The Vines

  Scott Fauchier, he thinks suddenly. The vines killed Scott Fauchier and I didn’t even know who he was, went most of my life never trusting my instinct that there’d been a third assailant, a third killer, so it wasn’t possible for me to hate that man in my heart. Or in my blood. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like. I only knew his name because Kyle Austin said it to me on the roof, before the vines tore him apart. Because the vines knew. The crime was written in my blood somehow. And that’s why they killed Scott Fauchier too. But the vines knew what he’d done, because his crime was written in my blood somehow. So they knew and they went for him.

  Vernon is waiting for Blake to strike, and when he doesn’t the man reaches for his revolver with a tentative, shaking hand. He doesn’t aim the gun at Blake with a killer’s confidence. Rather, he draws the handle close to his stomach. The barrel trembles.

  “You don’t know why I come,” Vernon finally says. “You’ve got no idea why.”

  “You picked the guys on your team you knew would say yes. Then you told them where John and I were meeting and you told them to—”

  “I told them to scare you!” Vernon roars. “You two, I thought it was just some kind of game. I thought if you didn’t have anywhere to go that you’d just . . . you’d just move on!”

  “John was terrified of you finding out. All you had to do was tell him you knew. He would have freaked and called the whole thing off.”

  “That’s not true. The way he looked at you. I knew—from the way . . . I just . . . I wanted to scare you guys. That’s all. I told them just to make you feel scared so that you wouldn’t feel so . . . comfortable meeting there, just a few blocks from—”

  “You liar!” Blake roars. “You wanted them to beat it out of us! You wanted them to punish us!”

  Thunderstruck, Vernon gazes at Blake as if he’s tripled in size. He can’t tell if it’s his volume or his words that have stunned Vernon. The man’s gun hand is shaking, the barrel still held close to his stomach as if he plans to muffle any kickback with his own girth. And Blake’s fear that the gun might go off accidentally is just a brief spike that gives way to a kind of drowsy satisfaction. He’s beyond such petty concerns now. A marked man has no such fears. A man with only hours to live is free to pursue his own final designs and no one else’s. And so he digs deeper, urging Vernon’s finger to end this for both of them.

  “Did you give them a choice at least? Did you threaten them? Or bribe them?”

  Instead of answering, though, Vernon asks, “How did you kill them?”

  “Magic.”

  “Uh-huh. OK then. How did you find out?”

  “More magic.”

  “Is that how you’re gonna kill me? Magic? ’Cause you sure as hell don’t have a gun. Otherwise you would have drawn it by now.”

  “Did you know they were being blackmailed?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they were idiots.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means Simmons called me. He actually called me after he murdered my son and the cop put the bite on him. And I recorded every goddamn thing he said. And I told him if he or any of those other boys ever mentioned my name, I’d send the tape to the police. So he could take his pick. Me or the cop. All the cop wanted was a piece of their spending money once a month. That was chump change to those little fucking brats. Me? I would have destroyed their lives with a phone call. They were idiots, is what they were.”

  “They were teenagers.”

  “They were murderers! You were there. You saw.”

  “Because you put them up to it!”

  “I put them up to being bullies because that’s what they were. That’s what I saw in them every day on the field. I didn’t know Simmons’s dad had messed with him when he was a kid. I didn’t know he was going to lose it when he saw you kissing my son.”

  “Of course you knew. That’s why you picked him. You just thought he’d be smart enough to lose it with me.”

  Vernon slumps back into his leather chair, resting the gun on his right thigh, his grip on the handle weak, the barrel pointed in Blake’s general direction but aimed at nothing in particular. Suddenly he has the vacant look of a nursing-home patient hollowed out by old age and isolation. Blake can’t tell if this is an admission, or the man’s just given up fighting with him. But now he needs it—he needs Vernon to shoot him. Needs his revenge. And so he keeps pushing.

  “Why do you come visit me once a month then?”

  “Because seeing you makes me want to die,” he answers quietly. “So I wait for you to come out those doors, and if the sight of you still hurts as bad as it did the last time, I come back here.” He raises the gun and pops the cylinder out. “I load one bullet.” He pops the cylinder back in and presses the revolver’s barrel to his right temple. “And I let God decide if I should live.”

  Vernon keeps the gun pressed to his temple, and for a while the two men just stare at each other as dawn’s first light slides across the floorboards between them.

  Finally, Vernon says, “Is that good enough for you, Blake Henderson?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it’s time for your magic then.”

  When Blake lifts up the front of his shirt, Vernon’s snarl collapses into a vacant, slack-jawed stare. In one hand Blake peels the snake of vine from his chest. It clings to him for a few seconds, but without so much resistance, and in another second or two, he’s holding it out for Vernon to see. When it starts to wrap around his wrist, Blake hurls it to the floor. Both ends curl and it starts inch-worming toward Blake’s feet. He takes a few steps back to lengthen its journey so Vernon can see it in action. The man has lifted his legs up onto his chair, like a parody of a housewife freaking out over a mouse in her kitchen.

  “Shoot it,” Blake says.

