The Family Tree

by John Everson

  “You’d best shower up and come down to breakfast. Mr. Pirdue is going to come by a little later with the last paperwork for you to sign from the will. I don’t suppose you’d want to meet him like this.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you want me to help you with the shower?”

  “No,” he said quickly, embarrassed.

  “All right, then,” she said. “But you don’t need ta be shy. I’ve been dealing with your bedpans, you know.”

  The mental picture of her hands working over his genitals as he lay there unconscious made his stomach twist. No, he could handle himself now in the shower. If he could stand there, the water would do its own work.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to do that, but I think I can handle myself now.”

  “Be careful, then,” she said. “I’ll send Caroline down to check on you.”

  Scott took his first couple steps without her help, and then put his hand on the doorframe to guide him into the bathroom. “I’ll be all right,” he told himself.

  He used the toilet on his own and then carefully bent over to turn on the shower. Once he stepped in, he noted the pink marks on his stomach and thighs. He could see where he’d been scraped and cut. But just barely. There were stitches zig-zagging up the exposed flesh of his splinted leg, but other than a few faintly yellow spots, the bruises he should have had all over his body seemed to have dissipated already. “It may not be the fountain of youth, but it’s a miracle drug, that’s for sure,” he said to himself.

  He was enjoying the warmth of the water sluicing through his hair and down his back when he felt a faint draft in the room. A second later, the shower curtain moved. The soft touch of a hand slipped over his shoulder, and the press of a small lithe body melted into him from behind.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” Caroline said. “You’ve been gone for days!”

  She picked up the bar of soap and knelt in the midst of the spray to gently wash his splinted leg. And then other things. The feeling of her fingers slipping up his inner thigh and cupping him made his whole body tremble.

  “We’ll have to take care of this later,” she said, slipping her fingers around his already responsive erection. “I’ve been missing you.”

  A half hour later, Scott was dressed and sitting at the Family Table, enjoying a king’s meal: sausage, bacon, pancakes, eggs scrambled with cheese, onions and some herb he couldn’t quite identify.

  Caroline and Ellen waited on him hand and foot. As he was finishing his last cup of coffee, the front lobby door jingled and Ellen went to check on who’d come in. A minute later she returned with a thin, bespectacled man in tow. He carried a briefcase and wore gray dress slacks and a white button shirt with a vest. He looked official.

  “This is Mr. Pirdue,” Ellen said. “He’s just got some business to go over with you.”

  As the lawyer greeted him, Ellen and Caroline quietly left the room. Over the next hour, Pirdue walked through the will, explained the financial status of the inn, and had Scott sign several documents related to transfer of various titles and accounts.

  When everything was done, and Scott’s head was spinning with information, the lawyer stood up and collected his things.

  “That’s about it, Mr. Belvedere,” Pirdue said. “I am always at your disposal if you have any questions, or need help with anything. Please don’t hesitate to call.”

  “Thanks,” Scott said.

  Pirdue pushed a notepad and some legal documents back into his briefcase, and held out a hand. Scott shook it, and just before breaking the grip, the lawyer looked him in the eye. His face seemed stern.

  “This is all yours now,” he said. “Take care of the inn, it’s a treasure. Bigger than all of us.”

  “Um, yes, I will,” Scott said, fumbling for words.

  Pirdue nodded, and walked to the door. Just before leaving, he stopped a moment, and turned. “You take care of The Family Tree Inn, and it will take care of you,” he promised.

  Chapter Nine

  When Scott returned from the hiking trail and finally reached the inn, he was covered in sweat. Heat seemed to rise in waves off his skin, and a steady trickle of sweat moved down his back and dripped into the crack of his ass. Over the past few days since he’d awoken after the accident, Ellen had fed him on steady, dizzying doses of various permutations of the Family Tree’s sap, leading to several spontaneous trysts with Caroline and Rocky. He had made amends with Rocky fairly quickly after she had begged forgiveness in a most undeniable way. (It’s hard to say no when you’re half drunk, seated at a dinner table with a splinted leg, and a mouth sudden engulfs your cock from beneath the table.)

  He’d tried to strengthen both his leg and work off the effects of inebriation by taking long walks on the trail behind the inn each morning. And after just a couple days, his leg felt so strong that he was itching to remove the splint. There was almost no pain now when he walked, just a faint ache.

  This morning he had eaten Ellen’s artery-constricting homemade biscuits and gravy, and then headed out to the trails before nine a.m. He had been full of energy when he started, but now he was sweaty and tired, and just wanted to rest. He laughed quietly at himself—wiped out before lunchtime!

  The inn was strangely quiet when he stepped inside; nobody seemed to be around anywhere. Scott walked through the empty lobby and down the hall towards his room. But when he reached the cutoff for his hall, he decided to take a walk back the way that Caroline had taken him the night she showed him the eyrie. He was curious what else was over there; the door to the “treehouse” hadn’t been the only unmarked door down that hall.

  It may have been the only unlocked door though, he thought a few minutes later when he tried the first three doorknobs down that hall only to find them all locked fast.

