The Vines (17 page)

34

When he sees Blake approaching down the front walk, the black man standing guard on the front porch of Spring House takes a few steps forward, his hand drifting to the gun at his hip. But his expression remains fixed and stern. The sight of Blake, scratched and bleeding, his shirt torn in a dozen different places from Vernon Fuller’s last, desperate attempt to make Blake believe he was trying to kill him, can’t hold a candle to whatever this man has just witnessed.

“Willie? Nova?” They are the first words Blake has uttered since his conversation with a ghost, and before the man can answer, there’s a scream from somewhere behind the house that causes him to flinch, but just slightly. This isn’t the first time the man before him has been subjected to the strange intermingling of voices joined together in a high, sharp cry, almost like train wheels coming to a sudden, grinding halt.

“You Blake?” the man asks. His voice trembles, and so, Blake sees, does the hand resting tentatively atop his gun. Now Blake recognizes him as one of Willie’s good friends, part of the usual crew Willie conscripted to work Caitlin’s parties over the years. His fear is palpable, and the closer Blake gets to him, the more he can see the man’s injuries are much like his own: claw marks that look like they were left by a human across his right forearm, bruises on his face and neck.

The early morning light splashes the tops of the oak trees overhead, and soon the extent of Spring House’s injuries will be revealed to the day. One section of banister and railing on the widow’s walk has completely collapsed, right at the spot where Kyle Austin was pulled straight through the roof by the vines.

Not the vines
,
he corrects himself.
Felix. Felix Delachaise. Felix, who is now . . . what, exactly?

The soaring front windows are shattered, as are all the slender ones framing the front door. The columns nearest the door are flecked with the impacts of the swarm that carried away Caitlin Chaisson’s very essence, her very soul. And in the middle of it all stands a proud, terrified black man whose last visit to the place was to serve rich white people, and who is now trying not to betray that he has just borne witness to things that have perverted his view of reality.

“Willie says if you came, I was to bring you inside,” the
man says.

Blake nods, and follows him from a polite distance, hoping that allowing him to take the lead will settle the man more firmly in his skin, and settle his mind once again.

The foyer is still a ruin, only now that portrait of Felix has finally tumbled from its perch, the canvas speared on one corner of a chest of drawers.

And then the screams come again. Not as piercing or devastating as the final wail he heard inside Vernon’s house as creatures under Blake’s command consumed the man. This sound has a more frustrated, aspirational quality. More like an engine trying to start up, an engine composed of several different high-pitched and desperate voices. And this time, it’s followed by a great crash.

All evidence of the devouring of Mike Simmons has been scrubbed from the giant front parlor, and through the open back door Blake sees Willie’s back. He is seated on the top step, rocking gently back and forth with his hands crossed over his stomach. Flanking him are two other men, also friends of Willie’s he recognizes from having worked various parties over the years, both armed, both gazing out at the ruined gardens before them with vacant, thousand-yard stares and small blood-dappled injuries on their arms and faces.

The spot where the gazebo once stood is now a yawning crater lined with great withered leaves. The crater is twice as deep as it was when Blake jumped down into it to cut free a section of vine just hours before. It appears as if a single event drained the life from all the impossible plant structures that had been pushing their way through it for a day, and now they’re strewn about the crater, fossilized remnants of a recent event. Much of the garden has been destroyed by what look like the claw marks of a great winged beast struggling to take flight. It makes Blake long in an almost nostalgic way for the small upsets and upended fountain Nova pointed out to him the day before.

The screams rend the air again.

They’ve come from the shed, where a cloud of black insects puffs through fresh cracks in the roof and walls. Something slams into the shed’s front wall from inside, and that’s when Blake sees Nova. His first thought is that she’s dead and for some reason they have chained her by both wrists to the door of the shed. The exhalation that comes from him turns into a defeated-sounding moan, which causes Willie to glance in his direction and then shoot to his feet when he sees it’s Blake. And by the time Willie has grabbed him by his shoulders, Blake sees Nova is very much alive, gritting her teeth. When the door behind her bucks from the impact of some powerful force within, Nova rears up, feet planted on the soil, upper back sealed to the door, turning herself into a human doorstop.

“Second swarm never came back,” Willie’s whispering, with the speed and breathlessness of someone nearly mad. “First one, one that took Caitlin, came back right after you left. Bet it killed all those people at that motel first. Then it came back here, went straight for the gazebo. But the second one. The second one . . .”

