The Vines by Christopher Rice
“Are they starting up tours again?” Blake asks.
“Not for a week, Daddy says. Till all this dies down. You see any news crews on the way in?”
“Nope. Just some cop cars.”
“They’re searching an area close by for him. Least they were this morning. They think he might have stumbled a ways after she whacked him or something.”
“But there’s no blood inside the shed?”
He asks this again because he doesn’t believe her, and apparently his tone makes that clear because she stops walking and glares at him over one shoulder.
She hasn’t just stopped to stare, though, Blake realizes. She wants him to notice what she’s standing beside. The fountain next to her is just a broad copper basin, one of the old sugar kettles that were part of the refining process. But the spigot has stopped running, and the basin is tipped so far to one side it’s emptied all of its water onto the flagstone path. Blake tries to imagine someone lifting it. But the job would be too much for just one man. It would be too much for several men, especially if they were drunk, which most of the guests last night most assuredly were.
“Did the police do this?”
“Nope,” Nova answers. “They didn’t do that either.”
She points to a spot where a planter has spit several of its bricks onto the flagstones. And spit is the best word he can think of for it. His first guess is that the earth underneath shifted and settled; what was this land all around them but glorified swamp? But it can’t explain the force that propelled the bricks out onto the path. A few seconds of blinking, and Blake realizes the only probable explanation is some sudden upward pressure. A heaving of some sort from below, and that’s just . . .
“Nova, run to my truck, see if my shovel’s—”
Willie Thomas has just emerged from the shed, when he sees who is standing beside his daughter in the lengthening shadow of the main house. And in an instant Blake watches Willie transform from a harried, overworked yardman to a smiling, happy servant whose every reaction to a white person is stained by a childhood of forced integration. As always, it is a transformation that makes Willie’s only daughter bristle with a combination of anger and shame. Out come the huge, solicitous smile and the too-eager handshake, which Blake accepts because no matter how hard he tries to treat Willie Thomas as a peer, the man is determined to greet Blake from behind this protective mask of inauthentic good cheer.
“How you doing, Mister Blake?”
“I’m all right, Mister Willie. How you doing?”
“Oh, we jes tryin’ to put things back together again, that’s all. Miss Caitlin went back to N’Awlins, so—”
“I told him,” Nova says.
“Well, that’s fine,” Willie says, but his emphatic nod can’t distract from the icy look he’s just given his only daughter. “This whole thing”—it takes some effort, but Willie puts the smile back on and focuses his attention on Blake—“this some misunderstandin’, that’s all. Mister Troy, he gonna come back soon. Five years married. I mean, they work through this. You see. They’s jes no sense in everybody gettin’ so worked up—”
“He’s dead, Daddy.”
Willie’s eyes flash with anger; he’s clearly been having this conversation with his daughter all day, and Blake wonders if the man agrees with her more than he’s letting on.
“He’s dead,” Nova says again. “And we have no idea what killed him.”
Before Blake can respond, Nova takes him by the arm and guides him toward the shed. “Come on,” she says.
“Nova!” Willie calls after them. But his daughter is undeterred, and by the time she’s pushed open the door to the shed, Blake feels Willie right behind them, breathless with anxiety.
Despite what Nova has told him, Blake is expecting a slaughterhouse inside. And so he is astonished by the cleanliness and orderliness before him. The only thing strange he sees is the set of indentations in the dirt floor. It helps that Nova has walked right up to them and has positioned the toe of her right sneaker next to the largest one. They have the appearance of rat holes, but the little dirt and debris piles you’d expect to find next to them are gone (although they were probably swept away by Willie’s broom).
“Mower did that, Nova!” Willie cries.
“Lawn mower’s been at our place for weeks. It was leaking gas all over, and Caitlin said she could smell it from the house.”
“Something else then. I don’t know.”
“Rats?” Blake asks. He’s standing right next to Nova now, and they are both studying the holes in the floor. There are five of them in all, and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern or order to their spacing. And the dirt here is drier than most other parts of the property, which is why Willie chose this spot for the shed, so there should be some cracking or other evidence of the violence it would have taken to punch these holes. But there isn’t.
“No evidence of digging,” Nova says.
“You didn’t sweep it away?” Blake asks Willie.
The man shakes his head and throws up his hands. “Mister Troy and that woman, they had some kinda crazy fight, and he stumbled outta here drunk as a skunk. Reason they can’t find him is ’cause he’s not dead. Now y’all come on outta here so I can—”
“That woman had so much blood on her it looked like she’d stuck a pig. And she would have cut you down with that axe if I hadn’t stopped her.”
“She was drunk.”
“She was terrified!”
“Wait,” Blake manages. “Everybody just . . . wait a minute. Are you saying there was something in here with them?” The silence startles Blake more than an affirmative response would. “So . . . you think something punched these holes down into the—”
“Not down,” Nova says firmly. “Up!”
