The Vines

  31

  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 . . .”

  “Oh, Daddy.”

  “Where’s he goin’?” he asks through tears. “Where’s Blake goin’?”

  “There’s somebody else, I think.”

  “Somebody else . . .” This is her father’s moment to come apart, she fears. She had hers earlier, but her father never got the chance. True, he hasn’t witnessed half of the nightmares she’s been forced to in the past few hours, but he’s seen enough. He’s heard enough. So she tries to steady her tone, hoping the sound of her voice will be her best tool for securing him to his own bones.

  “Somebody else responsible for John’s murder. He was alone with one of those ba—” She wants to call them bastards, but that seems profane given their terrible fate. “Those men on the roof before the guy got took. And he must have . . . I don’t know. He must’ve said something to him about there being somebody else involved. Why else would Blake take the vines with him?”

  “You think he’s gonna kill whoever it is?”

  “He thinks he doesn’t have long to live. So he’s gonna do something he wouldn’t do otherwise. I don’t know . . . I don’t know what . . .”

  “So which is it gonna be, baby?” Willie finally asks her. “We gonna run or we gonna burn this place?”

  “These things don’t burn. We start a fire and we might just set ’em all free.”

  “So we run?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy.”

  “Oh, Nova, I know you always hated this place—”

  “Daddy, don’t. You don’t have to . . . Not right now. You don’t—”

  “This is your house, Nova.”

  She’s sure it’s just a figure of speech, or that some swell of emotion twisted his words at the last moment, so she keeps closing the distance between them. But he holds up both hands to stop her, his palms white as bone in the darkness: “Nova. It’s your house.”

  “What?” she whispers.

  He straightens, clears his throat, and appears to test his sure-footed stance, like he fears she’ll try to knock him off his feet when he explains further.

  “I know I kept you here longer than you ever wanted to be. I know as soon as you started reading those books ’bout slave days that all you saw in this place was the blood of our brothers and sisters everywhere. And I hoped one day you could forgive this house and Miss Caitlin and people who don’t know no better ’bout their own history.”

  “I don’t understand, Daddy. Why?”

  “Because if Miss Caitlin’s really gone . . . then this place . . . it belongs to you . . . ’Cause when I tried to leave last year, when I was gonna start my own bidness wit yer uncle, she told me to name my price. And that was my price. Spring House. For you. I never in a million years thought she’d say yes, but she did. And then when I thought about it, it done made some sense ’cause Miss Caitlin, she didn’t want this place. Neither did Troy. She’s got her money and all kinds of things. This was her daddy’s dream. But you . . . I figured the land alone could set you up for life, if she said yes. So I told her she’d have to leave it to you.”

  “And you never thought she would.”

  “No. I thought I’d strike out on my own like you always wanted. Maybe finally earn your respect.”

  “You always had my respect.”

  “Maybe so, baby girl. Maybe so. But do I have it now?” His voice is quaking, and she can see his jaw quivering in the flashlight’s glow. “Do I have it now that you know what I’ve left you? Land with nothing but evil under it?”

  She answers by embracing him, and when she feels his wet sobs against her shoulder, she tightens her hold. Mine, she thinks. This house, this land . . . it’s mine. And this knowledge seems to radiate up her legs from the earth itself, warming her belly and filling her with newfound energy. But that’s all. On an ordinary night, Nova would be ecstatic over this news. But tonight these ideas feel like vague abstractions, and what she feels is a sudden, quieting sense of responsibility.

  Without meaning to, Nova has angled the Maglite’s beam at the ruined gazebo, where a large fresh tendril has emerged from the opening. There are four blossoms lining its thick stalk and they are opening now, the luminescence within intensifying as the white petals spread. Each blossom is about three times the size of the ones inside the house, the swollen mothers of those deceptively beautiful death markers in the front parlor and ruined study.

  Nova pulls gently free of her father’s grip. When he sees the new growth in the gazebo, Willie grabs her shoulder. But instead of going still, she reaches up and takes his hand so that they can approach the gazebo together. By the time they’re standing at the edge of the swollen crater, the radiance from the opening blossoms is enough to see by, and Nova has lowered the Maglite to one side, its beam no longer necessary to guide them.

  All sides of the crater are now draped with thick, blossom-lined vines, the petals on each opening with something that looks like leisurely anticipation. But what nails Nova in place is the sight waiting for them at the bottom of the pit, the swelling green protrusion that’s pushing its way gradually up from the bottom. A few seconds of staring at it, and Nova realizes it’s merely a semitranslucent skin over a dark, shadowy mass within.

  “It’s a pod, isn’t it?” Nova asks.

  “Yeah . . .”

  Blake is right. It’s a process they’re paying witness to, and it was set in motion by Caitlin’s blood, and then by Blake’s blood, and since then its individual components have proven themselves impervious to fire, and possibly a dozen other forms of physical destruction.

