FROM OCTOBER VINES

Gordon B. White

 

~ Cordials and Port ~

 

If you speak a word, the spell is broken. This is the first rule of a dumb supper.

So you walk silently backwards up the steps from the unkempt lawn to the sagging porch, Madison behind you going first to open the door and Selene in front, bringing up the rear. Cheeks pouched, lips pursed, each of you carries a tray covered with a white dust cloth into the old house.

Through the foyer, up the grand staircase, you three walk backwards, dragging your heels so as not to trip on the steps. You watch the back of Selene’s head, the collar of her pale dress. You listen for the brush of Madison’s hem when she reaches the landing. Down the hall, then, still hesitant as warped boards under damp carpet bend beneath your feet. Moonlight through the great window’s empty panes paints everything blue and black except your white dresses and the cloth over your trays.

Then Madison stops. The door behind you groans open into the room you girls had set for supper earlier that afternoon. That was back when there was light and you could speak.

Madison, you, Selene: in that order you back into the room. The round table at the center has no cloth, but bears a clutch of dead candles and eight full place settings with seven empty chairs. The seat closest to the door, however, is already occupied.

Regina, completely covered by the thick white sheet, waits. Stiff linen creases pool shadows along the hollows of her face beneath and, in the dimness, her features are melting like wax.

Then Madison strikes the match. As candlelight fills and softens the pits of Regina’s shroud, you can almost imagine that what lies beneath is furniture or a sack of laundry. But comfort is fleeting.

The inside of your closed mouth is beginning to burn; your tongue is numb and your gums prickle. The cool sting of alcohol swells with every inhalation through your nostrils as they are tickled, too, by dust and the first bloom of rot. So the three of you set your covered favors on the table and seat yourselves in predetermined order. Clockwise, it runs: Regina, empty, Madison, empty, Selene, empty, you, empty. Regina’s sheet glows against the void of the door directly behind her.

Madison nods to Selene, Selene to you, you to Regina. Regina doesn’t move.

Before each of you is a place setting done in mirror. Spoons and knife on left, forks on right. Bread plate and dinner spoon hover between empty glasses for water, wine, and after-dinner drinks on the table’s edge.

Madison lifts her smallest glass, and you and Selene follow. You raise them to your lips and spit back the liqueur you have been holding without swallowing since you first crossed the threshold. The liquid is dark amber and bubbled with saliva, but its ghost still coats your mouth like sap.

You place your glasses down. The dumb supper has begun.

 

♦

 

You took the crooked steps two at a time and the landing at a sprint. Still, when you reached the room—the round table already draped in white linen and ringed by eight empty chairs—Madison’s shriek had collapsed into sobbing. Selene stared open-mouthed.

Framed by a panel of setting sunlight through the window, Regina lay. Her eyes were bulged by broken capillaries, her tongue swollen, her throat clawed and bruised. Her honeyed ringlets spilled out like an illumination of the soul rising from the dead.

Although the dumb supper was yet hours away, none of you spoke.

 

♦

 

~ Dessert ~

 

The dessert course is Selene’s. Seated opposite and furthest from Regina, she is still in shock after finding the body. She bears the same wide-eyed, unseeing disbelief as when Madison first lumbered the corpse into the chair and covered it with the tablecloth. Even now, Madison has to wave multiple times before Selene registers that it is time.

Had it gone as expected, the dumb supper would have been simple. You would do it backwards; you would do it in silence; you would do it on Samhain. One by one, each girl would be joined by an apparition of her husband-to-be. That had been the plan.

Selene uncovers the dish before her: German chocolate cake. She takes up the gleaming pie-knife’s wedge, then turns it backwards, gripping the blade. With the handle, then, Selene furrows out eight mangled portions. One by one, plates are passed and she shovels out the moist crumb like mud in the candlelight. Dessert is placed in front of every seat. The three of you raise the littlest spoons.

A dumb supper, in truth, is not so universally simple. In some places, the empty seats are reserved for spirits. In others, it foretells if you will die. Here, tonight, you three who remain believe it might reveal who killed Regina. This is why Madison insisted on proceeding.

So you take a bite of the ruined cake, the sweetness piling over top of the liqueur’s still-sweet residue on your tongue. The steady slog of chewing pulses through your jaw, jostling the mouse bones in your ears and burying all other sounds except the whistle through your nose. You are watching Selene in the middle of your second mouthful, however, when her eyes go wide and her face drains. This freezes you, and then you hear what she hears.

In the hallway, something heavy is approaching. A pulsing drag, pause, drag, pause, grows louder as it reaches the black of the door behind Regina. A drag, then a pause just outside the frame.

An enormous worm’s glistening pink head pokes inside, large around as your thigh. In the candles’ flicker, you see bits of loam clinging to its reticulations like morsels of German chocolate cake. Neither Selene, nor Madison, nor you make a sound as the worm inches in, around the table clockwise and towards Madison, who remains still.