“Nova. What the . . .” It is the best Blake can manage, but the condescension ripples through even these basic, incomplete words. What is she saying? Some sort of animal punched up through a solid dirt floor and . . . what? Ate Troy Mangier, including the clothes on his back? It’s a preposterous suggestion. The holes might be big enough for a snake or a rat, but nothing big enough to consume a fully grown man in an instant. But these thoughts aren’t enough to keep a vein of heat from traveling up his right leg when he absently shifted his foot over one of the largest holes while Nova and her father were shouting back and forth at each other.
“Mister Blake doesn’t need to be bothered with all your foolishness.”
“I don’t work for Mister Blake and you don’t either, and he is here of his own accord, Daddy. And I know damn well you’re not gonna tell him what you’ve been telling me about this place for years, so I’ll just go ahead right now and—”
“Nova!”
“Tell him, Daddy. Tell him about the flowers, the ones we can’t find in any book, the ones that don’t die no matter how much poison you pour all over ’em . . . No? OK. Well, then I’ll tell him about what I’ve seen. I’ll tell him about the one you put in a pot on our porch, and then the next day it was gone. Not dead. Not withered. Gone.”
“Somebody picked that flower, Nova,” Willie says, but he’s resting one shoulder against the door frame, his glazed eyes studying the sunset as if it might be his last. It isn’t resignation coming off Willie Thomas; it’s defeat. Nova isn’t lying; she is spilling secrets Willie has tried to keep for years.
“It’s a private road, Daddy.”
“What are you saying?” Blake asks. “You’re saying the flower . . . walked away?”
“I’m saying something’s not right in the ground here. We’ve all seen it—Daddy, me, the other staff—and we’ve all taught ourselves how to unsee it. We’re just like everybody else . . .”
“How’s that?” Blake asks.
“So busy looking for ghosts in the attic, we never think to look in the ground.”
Without so
Blake feels a sharp pinch of sadness when he sees the expression on Nova’s face: lips pursed and trembling slightly, glazed eyes focused on the floor. It is then that Blake sees the courage it took for Nova to make these insane statements, that despite her bluster and her anger, she believes every word of what she’s said, and she is terrified . . . and now her father has abandoned her to Blake’s skepticism.
He decides to be objective—as a nurse, it doesn’t help in the ER to just make assumptions. As far as he can tell, Nova is not a drunk; she doesn’t smell of weed. Her first few years of college have not produced the kind of wild tales of rebellion or self-destructive behavior that were common among most of Blake’s friends when he was her age. And despite Nova’s simmering resentment toward her, Caitlin used to update Blake on Nova’s progress at LSU with a great sense of pride tinged with self-congratulatory noblesse oblige. Sleeplessness and the shock of watching her father almost get decapitated might be to blame for Nova’s anger, but not the extent of her—he stops short of marking them as delusions, but honestly, what else could they be?
And where are the telltale marks of addiction and mental deterioration worn by so many of the raving lunatics Blake sees wheeled into his ER on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis? He doesn’t see them, so he scours his memories of Spring House for any lost or buried recollection of walking flowers or strangely crawling vines. He finds nothing, but he also admits that his contact with the soil here is not as intimate as Willie’s or Nova’s, two people he has never known to tell a lie. If there is some strange, possibly supernatural secret to this place, it will be found in their memories, not his.
When he opens up his own memories, he sees himself as a child running the grounds fearlessly, convinced that he and Caitlin traveled beneath some bubble of adult protection that followed them everywhere. But the older he got, the more he came to fear jungles of shadows and open fields that seemed to lead to infinite darkness. The killing blow to his delusion of youthful invincibility was delivered by two assailants who attacked him and John Fuller one night during their senior year of high school. But truth be told, it was already dying before that awful night, and so for the past decade his experiences of Spring House have been confined to its parlors and guest bedrooms, not its gardens.
“I saw something . . . ,” Nova finally says.
“What?”
“I knocked the woman down before she could kill Daddy. Then Caitlin was right behind me, and she opened the door to the shed. There was no sign of Troy. No sign at all. But there was something else . . . I don’t know what it was, but it was low to the ground. About there”—she extends her foot until the toe of her sneaker is hovering above the spot in question—“and it was glowing.”
“Glowing?”
“Yes. Glowing. Like one of those light sticks you get in emergency kits. Only it was different colors.”
“What did the police say about it?”
“They never saw it. I don’t know what she did with it.”
“Caitlin, you mean . . .?”
Nova nods.
“What was it, Nova?”
She looks into his eyes for the first time in several minutes. “It was some kinda flower,” she whispers. “And it was where her husband should have been. And everything about it was just . . . wrong.”
Blake nods, more out of habit than agreement, then looks to the holes in the floor as if they might interject with a logical explanation of themselves.
“You don’t believe me,” Nova says. “Fine. I don’t care. Here’s the thing, though. We’re gone. You hear me? We’re gone and we’re not coming back until you find out what that thing was.”