  Then on the fourth try, a knob turned.

  He stepped inside, and found a stairway waiting. But instead of leading up, this one went down. He pulled a string hooked to the wall and a light went on somewhere below. Go down into the dank basement of this old moldering place, his inner self questioned? Really? What could you possibly hope to find beside spiders there?

  He shrugged. What the hell. He owned this place, right? Might as well explore it. Know it.

  The stairs opened on to what looked to be a root cellar. Rock walls, no windows. It was cool and clammy; Scott felt goose bumps rise on his arms since he was still sweaty and overheated from the hike. The ground was bare, hard-packed earth, and there were shelves crammed with bottles stored along one wall. The stone wall on the far side of the room was interrupted by the trunk of the tree; its rough and gnarled bark ran from the ceiling to disappear beneath the earth of the floor. The bark accounted for more than half of the width of the longest wall and the grout sealing the stone to the tree at its seams was green and cracked with moisture damage. There was a pit on one side of the room; a hollowed-out jumble of boulders and clay that reminded Scott of an underground cave that had been etched by eons of river flow. Maybe the inn had been constructed over a former underground stream?

  The rock floor of the main portion of the room ended in a ledge that extended out in front of the tree trunk by three or four feet. The steps into the basement room extended down into the pit, and Scott hobbled carefully down, more curious about that portion of the room than the more “finished” cellar setting above.

  Roots extended like grasping, fragile arms from places along that trunk there; some plunged down two or three feet to disappear into the deepest ground, while others hung free, out in the air, pointing emptily into space. One clump of dozens of roots right at the center of the trunk appeared particularly dense, and all of the branches angled down like a thousand intertwined tentacles toward the ground. They formed almost a cave of their own.

  Scott stepped toward the tree to look closer, and then let out a low whistle.


  He eased with a groan down to a crouch and peered into the space obscured by the fringe of roots.

  There were bones here.

  Human or animal, he couldn’t be sure; they were broken into many pieces and partially obscured by a thick spray of kinked tree growth—thin hungry fingers that seemed to wind and twist all around the white shards.

  He’d heard of feeding plants bone meal, but normally you crushed the bone into powder for that. Here, the bones were just broken and left to decompose slowly over time.

  Perhaps that was how you fed a tree, he considered. He reached down to pick up one of the larger bones, which could have been part of an arm or leg, he thought. It looked to be almost a foot long and tubular in shape. But when he put his fingers around it and pulled, the bone wouldn’t budge. He pulled harder, and it shifted, just a little, tiny beads of dried earth raining down on his arm. The roots seemed to have grown right into the old bone.

  “Geez,” he said, and wrenched it once more. The bone broke free then, but left behind a thousand threadlike fibers of root. The tree roots had completely burrowed inside the thing. He realized, peering closer, that they had grown upwards through a large pile of bones…all of the ground beneath the leg bone he had rescued, if that’s what it was, was comprised of jagged shards of white and yellow. This chamber appeared to be a burial ground of some sort.

  Roots hung like a waterfall from the lower trunk of the tree. He pushed some of them aside and saw that there was a lot more bone stacked up under there. It looked as if the tree were crouching over a cavern of bone. And the more he looked, the more he began to make out shapes in the boneyard that looked familiar. Five or six small thin bones, two of them connected…fingers? Part of a hand? A smooth dome shape buried in a mix of roots and small long bones…a skull? He tried to reach it, to see if he could shake it free, but he had to crawl all the way under the root curtain to get at it. And his splinted leg wasn’t going to make that an easy exploration.

  He had a suspicion though that this one was human. It wasn’t a long narrow skull, like an animal’s. The part he could see was truly round. He leaned into the gap, and as he reached for it, he could have sworn that something moved. He saw a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye.

  Scott jumped at the unexpected movement and fell sideways, off balance, knocking his head against the roots and releasing a spray of dirt and white dust all over his head and shirt.

  He looked hard to the left, but there was nothing there. Maybe it had been a mouse, he thought. Or a rat. He looked at his hands, covered in gray dust and dirt, and decided that this was not a job for bare hands. Or guys with broken legs. Now he was covered in the bones of dead things. What those dead things were exactly, maybe he didn’t want to know. He pulled out of the hole, used the trunk of the tree to steady himself, and then stood up and brushed himself off.

  So. He owned a treehouse and a bone garden.

  Excellent.

  He straightened up and backed away from the tangled roots and bones…but before he’d gone more than a couple steps, a voice stopped him.

  “Looking for something?”

  He turned and saw the striking orange of Sherrilyn Cartwright’s hair before he saw the woman’s smile.

  She was spying on him. There couldn’t be any other reason why she was here. She must have followed him down the hall. He’d closed the door upstairs behind him, so there would be no other reason for her to have come down the steps. Had Ellen asked her to keep an eye on him?

  “Just was wondering what was in this room,” he said. “The door was open.”

  Sherrilyn nodded. “We have nothing to hide here. But you don’t want to get lost either. The inn has all sorts of weird little places, and if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get to where you’ve been.”

