The Vines
Authors: Christopher Rice
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Christopher Rice
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of
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, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477826638
ISBN-10: 1477826637
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912277
For David Streets
You have taught me it’s possible to keep an open heart during the most challenging periods of our lives.
CONTENTS
BEFORE
Spring House had its portrait painted many times before it was destroyed by fire. Images of its grand, columned facade are so prevalent throughout gift shops in southern Louisiana most tourists to the region return home with a haunting sense they had visited the place, even if they didn’t take a bus tour of the old plantation houses that line the banks of the Mississippi River.
Hundreds of years after the conflagration that reduced the antebellum mansion to timbers and weeds, the house and grounds were restored to a more tourist-friendly version of their original splendor by one of the wealthiest families in New Orleans. Several of the slave quarters were removed to make room for a quaint gazebo, and the cane fields where African slaves labored and died in the punishing heat were replaced by manicured, fountain-studded gardens that have since played host to countless wedding receptions. The affluent families who pay for these events feel no meaningful connection to the place’s violent, bloody history; otherwise they would have second thoughts about staging such gleeful celebrations atop soil forced to absorb decades of systematic degradation and assault. No doubt, many of the brides in question grew up in homes where an etching or a painting of Spring House hung in the foyer or the upstairs hallway or, at the very least, the guest bathroom, and they too were seduced, sometimes subliminally, by these ever-present reproductions of its pastoral sprawl and muscular profile.
But there is one rendering of Spring House that continues to cause dispute among academics, and it is not found in gift shops. The sketch is primitive, but telltale architectural details of the old house are plainly visible: the widow’s walk and the keyhole-shaped front door, to name a few. It depicts a gathering of slaves who have been forced to stand and watch while one of their own is whipped by a man who is clearly the overseer. The inexplicable event that seems to have interrupted the overseer’s work is a matter of great contention among those devoted to the study of plantation history.
Some shape has descended from the branches of a nearby oak tree and twined itself through the overseer’s airborne whip, capturing it in midair and bringing a sudden halt to the bound slave’s violent punishment.
Even though it has no signature or date, the academics and tour guides believe this sketch to be the work of one of the many privileged white historians who took it upon themselves to document the personal narratives of freed slaves after the Civil War ended. Perhaps these accounts of misery moved one of these well-intentioned writers to work beyond the limits of his abilities, resulting in a crude illustration meant to manifest the sublimated rage of his interview subjects.
Or maybe it is the work of a former slave, who summoned all the steadiness of hand she could manage and put her own revenge fantasy to paper. But these scholars are sure the sketch does not depict an actual event. It’s a metaphor, they insist, an angry dream spilled in ink. Of this assertion these students, who devote their lifework to studying the bloody and complex history that runs catacomb-like beneath the bus tours and the spinning racks of postcards and the five-figure weddings, are absolutely sure.
And they are wrong.
NOW
1
When she reaches the shadows at the top of the stairs, Caitlin Chaisson is stilled by the sound of a woman’s drunken laughter. It comes from the guest bathroom a few paces away, where the half-open door reveals two pairs of entwined legs and a woman’s hands, capped with bloodred nails, tugging a man’s trousers down over his ass. She recognizes the man’s pants, as well as his slurred, breathy voice, and all at once the banister on which Caitlin is attempting to rest her hand feels as vicious and hungry as a lava flow.
The last of her guests are still draining out of the foyer below, but she feels utterly alone, as if the short distance down the gentle half spiral of the perfectly restored wooden staircase is a dizzying slope, and she is perched precariously at the summit. She wants to shatter this illusion by turning and running down the stairs, by mingling once more among her guests as they retrieve their coats from the indulgent valets. After all, they are her friends, her many cousins, and employees of her late father’s foundation, and they gathered that evening at Spring House to celebrate her birthday. And she’s sure if she joins once more in their gin- and vodka-slurred conversations about which member of which couple is sober enough to make the long drive back to New Orleans—a serpentine crawl along winding river roads, past shadowed levees—she will be freed from the terrible implications of what she’s just seen. But while the chatter coming up from the foyer below sounds bright and seductive, it is powerless to move her, as cloying and impotent as the condolence cards that poured in after the plane crash that killed her parents. So she remains frozen at the top of the stairs as her final birthday gift unfolds a few paces away.