It crawls past Madison, then rears up to squirm onto the seat between her and Selene. Selene begins panting around her mouthful of cake, hyperventilating as the chair on her right creaks beneath the worm’s weight and it loops one kink of itself around the headrest to assume a seated position. She is about to scream and break the spell, despite Madison’s furious waving entreaties, when the thing happens.

The worm parts its lips to reveal a set of yellowed teeth, as broad and flat as ivory dentures. It pulls its skin’s edges back into a smile, then dips down to gnash at the chocolate cake before it.

 

♦

 

Bradley must have known why you were walking down the road with a salad bowl. The old house was the only thing out that way.

He smiled, leaning from his car window. “Have you seen Regina?”

It was a casual question made strange by the distance from any explanation for his presence. A boyfriend’s bored curiosity? Jealousy?

He grinned again, batted his lashes. Your heart fluttered and you felt sick. You shook your head, No.

“Is she up at that house?” he asked “Are you girls doing something naughty? Should I go take a look?”

You shook your head again.

 

♦

 

~ Entree ~

 

Without looking at the worm to her left or Selene sobbing one seat past, Madison prepares to reveal the entree. She and Regina, it seems, were the best friends and the circle’s center. Selene, you had suspected and have now confirmed, was merely an extra spoke to help the wheel turn.

You are not unsympathetic. You already knew that Selene would die unmarried. You didn’t need the dumb supper for that.

Madison draws back the white cloth from the tray before her, untenting a roast chicken already stripped to the bone. It verges on a surgical marvel how cleanly she has pared the flesh away, as if an anatomical diagram, blown out and the minutiae labeled, has fallen onto a silver platter.

As Madison reconstructs the chicken slice by slice for serving, Selene weeps openly without speaking, chocolate dessert crusted at her mouth’s corners. The shovel-toothed worm, too, has pieces caked in its crevices but otherwise grins eyeless at its empty plate.

By the time Madison has reassembled her Faberge roast, there is a creaking on the grand stairs. As she serves it like a jigsaw, the footsteps creep across the landing. The hall. Outside the door. You look up as your plate reaches your hand. A man-sized and man-shaped shadow looms behind Regina’s shroud before the door.

Bradley, in a form, half-steps into the room. There is a dizziness to his features, a mélange of his eyes and mouth and a shifting of his limbs. It is not so much that he cannot settle on which way to stand, but more that reality has not yet settled on which of the overlapping versions of him stands there. Selene, poor girl, does not respond at all. Madison, however, stares mouth agape, and then turns to you. Her eyes ask, without speaking, if you have been found out. Then, the alternative blossoms: Is this what you have conducted the dumb supper to discover? Was it him?

As Madison stares at you over the worm which delicately nibbles a drumstick with its outsized teeth, you watch the swirl of Bradleys in the doorway split like oil on water. The inaccuracy of his features, the almostness of his gaze, everything resolves as the solid part—the real Bradley—falls back and staggers off down the hall. Down the stairs. The door slams below.

The aspect of Bradley which remains is a gossamer boy, a thin and diaphanous fancy. He smiles so wide, but his eyes are empty and have no lashes to bat. With silent steps, the ghost of him skirts to Regina’s right and sits down in the empty chair between you two.

Smiling blankly, the specter saws away at the ghost of the chicken with transparent versions of his offhand silver.

Madison stares at you. Her eyes are saying, I told you, I knew it was him. She tilts her head to the door, questioning. But you shake your head.

You sweep a hand to the remaining dumb supper before you. The spell can’t be broken before it ends.

 

♦

 

“Food comes last, stupid,” Regina said. “You know that.”

Your cheeks burned as she laughed. You picked up your covered bowl, but Regina grabbed your wrist. “Don’t,” you would have whispered, but you held still as her dusty fingers slid up under the sheath and plucked out a round, ripe tomato. Past her fine lips, she popped the fruit between her teeth.

“You’re leaving me to set up alone?”

You opened your mouth as if to answer, but she waved you off as she wiped the juice from her lips’ corner.

“Maddy and Selene are coming soon. Don’t bother hurrying.”

 

♦

 

~ Salad ~

 

You cannot put tomatoes back on the vine. You cannot plant cabbage back in the soil or re-stem spinach. What is done cannot be undone; what is seen, not unseen; said, not unsaid. You wonder, as you unveil your salad with the crisp bed-lettuces and jewel tomatoes, if the others appreciate this.

You have only dipped the tongs hinge-first into the bowl when the first cavernous thump resonates downstairs. Even poor Selene stirs momentarily from her horror and the worm beside her quivers, its attention drawn. Only phantom Bradley beside you continues to eat his ghostly meal uninterrupted.

Madison looks to you, the fear in her eyes almost a delicacy. Your cheeks flush to think that you are the expert here. Then you realize she is focused on phantom Bradley to your left. Has she put together that at the dumb supper the seats are reversed from custom, with the woman on the right and her date, or fate, on the left? That this makes Bradley yours and not Regina’s? But does she really think you would entertain such a union? Well, yes, he’s rich. Handsome, too, perhaps. But none of this is where your interest lies as the dumb supper approaches its conclusion.

