The Glass Flame

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “I used to play here when I was little,” Chris said, his voice echoing in the cave of the cabin. “Nobody’s used it for a long time, and when the kudzu came everybody forgot that the cabin was underneath. Most everybody forgot.”

  He crossed rotting boards to a table, where I saw that a candle had been stuck to a cracked saucer, with a box of matches beside it. The sound as Chris struck a match was loud in the smothering quiet, but the small flame lessened the gloom. I looked about, my sense of dread increasing, as though some disaster might occur at any moment—something awful that I would never be able to stop. And if it did, who would ever know that we were buried here under these monstrous vines?

  The smell of rank vegetation pervaded the little cabin, combining with the musty smell of a long-closed room, and now a new, cloying scent of sandalwood that rose on the air—a nauseating scent I knew all too well by this time.

  “It’s one of Nona’s candles?” I asked.

  Chris nodded. “I brought some here a while ago. Someone else has been using them. And those matches are new. There’s food too, all wrapped up in foil, and some cans and a few dishes in the cupboard over there. There’s even a big jug of water.”

  I could see now that the cabin was crudely furnished with a cot and a single chair, beside the table and cupboard. Tumbled blankets were piled on the cot, and there was a soiled pillow. Now I knew why the police had found no one on the island. No one had remembered the derelict cabin that had long ago been swallowed by kudzu. Only a small boy who had played here knew, and perhaps his mother. Perhaps one other person, as well.

  “Why haven’t you told your father about this?” I asked.

  “Because he already knows.”

  “What do you mean—he knows?”

  Chris’s voice was harsh beyond his years. “Just that he does. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Does your mother know, Chris? About the cabin, I mean?”

  He stared at me, his eyes wide and bright in the candlelight. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Wind rustled through vines overhead and old timbers creaked. I looked uneasily up at the hand-hewn beams. “I should think the weight of the vines would crush the whole roof in.”

  “They built these old cabins pretty strong. But you can see where the kudzu has broken through, over there in the corner.”

  I looked in the direction Chris pointed and saw that the green scourge had crept through, with tendrils like the antennae of some horrible insect reaching between the logs, prying them apart.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, trying to keep panic from my voice. “That man may come back at any moment, Chris. We’d be trapped if he found us here.”

  “There’s a back door out of that other room,” Chris said. “We’ll go in a minute. I didn’t show you yet. I didn’t show you what I want you to see.”

  As I watched in new dread, he dropped to one knee and placed the candle saucer on the floor. “Look, Karen. Look here!”

  Reluctantly, I knelt beside him, but there seemed nothing noticeable about the dirty floor. Perhaps it was a little darker in this area. Perhaps those were stains against the wood.

  “That’s where the blood was, Karen. This is the place where he died.”

  “Who died?” My lips barely formed the words.

  “It’s where Uncle David died. Whoever killed him brought him here and hid him in this cabin. I found him when he was lying there with blood everywhere. From his head, I guess. I didn’t want to look, but it was all over his suede jacket and on his Stetson hat.”

  Horror could be utterly weakening. My knees seemed to dissolve and I stumbled to the single chair and sat down.

  “He was dead when I found him,” Chris went on, his voice strangely unemotional—perhaps because he had lived so long with his terrible secret. “I felt his hand. It was ice cold and there wasn’t any pulse. He was still wearing that ring my mother gave him. The one with the sapphire. I’ve never touched anything so—so cold before.”

  His words choked into silence and I closed my eyes futilely against the images in my brain. David lying on this rotting floor where I now stood, bleeding to death while that dreadful green vine closed in overhead, crushing everything with its weight, obliterating life. Suddenly I understood why Maggie Caton had painted her terrible picture—with David’s eyes looking out from those man-eating vines. Maggie knew. That was why she had painted the picture. Maggie too had seen, and had been terror-stricken ever since.

  Now I could understand something else as well. I knew why an explosive had been used when David’s body was hidden in the house that had been destroyed. A murder had been committed—a deliberate murder, and fire alone was no longer enough to conceal the fact. The plan had succeeded. It had been possible to identify David, but evidence of murder had been destroyed. Two people other than the murderer had known he was dead before he was put into that house. Two frightened people—a small boy and a neurotic, terrified woman.

  Chris recovered his voice. “I was scared when I found him. I ran away and rode my bike way out into the park. I didn’t go home until it was dark. I didn’t know about the explosion and the fire until it was all over. Next day when they found what they thought was somebody killed in that house, I knew what had happened. Whoever did it carried Uncle David inside after it was dark and set the house to blow up and burn. Maybe so people would think it was an accident, and nobody would ever know that he’d been murdered here on the island.”

  “Oh, Chris! Why didn’t you go to your father about this?”

  He stared at me without speaking—and I knew why he hadn’t.

  “But it wasn’t your father, Chris. You have to believe that. He could never do a thing like this.”

  “Maybe he could. He had an awful fight with Uncle David that morning. Because of my mother. And Dad was over here on the island. I saw him before—before I found what was here in the cabin. And I found that pencil too—in the ashes of the house. One that belonged to Dad.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “The pencil could have been dropped there anytime. None of it matters because he couldn’t do a thing like this.”

