life of me I cannot remember the horse’s name.

More than anything I want to get the Window through the storm. I crouch over the burlap like something feeding — my skin becoming one more layer of protection for the glass. Soon my clothes are soaked through. The elements seal my eyes, so that I have to keep watch over the Window blindly with my arms. I clutch at it like a raft as the prairie pitches in icy waves. Images swirl through my mind of animals freezing in their stalls, black fingers lost to doctors’ saws. Think of a Bible verse, a hymn! What enters my head instead is my mother’s humming, a weedy drone that has no tune. Hours pass, or maybe minutes or whole days; the clock of my body breaks down. The world is pitch-black.

WHEN I WAKE, water is running in spring rivers down my face; my eyelids unravel and crack open. The temperature has risen, and a sunbeam fixes an X on my hand, which burns when I flex it. The hard pillow of the Window comes into focus under my cheek. I turn my head and find I’m surrounded by leafless skeletons of trees and the sapphire ice — and a man, watching me.

I sit up. Fifty yards ahead, a willowy man takes one sideways step through the golden haze and is somehow suddenly upon me. I’m saved! I think — but just as quickly my cry for help dissolves. This man looks even worse off than me. His gaunt face is entirely black except for the wet cracks of his eyes and mouth and pink lesions on his cheeks, as if he has just survived some kind of explosion. At first I think the skin is charred, but then the light gives it a riverbed glow and I realize he’s covered in mud — soil, sod. His shirt and trousers are stiff with the same black filth, and the dirt on his collar isn’t dried at all, but oozing. A dim saucer at each knee shows he’s been genuflecting in the fields. Only, what sort of man is out farming in a blizzard? Not even my father is that crazy. What would drive a person into this weather?