The Looming Lattice

The summer I turned fifteen, my family moved to a small town in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The house was a relic from the 1970s, all shag carpet and wood paneling, but the previous owner had been obsessed with wooden trellises. They were everywhere: along the porch, beside the garage, even in the backyard. Most were skeletal and bare, but the one outside my bedroom window grew a thick, gnarled vine that creeped up to the second floor, its leaves a sickly green.

I was a gymnast, my body trained to bend and balance, but that summer I was in a cast—a broken wrist from a fall at a competition. My endless practices, my traveling, my sleep-away camps—all paused. I was confined to the house, my mother convinced I’d re-break something if I so much as walked to the corner store. So I spent my days in my room, studying the vine outside my window. It was a monster, its tendrils like gnarled fingers, and I swore it grew an inch a day.

My mother was from the U.K., an atheist, and she found my sudden fascination with the local cult funny. A group of people in flowing robes would sometimes walk down our street, chanting in a language I didn’t understand. They always stopped in front of our house, their eyes up at my window. I felt a pull toward them, a hypnotic draw I couldn’t explain. My mother forbade me from speaking to them. ‘Bloody nonsense,’ she’d say, and I’d try to ignore the way they made my skin prickle.

One night, a heat wave broke and a cool breeze finally came through. I fell asleep with the window open, the vine rustling against the screen. I dreamed of a lattice—a perfect grid of wooden beams—and in the center, a face, not human, made of knots and whorls. It was weeping, and its tears were leaves. I woke with my cast throbbing, the room pitch black. The window was shut, the screen gone. Outside, the vine pressed against the glass, its leaves flattened, as if it were trying to get in.

I told my mother the next morning, but she chided me about watching too many scary films. But the vine grew faster. By the end of the week, its tendrils were forcing the window frame, and I could hear a faint, rasping sound at night, like dry leaves rubbing together. I started to see it move out of the corner of my eye, and I knew it was watching me. The cult members took to standing at our gate, their faces turned up, and one day, they left a small bundle of twigs tied with red string on our doorstep. My mother threw it in the trash, but I fished it out and hid it under my pillow.

Desperate, I remembered the Catholic priest at the chapel downtown. My mother, despite her dismissal, encouraged me to see him. ‘If it makes you feel better, love,’ she said. The priest, Father Miguel, was an old man with kind eyes and a silver cross. He listened without judgment, his expression deepening as I spoke of the vine and the dreams. He gave me a small vial of holy water and told me to sprinkle it on the vine at sunrise for seven days. ‘It will not be easy,’ he said, ‘for this is not a natural vine. It is a growth of the earth that has been fed by unholy attentions. It latches onto those who are between—between youth and adulthood, between belief and doubt.’

On the first day, I stood at the window as the sun crested the mountains, my cast making it awkward. I sprinkled the water, and the vine hissed, its leaves curling and turning brown, as if burned. The sound was like a thousand tiny screams. The cult members, who had been gathering silently in the street, began to chant louder. My mother, now fearing for my safety, tried to keep me inside, but I was determined. Each morning, I confronted the vine, and each morning, it recoiled, but I saw new growth—pale, white tendrils that reached for me.

By the fifth day, the vine had retreated to the first level, but the lattice—the perfect grid I’d seen in my dream—had appeared on my wall, burned into the wood paneling like a brand. The face was there too, weeping, and I understood now: it wasn’t my face. It was the face of the last person who had tried to join the cult, who had been invited into the vine, and had become part of it. The cult wasn’t interested in me for me; they wanted me to be the new face, to be the one to feed the vine my youth.

On the seventh day, I woke before dawn. The room was cold, and the vine was gone from the window—only a withered husk remained. I poured the last of the holy water over the lattice, and the face contorted, screaming silently. The wood cracked and peeled, and the lattice collapsed into dust. The cult members vanished, and the town felt emptier, as if they had taken the shadows with them.

I finished my recovery, and my cast came off. But I never look at bare trees the same way. I still hear the rustle at night, and I know that the vine can regrow, that the lattice is always waiting to be built again. My mother never went to church, but she keeps a small cross by the door now. And I know that the face I saw was a warning—a reminder that some hungers grow in the dark, patient and woody, waiting for a child who is on the brink of something they don’t understand. It’s been a year, and the cult never returned, but I still have that bundle of twigs, hidden in a shoebox at the bottom of my closet. I keep it to remind myself that what I saw was real—and that the holy water worked, just as the priest promised. But I wonder, sometimes, if the vine is growing somewhere else, waiting for a new season, and a new sun to rise over a lattice of leaves.