The Vines (2 page)

The past and present have met in a fever dream of rage, and now her husband is staring slack-jawed at her through a doorway—in time, in history, in sanity, she can’t know—while he continues to fuck some little slut atop the bathroom sink. But the rage is leaving her. Maybe because Troy is staring at her over one shoulder, mouth open, eyes vacant. His expression is devoid of lust; his thrusts seem compulsory now. The floor between them explodes, and with the exhalation of her crippling rage, Caitlin senses the arrival of a strange new power.

3

“Not here,” Troy whispers.

And that’s when Jane Percival realizes why he won’t take his hand out from his Hanes, even though she’s pushed back over the porcelain sink so far the copper faucet is digging into her spine, even though her dress is hiked so far up her legs he’s been able to work wonders on her with his mouth for a good five minutes now—his blood isn’t pumping to all the right places yet, and he doesn’t want to let on.

What does he want? A short walk, a little caffeine? Neither will be easy to come by with the wife hovering somewhere downstairs.

Is she hovering,
Jane wonders,
or is she passed out drunk somewhere?

Caitlin Chaisson spent most of the night glaring at Jane like she was some party crasher, and all night long Jane fought the urge to get right up in the girl’s face and let her know that while he was singing “Happy Birthday” with the rest of them, Caitlin’s husband was winking at Jane across the room and dragging his top teeth across his bottom lip like he could taste her on it.

Happy Birthday, princess!

Still, she hadn’t planned to move quite this fast, because she hadn’t been prepared for how epically drunk her target was going to be. Just the thought of having to stop now sends a spike of panic through Jane. Her first choice would have been slow seduction, not a frenzied quickie in the upstairs bathroom. But in her experience nothing killed a long game faster than a false start, or a suddenly remorseful husband buttoning up his pants and racing for the confessional booth. And tonight had taken weeks of subtle but careful preparation, weeks of listening studiously as her best friend, Margot, gossiped about the loveless marriage between her two wealthiest clients, one a former hero cop her aunt Judy would have described as
crap your pants handsome
,
the other a spoiled-rotten trust-fund baby who went through life looking like she’d just smelled something terrible and it was you.

It wasn’t an easy sell, getting Margot to take her on as a crew supervisor for bigger events, events like Skanky Chaisson’s birthday party. The two women met when Jane worked the bar for one of Margot’s first events after she started Simply Splendid
eight years ago. Since then, Jane had pitched in at all levels of the business, except for supervisor. Still, Jane wasn’t interested in passing trays; she was pretty damn sure the unflattering black-and-white uniform would make it that much harder to catch Troy Mangier’s eye. Instead she’d pitched Margot hard on the position that would allow her to wear a sparkly, low-cut cocktail dress, enabling her to look as classy and elegant as most of the other invited guests.

But now Jane is missing in action during teardown, her target is on the edge of bailing, and there’s a possibly suspicious wife somewhere nearby.

Good Christ, if Margot gets wind of even half of this, Jane will be in a world of trouble far bigger than an angry wife pounding on the door with the side of one fist.

Troy Mangier pulls up his trousers by his belt buckle and takes a step back, forcing Jane to unwrap her legs from around his waist. The way she sees it, she’s only got two options: try for the remorseful, romance-novel routine of
I’m so sorry I forced myself on you
—even though she hadn’t, technically—
but my feelings for you are just soooooo strong
, or drop to her knees and take him in her mouth right there.

But before she can commit to either, Troy Mangier takes her by the hand and pulls her off the sink. Her feet land gracelessly on top of her high heels instead of sliding into them cleanly, and Troy grabs her by the waist to make sure she doesn’t lose her balance as the shoes crumple under her feet like foliage.

Their lips meet in a sloppy kiss that fills her mouth with scotch breath, and Troy Mangier says, “Come with me.”

4

The hallucination breaks, giving way to a reality inside the gazebo that is more dreamlike and impossible than any of the visions that just strobed across her mind’s eye.