It is the precision of what she sees next that cuts her most deeply, as if the scene had been staged for her arrival. But she knows this can’t be true. The second floor of Spring House is a warren of shadows, and there are still guests sprinkled all over the long front drive, most of them following her gardener and handyman, Willie, as he leads them back to their parked cars with an antique gas lantern raised in one arm. The upstairs bathroom is the quickest escape for two people gripped by drunken lust. Worse, there is nothing calculated about the way her husband’s mouth gapes against the young woman’s exposed neck; rather, a blind passion animates his movements, and despite the deep, agonizing twist in her gut, Caitlin sees it for what it is: adolescent lust. But the childishness of Troy’s
pawing—he’s
almost got the woman’s right breast free from her cocktail dress—does nothing to diminish its impact. It is wild and liberated in ways it has never been inside the bedroom they’ve shared for five years. It gives the display a terrible, crushing purity.
And the woman. Who is she? Caitlin noticed her earlier, circulating among the other guests, some yat
friend of one of her cousins, she’d thought. She’d looked wide-eyed and cowed by the masterfully restored plantation house and its sprawling, manicured grounds. And yet, had she been biding her time, waiting to strike? Or worse, had this little betrayal been planned in advance? Is this not the first time her husband has twisted this delicate blonde’s right nipple in between his thumb and forefinger while gnawing gently on her earlobe?
Caitlin is amazed they can’t hear her sharp intakes of breath. She is amazed that the door is open just the right number of inches for her to see the full arc the woman’s body makes when Troy lifts her up onto the edge of the sink and forces her thighs apart as much as they can go inside the confines of the dress. Caitlin is amazed by the poses, by the props, by the cruel timing of the scene before her. But its content and its meaning both carry the crushing weight of the inevitable. And as five years’ worth of suspicions are confirmed, Caitlin Chaisson learns that she is not the plucky, courageous woman she has seen in movies. Because though it pains her beyond measure, she can’t even bring herself to move, much less throw the bathroom door open and drag her husband out into the hallway by his hair. Indeed, her right foot is still hovering in the air just behind her; she’s yet to complete the final step that brought her here.
And so Caitlin Chaisson begins backing down the stairs, and by the time she turns around, she finds the foyer empty—the last of the party’s attendees are but shadows outside as they follow the flickering ghostly halo of Willie’s lantern down the oak-lined gravel path that leads to the guest parking lot by the levee.
Through the double parlor she runs past the giant painting of the grand Greek Revival house as it looked before its destruction in 1850, past the caterers who are cleaning up in the kitchen; they do their job to perfection, never noticing the woman of the house as she sprints past them, her breaths turning to shallow coughs.
It is on the railing of the back porch that she sees it: half-empty, lipstick-smudged. After any other party it would have been an irritant when she passed it the next morning, but tonight it is the instrument of her salvation. She picks up the champagne flute, smashes it against the porch rail, and continues to run.
2
By the time Caitlin reaches the gazebo, she has tried several times to begin the incision, and the results are a series of claw marks on her left arm that are oozing a thin layer of blood. The floorboards give her footfalls greater resonance than the muddy paths she traveled through manicured gardens to get here, and this sharp, staccato reminder that she is still among the living forces her to reconsider her decision. Now she finds herself spinning in place, the shattered rim of the champagne flute dripping blood onto the gazebo’s floor.
The overhead light inside the gazebo is off. The great house is a vision of antebellum perfection beyond what was once the plantation’s sprawling cane field, but is now a maze of brick planters, flagstone walkways, and small fountains—the latter of which make an insistent, nagging gurgle in the absence of laughter and party chatter.
This moment of quiet is all she needs for years’ worth of warnings and admonishments to fill the silence, a riot in her head that shoves out all reasonable and adult voices, that has her spinning in place, her grip on the broken champagne flute growing tighter even as she tries to relax her hand.
No shadows have pursued her. No guilty husband is striding toward her across the watery lawns.
Why should he? No wound in her soul could ever be deep enough to draw his mouth from that whore’s pale, young flesh. Perhaps if she had screamed . . . But she is alone now with the terrible knowledge that, in her husband’s eyes, she really is just freckled Caitlin with the down-turned mouth that gives her a constant frown and the pinprick eyes that too closely crowd the bridge of her nose, the girl with the sloping shoulders and the skinny neck that’s always been too long for her frame, the awkward one, the one everyone looks over in an attempt to get a better view of the
real
prizes that carry the Chaisson family name: the mansion on St. Charles Avenue, the postcard-perfect plantation, and the libraries and museums named for her grandfather.
Back in high school, Caitlin overheard a teacher—not some bitchy fellow student, but an actual
teacher
—say of her, “The Chaissons may be loaded, but all the money in the world isn’t going to drag that girl over from the ugly side of plain.” And now it’s clear her husband is no different from that vile, hateful woman, despite the fact that he gave all the right answers during the neurotic, late-night interrogations she’s subjected him to over the years.
