by John Everson
He pushed the shovel in near the edge, to widen the hole, and as he did, chunks of earth broke away and fell into the blackness below.
“I bet this is one of the tunnels Miss Roxy was talking about,” he whispered. He moved around the hole in an ever-widening spiral, shoving the spade down and letting the earth fall away. In just a few minutes, he was looking at a four-foot wide hole that went…nowhere.
Well, it went somewhere, he supposed. But he wasn’t sure just where. Everything below his feet was black…but when he laid down on the ground and looked down, he could see stars. Faint pinpricks of light in the darkness below. If he dove through the hole…he’d be in space!?
“You made it,” a voice said behind him. Jeremy jumped. She’d surprised him again. Miss Roxy was standing there behind him. Her feet were on the last step.
“It’s outer space down there,” he said.
Miss Roxy shook her head. “It’s whatever you want it to be. If you want to go to China, just picture it in your head, and jump into the hole. That’s where you’ll go.”
“Did your husband go to China?” Jeremy asked.
She shook her head. “I dug the hole for him, and then when he could see the stars, I asked him what he thought hell looked like. He thought about it for a minute, and then described a really horrible place full of fire and impaling spikes and…” Miss Roxy stopped speaking for a moment and shook her head. “Things you don’t need to know. When I was sure he had a good picture in his head, I gave him a little push, and away he went. I hope he did end up in the place he imagined…he was a bad, bad man.”
“I don’t want to go to hell,” Jeremy whispered, scooting back from the edge.
“No, no, sweetie, I would never have given you the shovel for that. I want you to go where you want to go.”
“I want to go to China,” Jeremy said. He stood up, his eyes welling with tears. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Miss Roxy nodded. Her face was serious. “Think of China, then,” she said. “Close your eyes and picture it really good in your mind.”
Jeremy screwed his eyes shut and held them that way. In his head, he imagined the place that he’d been thinking about for months every night when he laid down to sleep. In his mind, there were beautiful tall buildings with flags and banners waving in the wind. Horses marched along stone paths and dogs frolicked in the grassy square. All around him, short people walked hand in hand. Hardly anyone was taller than Jeremy, but everyone was friendly and kind.
“Do you see it?” Miss Roxy asked softly.
Jeremy nodded, but didn’t open his eyes.
“Good,” she said. “Just take a step forward, and you’ll be there.”
“I’m afraid,” he whispered.
Miss Roxy put her hand on his shoulder. “Is the place you’re thinking of nice?”
He nodded.
“Is it where you want to go?”
He nodded again, faster.
“Then I’ll help you,” she said, and gave him a gentle push.
When Jeremy’s mother stopped yelling out the back door for him, and instead stepped out of the house and into the backyard, she immediately walked to the shed. She knew Jeremy had been digging back there lately. She’d let him do it since it kept him out of her hair.
“Jeremy!” she yelled, stepping around the back. “You are so going to be grounded.”
But when she turned the corner to the back of the shed, Jeremy wasn’t there. The evidence of what he’d been doing remained, however—a mound of dirt was piled up near the fence, and the hole in the ground where it had come from was nearby. It looked as if Jeremy had dug down two or three feet in the dirt. The broken blue plastic shovel he’d apparently been using lay abandoned next to the hole.
She called her son’s name once more, and looked around at the rest of the yard, and then at the neighbor’s house next door. The place was overgrown with weeds; nobody had actually lived there since the murder, years ago. After the wife had gone missing, the police had questioned the husband, but never came up with enough evidence to arrest him. When they had finally come around with dogs, they’d unearthed the body of his wife, found buried beneath the floor of the broken-down shed. Ironically, by the time they discovered the whereabouts of the missing wife, the husband had gone missing. And he had never been found. Most people assumed he’d fled the country to avoid being arrested.
Jeremy’s mother shivered in the breeze and looked up at the old, empty house next door. It may have been a trick of the rising moon…but there appeared to be a face in the upstairs window. A woman’s face.
The woman seemed to be smiling.
Jeremy’s mother looked away and around the darkening yard once more, calling angrily for her son. When she glanced back at the window of the house next door, the woman had vanished.
Just like her husband.
Just like her son.
She stared at the hole Jeremy had begun to dig. She remembered when she was a kid, how the other kids used to say that if you dug down in your backyard really deep, you could dig your way all the way to China. Once in her life, she’d really believed that was true. Once, she’d believed a lot of things were true.
A tear crept down her face, followed quickly by another.
God, did she wish she still believed that now.
She wished she could dig a hole to take her far away from here.
All the way to China.
About the Author
John Everson is a staunch advocate for the culinary joys of the jalapeno and an unabashed fan of 1970s European horror cinema. He is also the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Covenant and seven other novels, including the erotic horror tour de force and Bram Stoker Award finalist NightWhere and the seductive backwoods tale of The Family Tree. Other novels include Sacrifice, The Pumpkin Man, Siren, The 13th and the spider-driven Violet Eyes.