Blake knows what Willie is asking. Did Blake manage to outrun them, or have the bugs yet to catch up to him?

“It’s over,” Blake whispers.

There’s another series of screams from the shed, another impact against the walls that causes Nova to let out a startled bark and lift her butt up off the ground to straighten her bound arms.

“It ain’t over,” says one of the men next to him.

Blake is having trouble finding his words. “Why did you—”

“We didn’t do that,” Willie says, gesturing toward his daughter. “We had a deal. We had a plan. We was gonna kill whatever was born out of that damn thing, whatever came out of the gazebo we was going to blow it to hell, set it on fire, anything we could do. We wasn’t gonna let it loose on the world, that’s for sure.” The smell of kerosene hits Blake, and that’s when he sees the small trenches they dug around the gazebo, trenches they never managed to light, otherwise Blake’s eyes wouldn’t be watering from the fumes. “But it looked like some slave woman, and that’s when Nova . . . that’s when Nova took the chain we was gonna use if we had to tie whatever it was down, and she chased it into the shed, and she did that to her wrists and swallowed the key.” Tears sprout from Willie’s bloodshot eyes, and the arm with which he’s been gesturing wildly to his daughter flies to his mouth.

“I’ll talk to her,” Blake says quietly.

The absence of fear in his voice startles him as much as it does the other men. When he steps down off the porch, he hears one of them following and figures it’s Willie.

Nova is staring down at her lap as he approaches, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths, her narrowed eyes and tense jaw a study in strained concentration amid terror. When she sees Blake standing a few feet away, what appears to be a drunken smile passes over her face.

“Hot damn,” she says, her voice hoarse from a night of screams. “Hot damn, look who made it.”

“What are you doing, Nova?” he asks as gently as he can.

“Just giving it some time, that’s all. Because that’s all she needs.
Time.
”

“It ain’t a she!” Willie barks. “It’s all sorts of people in one. It don’t
know
what it is.”

Nova ignores her father’s cry, blinks madly, and tries to study Blake closely.

“So what’d you do, Blake? You outrun them?”

“No.”

“Burn them?”

Blake shakes his head. “Where’s the key, Nova?”

“She swallowed it,” Willie wails. “I tol’ you. I’ll cut you free, girl. I’m gonna get an axe and cut you free if you don’t stop this—”

“I don’t have to stop nothing!” Nova’s rage is pushing her voice past its limits. She is oblivious to the sliver of drool dripping from one corner of her mouth. “You just have to
wait
.
You just have to put your guns down and
wait
, Daddy!”

Her outburst silences them but not the tumult inside the shed. Now that he’s close enough, Blake can hear what sounds like the persistent flight of some trapped winged creature. The roof jumps, and then a sidewall, and then the door.

“Seriously,” Nova says. “Seriously . . . how are you . . .
alive
?”

“You were right.”

“About what?”

“It made a difference. That I said no. You were right, Nova. It made a big difference.”

“Well, good.” The smile that breaks across Nova’s face brings tears to her eyes; his words were a ray of sunshine in a long nightmare of seemingly impenetrable darkness. And he feels himself smiling as well, and then he’s blinking back tears too. “Well, that’s real good, Blake.”

“Yeah. It is . . . I hope.”

“It’s her, Blake,” Nova whispers, jaw quivering. “It’s Virginie.”

“It’s not her!”
Willie roars.

“It’s her,” Blake says quietly.

They both stare at him as if they’re sure that whatever he’s just experienced outside of Spring House has endowed him with this knowledge and the confidence with which he has expressed it. But for Willie it’s still not enough. “Then she’s
evil
. Then she’s the one who killed those boys! She’s the one who took Miss Caitlin and went to that motel and killed all those poor people. They in her now, those people.
They in her now
!
”

“Blood gets spilled every time a baby’s born,” Blake says. “It doesn’t make the baby evil.”

“Does that thing sound like a baby to you?” Willie asks.

What happens next comes so quickly neither Nova nor Willie has time to process it. There’s a brief flash of light that moves so fast Blake is confident he’s the only one who saw the trail it made as it swept from behind him and across Nova’s wrists. And he was able to see it only because he was expecting it. Then Nova’s wrists slip free of the chain that’s been cut in half. Its heavy links fall to the mud on either side of her with wet thuds; the broken padlock tumbles free, and suddenly she is lowering her arms in front of her in disbelief.

When Blake extends his hand, she takes it in a daze. He lifts her to her feet, and the door to the shed swings open behind her. Once he’s tucked Nova behind him, Blake steps forward into the darkness.

