Blake hits the floor knees-first, then goes over, the sobs ripping from him but impossible to hear over the angry roar above. The sound changes again, from a riot of motorboats to a flock of chain saws, and a few of the little monsters clatter off the floor on all sides of him before rejoining their brothers and sisters overhead. But when Blake looks up, a blinding light seems to spread across the entire house, reflected equally off the shattered glass doors and the mirrors above the television, and suddenly he is raising both arms, as the buzz-saw sound of the insects is replaced by something that sounds more like a man’s rageful scream.
34
When he sees Blake approaching down the front walk, the black man standing guard on the front porch of Spring House takes a few steps forward, his hand drifting to the gun at his hip. But his expression remains fixed and stern. The sight of Blake, scratched and bleeding, his shirt torn in a dozen different places from Vernon Fuller’s last, desperate attempt to make Blake believe he was trying to kill him, can’t hold a candle to whatever this man has just witnessed.
“Willie? Nova?” They are the first words Blake has uttered since his conversation with a ghost, and before the man can answer, there’s a scream from somewhere behind the house that causes him to flinch, but just slightly. This isn’t the first time the man before him has been subjected to the strange intermingling of voices joined together in a high, sharp cry, almost like train wheels coming to a sudden, grinding halt.
“You Blake?” the man asks. His voice trembles, and so, Blake sees, does the hand resting tentatively atop his gun. Now Blake recognizes him as one of Willie’s good friends, part of the usual crew Willie conscripted to work Caitlin’s parties over the years. His fear is palpable, and the closer Blake gets to him, the more he can see the man’s injuries are much like his own: claw marks that look like they were left by a human across his right forearm, bruises on his face and neck.
The early morning light splashes the tops of the oak trees overhead, and soon the extent of Spring House’s injuries will be revealed to the day. One section of banister and railing on the widow’s walk has completely collapsed, right at the spot where Kyle Austin was pulled straight through the roof by the vines.
Not the vines, he corrects himself. Felix. Felix Delachaise. Felix, who is now… what, exactly?
The soaring front windows are shattered, as are all the slender ones framing the front door. The columns nearest the door are flecked with the impacts of the swarm that carried away Caitlin Chaisson’s very essence, her very soul. And in the middle of it all stands a proud, terrified black man whose last visit to the place was to serve rich white people, and who is now trying not to betray that he has just borne witness to things that have perverted his view of reality.
“Willie says if you came, I was to bring you inside,” the man says.
Blake nods, and follows him from a polite distance, hoping that allowing him to take the lead will settle the man more firmly in his skin, and settle his mind once again.
The foyer is still a ruin, only now that portrait of Felix has finally tumbled from its perch, the canvas speared on one corner of a chest of drawers.
And then the screams come again. Not as piercing or devastating as the final wail he heard inside Vernon’s house as creatures under Blake’s command consumed the man. This sound has a more frustrated, aspirational quality. More like an engine trying to start up, an engine composed of several different high-pitched and desperate voices. And this time, it’s followed by a great crash.
All evidence of the devouring of Mike Simmons has been scrubbed from the giant front parlor, and through the open back door Blake sees Willie’s back. He is seated on the top step, rocking gently back and forth with his hands crossed over his stomach. Flanking him are two other men, also friends of Willie’s he recognizes from having worked various parties over the years, both armed, both gazing out at the ruined gardens before them with vacant, thousand-yard stares and small blood-dappled injuries on their arms and faces.
The spot where the gazebo once stood is now a yawning crater lined with great withered leaves. The crater is twice as deep as it was when Blake jumped down into it to cut free a section of vine just hours before. It appears as if a single event drained the life from all the impossible plant structures that had been pushing their way through it for a day, and now they’re strewn about the crater, fossilized remnants of a recent event. Much of the garden has been destroyed by what look like the claw marks of a great winged beast struggling to take flight. It makes Blake long in an almost nostalgic way for the small upsets and upended fountain Nova pointed out to him the day before.
The screams rend the air again.
They’ve come from the shed, where a cloud of black insects puffs through fresh cracks in the roof and walls. Something slams into the shed’s front wall from inside, and that’s when Blake sees Nova. His first thought is that she’s dead and for some reason they have chained her by both wrists to the door of the shed. The exhalation that comes from him turns into a defeated-sounding moan, which causes Willie to glance in his direction and then shoot to his feet when he sees it’s Blake. And by the time Willie has grabbed him by his shoulders, Blake sees Nova is very much alive, gritting her teeth. When the door behind her bucks from the impact of some powerful force within, Nova rears up, feet planted on the soil, upper back sealed to the door, turning herself into a human doorstop.
“Second swarm never came back,” Willie’s whispering, with the speed and breathlessness of someone nearly mad. “First one, one that took Caitlin, came back right after you left. Bet it killed all those people at that motel first. Then it came back here, went straight for the gazebo. But the second one. The second one…”
Blake knows what Willie is asking. Did Blake manage to outrun them, or have the bugs yet to catch up to him?
“It’s over,” Blake whispers.
There’s another series of screams from the shed, another impact against the walls that causes Nova to let out a startled bark and lift her butt up off the ground to straighten her bound arms.
“It ain’t over,” says one of the men next to him.
Blake is having trouble finding his words. “Why did you—”
“We didn’t do that,” Willie says, gesturing toward his daughter. “We had a deal. We had a plan. We was gonna kill whatever was born out of that damn thing, whatever came out of the gazebo we was going to blow it to hell, set it on fire, anything we could do. We wasn’t gonna let it loose on the world, that’s for sure.” The smell of kerosene hits Blake, and that’s when he sees the small trenches they dug around the gazebo, trenches they never managed to light, otherwise Blake’s eyes wouldn’t be watering from the fumes. “But it looked like some slave woman, and that’s when Nova… that’s when Nova took the chain we was gonna use if we had to tie whatever it was down, and she chased it into the shed, and she did that to her wrists and swallowed the key.” Tears sprout from Willie’s bloodshot eyes, and the arm with which he’s been gesturing wildly to his daughter flies to his mouth.
“I’ll talk to her,” Blake says quietly.
The absence of fear in his voice startles him as much as it does the other men. When he steps down off the porch, he hears one of them following and figures it’s Willie.
Nova is staring down at her lap as he approaches, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths, her narrowed eyes and tense jaw a study in strained concentration amid terror. When she sees Blake standing a few feet away, what appears to be a drunken smile passes over her face.