Over the past twenty years, his short fiction has appeared in more than 75 magazines and anthologies and received a number of critical accolades, including frequent Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology series. His story “Letting Go” was a Bram Stoker Award finalist in 2007; the story “The Pumpkin Man” was included in the anthology All American Horror: The Best of the First Decade of the 21st Century; and he was also a finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest. In addition to his own twisted worlds, he has also written stories in a number of shared universes. He has written novelettes for The Vampire Diaries and Jonathan Maberry’s V-Wars series, as well as stories for the anthologies Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook and The Green Hornet Casefiles. His short stories and novels have been translated into Polish, French, Italian and German and optioned for potential film development.
His other short story collections include Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions, Needles & Sins and Vigilantes of Love. Learn more about John on his site, www.johneverson.com or connect on Facebook at www.facebook.com/johneverson.
Look for these titles by John Everson
Now Available:
NightWhere
Violet Eyes
The Family Tree
Its roots are old...and twisted!
The Family Tree
© 2014 John Everson
The blood of the tree is its sap. It has sustained Scott Belvedere’s family for generations. It’s the secret ingredient behind the family’s intoxicating ale and bourbon, among other elixirs. But only when Scott inherits The Family Tree Inn, deep in the hills of Virginia, does he learn anything about his family, its symbiotic history, or the mammoth, ancient tree around which the inn is literally built. And after he stumbles upon the bony secrets hidden in its roots, while in the welcoming arms of the innkeeper’s daughter, he realizes that not only is blood thicker than water—it’s the only thing that might save him from the hideous fate of his ancestors…
The address on the envelope caught his eye. At first, he thought it was junk mail. But why would a legal firm based in Virginia pay for the postage to be sending him junk? A guy in Chicago was not likely to call a lawyer in Rannakin, VA if he needed to fight a traffic ticket or to file a small claims dispute.
Scott Belvedere slipped his thumb into the corner of the envelope and slit it open. He pulled out the letter inside and quickly realized that beneath the letterhead (J.R. Pirdue, ESQ, 145 N. Lebar St., Rannakin, VA) it was anything but a “form” letter.
“Dear Mr. Belvedere,” it began, “The last Will and Testament of your great uncle Maximilian Belvedere specifies that the property at 1397 Route 7 in Rannakin, VA is to transfer to you upon his death, and as I believe you are aware, Mr. Belvedere passed away on March 23rd. This letter is to inform you that…”
Scott raised an eyebrow and read the first paragraph of the letter again. He did know that his grandpa’s brother had died, but he hadn’t travelled to the east coast to go to the funeral; he’d never known the man. But now, supposedly, he had come into an inheritance?
Part of him wanted to crumple up the letter and pitch it, but the other part stayed his hand. This was not the typical “you have come into a sum of $3,400,000 dollars” kind of spam. It appeared to be legitimate.
That said, Scott didn’t want any property on the east coast. He had a life, albeit a solitary one, in Naperville, IL. He liked it there. He spent his free evenings enjoying its great restaurants, a long park of a riverwalk, even a carillon that they used for bell concerts in the summers. Sometimes they held music and microbrew festivals in an old “historical” section of town called Naper Settlement, and he always tried to go to those. He’d seen The Smithereens play there just a year or two ago, which was amazing. The Smithereens playing a local park? He loved this town! He may have been alone, but he wasn’t bored. He went to work everyday and collected his check every two weeks and was happy to come home to his small house and lie back on his faux leather couch and channel surf beneath his blanket until a) the beer was gone or b) he fell asleep. Frequently both happened around the same time.
But now.
He read the letter twice and realized that he was going to have to make time to go out to Virginia to see just what this was all about. To see what he had inherited.
His initial thought was that he could just hire a real estate agent and sell the place. A fantasy windfall number with a dollar sign at the front and multiple zeroes flashed through his mind for a moment, but then a line in the legal letter jumped out at him. The letter noted that the property was the home of an Inn. The Family Tree Inn.
A business.
The reality gave him pause. He didn’t need a house on the coast, but if he was inheriting a business that generated actual income? Well…he could be an absentee landlord, couldn’t he? A new income would be a lifesaver. Total security.
Or, again, he could sell the place and have cash in hand without worrying about being responsible for leaky pipes and roofs from a thousand miles away.
Scott folded and instantly unfolded the letter. Then he folded it again, after nearly memorizing its contents. He knew that he had to go there. To see what it was that he had somehow ended up with. A strangely benevolent gift, since he had not even seen his great-uncle since he was a kid. He had a vague memory of visiting his dad’s family as a child, but really, he couldn’t remember much about it, other than that they lived far away, in a big house in the woods.
He considered the five weeks plus of vacation time he had banked, since he rarely ever took off work and nodded before announcing to the empty room:
“Okay Rannakin, Virginia, here I come.”
Virginia was a whole lot greener than Chicagoland.