  “So you’re here to guide me?”

  She looked to the dark ceiling and smiled faintly.

  “You could say that.”

  She held a long pale hand out, and he took it. Her fingers were cool in his, but gripped strong. She wore a casual red sundress, which contrasted with the creamy glow of her skin.

  “I could use a guide,” he said. “I don’t know what to do next.”

  “I never know,” she answered. “But I fake it really well.”

  She twined her fingers around his, and pulled him up a step towards the exit of the cavern.

  “Why did you go down there?” she said, sounding genuinely surprised that he would do such a thing.

  “Because I was curious,” he said. “I wanted to see what was down here.”

  “And are you satisfied now?” she said.

  “Well, yes and no.”

  She looked at him with a frown. “Why no?”

  “Well, I saw plenty of bones, but I don’t know why they’re there. Or whose bones they are?”

  “They’re feeding the tree,” she responded, not meeting his eye.

  “But where did the bones come from?”

  She turned to him and shrugged. “Where do any bones come from?” she said. “The dead. Any more than that, is irrelevant. What’s dead is dead.”

  “True,” he began, warming up to his argument. “But if the body was…”

  She cut him off.

  “There are bodies everywhere. Some of them are alive. Some of them are dead. Some of them feed the tree, and the tree feeds all of us. Let it go.”

  She squeezed his hand and pulled him out of the root cellar. Her tone shifted. “Come, I want to show you something.”

  He struggled to keep up as she picked up her pace and strode quickly down the corridor away from the bone room. They wound deeper into the inn than he’d ever been before.

  She was quiet as she walked. Perfectly refined, but weirdly silent. She moved confidently as though he shouldn’t question her about where they were going. Though he certainly wanted to know.

  They passed through several hallways that seemed to grow increasingly old; the wood paneling looked more worn, and the pictures and wall sconces that were hung along the way definitely had been installed in another time. Obviously, the breadth of the inn had expanded with the generations. No doubt, each generation had built a new wing.

  After several silent minutes, she finally stopped and opened a dark walnut-stained door. She motioned for him to follow her inside. His eyes widened when he did. The place was like some secret, decadently luxurious, lounging hideaway.

  You could lean anywhere in this place and be cushioned. That was his first thought.

  There was velvet everywhere.

  The walls were covered in wallpaper that taunted the eye with complex curlicues of deep red velvet. The floor was carpeted, also in a deep burgundy. And as he stepped into the living room, he saw, beyond the antique hurricane lamp, that the couches also looked to be upholstered in cushions of wine.

  She flipped on a dim lamp and stepped to a dark wooden bar on one side of the room and lifted two crystal glasses from a tray. “What do you drink?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Bourbon?”

  She smiled. The red of her lips swelled in a vibrant moue that only served to accent even more the red of her hair. It occurred to him that everything about her was a shade of red. Her dress, her lips, her nails, the place where she lived… She lifted an unmarked bottle of amber and poured a glass half full. Even her drink…

  “Neat?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “I knew there was something good about you,” she said and poured a second glass the same as the first. She brought both glasses to the couch.

  “Sit,” she urged, and he did.

  The cushions were soft; the velvet tickled his back as it slid around him, giving way and surrounding him like a gentle embrace.

  Sherrilyn sank into the cushion next to him, and held her glass out to toast. “To the family,”
she said.

  He tapped his glass to hers and grasped for a suitable counter toast. His recent adventure came to mind. “To the tree.”

  That raised a smile from Sherrilyn, who took a sip of the liquor. After savoring a slow, warm breath, she added, “They’ve been connected for generations.”

  “You’ve apparently been connected for quite a long time yourself.”

  She nodded. “Your grandfather was very good to me. I went away to college, but the inn always called me home. Now that Ellen is older, she needs my help even more to keep this place going.”

  “What about Caroline?” he asked.

  “She’s a good kid,” Sherrilyn admitted.

  “Kid? You two look to be the same age.”

  Sherrilyn’s lips turned up in an amused smile. “I practically raised that girl,” she said. “She’s a great help, but she’s still just a kid.”

  With that, Sherrilyn slipped an arm around his shoulder. He felt the soft warmth of her suddenly pressing against his ribs and hip as she shifted closer. “I’m not a kid,” she said softly, and held her bourbon out to clink once more against his glass.

  “No,” he admitted, and quickly took another sip of his drink. It tasted like bourbon, but richer. The burn as it went down was tempered in something honey-sweet. His whole body felt instantly warm. He recognized the buzz and the aftertaste then. Her bourbon must have been spiked—just like everything else in this place—with the sap of the Family Tree.

  “I want to get to know you better,” she said. Her eyes locked on his, and didn’t blink. “I loved your grandfather. And you…you remind me of him. I saw the resemblance as soon as Ellen walked you into dinner the other night. The way your eyes squeeze almost shut when you smile, or the way your chin gets a little dimple in it when you laugh. Those are Belvedere traits. I bet he looked a lot like you when he was really young.”