At the moment when Caitlin is sure her knees are going to strike the gazebo’s floor, a slick tendril wraps around her throat and she cries out, sure she’s about to be choked. But it does nothing of the kind. Rather, with a gentleness that seems almost human, it rights her until she is standing on both feet once again, before it slips off her shoulder, slides briefly down her left breast, and hovers in the air in front of her, level with her chest. In the pulses of light that line the stalks of each vine, she sees a clover-like assembly of leaves unfurling at its tip, opening to her just as the blossoms have. Only nothing glows within these leaves. They contain darkness deeper than the vague, shadowy definitions inside the gazebo.

But there is no misinterpreting the gesture; it’s as delicate and unnervingly polite as the sudden catch that kept her from falling knees-first to the floor.

She can vividly recall each vision that came from the scent of the blossoms, the jostled, terrifying flashbacks and the absolute certainty she was inside the body of some long-dead slave, the sense of imminent attack—
they are coming!
—but then, at the very end, her own husband, followed by the miraculous sense of the rage draining from her.

Draining,
the word occurs to her easily, instinctively, and she remembers the eagerness with which the first tendrils that poked up through the floor pursued her fresh drops of blood. And that’s when she realizes what the unfurled leaves and the helpful vine hovering in the air before her look like—an extended hand.

A soft pop comes from the direction of the main house, the sound of someone trying—too late—to keep a screen door from slamming behind them. Peering between the vines, Caitlin sees them: Troy and the little slut.

Two silhouettes moving down the back of the house, crouching down to avoid the kitchen windows before they hurry through the maze of fountains and flower planters, bound for the oak-shadowed corridor on the opposite side of the property that houses the gardening shed. They are oblivious to her, where she stands shrouded by magic and shadow.

The girl almost trips, which causes her to throw her hand to her mouth to stifle her startled cry, and Troy curves an arm around her shoulders, and together, they stumble toward the shed.

As she watches her husband and his little slut join the darkness, Caitlin craves that cleansing feeling that marked the very end of the violent vision quest the blossoms just gave her—that sense that the rage she feels toward Troy has been expelled from her like a breath she’s held in for half a minute too long. Even if it means being rocketed back inside the body of that terrified slave. Even if it means unleashing some greater power from the inexplicable monster before her.

Caitlin extends her bleeding wrist toward the hovering vine. A thirsty pulse moves through the blossoms as it wraps firmly around her open wound. No visions come to her, but the sensation that accompanies the vine’s patient suckling is like a dozen sets of hands gently dragging their fingernails across her skin from her scalp to her toes. Her cry has more abandon in it than any sound she heard Troy’s little whore make in the guest bathroom.

As the vine slides down her wrist, then slips gently free of her palm and fingers, she sees that she has been healed; all that remains of her determined gash is a pale, rosy scar. Before she has time to process the implication of this, the thick tendrils on all sides of her descend cleanly through the spaces between the floorboards.

Barely a minute later, the earth shifts violently underneath one of the fountains in the center of the garden. The impact from below jostles the fountain’s copper basin to such an angle that the water begins pouring out of it in a thin and steady stream. A few seconds later, a tiny stone cherub is knocked from its perch, and several bricks along the side of a flower planter have been knocked free. Caitlin realizes they are but pieces of a contrail from some healing force that is now moving through the soil in pursuit of her husband’s sin.

5

Jane is amazed by the power of desire.

She is terrified of dark places, especially this far out in the country, and on any other night this pitch-black gardening shed would be an un-enterable lair of coiled snakes and patient psychopaths. But tonight, with Troy Mangier palming her and suckling her and taking her in a lust-stuttered waltz across the dirt floor, the darkness liberates.

Jane has watched every single one of his TV appearances she can find on YouTube, dating back to when he first solved the John Fuller murder. She recalls the same features that are currently concealed by shadows, the sight of Troy’s swoon-worthy jawline and thick, muscular neck. These fragmented memories juxtapose with the reality of his fingers working their way inside of her and intensify the delicious, toe-curling thrill of ambition meeting lust. So when she hears a strange crackling sound, she assumes it’s her own dress being torn away from her.