35

Willie and his men must have emptied the shed of most of its supplies before the creature inside emerged from the ground. Whatever the thing is, it’s down on all fours like a dog, its bent, misshapen limbs shuddering. The pale morning light falls in thin slats across its back, which appears to be changing color with liquid speed. He can make out two contrasting skin tones, one after the other. First he sees the same rich brown of Nova’s and Willie’s flesh, then, a few quivering seconds later, the pale and red-blotched skin tone of some white person. They pulse across the thing’s outer shell in alternating waves, each with the same brilliance as the luminescence Blake saw in the death-marker blossoms Nova could not burn.

The creature rockets toward the ceiling. For a second, it looks as if the thing has propelled itself skyward on its hind legs. But they are long and tendril-like, incapable of supporting the creature’s full weight. The head, which Blake sees for the first time, is vaguely human in shape, but the features are a riot of indecisive transformations, undulations involving musculature and bone. And now the head is thrown back on its long neck, gazing upside down at Blake from the ceiling with wide, expectant eyes and a yawning mouth. The face of a man is there for an instant, a man Blake doesn’t recognize—someone from the motel, he figures. But then it leaves like a reflection on water that’s been sliced by a skipping stone; the eyes ripple and are gone, leaving socketless caverns of molten bone.

When the creature screams, the sound is so deafening Blake’s hands fly to his ears. He hits the dirt floor knees-first. In time with the terrible intermingling cries, two tendrils of insects fly from the creature’s half-formed nostrils, tumbling across the empty interior of the shed, bouncing over bare shelves before flying through the cracks in the ceiling and walls.

Shedding.
It’s the only word Blake can think of to describe what he’s witnessing—the lavalike transformations of skin and bone, the entangled screams, the sudden rocketing skyward followed by the eruption of insects from the creature’s nose. It’s just as Willie said: all the spirits within this creature are fighting for control. All traces of the man he glimpsed seconds before are gone now, and when the creature flips and lands on all fours on the floor a few feet away, Blake finds himself staring into Caitlin’s eyes. The rest of her body is a spindly, shuddering mess of naked pale flesh, and her great yawning mouth has no lips, just ragged borders of skin that flap like rubber casing around an air duct.

“Caitlin!”
Blake screams.

The eyes meet his, the same eyes that greeted him when he came to in the hospital room after being beaten by John’s killers, the same eyes that turned to him in agony and despair when the bugs came for her. Even as the rest of the body shudders and molts and transforms, the vestiges of Caitlin’s spirit stare out at him from this impossible war between flesh and dueling spirits.

The sound of her name, and the familiar voice that just screamed it, intensifies Caitlin’s hold on the hovering riot of flesh and bone. Blake has the sense that he has just called Caitlin further into being, and he doesn’t know if that’s what he wants.

The creature rises, but without the same mad propulsion with which it rocketed to the ceiling only moments before. Caitlin’s long nose begins to take shape on the creature’s face, her eyes—too large to be human but still distinctly hers—widen and grow even larger, and the vague outlines of human lips resolve around the edges of her yawning mouth. Birdlike breasts swell on her chest. He sees her legs for the first time, which dangle behind her like broken tree limbs.

“Caitlin?” Blake asks.

“AmIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIprettyamIpretty?”

The words sound like whale song filtered through the same grinding buzz of insects that has terrorized them for most of this long, awful cycle of slaughter and rebirth.

“Let her go!”
Nova screams.

When Blake looks over his shoulder, he sees Willie and the other men holding Nova back. Their combined effort has dragged her several feet away from the door to the shed.

Blake looks back to the spirit. More of Caitlin’s features now dominate the otherwise misshapen face. Her eyes burn with a familiar rage.

“Caitlin . . . please . . .”

The spirit’s eyes meet his.

And Blake is speechless.
Please . . .
What could he say to her? What could she reveal to him that would help him to make the choice he knows comes next?

Show me. Show me you have learned something in death. Show me you have become something better than the self-loathing and the rage that have delivered you to this state and set this nightmare free upon the soil. Show me, Caitlin. Show me you are worth saving. Show me why I shouldn’t destroy you with the new power that has been placed in my hands.

Her answer is the same mad, rhythmic plea:
“Ammmmmmmmm IIIIIIIIIIIIII prrrrrrreeeeeeeettttttttyyyyyyyyyyy?”

And he cannot answer.
Is this death?
he thinks.
Is this what we become at the moment of our death, not our purest form, but our basest self?