  “There’s something inside that thing,” Willie whispers.

  “I know.”

  “And it’s growing. Right now. In front of us.”

  “I know, Daddy.”

  “We can’t let it. Whatever’s inside that thing, we can’t jes let it—”

  “I know. But we can’t burn it. Not when it’s . . . like this.”

  “Let’s try.”

  “And burn down the whole damn house?”

  “Then, what? We jes run?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not gettin’ it, baby. What’s the plan here?”

  “We wait for it to be born,” she answers. “Then we burn it.”

  The gazebo is quiet now, the blossoms open—eighteen in all, Nova’s counted—and her father’s astonished, frightened glare is raising hairs on the back of her neck.
r />   “You sure?” he asks, when she finally looks him in the eye.

  “About which part? The waiting or the burning?”

  “Both.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  They hear it at the same time, a sound like flying chain saws, and the expression on Nova’s face is enough to make her father grab her by the wrist and take off running. The sound gets louder as they run straight into the empty, unplanted fields, and after a few minutes of not feeling a bug or anything like it on her skin, Nova risks a look over one shoulder.

  They aren’t being pursued. The cloud of insects sweeping down out of the sky is headed straight for the gazebo, and the shadows they make as they flit through the security light above the kitchen door are the size of sparrows. These aren’t the insects that have been gathering inside the house, awaiting the call of whatever strange power pulses inside of the death blossoms. These are the terrible obsidian monsters that left only an hour before. And now they’re back.

  Nova finally stops running. Her father pulls on her for a few tugs before he gives in and stops running too. Chests heaving, both bent over with hands braced on their knees so they can catch their breath, Nova and Willie watch as the insect cloud descends on the gazebo’s wreckage. The collective glow from the blossoms illuminates the great swirling cloud of monstrous bugs. Then the glow itself is extinguished as the bugs pile onto each large flower, coating it with a greater speed and ferocity than exhibited by any of their smaller forebears who have taken up residence inside the main house.

  “Mother of God,” Willie whispers. “Whatever’s in that gazebo, they’re pollinatin’ it.”

  They’re transfixed by the play of shadows around the gazebo’s tilting ruins, when suddenly a fierce flicker illuminates the front parlor. To Nova it looks like a small, contained lightning storm. They’re too far from the house to see the chandelier in any detail, but she’s sure that’s the source. She’s sure that the bugs gathered around its dangling crystals are on the move, taking the next step of this unholy process that’s turned the property before them into a launching pad for winged demons.

  The sound of shattering glass from the front parlor is loud enough to mean at least two of the front windows have just been broken through. And when she realizes the violent little electrical storm has ceased, Nova whispers Blake’s name and grips her father’s right hand.

  “Nova—”

  “We’re stayin’. This is my house now and I’m sick of this shit.”

  Her father just stares at her, and she can’t tell if it’s exhaustion or shock that’s drained any discernible expression from his face. “Well, all right,” he finally says. “Then I’m gonna get us some help.”

  32

  Blake has seen the outside of Vernon Fuller’s house before, but he’s never had the nerve to cross the entrance to the long driveway. The place was once the family’s modest weekend retreat, but ever since Vernon abandoned his wife and his career, it’s become his permanent refuge. In other parts of Des Allemands, this one-story L of weathered red brick would be just another unimpressive tract house, but the lot here has frontage on a secluded, tree-lined corner of the bayou, and the boat dock floating in the inky water looks taller than the house itself.

  The 1988 Suburban, the same vehicle Blake so often finds waiting for him outside the hospital where he works, is parked at the head of the driveway, its chunky nose kissing the half-open door to a garage that looks like it’s been turned into some kind of toolshed or workroom.

  By the time he reaches the front door, the tree frogs and crickets are accelerating their frantic song in anticipation of sunrise, and he wonders if their music will mask the approach of his fate.

  He knocks and hears voices from a television inside. They make it impossible to hear whether or not someone is approaching the door from the other side, so when it opens suddenly, Blake finds himself standing almost nose to nose with Vernon Fuller. Both men jerk back, but it’s too late for Vernon to hide the revolver he’s got in his right hand. He’s got no choice but to act tough; he tucks it firmly in the waistband of his jeans, at the small of his back.

  “Can I come in?” Blake asks.

  The man once had an angry, seductive slant to his eyes that used to remind Blake of the handsome Eastern European politicians he sometimes glimpsed on cable news. But like most of his facial features, it has collapsed some with age, giving him a perpetual suspicious squint. He’s wearing jeans and work boots and a white tank top that displays the lingering huskiness of a former athlete, and it’s clear Blake has disturbed him in the middle of getting dressed.