That was Scott’s first thought as he drove his Kia through the winding highway towards the emerald splotch on the horizon that his iPhone said was Rannakin. While still early spring, the humidity was already heavier than Chicago, but the air smelled fresher somehow; as if he were breathing in the scent of the coming summer itself.
It was a good feeling.
The kind of thing that made you feel alive.
For the first time, Scott got beyond the hassle factor of the whole trip and found he was really looking forward to seeing The Family Tree Inn. He liked the way it felt here. It felt as if he’d travelled deep into the backwoods; cars passing him going the opposite direction had quickly become an infrequent occurrence. But yet, he really was not too far from the city. Hell, this place was only supposed to be 40 minutes from the airport.
It wasn’t too long before the just-sprouting fields of—what? tobacco?—turned to shadows as the road wound into the tree-covered lanes that led up the first steps of the hills.
“Welcome to Appalachia,” Scott murmured to himself, as he passed an old white (well, sort of white) trailer sitting off the side of the road. It was surrounded by debris; a washing machine, a rusted lawnmower, a car tire, a rusted wheelbarrow.
“Home sweet trailer park home,” he completed.
The rusted-out trailer slipped around the corner and out of sight. He wondered if anyone lived there; it could have been sitting there abandoned for years.
Not too much farther down the road he passed a small motel, its pink and sea-green trim faded and peeling.
Another place where he couldn’t tell whether anyone actually lived there or not. It was almost too quiet here. Nothing to disturb the silence and early afternoon shadows but the wind.
Eerie.
Soon the tree cover grew thicker and the leaf-dappled shadows made it feel as if he were driving the Kia through a tunnel. Speckles of sunlight flitted across his windshield like mosaic glimpses of a world beyond…a place far away.
He was winding his way inside the hills now. And the road quickly changed from aged asphalt to broken, rutted pavement that soon after began to resemble a trail more than a road.
Scott was in Appalacia. Hill country. Home of his ancestors. People he had never known.
He knew he’d been here at least once, but the memories were too faded. His dad had talked about growing up in the hills, and of deadly copperheads sunning themselves near greying barns and sheds and of remote hot springs found deep in the woods and of outhouses still often used in place of internal toilets…. But the stories had always felt weirdly distant to Scott. Fragments from some book of tall tales, not anything that had truly happened to anyone.
Just stories.
But now…here he was…driving through the “story map” that his father had painted in his memory so many years ago, now and then, when someone had drawn him out.
Someone other than Scott. He felt like a shit but…. He’d never really asked his father about his family or relatives. He hadn’t cared. And his dad hadn’t volunteered much. But now pieces of his father’s occasional shadowed stories of his childhood seemed to be unveiling themselves as he drove.
Scott wasn’t sure that he was happy about that. “Blood is thicker than water,” his dad had always told him—usually when Scott was choosing his friends over going along with some family outing.
The cab of the Kia was starting to get sticky warm, and Scott was beginning to wonder if he’d turned down the wrong fork at some point when he saw his first sign for the Inn. Just a simple wooden placard—“The Family Tree Inn, 2 miles.”
The way this road wound, two miles could be another 15 minutes. Just beyond the sign for the Inn was another sign, this one for the town of Rannakin. “Heaven in the Hills” it promised. “Population 687.”
Scott could tell even without the signs that he was nearing some bit of civilization. The road seemed to be widening slightly, and was smoother than it had been for the past several treacherous miles. And then for the first time in 15 minutes a car passed him, heading away from Rannakin. The
slight sense of, not quite claustrophobia, but…nervous isolation…lifted and he smiled as he rounded a bend and saw a large cedar sign for the Inn with a white arrow pointing down a turnoff road.
Scott took a deep breath and turned. “Here we go,” he said, and drove up a small hill that opened into a bright, sunlit clearing. At the far end of the open field was a large, rustic-looking structure. Sided in dark wood and surrounded by a rambling, railed porch, it almost looked like three houses jammed together—various wood-shingled roofs slanted at odd directions and alternating levels. As he drove closer, he realized why the geometry of the Inn was so skewed.
The place was shaded by an enormous tree. It was like some kind of prehistoric dinosaur tree—tall enough to be a redwood. And the Inn was literally built around it. The thing rose up from the center of the crazily cascading roofs.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to have cut it down…or to have built next to it instead of around it?” Scott murmured as he put the Kia in park next to another car in a small log-bordered parking area to the side of what appeared to be the Inn’s main entrance. There were three steps up to the broad boardwalk of a porch, and a large, heavy-looking door with an inset of painted glass at eye level. “Enter,” a sign directed on one side of the door. On the other side, a smaller sign was painted with the image of an old Southern-looking grandmother. Her hand was held out, and above the palm, it said “Our Home Is Yours.”
As Scott turned the copper door handle, he saw that the glass inset was painted to look like the leaves of a tree.
The door swung inward easily on well-oiled hinges, and Scott stepped inside.