From outside the shed, Nova Thomas screams, “Let her go, you bitch!”

The lips vanish from Caitlin’s mouth. Once again it’s a yawning dark hole, and from it pour two heavy flows of insects, blacker and thicker than any of the earlier eruptions—their constituent parts too tiny to make out, their sound a smooth buzz compared to the night’s previous swarms. And as they evacuate the body, Blake watches in astonishment as her skin darkens until it’s a light shade of mocha. The limbs become slender and proportional, delicate even. For a few seconds, it appears the great tide of black spirit matter leaving her has also caused the dirt floor to swallow her. But she is simply shrinking down to human size. Her black skin glistens; her delicate facial features are defined enough to give her an expression of astonished surrender as the bugs leave her.

Virginie . . .

Blake is so astonished by the slave woman taking proper form before him, he has paid no attention to the gathering cloud above. Within its dark swirl, a towering and ghostly impression of Caitlin Chaisson has taken shape. Her mad, pupil-less eyes are focused on the astonished gathering just beyond the shed’s open door.

Did Virginie Lacroix summon some great reserve of strength and wrest control of her resurrected body from Caitlin’s spirit? Or did Caitlin leave her in a divine rage over Nova’s last slur? Has Caitlin chosen this form because it will better allow her to tear Nova apart?

There is no mistaking the hatred in the spirit’s—
Caitlin’s
—eyes. The wall around the shed door shatters. A tide of wet, cold air blasts across Blake’s neck. He glimpses Willie hoisting Nova off her feet, one of his arms around her waist, the other holding his shotgun, and the terrified assemblage scrambles desperately up onto the back porch. Then Blake gives Felix Delachaise his first command since ordering him to consume Vernon Fuller.

“Take her!”
he cries. “Take her now!”

At the last second, when it’s clear they won’t be able to outrun the mad ghost made of insects, Willie drops Nova and spins on the advancing spirit, raising his shotgun. Nova’s ass slams to the floor of the porch so hard her teeth knock together. But the pain is a dull, distant thing as she stares death in the face.

Nova is ready to die. The rage has left her, and she is filled with a sudden and total comfort over the fact that she will die in defiance of the spirit’s rage—of Caitlin’s rage. She only wishes the men would leave her to her fate. Not her father. But Sam and Allen. Because this is not something they invited on themselves.

These thoughts are halted by the sight of Blake standing just inside the shed’s ruined front wall, a silhouette through the dark gauze of the furious approaching insects. But his hands are at his sides, his fingers splayed, animated, it seems, by an intense power.

The first column of them comes zipping over the roof of the house, glowing so brightly their violent interior light isn’t dimmed in the slightest by the rising sun. They are like fireflies that appear out of thin air itself, and they tear through Caitlin’s raging, advancing spirit in a fierce bright line, like shrapnel shredding a plane’s fuselage. The first column is dotted by white flapping wings, as is the second, which flares across the cracked, shifting roof of the shed before blasting into Caitlin’s remnants from behind. It looks as if they are cleaving and incinerating the tiny monsters in the same instant. Compared to what they are attacking, these new luminescent winged saviors move with determination and grace, making a sound like a saw cutting cleanly through wood.

And there’s no mistaking Blake’s pose, his posture. If he isn’t driving these things, he has summoned them somehow. How else to explain his confidence, his stillness, and the steadiness of his outstretched hands?

It made a difference, that I said no. You were right, Nova. It made a difference.

But the battle isn’t done. The remaining floating tendrils of Caitlin’s mutilated spirit rise, struggling to reassemble. But the fierce blue invaders—they are either dragonflies or the spirit world’s imitation of them—are penetrating these columns, matching their every duck and weave until the last dark remnants of Caitlin Chaisson’s spirit are being chased skyward, toward the lightening sky and its tufts of clouds.

Only when a silence falls does Nova realize how high the last evidence of this battle has ascended.

She rises to her feet, stumbles down the back steps, eyes skyward, searching for any last remainder of the spirit that almost devoured her. But they are gone, and as the last few sparkling flecks of power Blake called forth wink out in the sky overhead, she sees he has gently closed the fingers on each hand.

And then the watery silence is pierced by a new sound, a sound that in any other circumstance would be alarming enough to elicit at least a grimace from one of the stunned people staring skyward. But in this garden of ruin, it is a comfort. It is full of promise. It is the sound of a woman crying with the confusion and pain of one newly born.