  Vernon’s lips are trembling; the sight of this otherworldly organism moving across the floor of his home has rattled him out of his guilt, self-loathing, and suicidal fantasizing. And Blake enjoys the sight of this, knowing that he doesn’t need to necessarily kill him to get retribution. If it’s all I can do to him, then let me. In the time I have I’ll destroy what’s left of his sanity by forcing him to bear witness to the horrors I’ve seen during the long and terrible night.

  “Shoot it, Vernon.”

  Vernon fires. His aim is good. But it’s as if the bullet has been captured by a pocket of electrical energy just a few inches above the vine. There’s a spitting arc of flame where the bullet seems absorbed by the vine itself. The vine goes suddenly still, but it’s undamaged.

  When Blake realizes his ears are ringing so loudly he won’t be able to hear the insects coming for him, he feels a swell of genuine panic he can’t ignore. He waits another few seconds for the ringing to lessen some; then he starts talking loud enough to hear himself over the din.

  “You feed them your blood, you see. They drink from you, and then they devour the people who’ve hurt you the worst. My friend discovered them. And then she gave them my blood too, and they killed Mike Simmons and Kyle Austin and Scott Fauchier.”

  “Why didn’t they kill me then?”

  “I’d have to feed them again. It’s a cycle, you see. Which makes sense, after all. It’s a plant.”

  “That is not a fucking plant.”

  “I know.”

  “Well . . . are you going to feed it?”

  “No.”

  Vernon takes his eyes off the slack vine for the first time since Blake pulled it from his chest. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not a murderer, Vernon.”

  Vernon stands and walks to the spot where the vine has gone still.

  “If it’s a cycle, how does it end?” he asks.

  “There’s a price .
. .”

  “What kind of price?”

  “Bugs.”

  “Bugs?” Despite what he’s seen with the vine, Vernon can’t keep the skepticism out of his voice.

  “After they kill, they leave a flower in place of the person’s body, and then the bugs come and they feed off it and it changes them. And then they come for the person who gave their blood.”

  “And then what?”

  “They tear them apart.”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind, kid.”

  “Shoot it again and then tell me I’m crazy. But look me in the eye when you say it.”

  “So they’re coming for you? The bugs? They’re going to come here for you?”

  “Something like that. Yeah.”

  “You’ve seen this? You’ve seen this happen?”

  “I’ve seen all of it.”

  “And they’ll hurt me too?”

  “No. It doesn’t work like that.”

  Vernon is distracted by something at Blake’s feet, and Blake looks down and sees the vine has wrapped itself around his right ankle.

  “Then what the fuck are you doing here?” Vernon asks.

  “I wanted to give you a choice.”

  “’Cause if I’d hurt you, then that thing—that thing will drink your blood and come after me . . .”

  “Yes.”

  When Blake looks up again, Vernon is holding the revolver’s handle out to him, and it takes a few seconds of stunned silence for him to realize the man is actually offering him his weapon.

  Is he offering Blake the opportunity to kill him? Or is he trying to give him a chance to end his own life before a million winged terrors come for him?

  Maybe both. But these questions lodge in his throat when he hears the sound he’s been dreading for over an hour now. Here on the bayou, dappled now with the gray light of early dawn, it would be far too easy to pretend it was just the whine of an approaching outboard motor, but Blake knows that isn’t true.

  He turns to the walls of glass in time to see the great clouds swooping low over the tree line across the bayou. Two matching columns of dark, tumbling flecks barreling straight for the house. One instant they’re vivid against the gray sky; then they’re camouflaged by the backdrop of the surrounding foliage, even as their whine gets louder.

  He can hear Vernon backing away, can hear the man’s shuffling, panicked footsteps squeaking against the floorboards.

  “I said no,” Blake whispers.

  He presses his hands to the glass. The clouds cross the water’s edge yards away, filling the gaps in between his fingers.

  “I said no and you took my blood anyway!” he growls. Who is he praying to? He’s not sure. God? Virginie Lacroix? Vernon Fuller?

  The whine is deafening now, as loud as it was in the moments before Caitlin was rocketed across the second-floor hallway of Spring House.

  “I said no!” Blake screams.

  A tremendous force slams into the wall of sliding doors, shattering them in a single eruption powerful enough to send Blake skittering backward. But the hand he held against the glass when it was still intact is still out before him, bloodied, but still rigid and defiant, like a child’s attempt to stop an ocean wave. Blake forces his eyes open against the onslaught and sees the clouds have stopped their relentless assault. A thin finger of them reaches almost to the center of his palm, but nothing pricks the skin there, nothing touches his skin at all, and behind this buzzing tendril the clouds are branching off in different directions, a great swirl that extends from the lawn outside through the wall of shattered glass and into the living room.

  Is it possible? Has he really staved them off with a single cry and an outstretched palm? Could Caitlin have done the same?

  The cloud before him assumes a fibrous shape that is gaining human proportions. The noise they make is steadier and even-toned. Behind him, Vernon Fuller emits desperate panting that sounds almost sexual, if not for the terror pulsing through each one. And a few feet in front of Blake, a face appears out of the insect swarm in impressionistic brushstrokes.

