Welcome back to the Saturday Night Story. Tonight, please enjoy a portion of one of my short horror stories titled VINE WORLD… you can buy the E-book version of the full story here.
VINE WORLD
The Vines came almost all at once, on a warm otherwise unremarkable summer night twelve years ago. Teddy didn’t remember their coming. He was only fourteen now, which meant he was two when they came. Actually, it wasn’t exactly accurate to say he didn’t remember their coming.
There were the dreams.
In the dreams he’d be asleep, peaceful in his bed, when suddenly, with the rending sound of a thousand angry zippers the snakes would punch through the walls, yellow eyes flashing, their mouths open wide and hissing, long saber-like fangs spitting luminous green venom. They would spill into the room like waterfalls and begin to coil around him in his bed. Tighter and tighter until breathing became an impossibility and the hissing crowded out even his own panicked thoughts and the world beyond his eyes began to grow dark.
He didn’t always wake up screaming from these dreams, but he did so often enough that his parents worried about it. He could hear them talking about it in low whispers sometimes when they didn’t think he could hear them. Sound carried well in this house. But that tended to happen in structures where the walls didn’t always line up, floors sometimes leaned crazily in every direction, doors had long ago been pulled permanently free of their frames, and windows were smashed and lying on the ground in twinkling shards of glass.
The vines had done all that.
Teddy lay in his bed in the eternal twilight of Vine World, which was what everyone called ground level these days. He knew that if he looked at the wind-up clock on his nightstand he would see that it was eight o’clock in the morning, give or take fifteen minutes. His brain knew what time it was, even if there wasn’t enough sunlight down here to confirm what his brain already seemed to know.
“It’s your Shark-Alien rhythms” his Dad had once explained. Whatever that was. Teddy made a mental note to look up “Shark-Alien” on his next trip to the library, though what sharks and aliens might have to do with waking up with the sunlight, he couldn’t possibly fathom.
The “ceiling” of his bedroom was a vine. Twenty feet in diameter Teddy guessed, big for sure, but not even close to the biggest vine Teddy had ever seen. The vine’s underside bowed freakishly down into his room. On the right side of the ceiling it coiled away and upward towards the sky. On the left it traveled back through the wall it had smashed twelve years ago and down into the ground. Teddy’s Dad had nailed some boards in around the places where the vine touched the walls in an attempt to weather-proof the room, but the vines were alive. They moved constantly, breathed almost, even if it was only barely perceptible, and the seals rarely held for very long. This morning, humidity poured through the gaps between the vine and the walls and a thin sheen of sweat broke out on Teddy’s forehead and in his arm pits.
Mostly the weather stayed on the right side of the “wall”, but not always. It got particularly bad in August, which was Hurricane season here in South Louisiana. But those only hit once or twice a year, and only that often in the really bad years. When they did he would simply move in with his parents, or his brother Bob, for a couple days until the angry wind blew itself out somewhere over Arkansas or Mississippi.
Teddy stared thoughtfully up at the vine. He wasn’t sure exactly what you were supposed to call the skin of the vines… bark he supposed. The bark was scaly, like a snake or a fish, each scale the size of a frisbee and shaped like the business end of a spade. The scales were generally brown, but there was a soft iridescence to them and a subtle shifting pattern of colors constantly rippled across the bark? Scales? Skin?
“Whatever”, Teddy mumbled as he pulled himself up to a sitting position.
It was the thorns you really had to look out for. Teddy was lucky though, there were only two thorns on the vine that had been his bedroom ceiling since just before his second birthday, a day he remembered only in his dreams.
The thorns were not conical like those on the ragged patches of blackberry bush that still somehow managed to thrive in the backyard places where occasional columns of sunlight fought their way down through the alien canopy. No, these thorns were more like the arrowheads his Dad had taught him to hunt with, though much larger. They were shaped like pyramids, with a point sharp enough to stab through wood and four symmetrical ridges so hard and razor sharp they could put a score on a piece of glass.
There was poison in them too. They’d found that out the hard way, hadn’t they? But the less said about that, the better, Teddy thought.