Scott’s expression is suddenly pale and distant, and for a second Kyle is afraid he’s about to be punished with an ass-whipping for not being visibly excited about Scott’s insanely large firearm. But Scott is staring past Kyle, at the computer screen and its night-vision views of Caitlin Chaisson’s mansion. And then Scott is walking slowly across the apartment, and when Kyle sees the giant handgun left all by itself on the kitchen counter, he has a mad urge to dash for it, as if it might be snatched up and wielded against them by a mentally imbalanced ghost.
“What the…?” Scott finally whispers. And Kyle is forced to turn his attention away from the abandoned gun to the computer screen.
What he sees there at first appears to be a trick of shadows until he realizes there’s only one concrete, physical explanation. One glass wall of the second-floor solarium is either gone or mostly shattered. He can’t see the broken glass, but he can see the clouds of insects now swirling freely through the solarium’s interior like a compact tornado. The cloud looks three times larger than he first thought. It looks like the bugs have knocked over some sort of appliance that’s now short-circuiting. The whole scene looks like a miniature version of a transformer gearing up to blow in a violent thunderstorm. In the split second before each pulse of light overpowers the night-vision lens with sickening intensity, Kyle glimpses a density of insects to rival the clouds of Formosan termites that used to shut down Zephyrs baseball games when he was a kid.
“Did they—did those bugs…?”
“Yeah,” Kyle says. “I think they broke the goddamn window.”
The next flash is fierce, far larger than the ones before, so bright Scott leaps back from the computer screen, one arm going up to shield his eyes. But Kyle can’t force himself to look away, because there was a shape to this explosion of light that the other pulses lacked, a brilliant, brief silhouette of a form that looked halfway human as it made its way through the tumbles of hovering insects like a propulsion of fierce white dye.
But the image is so brief Kyle is able to dismiss it as a trick of the eye. What he can’t dismiss is the gaping, jagged hole in the solarium’s glass wall that the flash illuminated in full for the first time. And now the clouds of insects are streaming through it and taking to the night sky, so many of them it looks as if they weren’t just filling up the solarium but the entire house.
21
There was a brief period in the more recent history of Spring House when Caitlin’s mother entertained the idea that she would do some of its gardening herself, and the tools she purchased for this endeavor—and even used on perhaps two or three different occasions—are still in a gleaming red box inside the gardening shed, right where she left them years before.
Caitlin carries the box, along with a flashlight—the biggest and brightest she can find—to the gazebo, taking the long route through the middle of the gardens so as to give her pursuer time to catch up. She doubts she will hear his car approach, although he (she assumes it’s a he) doesn’t strike her as the most professional of night stalkers, as evidenced by his own arrogant over-the-shoulder wave to his own planted camera. Still, she has one goal and one goal only. To get him to visit the gazebo. Alone.
She sinks to her knees and runs her hands across the floorboards. They are cracked and jostled in places, but the damage isn’t as severe as she had thought. It seems as if the vines didn’t punch through them like a fist but instead somehow managed to flatten themselves in between the cracks, as snakes and rats do when they’re trying to fit inside walls.
They won’t need to do that this time.
She grabs a small gardening shovel and wedges its sharp tip into one of the thin cracks. After a couple seconds of prying, she’s pulled free a half-foot section of floorboard. She recoils instinctively, half expecting to uncover a swirling portal to the spirit world. What lies below, however, is glistening and densely coiled and appears to be very much of this earth. These growths appear fetal when compared to the vines that nursed from her wrist; they lack blossoms and leaves, and their general shape and enmeshed pattern remind her of old illustrated versions of Jack and the Beanstalk.
She spends the next twenty minutes removing as many floorboards as have been jostled loose by the previous night’s eruption. She tries, with each move, to strike a balance between the speed of a furtive late-night burial and the time her pursuer might need to catch up with her. It isn’t critical that he see her every move, just the final act, which includes removing several magazines she found in her trunk—now wrapped inside an old T-shirt—and placing them down under the floorboards of the gazebo as if they were an item of great and secret import.
She has set the bundle atop the coiled vines and is about to retreat altogether, when she realizes her next few moves might require a little test. She runs three fingers down the side of one of the slick vines. It reacts to her touch with a leisurely, serpentine slide that makes a moist, fleshy sound.
Still connected, she thinks. Still… mine?
There’s only one way to be sure.
She takes the shiny, barely used pruning shears from the toolbox and presses its handle until the blades open wide enough for her to drag one sharp edge across her left palm. The resulting wound doesn’t bleed as much as her wound the night before, but it’s enough. The first fat red droplets to hit the vine below are absorbed immediately, soundlessly, like water evaporating in a time-lapsed film. And then, as Caitlin holds her dripping palm out over the small shadowed cavern, the tip of one vine is lifting up into the air like a charmed cobra, and this time, because she is present and fully conscious, a delirious laughter overtakes her as she watches it twine gently around her bleeding palm, covering the wound, drinking from her silently and without effort. Her breasts are smashed against the gazebo’s floor, her hair draping her face, several locks of it blinding her right eye, but she fears any adjustment will disrupt this magical marriage of earth and blood.
When it is done, it is done. It untwines from her hand, and once again a flowing wound has been miraculously reduced to a vague rosy scar; this vine has the power both to drink and to heal, it seems. And then it is drifting back down to its former resting place. The night before, it took off in immediate pursuit of her husband, the man whose terrible betrayal was freshly seared into her soul, but now it lies motionless. Waiting? If so, then for what? Perhaps because her pursuer is not yet within her immediate vicinity. Maybe as soon as he gets close, as close as Troy and his little whore were to her the night before as they hurried off to the gardening shed…
She replaces the floorboards as carefully as she can, taking care to leave one conspicuously loose. She turns on the gazebo’s single lightbulb before heading back to the main house.
As she circulates through the mansion’s silent hallways—killing the lights, pausing to undress in front of the bedroom window, giving the appearance that she is retiring for the night—the gun is either in her right hand or within reach the entire time.
Once Spring House is in darkness, she stands in one corner of the master bedroom window, the four-poster canopied bed throwing a monstrous shadow on the wall beside her. She waits, listening to familiar ticking sounds of a great house cooling in the late hours of a night in the Deep South.