  Blake smells coffee, not the stink of hard alcohol, and the living room behind Vernon is cluttered but not the reality-show ruin Blake had hoped for. The fact that Vernon Fuller isn’t living in his own filth as penance for his sins, that he’s preparing for his day like some normal commuter, fills Blake with a rage that drives him to cross the threshold without being officially invited.

  Beneath his shirt, the vine clutches his chest more tightly, thirsty for the hot pulse of anger in his veins.

  A wall of sliding glass doors looks out onto the plain swell of grass that tapers down to the water’s edge, and in the corner of the living room the WWL Eyewitness Morning News plays on a boxy television piled with unopened bills. Police lights splash a haggard-looking roadside motel, and then the screen fills with the face of some pimply teenager, his jaw tensed as he squints into the harsh glare of a camera light. The reporter just off camera says, “You do realize this story is hard to believe, don’t you, sir?”

  After the reporter sticks the mic back in his face, the kid answers, “I do. I do realize that and I know what I saw, and what I saw was a lot of bugs killing those people.”

  “Right. But you’re also saying—”

  “It was the cheaters,” the kid says. Dazed, but slightly perturbed, as if he’s being asked to give simple directions once more to an elderly and confused relative. “They killed the cheaters.”

  There’s an empty two-second beat while the reporter gives the kid a chance to recant this insane statement, and the kid does nothing of the kind. Instead he lifts a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the camera light but remains rooted in place, ready and willing, it seems, to answer more questions.

  Vernon kills the television with the remote, settles into a tattered leather Eames chair, and begins shaking a cigarette out of a rumpled soft pack. On top of a short cabinet just a few inches from his right elbow sits an eight-by-ten photograph of John Fuller, taken only months before he was murdered. Blake knows this because Blake took the photograph, on the levee, not too far from where he was later killed. John is beaming, revealing small, unobtrusive teeth, perfectly aligned by braces he’d shed the year before. It’s a smile that crinkles bright eyes with the same beautiful Slavic slant his father lost to old age. His swath of black hair, lightly gelled as it always was, is tossed by the wind off the lake and covers most of his forehead.

  “Do you want me to stop?” Vernon asks.

  For a second or two, Blake thinks he’s referring to the cigarette he’s just lit. He exhales smoke through both nostrils like a parody of a dragon, but his glassy-eyed stare searches Blake’s face even through the cloud.

  “My . . . visits, I mean,” he continues. “Is that why you’re here? You want me to stop?”

  Blake had planned to take his time and uncover as many more secrets as he could. But the news report just reminded him he doesn’t really know how much time he’s got left. An hour? Two or three more? They will come for him out of the sky, and they will take him just like they took Caitlin. And if Vernon Fuller fails the test Blake is about to lay out for him, he will be forced to watch, which isn’t exactly what Blake wants, but it will be better than nothing.

  With a start, Vernon realizes he’s sitting on his own gun—that he failed to remove the revolver from the back of his p
ants before he sat down. He eases forward slightly, eyes on Blake, and pulls the gun free. Blake expects him to slide it in a drawer, but instead he sets it atop the cabinet nearby, just inches from John’s photo. He does, however, take care to turn the barrel so that it isn’t pointing directly at Blake.

  “I know why you come and see me at work,” Blake says.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. You killed your son.”

  Vernon Fuller’s eyes water. First his lips purse so tightly it’s as if he’s pressed one finger to them, and then his jaw tightens so much his chin quivers in response. His hands are resting on his knees, but he’s leaning forward as if at any second he might propel himself out of his chair and close his fingers around Blake’s throat.

  And that will be just fine. Fine, but not perfect. Blake is hoping for a gunshot, because a gunshot will unleash enough blood to feed the vine on his chest. Because that’s the deal Blake has made with himself, to confront Vernon with what he knows, and allow Vernon’s response to seal his fate. Not Blake. Not the vines. Not Caitlin. And not the furious ghost of Virginie Lacroix. No one but Vernon should decide his fate. It might not be the justice of the earth the slaves at Spring House saw before they escaped its destruction, but it’s as close as Blake can get in the final hours before he’s ripped from this world.

  But Vernon Fuller hasn’t reached for the gun, or even moved an inch. Blake takes a step toward him, grateful when the glare from a nearby lamp moves across John’s framed and frozen smile.

  “Mike Simmons. Kyle Austin. The other one . . .”

  “Fauchier,” Vernon answers in a whisper. “Scott . . . Scott Fauchier.”

  “Yes. They’re dead. All three of them.”

  “You? Did . . . you?”

  “Yes. I killed them.”

  Is it a lie? Worse, is it a betrayal of the promise Blake made to himself, not to deceive Vernon into spilling blood? It feels like the truth. It feels as if he murdered those three men. Was there something in Blake’s soul that wanted those men torn limb from limb, and did the vines consume it and follow its instructions? Could they have done their terrible work without his rage?