  Chris’s face seemed to crumple. He was no longer old beyond his years and holding back a terrible secret. He was a frightened small boy who needed to be comforted. I put my arms about him and he clung to me, letting go at last to weep stormy tears.

  “We’ll leave now,” I told him gently. “We’ll go home and find your father. The man who did this is over there in the theater right now. When we can we must tell your mother too what he has done. If she’s trusting him for some reason, she has to know.”

  “What if she already knows?”

  “That’s not possible,” I said, and hoped my words were true.

  Over our heads the rain came with a sudden rattling sound upon leaves and ancient roof. Quickly it dripped through into the cabin from numerous cracks where the insidious vine had pried the shingles apart.

  “We’ll run for it,” I said. “We mustn’t stay here. It’s not safe.”

  “Wait,” Chris said. “Let me look first. I can hide quicker than you can. I know the places. We’d better not run into him on the way out.”

  At the thought of that possibility I was willing to wait a few minutes longer in the cabin. I stood in the doorway, with its opening framed in vines, and watched Chris crawl away out of sight. The leaves nearest the cabin quickly ceased to stir, and I waited, listening intently while minutes passed.

  Chris should have come back almost at once—but he did not. Now I could hear only the rain beating upon vines and cabin. Then suddenly, from farther away than I expected, I heard Chris’s voice, raised in a curious shout.

  “Catch me if you can! Come on—chase me!”

  I froze in new terror there in the doorway. The unsavory Bruen had indeed been coming this way, and Trevor’s son was, playing mother bird, trying to lure him away from the nest where I was hiding. I blessed him for warning me, but I was frightened for
him as well as for myself. Yet if there was flight and pursuit, I couldn’t hear it above the rain.

  In any case, I must escape from the cabin while I had the chance. I dropped to my knees, but even as I started to crawl out beneath the vines the sound reached me of someone on the road close by, coming this way. Apparently Chris’s challenge had not been accepted.

  I rose quickly and went back to the cabin. Chris had said there was a back door, and I ran into the next room to find it. When I grasped the iron handle and worked the latch, the door pushed outward easily, and I looked into a pocket of space that had been cut through the vines beyond the rear of the cabin. Perhaps whoever had used this place for a hideout had also wanted another exit. I stepped quickly from the cabin and pushed the door softly shut after me. There was no sky to be seen overhead, since thick green vegetation crawled above me from cabin roof to nearby bushes, closing in thickly as I moved away from the cabin.

  I could hear him inside now, and desperation seized me. No real passage seemed to have been cut into the vines back here, but I struggled with the resisting chains, fighting my way through tendrils that clung and around the shelter of a buried and dying bush. The blanket of vines fell behind me, shutting me in. But I couldn’t stay here so close to the cabin. That rear door might open at any moment, and he would find me easily. Chris, at least, was safely away.

  I found that it was better if I crawled, pushing my way into the thicket, lifting a blanket patch wherever it would lift, thrusting my way through and under until my hands were torn, my knees sore. It seemed that the vines were fighting me back and they were unbelievably heavy when I tried to lift them. At least I had escaped the cabin.

  Rain began to fall more heavily, drowning out the rustling sounds of my passage, turning the leafy earth under my hands to slime. Not until my strength was gone did I pause, huddled and muddy, with rain dripping down the collar of my raincoat, my face wet where giant leaves had slapped across my cheeks, my hair wild from tugging tendrils. Surely by now I had tunneled far enough. The strength of panic was fading and my hands and arms had gone weak and useless. I must stay here until I dared to crawl out.

  But when would I dare? How would I know when it was safe to come out of this trap of kudzu? What if that man stayed in the cabin all night?

  These were panicky thoughts and I must not harbor them. There might be acres of vines, but they didn’t cover the whole island. I had only to struggle in one direction and I would come out—somewhere. First I must rest. I was safe enough. Even if the man in the cabin opened that rear door he couldn’t see me now, and he was unlikely to make the desperate struggle through the kudzu that I had just made. He knew Chris was about, but not me.

  As I sat huddled on the ground, protected only a little from rain by the leafy roof, I began to realize that not even I could tell from which direction I had come. The vines had closed in behind me securely, scarcely disturbed by my passing, their smothering presence pressing upon me from all sides—all looking alike. I might easily go straight back to the cabin. Or I might go in circles, fighting the enemy vines and never finding a way out. I remembered Trevor telling me that the highlanders called the rhododendron and laurel thickets “hells,” because once you were lost in them there was no way out. Was that what I had come to now?

  But this was nonsense, of course. Chris knew where I was, and Chris would never abandon me. Yet fear has little to do with reason and I knew an almost paralyzing terror. A terror as much of these wicked vines as of anything that lay outside them. Did I fancy that movement at my wrist? I looked down and saw that a tendril thick as a man’s finger circled my hand. But I had done that—not the creeping vine. Yet if I stayed here long enough it would really happen.

  What if Chris hadn’t escaped after all? What if the man’s return to the cabin only meant that he had the boy with him—silenced perhaps? Who would ever know I was here? All that overpowering greenness would envelop me, bury me here, where no one would ever know I had come.