“Does your dad know you’re leaving?”
“Check the truck. His bag is packed.”
“Jesus. Fine . . . But me? What do you expect me to do?”
“You’re her best friend,” she says, as if that is all the explanation necessary.
“I was her best friend. Six months ago. You think she’s going to tell me anything right now?”
“Yeah, I do. It’s not like she replaced you. No one else has the patience for her, I guess.”
“Nova, if I call her right now about anything, especially this”—Blake stutters a bit when he realizes this includes crazy talk of walking, glow-in-the-dark plants—“she’ll just think I’m trying to rub her nose in it.”
“Then don’t rub her nose in it . . . unless you think you won’t be able to help yourself.”
“Well, that’s not fair. For Christ’s sake, Nova, I’m a nurse, not a detective.”
“And my father is not a slave!” she cries, whirling on him. “There is something dangerous here, and I don’t care if she kicks him out of that house; he’s not working another day here until I find out what it is. Now, he came close enough to death last night ’cause of some stupid white lady, and I’m not going to let it happen again, you hear me?”
“Nova, I know you’ve been mad at her for years, and I get it. Caitlin’s behavior around your dad . . . it’s not always healthy and . . . I get it, is what I’m trying to—”
“You don’t know anything about my anger.”
“Oh yeah. ’Cause I’ve never dealt with prejudice in my life.”
“It’s not the same.”
“You’re right. You didn’t lose the man you loved.”
“Not yet,” she whispers.
And then she is gone. And Blake is left alone with the realization that in another minute or two it will be so dark outside he will either have to pull the chain on the lightbulb overhead, or leave the shed altogether. He chooses the latter.
12
A year before he died, Caitlin’s father transformed one of the side porches of their home on St. Charles Avenue into a solarium, replacing its three walls of sagging screens with clean sweeps of plate glass. It is on the second floor and looks out mostly onto the neighbor’s yard. Her father compensated for its oak-branch-filtered view of the Bickmores’ swimming pool by lining it with potted plants Caitlin has done her best to tend since she inherited the house a few years before.
She can think of no better place to bring the flower she plucked from the spot where her dead husband should have been.
She has placed it inauspiciously in a tulip sundae glass, half-filled with water, and set it atop the white wicker coffee table beside a pile of unread copies of Architectural Digest, which she adds to once a month because the subscription is her mother’s and she can’t bring herself to cancel it.
For what feels to her like hours, she has been staring at the blossom, awaiting the return of the strange luminescence with which it first greeted her.
But the only otherworldly aspect to it now is its shape; the petals are too large, hand-sized, proportional to each other but not to its slender stalk. Their vibrant shade of white isn’t bruised in the slightest, even after hours of being pressed against her flesh, hours in which she was questioned ceaselessly by the police, all the while wondering if the secret under her dress, the one laced under the waistband of her panties, was about to explode in another slick and thirsty eruption. Rather than frightening her, rather than quickening her words and making her appear sweaty and suspicious to the stoic detectives, this uncertainty filled her with a kind of delicious, drugged calm, and she wondered how many others found themselves drowsy and contented upon suddenly learning they were drifting through an upended world.
Even now, even in the absence of its strange pulses of light, she half expects the flower’s supernatural promise to spread through the house, a reality-bending gas that alters the very fabric of each room. She wouldn’t be surprised to see the regal portrait of her father in the adjacent sitting room suddenly peel free of its canvas and take a humanoid form, slowly dropping to the ha
Ever since she was a little girl, she has tried to nurse a belief in heavenly guardians; her bedroom was filled with framed pictures of cheerful cherubs and proud archangels, and for years little angel statuettes were everyone’s go-to present when the time came to buy a Christmas or birthday gift for the girl who could afford to buy herself anything. But belief is a feeling and faith is a practice based in experience. Now she has faith; in her lowest moment, an angel did appear to her—only it had blossoms instead of wings.
Caitlin brings the flower to her nose and inhales. Its scent is something akin to charred sugar, sweet and smoky and a little cloying. Then comes a loamy undertone, an intoxicating compromise between turned dirt and the taste she’d often discover just below her husband’s armpit during sex.
This smell of earth and flesh induces a state of feverish, sudden arousal; she finds herself going moist with the impossible speed depicted in the letters on Penthouse Forum she would sometimes read aloud to Troy when things had gone particularly soft in the bedroom. Is this response simply a result of being reminded of her husband? Her husband, who cheated on her at her own birthday party, just a few feet from where she stood. Her husband, who is now gone, gone, gone.
No. It isn’t possible. This is a force greater than memory, and it is using her nostrils and mouth and sex as entry points.
The petals of the flower have rounded slightly around the edges, forming a half funnel that is now aimed directly at her. The stamens and filaments within have gone rigid, abandoning the slightly interlaced posture they’ve held since she first discovered the impossible blossom, and the slender stalk is curling gently back and forth through the water like a tethered tadpole.