She must think they’re inside of her, but Clay knows they aren’t. Clay knows if they wanted her, she’d be dead already. Because these things, whatever they are, they don’t fuck around and they don’t feel the need to hide.
The man who burst from room 5 is standing in the middle of the highway now, waving his arms at nothing. Clay wonders if one of the swarms got him, if he’s trying to wave them away, but his movements are still his own, and when a truck swerves to avoid him before slamming on the brakes, he sees the man is untouched, unharmed, just like Taletha. Just like him. And when the driver of the truck steps out, shouting obscenities, the man collapses in his arms, bawling like a baby.
Then something brushes Clay’s face. He’s staring at one of them. It’s hovering inches from the tip of his nose, so black he could mistake it for a fragment of shadow if not for the buzz of its wings.
Taletha sees it and lets out a strangled cry. The sense that the insect is staring into him—into his soul—is no more preposterous than any of the other horrors he’s just witnessed, and so Clay Lee feels his limbs go lax, feels a kind of surrender take him, and believes, in some fundamental and primitive way, that if he’s obedient during this examination, he will make it to the other side in one piece.
And he’s correct.
Whatever this creature is, it sees nothing in Clay that will satisfy its demonic hunger, and so after a minute of study it zips off into the shadows to join one of the several feasts now taking place in different rooms of the Hibiscus Inn.
And for the first time Clay starts to see the larger pattern, not just the open doors and the U-shaped layout of rooms and parked cars all around him, but a kind of awful regularity to the skin-rending impossibilities blanketing the Hibiscus Inn.
Taletha is still on her knees a few feet away from the car she just wrecked, out of her mind with fear but physically unharmed, trying to cough up a bug in her lungs Clay is sure she’s just imagining. But her rich, shifty-looking john, the same asshole who always made a point of avoiding Clay’s eyes when he scurried past the front office, was just turned into bug meat. And the man who just ran from room 5 and into some truck driver’s arms is Sidney Dautreaux. The guy works most of the year offshore, but he occasionally spends a night at the Hibiscus Inn so he can stick it to Lisa LaPearl, whose been married to that drunk Joseph Marigny for about five years now and doesn’t have the guts or the money to leave him. Clay saw Lisa and Sidney go into room 5 together after he handed Sidney the key not thirty minutes ago, but now there’s no sign of Lisa at all, just another furious buzz of insects inside the room she should have come running out of, screaming bloody murder. But she didn’t.
She still hasn’t. She didn’t run and he can’t hear any screams—just more bugs.
Because they’re eating her too.
But not Sidney. Not Taletha. And not him.
And that’s when it hits him, a conclusion so simple it feels like a strange, sudden comfort amid the surrounding horror.
It’s the cheaters, Clay Lee thinks. Son of a bitch, they’re only eating the cheaters.
30
Blake wanted to go back to the main house alone, but Willie wouldn’t let him, and there was no leaving Nova there by herself. So the three of them are walking close together through the garden’s small maze of fountains and waist-high hedges when a sound comes from underneath the gazebo like mud being hurled into a wood chipper.
The gazebo’s entire floor surges upward. Nova screams and throws her arms around her father. Willie raises his shotgun in a practiced grip. Silence falls. The gazebo now looks like it’s tilting atop a small lava dome, several feet above ground level.
Nova’s breaths sound more like whimpers. Willie makes no move to lower the oily-looking firearm. He has changed from his silk dress pants into a pair of blue jeans, and the cartridge of shells makes an obscene bulge in his front pocket.
“I thought you said it didn’t care nothin’ ’bout us,” Willie finally says.
They’ve been frozen for a good five minutes, awaiting the next horrible event.
“I said it targets,” Blake says. “That’s what I said. The vines, the bugs… they go after specific people and they all have to be guilty of the same—”
The gazebo crackles. Willie straightens, raises the gun. But it’s just a dull clatter of floorboards falling into the pit, which is now a few feet deeper thanks to the sudden pregnancy of the surrounding walls. A few seconds later, the overhead light inside shorts out, its wires severed by the eruption.
“It’s a process,” Blake says, once he has his breath back. “That’s what I said. Whatever this thing is, it’s a process…”
“Somebody around here feedin’ blood to those vines right now?” Willie asks. “What’s all this… nonsense got to do with the process?” He jerks the shotgun’s barrel in the direction of the tilting gazebo.
“I don’t know. The bugs, maybe.”
“The bugs?” Willie asks. “The ones that took Caitlin?”
“Yeah, the way they left… it was like they were headed somewhere. Maybe whatever they’re doing is causing that. I don’t know. It’s all connected. That’s all I know. It’s connected…”
Blake is only a few feet from the main house when he sees a crystalline pulse of light reflected in the front parlor’s chandelier.
He stops in the doorway, hoping to absorb every detail of the room before he crosses the threshold.
The holes in the floor are just like the ones they saw in the shed earlier that day, only with splintered rims. The story of Mike Simmons’s vain struggle against the vines is written in a long trail of drying black bloodstains that move from the varnished hardwood just inside the doorway to the Oriental rug. But here again is evidence of the vines’ precision, of their ability to punch through solid objects with preternatural efficiency. These surgical details remind Blake that it was really Kyle Austin’s body that tore gaping holes through each floor, from the widow’s walk on down, not the vines themselves, and suddenly the urge to vomit returns with eye-watering vengeance.
So he focuses on the flower that emerges gracefully from a splintered hole in the middle of the floor. It’s a vital, fully powered version of the one he saw in Caitlin’s solarium that evening. A perfect match with Nova’s description of what she saw in the shed right after Troy vanished. The pulses of bright light that flush its white petals seem to have no beginning, end, or specific center, and Blake can’t discern a specific rhythm. They are not mere bioluminescence; they are a presence, a glow that looks powerful enough to float free of the plant structure itself.
He’s half-afraid that he’ll be hypnotized if he stares at them for too long. But that would be a charm compared to the other vicious capabilities of these plants, so he doesn’t force himself to look away.
He blinks madly and wonders if the chandelier overhead is devolving into hallucination, but the bugs dappling its crystals appear solid and shaded and real. The profusion seems unholy, but the participants are everyday creatures, nothing like the winged black monsters that exploded throughout the foyer after Caitlin was consumed; these are cicadas, houseflies, and moths. And he wants to believe it’s the chandelier’s soft glow that’s drawn them here, but he knows this is just his desperate desire to cling to the last vestiges of an ordinary world.
It’s the flower they are drawn to, the same glowing, impossible blossom onto which Nova is now emptying an entire can of lighter fluid. Willie’s expression suggests a collision of urges: should he lower the gun and pull his daughter back, or should he keep the firearm at the ready in case all hell breaks loose?