  Does the spirit driving these tiny creatures feel compelled to present some random face Blake will find knowable? Or is this monster about to reveal its true identity?

  He has never seen a painting or a photograph of Virginie Lacroix. But it doesn’t matter, because the face swirling before him now is not hers. The high-domed forehead, the deeply recessed brow, the lips so fat they appear to be peeling free of his face—they are familiar features he’s stared up at in the foyer of Spring House since he was a small boy. Blake finds himself staring not at the visage of a murdered slave, but at the face of Spring House’s owner.

  “Felix . . . ,” Blake whispers.

  “Blake Henderson.”

  33

  The spirit’s voice is so loud it rattles Blake’s teeth and every other hard surface in the wrecked living room.

  “Who are you?” Blake cries.

  “My visage is not intended to deceive.”

  “You’re really Felix Delachaise. You’re his—you’re his ghost?”

  “I am what remains of him when he is called back to this plane again and again by the will of another.”

  The whine of each insect forms a lone note in a monstrous symphony that rattles Blake’s bones. It feels as if he and Vernon are literally swimming in the spirit’s every word.

  “Who brought you back? Caitlin?”

  “You and Caitlin Chaisson are the tools, nothing more.”

  “The tools for what?”

  “My freedom. My existence consists of teasing glimpses of a realm of limitless possibility before I am returned again and again to the soil of this earthly plane, the soil beneath Spring House. There I am forced to endure the racket of human passion and rage. Ever since the death of my body, I have poked and prodded at your meager existences from my prison of spirit and blossoms, desperate for a way to unburden myself of my sins, so that I may move on. Know this. It is not the living who are haunted by the dead—it is the dead who are haunted by the living.”

  “I don’t understand. The will of another . . . whose will? Who keeps bringing you back?”

  “Life, human life, is nothing but resistance to the infinite. All cells, all spirits, are without shelter, are without home, until they find a single will around which they may gather and take form. And as long as that will endures, there is life, even if it doesn’t wear a costume of flesh and bone. And so, as long as Virginie Lacroix’s will to walk this earth as a free woman endures, I am tasked with her resurrection. I am doomed to live as the slave to my slave.”

  “All life?” Blake cries. “You’re saying anyone can be brought back if they didn’t want to die?”

  “Those with magic in their hands do not die as easily as others might.”

  Blake feels again the soft bed that was waiting for him at the bottom of the pit when he jumped into it to cut a segment of the vines free. A new growth, a new life, swelling up from the earth itself in response to the terrible events all around Spring House.

  “We’re the tools you’re using to bring her back?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Betrayal is my sin. I used Virginie Lacroix’s powers for gain and refused to keep my promises to her in exchange. Her revenge caused my death and took prisoner of my spirit. But I was given new direction and new power by the blood of Caitlin Chaisson and the betrayal that ran through it. Her rage. This is the justice of the earth.”

  “Rage? That’s the essence of life itself? Only rage?”

  “All life? Perhaps not. Perhaps only the life I am able to create while trapped in this prison. The life I am able to create for Virginie.”

  “But you stopped,” Blake says. “You just stopped. Why haven’t you taken me?”

  The spirit doesn’t answer. T
he low whine from the surrounding insects could be their usual song or Felix’s frustrated growl; there’s no telling which.

  “Where’s Caitlin?”

  “What remains of Caitlin has gathered up the lives she needs to aid me in the resurrection. She has returned to Spring House to play her role.”

  “And now it’s my turn to play mine? Is that it? You’ve come for me and then I’ll . . . what?”

  “You will devour more of the sin that fed your rage, the same rage with which you fed the vines. And then you too will play your role in Virginie’s resurrection . . .”

  “And your freedom, right? Because when you bring Virginie back to life, you’ll be free? Is that how this all works?”

  There is no response from the clicking, shifting apparition, but there is no clearly etched facial expression to interpret either, so Blake takes the silence of this ghost as hesitation, a gap in the all-seeing divine knowledge it touted only seconds before.

  “Fine!” Blake shouts. “Then do it! Do it now!”

  And yet, the spirit is silent. The swirl of insects, not a single one of which touches his skin, now seems stuck in a kind of repetitive paralysis.

  “You can’t. Why not? Why can’t you take me the way you took Caitlin?”

  The spirit’s form is too impressionistic for Blake to read any emotion or nuance from its vague expression.

  Vernon has collapsed in the far corner, a few feet from the Eames chair he knocked over as he stumbled backward. Squinting, his chest heaving, he sweeps the curtains of winged, otherworldly creatures with a swaying, indecisive aim.

  “It matters,” Blake whispers. “The choice I made. That I said no. It matters, doesn’t it? It’s stopped you.”

  “It has done more than that, I’m afraid.”

  “What? What . . . more has it done?” Blake is answered by the grinding buzz, but not words. “Caitlin screamed bloody murder, but she couldn’t stop you. How come I can? What happened when you took my blood, my rage, without my consent?”