You flap out the green leaves and ruby tomatoes alongside juicy cucumbers and crumbled feta. No dressing, of course, as you couldn’t jury-rig it back into the bottle. Your aim now is to serve everyone before the drumming on the stairs arrives.

Since there are only two seats left—the empty one to Regina’s left beside Madison, and the one right between you and Selene—Madison takes her plate and rakes her salad in with a knife. Selene and the monstrous worm grind face-first at their plates, mindless, as the intruding guest’s heavy step resonates down the hallway.

With everyone else chomping away, you take the final plate as the approaching clomp reaches the hallway’s end. Madison and Selene and the worm roar through their courses, as if finishing before the new attendant can assume his spot might prevent his arrival. You, however, place yours down with the leaves and glistening tomatoes untouched. The others have too much left to eat, anyway, and cannot wipe away the juice from the last ripe tomatoes fast enough as the behemoth enters.

It is an enormous coffin, covered in dirt. It wobbles from end to end into the room under its own power. A gentleman obelisk, it waits at the threshold for just a moment. A heavy breathing rocks the lid out and in. Then it wobbles in, step by half-step, three inches at a time. The wheezing ebony casket stumbles around the table, past the empty chair between Regina and Madison. Madison. The worm. Selene.

Then, with a ponderous inhale, it collapses towards you but you don’t even flinch as only inches away it crushes the chair between you and Selene into splinters.

The wobble of the table sends cold salad tumbling across its face.

 

♦

 

Fresh from October vines, you ran the tomatoes beneath the kitchen tap and placed them on the terrycloth towel to dry before adding them to the salad. Undressed, obviously.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this with them,” your brother called from the living room. “Bradley, Regina’s boyfriend, says they say you’re weird.”

You knew that. But you also knew they thought you knew weird things, too. Things like the dumb supper.

And you do. But you know better ones, too.

You inserted the hypodermic needle through the tomato’s skin, just a perfect little hole, and plumped it full and juicy.

 

♦

 

~ Aperitif ~

 

Aperitif was to be Regina’s, but your digestifs sit there, waiting. This is the dumb supper; the end is the beginning.

Poor Selene, already drained, died almost immediately. Draped across her coffin, her cooling weight keeps the lid from rattling. The worm, too, is slung over its headrest, purpling and tumescent as poison courses through its single vein. Madison, though, still thrashes willfully on the floor. She claws her throat as if to open it for air and, wildly flailing, grips the cloth covering Regina. She yanks it away to reveal Regina—the first and now final unveiling—yawning as black and empty as the doorway beyond.

Soon enough, however, even Madison stops moving.

Alone, you lift your aperitif, having come full circle. The liquid is still dark amber, pearlescent with saliva bubbles. You are contemplating its viscosity when the last guest appears.

You.

The you who enters is thin and gauzy, like Bradley’s specter still blithely smiling on your date-side. You try to wave your doppelganger away; the party is already over and the killer revealed. Nevertheless, it seats itself on Regina’s body’s left.

Hollow-eyed and grinning, your ghost is sitting politely when the first splash of crimson light soaks the room. It washes ruby red, then bruise blue, then repeats. You rise and approach the window. Down below is a police car, lights flashing but siren off.

Two officers emerge and open the back to release their passenger. It’s Bradley: the real Bradley, not your ghostly companion who split off from him when he intruded during the entree course. Your killer, then, and not your husband. You sigh. That makes more sense.

He points up to where the window frames you, so you smile and wave. As the officers stare, hands on holstered pistols, you raise a toast, the liqueur alternating red and blue as if unsure of its final form. Then you turn back to the dumb supper’s remains.

Downstairs, the front door is kicked in. When they reach this room, the spell will be over, so you prepare. As they gallop up the grand stairs, you blow out the candles. As they reach the landing, you pick up a fork and spear one perfect tomato from your salad plate. In the flashing light it is the most brilliant red, then the dullest gray, blinking like an eye.

The men are racing down the hall as you hand your ghost the fork. The first officer inside tackles your double from its chair just as it bites down. Bradley and the other officer, taking in the full carnage, blanch. You smile and throw back your aperitif.

Your own deal is concluded, your spell completed.

You are vibrating. You are transforming. Darkness consumes you and then you are darkness. You are more powerful, less defined, than anything Regina, Madison, Selene, Bradley, or anyone else could have imagined.

In the gap between red and blue, you slip out through the darkness into the night. You spread your wings.

 

♦

 

You were pruning vines when the darkness spoke to you again from the shadows beneath the leaves. You pretended not to hear.

Regina, Madison, and even Selene, had ditched you again. But it was fine, you lied; more time to attend to these withered stalks. Your tomatoes were still unripe, but without the leeches they might be salvageable.

The darkness called you by name and you clipped a bit too far, nicking your fingertip.

“What do you want?” you hissed.

Your brother slid open the side door. “Telephone,” he called out. “It’s those girls.”

“You,” the darkness answered. §