And yet there
were
warnings. Years of them, mostly subtle. When her mother was still alive, for example, the struggle not to speak up had practically torn the woman apart, and somehow, witnessing that restrained torment out of the corner of her eye had been worse for Caitlin than some outright confrontation over whether or not her handsome, charming husband really loved her.
And then there was Blake, her closest friend in the world . . . until he’d actually come to her with evidence. He had friends who worked at the casinos in Biloxi, and they’d seen Troy there with other women, even after Troy had promised never to gamble away another dime of their money (her money, her money,
her
money!) again. It was almost enough to dismiss the fact that he’d done so while in the company of various sluts (and even now she couldn’t help wonder if one of them had been the whore getting
fingeredfuckedsuckedlicked
by her husband right now . . . ).
And what had she done?
First she accused Blake of being ungrateful.
After everything Troy did for you when he was a cop!
Then, when that tactic didn’t shame Blake into silence, she accused Blake of having romantic feelings for Troy, of getting all tangled up in their long, complex history. After all, years before he married Caitlin, Troy was Blake’s savior, the man who had brought him swift and lasting justice. Perhaps, since then, Blake had decided he wanted Troy to be his knight in shining armor in every possible way! Hell, maybe he’d been nursing feelings for Troy ever since they’d all first met. It had been bullshit, of course. Utter and complete bullshit, but she’d hurled it right at his face rather than accept the horrible truth Blake had delivered with a bowed head and averted eyes.
In the six months since they last spoke, it has been impossible not to see the stunned and wounded look on Blake Henderson’s face every time she closes her eyes and tries to sleep.
The rock walls in her mind that keep a life’s worth of painful memories from meeting in a single river of fiery self-hate have collapsed entirely. Her present humiliation flows right through the doors of that long-ago hospital room where Blake made a confession far more devastating than the one he’d made six months ago about Troy’s gambling. He’d been recovering from a brutal assault at the time, medicated out of his head for the pain. And it was her fault, really. She was the one who’d made the mistake of going back in, of asking him later if the tale he’d told her about her father was something more than a morphine-fueled delusion. Drug-fueled perhaps, Blake had admitted, but not a delusion.
When they were just freshmen in high school, her father offered Blake money to have a romantic relationship with her. Not just money, but scaled incentives that would increase over time, all to remain in an intimate, sexual relationship with his teenage daughter. First a nice car when Blake was old enough to drive, then money for a decent college when the time came, and after that, if he actually saw fit to marry her, who knew? A house? A career? Blake had turned him down, of course, mostly with nodding and stunned silence. But the story wasn’t about Blake, or what he did or didn’t do. The story was about a father so convinced his daughter was irredeemably ugly he felt he had no choice but to arrange her marriage to a fourteen-year-old boy who was clearly on the road to homosexuality. What was it that had convinced her father she was so unattractive, so profoundly unlovable? Was it her stork-like neck? Her impossible, wiry hair?
They had all seen, all of them. Blake. Her mother. Her father. They’d seen the lie at the heart of her marriage and tried to warn her in their own pained and desperate ways. Now they were gone, all of them—her parents incinerated in a single instant when their Cessna crashed to the earth, and Blake driven away by her vengeful misuse of one of the most painful episodes of his life.
Alone—not a hazy, vague feeling that’s sure to pass in time. A diagnosis. A terminal condition. Just her and the continuous, eye-watering vision of her husband driving his hand between the thighs of that pretty little blonde, who had been smiling graciously at Caitlin across a room full of her friends just an hour before. Had the girl also stared smugly at her through the crack in the bathroom door even as Caitlin’s husband lifted her up onto the vanity? Or was she imagining that now?
A few months after they were married, Troy used a demonstration of the right pose and angle for a real suicide cut as a prelude to more pleasurable matters, standing behind her as he gently dragged a fork up the length of her wrist. “This is how you do it if you’re serious about something other than getting attention from the other kids,” he’d explained. And after she’d taken over, he’d whispered in her ear, “Good form, baby,” before he slid one hand around the back of her thigh and clamped the other over her chest so he could hold her in place when she started to writhe under the sudden, fierce ministrations of his fingers. At the time it had all seemed dangerous and sexy. How else would a cop do foreplay? But had there been more violence in the display than she’d been willing to see? Had he just been tutoring her for a moment like this one? Had he been imagining her eventual suicide with a murderer’s intent?
