Die…
There is a crackling like that of fire, but it is the skin of the cane stalks giving way as the life is sucked from each one by the earth itself. And within seconds, they are tumbling into one another like towers built on swamp. And as they fall like shadowy, rustling dominoes, Blake can see past them to where Mike Simmons floats in a halo of fiery orange, eyes wide, gagged, and bound to a chair, his very presence beyond the field a portal between the present and the past. An invitation to unleash a similar rage as the one Virginie Lacroix released into the cane fields on which Felix Delachaise and Spring House drew all sustenance.
NO!
“No!” Blake screams.
He is staring down at the clover of leaves that have opened at the tip of a new tendril—a hand extended in greeting. Not just greeting. Invitation.
He does not give his hand in return; instead he takes a step backward, beholding the impossible being before him—its glowing blossoms and its slick green stalks—and utters the only words he can manage: “Fuck off.”
When the gunfire breaks out, he assumes Nova has shot at the monstrous growths before him. But the sound comes from the wrong direction, and when he turns to look, he feels a terrible pressure against his chest—he looks down and realizes the vine has taken him despite his refusal. It’s wrapped around the wound Caitlin slashed in him with punitive, angry speed.
Blake pitches forward, unsure whether he’s lost his balance or if the vines themselves are dragging him into the pit. By the time he hits the bottom and other coils of vine lurch beneath his sudden weight, he realizes it doesn’t matter; the vine wrapped around his chest has begun to drink.
25
Nova is vaguely aware that she’s holding her hands up in the air on either side of her head as she runs in a crouch. But it isn’t until she lands knees-first on the floor of the back porch that her spirit seems to crash back into her body. She spins until she’s got protection from the wall behind her. Her ears are ringing from the gunfire, and when she dares a peek around the edge of the doorway, she sees no sign of Caitlin, just the brightly lit gazebo and the sea of darkness beyond.
No sound comes from the lair of the vines. If the gunfire has frightened Blake into silence, it’s a good sign, a sign he isn’t being torn apart or injured. But he’s out there, alone. From what she saw of it, the pit isn’t big enough to hide in; there’s nowhere for Blake to crawl in either direction.
When the shooting started, she thought she’d fired the gun by mistake, but the muzzle flares from the far side of the garden made it clear in an instant the property had been invaded. Now, if whoever did the shooting comes forth out of the shadows, Blake will be exposed. And maybe his silence isn’t a good sign at all, maybe those things ate him. Because Caitlin Chaisson has no idea what she’s truly unleashed out here.
She dropped the gun. The gunfire was so loud, so fierce and sudden, it felt as if the bullets were piercing her, even though they weren’t. She’s never been around gunfire in her life. Has never handled a gun for longer than a few seconds when she was a little girl and her father exploded into the room in a panic and tore it from her hands. If I wanted my baby to grow up around guns, I would have raised her in New Orleans! That was her father’s mantra, and now it’s left her defenseless. But none of that matters. Because she just dropped Caitlin’s gun like some stupid white girl in a movie she and her friends would jeer at from the third row.
But she can see it. It lies a few feet from the back steps. From this distance, in the halo of light from the gazebo, it looks almost like a patent-leather shoe with a bright shiny buckle. And that only makes her think of the tie—Troy’s necktie—they just pulled from the vines, and now Blake is down there, down there alone and silent and—
“Hey!”
Mike Simmons is draped across the doorway between the front parlor and the back porch, his wrists still bound and pressed between his chest and the floor. He’s inch-wormed most of the way there on his side, and the exhaustion, pain, and exacerbated blood loss has left his jaw slack, his mouth drooling. He’s the color of milk, his bloodshot eyes ringed with purple.
“Those—they’re my friends,” he wheezes. “She was calling them… threatening them. I heard her…”
After scanning his prone, trembling body to make sure he isn’t bluffing, that he’s still bound, Nova spins away from the doorway, banishes a thought about whether or not bullets could pierce the porch wall behind her, and yanks her cell phone from her pocket. She finds Blake’s number.
Gun. Halfway btwn gazebo n house.
“She did this all wrong,” Mike wheezes. “See… we can figure this out… She’s crazy…”
Her phone vibrates, flooding her with relief.
Doesn’t matter.
“Those are my friends,” the man whines. “Please. I can talk to them and—”
“It doesn’t sound like they want to talk,” Nova says.
“No, no, no. Listen—”
“Shut up!” Nova hisses. But she can’t take her eyes off the phone.
Why???
Somewhere outside, in the great sea of darkness, a man is screaming. Mike jerks and goes still, eyes wide, drool puddling on the floor under his chin. Nova fights the urge to leap to her feet. But it’s not Blake. The sound is too far away. It must be coming from the same darkness the bullets came from, the same rain of gunfire that’s imprisoned her on the house’s back porch, and unlike the crazed sounds Jane Percival made the night before, this frenzied, blubbering eruption carries the sounds of sheer struggle as well as agony. And now she and Mike Simmons are both silent, the victims of a terrible unwanted connection as they are reduced to audience members for this symphony of pain. This is not the sound of a fight gone wrong, or a knife wound, or a gunshot to the leg. This is the sound of someone being—she feels her lips mouth the final word—eaten.
Her phone vibrates in her hand with Blake’s response.
Vines gone.
“Scott,” Mike whispers. Fear and resistance have left his voice. He lets his head drop to the floor so hard his forehead knocks against the threshold.
She can’t tell if he’s crying or laughing. What’s obvious is that he doesn’t feel the sudden, violent shift of the floorboards beneath them, doesn’t hear the rattle that courses through the wall behind her in response. Or he just chooses to ignore these things, just keeps his head pressed to the floor because his wrists are bound and there’s no way to cover his eyes with his hands like a frightened little boy.
Then he retches like a cat trying to cough up a hairball, and suddenly he is rising up and off the floor.
His wrists, still taped and bound, peel out from his bloody chest and dangle in the air below him as he is righted and lifted at the same time. For a moment or two, it looks like he is levitating. But by the time his bound ankles rise several inches into the air, he is hovering at a right angle to the floor, and through the blood covering his sternum, Nova can finally make out the slick, dark tentacle that has torn through the man’s stomach, then laced itself back through a hole in his throat, venting the breath from his screams.
Behind his head, a great blossom unfurls. It is a giant, cartoonish version of the flower Nova glimpsed in the spot where Troy Mangier’s body should have been. The massive petals contain the fierce luminescence of another world as they open to swallow Mike Simmons’s head.