  I jerked my hand free of kudzu fingers. Stop it! I told myself. Stop it! Helpless I was not, and when the time came I would fight my way out. For this little while I would rest and think of other things.

  At once I thought of those stains on the floor of the cabin, of David dying there, and of the man who had killed him and was running free. He had to be stopped, exposed. We could do that now, because I knew his hiding place. I would find Trevor as quickly as I could and I would tell him all that Chris had told me. Chris and Maggie might have kept silent for their own mistaken and emotional reasons. Chris protecting his father, Maggie protecting—Eric? But I would tell what I knew as quickly as it was possible, and the truth would come out.

  As quickly as I could get away from here.

  The rain seemed to be easing a little at the moment, but I was wet and cold, wrapped in my blanket of green shade. If the sun came out I would hardly know it was there. This part of the island had offered bushes and small trees aplenty for the vine to grow over, so that it didn’t crawl along the ground, but heaved itself upward into those mounds that seemed to undulate like green waves when seen from afar. But this also meant that I must fight my way not only through the vines but through all the thick undergrowth it had clambered over and between as it smothered the landscape in its terrifying course.

  There was a smell too—a dusty, choking odor of wet, green vegetation, pungent and horrid to breathe. It was a smell I would never forget.

  Where was Chris? Why hadn’t he come to find me?

  Had my thought of his being captured been right? Surely no one would harm a child. But if Chris was kept from going home, the vines could close me in, cover me like a green shroud. I could die here and turn to bones—and it might be years before whatever was left of me was found in my green grave!

  Again I fought my own fears. Chris might need help. It would be better to struggle back to the cabin, if I could find it. Then I could make sure that Chris had escaped. I could at least peer through a window, spy upon this man who was a murderer.

  I struggled up from my place on the wet ground, unable to stand completely because of the weight of vines above me, but able once more to crawl. My earlier passage must surely be marked by bruised leaves, tendrils that had torn away from whatever they grasped. If I looked carefully enough I would surely find my own tracks. Once I located the cabin and made sure Chris wasn’t there, I could find my way around it and back to the road.

  Once more I gathered my strength to fight my living, grasping, enemy and chose a direction where the leaves seemed to have been slightly disturbed by my passing. Once more I crawled and fought and crawled again.

  “Karen!” The sound was only a whisper but it reached me. I answered softly, “Chris?”

  “I’m here, Karen—I’m coming. I’ll get you out.”

  I had never heard a sound sweeter than the rustling of the vines as he tunneled his way to me, knowing a path of his own where the vegetation was weakest, perhaps from his own previous attacks. In moments he was beside me, kneeling to look into my face. I held my hands out to him, too choked to speak, and he saw how wet and muddy and torn they were. Quickly he snatched a handful of leaves and wiped my palms with their wetness.

  “Your hands will be all right, Karen. They’re only scratched.” But he must have seen something in my face, in my eyes, for he put an arm gently about my shoulders. “He scared you, didn’t he? But he’s gone now. He never tried to catch me. He just went back for something in the cabin. I got a glimpse of him afterwards, running off toward the theater, carrying a box. So we’re all right now. Let’s go back to the cabin and get out that way.”

  There was kindness in his expression, tenderness and sympathy, and my tears spilled over. He put both arms about me as though he were the adult protector and I the child, and for a moment we held each other. I held his young body in arms that had never held a child so close and lovingly before. He let me cry and patted me kindly. Then he gave me a small, parental shake.

  �
�We’d better go now, Karen.”

  He knew the way, somehow, through what to me was only a green labyrinth, and I was able to follow him back to the cabin with a minimum of effort. We slipped in through the back door, and went out the open front way. It took only minutes to return to the road, so I hadn’t been all that far into the vines, after all.

  When we stood up at last in the lessening shower I felt only a sense of enormous relief. That was all I could absorb at the moment. Relief and a deep and loving gratitude to Chris.

  Together we ran through the clean light rain that washed away the mingling odors of vines and dust and sandalwood. All those odors of death.

  “We’ll go to Vinnie’s house first,” Chris decided. “Then you can dry off a bit and rest. You look real tuckered out. It will be all right. I don’t think he comes there anymore. It’s down this way.”

  The octagonal house loomed quickly ahead of us, tall and brown and shining-wet. Now that we were soaked, we might just as well have run across the causeway to my car, but for Chris I sensed that this was a postponement of something he dreaded. He knew now that he had to face his father, and gradually our reversed roles swung back to normal. Once more I was the adult, and he the troubled child. The ordeal of talking to his father thoroughly frightened him.

  I could understand this. His own mistaken notion of the truth terrified him and somehow I must ease his concern. Perhaps a pause at the house would give me the opportunity to reassure and comfort him. Besides, I needed a rest. I needed to regain something of my own courage that I had lost back there among the vines.

  When we reached the broken driveway I looked about again for Trevor’s car, hoping against hope. But it was nowhere in sight. Something serious must have happened to keep him from the island, and I could only wish desperately that he would still come. What I knew must be shared quickly—while there was still time.