Caitlin presses the jagged lip of the shattered champagne flute against her wrist until she sees the flesh give from the pressure; then she drags it slowly up the length of her forearm. The wound flows, but isn’t the sloppy, arterial burst she was aiming for. Even so, a tremendous heat travels up the length of her arm, so intense she doesn’t realize she’s dropped her makeshift dagger until she hears it hit the floor. But the heat is more pressure than pure flame, and it is a relief compared to the Indian burn she felt inside her gut when Troy’s teeth fastened around that pretty young woman’s earlobe. It feels as if her left arm is turning to vapor, and she’s half convinced the crackling sound she hears is her own blood hitting the gazebo’s floor.
But the soft series of pops that come next has to be cracking wood. That can mean only one thing and it’s absurd: something is chewing the gazebo itself.
Impossible . . .
Caitlin clamps her hand over the flowing wound. Her suicidal conviction has evaporated at the first signs of either a monster or a miracle, she isn’t sure. The dark tendrils curling up through the fresh cracks in the gazebo’s floor have started a serpentine crawl toward the splatter of blood at her feet.
They are snakes gone boneless,
she thinks. That’s how they’ve squeezed through the cracks in the gazebo’s floor. But when they continue to rise straight up into the air with strength and determination, when their fat, wrist-thick bodies don’t droop or bend, when she sees not one, not two, but four tendrils in all, rising on all sides of her in an almost perfect circle, she glances down at her hand, at the tiny rivers of blood spilling in between her fingers, to see if her blood loss is severe enough to cause hallucinations. But while the pain is still there, the flow is too slight, hitting the jostled floorboards in fat intermittent drops. She isn’t near death, that’s for sure. And the shock of almost walking in on her husband fucking another woman has pushed the champagne rapidly through her system, leaving her stone-cold sober and alert.
Caitlin can see clearly alternating patches of strange luminescence lining the slender bodies of these strange creatures. And while everything about their size and their behavior is utterly wrong, their composition is simple, common even.
“Flowers and leaves . . .”
She whispers these words to herself.
Not snakes, not the fingers of some subterranean beast. Vines. That’s all.
But once she’s whispered these words aloud—
flowers and leaves
—the words only deepen her paralysis, because by then she can see that the blossoms, each one about the size of her hand, are opening in unison. They look like the flowers of a calla lily, but inside of their four, evenly sized white petals is an insect-like amalgam of stamens and filaments, and all of it glows with an interior radiance so powerful it looks like it might drift away, spirit-like, from the temporary prison of the petals.
And each blossom, each impossibly animated, pulsing blossom, is pointed directly at her.
They’re looking at me.
Then the smell hits her, a force as powerful and determined as the vines themselves, plugging her nostrils, making her eyes water. She hears her own quick, deep breaths as if from a distance, a ragged counterpoint to the sounds of the floorboards underfoot settling back into their new disturbed positions. The smell is blanketing her, consuming her. She blinks madly, trying to resist its call, because not only is it somehow drawing in darkness from the edges of her vision, but it is also nothing like the cloying perfumes she has always associated with Spring House.
It is the smell of fire.
. . . They are coming.
She can feel the horse hooves pounding the mud, can feel them through the channel she has opened in the palms of her callused hands, the ones that connect her to the clamor of angry souls within the soil. She can hear their shouts. They have discovered the decimated cane field, and they know what she has done. That after promising them a limitless bounty, she has punished them for their betrayal.
And because they have some sense of what she is capable of, they will come with their polished Colt revolvers, and they will attack with as much swiftness as they can muster. And so she has no time to wait. She must bring herself to the very raw edge of her power, the place where she can feel a writhing, feral chaos in the darkness on the other side.
The darkness below. The darkness underfoot.
She’s always pulled back from that place, not in fear that she wouldn’t be able to stop the result, but in fear that it would tear her apart from within. But now the choice is to either die by their lead, or summon forth a final justice from an earth that has always spoken to her in a magical language only she seems to hear.
Because they are angry. They are seeking their own twisted form of justice, and this fact leaves her with the despairing realization that all forms of justice are somehow twisted at their core. Will Felix Delachaise be among them, or will he leave the bloodiest work to his overseer as usual, the same overseer whose work she halted in mid-whip, beginning this whole mess?
But when the door to the slave quarters behind her blows open, she sees neither the overseer nor Spring House’s bastard owner. She sees a perfectly framed view of her husband, Troy Mangier, halfway out of his suit, bare ass flexing as he drives himself into the beautiful young woman. And Caitlin feels herself jostled inside of her dreaming point of view—who was it? A slave?