When Troy goes still, Jane takes this as her cue. She reaches for his crotch and is relieved when her hand closes around something hard and thick. She starts to stroke him—it’s much bigger than she expected—and she’s trying to think of the nastiest, dirtiest way to say this to him when she realizes something about the thing isn’t right. The surface of his cock is spiny and slick.

When she realizes the darkness has tricked her, Jane stumbles backward. She sees Troy’s shadow bent at the waist; the fluid-filled, throaty sounds coming from him are not strangled, lustful groans.
Choking. He’s choking.
A thick strand of shadow juts from his open mouth and up toward the dark ceiling; a sliver of light from the nearby window falls across its spiny length.

The thing Jane just released from her right hand has the body and tense energy of a serpent, and it has now reached an elephantine length in the darkness between her and Troy, curving at the tip, coated in a slick substance that has to be blood.
Troy’s
blood . . .
because the damn thing has punched right through his—they’re connected. Holy shit. It’s the same goddamn thing and
it’s gone RIGHT THROUGH—

Jane falls ass-first to the floor before this deranged thought can complete itself. The first scream will feel too much like a surrender, so she tries to screw her jaw shut, which even then has her cursing madly under her breath as she scrambles toward the wall and its racks of gardening tools.

By the time she’s closed her hands around the handle of the axe hanging on a nearby shelf, two more snakes of darkness have punched up through the dirty floor, and Jane Percival glimpses the impossible luminescence coursing through one shimmering white blossom before its petals open like a snake’s jaws . . . and the entire flower clamps down over Troy Mangier’s bulging right eye.

A white pulse streaks through the flower, then the pulse becomes a bright-green glow that courses through the entire tangle of stalks, illuminating its growing, snarled structure. The flower and Troy’s flesh have merged somehow, and the vine just behind the flower swells in thickness. And then Troy’s head has vanished inside a thickening tangle of . . . she’s about to think of them as snakes again, but even as she pulls the axe free from its shelf, a very steady voice inside of her head corrects her:
Vines. They are vines. Look . . .

And because she can’t bring herself to scream just yet, because only decisive action will hold the nightmarish impossibility of all of this at bay, Jane Percival draws the axe back over one shoulder and swings. She is convinced that one good whack will send this creature back down into the ground, that a thing without eyes and a face will react to any swift and terrible blow with pure fear and total retreat.

And yet it doesn’t, and she’s distracted by the sound she made when the axe hit its shifting, growing target—a raspy grunt that threatens sobs. Then she understands. She feels the hot, wet spray and sees how terrible her aim was. The blade has sliced clean through a knot of vine around Troy’s leg, and the eruption of blood is fearsome, arterial, and the vines do not retreat. Rather, they close thirstily over the wound instead, and suddenly Troy Mangier is completely entombed.

The vines are crawling up and over the spot where his head and shoulders were just an instant before, and now they’re coming down on themselves, making a shape that tells her Troy has been devoured from the crown of his head to the center of his chest. She realizes the rest of him is almost gone too, and that’s when Jane Percival finally starts to scream.

6

When the screaming starts, Nova Thomas is washing Caitlin Chaisson’s best china and wondering whether or not to tell her father she saw Troy sneak off into the garden with one of the pretty white ladies from the catering company. Troy must have been drunk as a skunk—otherwise he would have known to pull off his shiny gold necktie. But he didn’t, and the thing winked at Nova each time the shadowy couple passed just outside the halo of one of the security lights fixed on the back of the house.

For the past few minutes since he escorted the last guests to their parked cars, Nova’s father has been proudly telling stories about Spring House like he, Willie Thomas, owned the place, all the while pouring leftover champagne for the catering staff and valets, who are cleaning the kitchen in a controlled frenzy. But Nova’s glass of bubbly sits sparkling and untouched on the counter beside her. It feels strangely like a bribe from the birthday girl herself, and after three years at LSU listening to professors lecture on the real and bloody history of sugarcane plantations like Spring House, Nova isn’t all that inclined to celebrate some spoiled white lady who lives off her dead parents and still treats Nova as if she were a dumb child.

Then a woman is screaming somewhere out in the dark, and Nova’s resentments are forgotten. Her father stands frozen, an upended champagne bottle in hand.

When the overflows, the chef reaches up and rights the bottle, but he too is staring out the large picture window toward the shadowy gardens and the source of those terrible, piercing screams.

The bottle smashes to the floor as Willie runs out the back door.

Nova runs after him.

She’s one hundred percent sure Caitlin’s found her husband with that girl in the shed, and now all hell’s about to break loose. And what if Troy’s got some kind of gun or who knows what? And the way her daddy is with Caitlin (
Miss
Caitlin to him, every time), always acting like her happy house Negro, he’s bound to do something stupid to defend her and—

“Daddy, stop.
Daddy
!
”

Her foot catches on something. Her hands break her fall on the flagstone path. When she looks back, she sees that some kind of eruption in the planter behind her has tossed several bricks onto her path.

By the time he throws open the door to the gardening shed, Nova is struggling to her feet, scanning her surroundings, trying to get her balance.

What happens next has the quality of a dream’s last few minutes, that moment just before the dreamer starts to awake—crystal clear but somehow paper-thin and unreal.

The woman who explodes from the shed is so covered in dirt and blood Nova doesn’t recognize her. What she does recognize, though, is that she’s got an axe raised over one shoulder, and when she swings it, Nova lets out a sound that is more animal than human. The earth seems to fly by under her feet, but it’s not enough—the head of the axe is aimed straight at her father, and her breath freezes in her lungs as she leaps.

He ducks. The blade nicks his shoulder anyway, and he goes down. Nova leaps before the woman has time to raise the axe again. There’s no fight in the woman’s body when Nova slams her against the wall of the shed. Nova realizes the woman has dropped the axe only when both of the lunatic’s dirt-smeared hands are fending off Nova’s blows.

“You crazy bitch!” Nova hears herself scream. “You crazy white bitch!”

Her father is shouting her name with a strength and confidence that tells her he’s not badly injured. But her anger is a wild and uncontrollable thing; it flows copiously through valves that have been opened in her only recently by education and history and a new sense of self that one of her professors defined as
personhood
.

Some stupid white girl’s not going to chop my daddy down like he’s a damn tree. I don’t think so! No ma’am.

At first Nova thinks it’s her father who has pulled her off the crazed woman—who has sunk to a crouch and is sobbing hysterically, hands raised to defend herself. But the voice in Nova’s ear is soft, and almost a whisper. It’s Caitlin.

“Oh gosh,” Caitlin says, sounding more dazed than panicked. “Now what on earth is happening
here
?”

Gosh?
Nova thinks.
Caitlin’s as crazy as this bitch covered in blood.

The woman collapsed in front of the shed has lost her mind, it seems. Her legs splayed, she’s pumping her hands in front of her face like she’s trying to disperse a cloud of invisible insects.

Caitlin steps over the crazy woman and into the darkness beyond. Despite her lingering anger, Nova is astonished by the woman’s bravery, by the way she pushes the door open just enough to allow herself to step inside what is surely a scene of bloody horror.

“Miss Caitlin,” Willie calls out to her, and Caitlin turns, one finger raised to quiet him. The nod she gives them is both calm and authoritative, as if she is relieving them of their solemn duty so she can face whatever bloody nightmare must be inside the shed alone.

And that’s when Nova sees it. It is small and it is glowing, and it appears to be hovering just above the shed’s dirt floor. Her first guess is that it’s one of those glow-in-the-dark sticks that come with the emergency kits she buys her father for hurricane season, the kind you crack in both hands to illuminate. But there are too many different bright colors pulsating in it—and she can’t think of why one of those would be in the shed in the first place.

Nova is riveted by the sight of the . . .
flower? Is it some kind of flower? Maybe some decoration stolen from inside the—

Caitlin is looking back at her.

It’s easy to miss in the shadows, but the woman is most certainly staring back over one shoulder at Nova, and there is nothing startled or solicitous about her expression. She needs no confirmation from Nova that she too has witnessed the strange, shimmering apparition. Instead, she reaches back and shuts the door behind her, leaving Nova with the conviction that Caitlin knows exactly what the damn thing is and doesn’t want anyone else to see it.