House of Dead Trees

by Rod Redux

  “Oh, shit!” Tish exclaimed. She’d hopped back to keep her toes from getting squashed rather than try to grab the falling album. She was in open-toe heels.

  “Is it damaged?” Jane asked, coming quickly around the bed.

  Figures… she’s more worried about a book than one of her castmates, Tish thought, then she noticed the content of one of the faded photos and laughed. “Oh, wow!” she exclaimed, her eyebrows arched. She squatted and gathered the photos that had spilled from the album.

  “What is it?” Jane asked, curious.

  “Oh, my!” Tish smirked, ignoring Jane as she sifted through the photographs. Her eyes sparkled with glee.

  Jane came around and looked over Tish’s shoulder.

  “Look at the size of that!” Tish chortled, and she flashed Jane a faded photograph of an enormous male sex organ.

  Jane recoiled, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

  “I guess those grew a lot bigger back in the day, too!” Tish snickered

  “That fell out of the book you knocked off the shelf?” Jane asked.

  “Yep.”

  Tish passed Jane the antique photo. It was faded, the edges chipped, and it felt frighteningly brittle. Jane turned it over to see if anything was written on the back, handling the photo as delicately as possible. The back was blank but for a date and some initials: 7-3-28, written in a spidery cursive hand, and the letters AGF.

  The Forester Twins had occupied the house in 1928. Was this a photo of Anson, or his brother Abel? Jane glanced at Tish to see if she was watching, then turned the photo back over to examine the picture more closely.

  It was just a snapshot of some anonymous naked man, navel to mid-thigh. He had a birthmark on his left hip and pendulous genitals. It could have been anyone—Abel or Anson Forester, or any of the locals who had frequented the Forester House at the time. The Twins and their coven had reputedly gotten up to all sorts of kinky shenanigans here at the family estate. She wondered if the photo had been taken here in the house, but the background of the photograph was too dark to make out.

  “What is it with guys taking pictures of their junk?” Tish asked with a snort. “I bet they started doing it as soon as someone invented cameras.”

  Jane laughed as Tish passed her some more photos. “Niepce probably invented photography to take pictures of his junk,” she said.

  “Probably!”

  Jane looked at the next photograph. It was the same man, from chest to shins, but standing sideways to the camera. It was taken from a little further away, but the background was still too dark to make out.

  In the next one, the man was lying on his stomach. He was lounging on a blanket in what was clearly a wooded outdoors location. Jane could see some blades of grass curling out from under the edge of the blanket and the base of a tree trunk, roots knuckled into the earth. It reminded her of baby photos people used to take of their children.

  He was a fit man, though pale, with a muscular back, slim waist and freckly white butt. One leg was cocked in the air, toes curled. His face was turned away from the camera, one hand pressed to the ground, as if he were getting ready to rise. Though the picture was black-and-white, Jane could tell he had blond hair. In the upper right hand corner of the photo was what looked to be the leg of a small hoofed animal—a goat, maybe?

  On the back of this, The Great God Pan was writ. The date was 6-23-28.

  Jane was pretty certain it was one of the Forester brothers. She wondered who had taken the picture.

  She turned the photo over, referring to the single hoofed leg. Goats and pigs had hoofed feet, right? Lots of farm animals did.

  The Great God Pan, she thought, and shuddered.

  The next was of a waifish young woman. She was smiling at the camera, naked from the waist up. Her hair was light-colored, cut short and curled. They used to call that particular hairstyle a bob. Dark lipstick, heavy mascara. The woman had small, pert breasts, nipples like pearls. In the background was what looked like a vanity, covered in small glass bottles and cosmetics containers, and a large, brightly glowing window.

  This room, Jane realized, glancing over her shoulder. The vanity was still right there, next to the window, though all the cosmetics had been put away, its surface empty. Abandoned.

  It gave her a strange sense of displacement, like déjà vu.

  On the back of this, a poem:

  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

  Old time is still a-flying,

  And this same flower that smiles today,

  To-morrow will be dying.

  The date: 8-10-29.

  Two months before the fateful masquerade, when so many had died here at the Forester House, poisoned, some said, by the twins themselves. Mass murder or mass suicide? No one would ever know. That knowledge had died with the partygoers.

  Ice shivered up Jane’s spine.

  “Old-timey porn,” Tish laughed, and handed Jane the last photo in her hand.

  It was a picture of one of the Forester brothers having intercourse with the waifish blonde. The woman was bent over, gripping the back of a chair. Anson or Abel—whichever one it was-- was standing behind her, fingers digging into the pale flesh of her hips. They were both looking into the camera, grinning as if caught by surprise, their faces sweaty, flushed. They seemed to be rutting in the parlor. Jane recognized the furniture behind them, the massive fireplace in the background.

  “You think Rob favors his relatives that way, too?” Tish asked, squatting down to retrieve the fallen album.

  Jane shook her head as if flicking away a bothersome gnat. She didn’t know or care about that. Robert Forester did look remarkably like his uncles, however. The resemblance was more than uncanny. If he shaved his beard…

  Tish sat on the mattress of the four-poster bed and began to flip through the photo album. Jane joined her. They each held a cover as Tish turned the pages.

  “Oh, wow,” Tish breathed.

  The album was filled with nothing but pornographic photos. The girl, the Forester Twins, their associates. All of them in various states of undress, and engaged in a variety of sexual acts, from the commonplace to the shockingly taboo. There were photos of the twins copulating with different women, one at a time or jointly, as well as various unidentified men. Here was a photo of one of the twins coupling with a woman thrice his age. She looked dizzy with ecstasy, her arms and legs wrapped around his masculine form. There was a picture of both the twins, rutting with a fat man, an act Jane believed was called a “spit roast”.

  Here, a photo of an orgy. There, the twins locked into a passionate sixty-nine, a venereal Ouroboros, their eyes drooping with pleasure, their jaws distended.

  Jane was nauseated by a photo of an unknown man sexually abusing a chicken. He was a tall aw-shucks redneck. One of the twins stood laughing in the background.

  A woman, movie star beautiful, reclined in a bed in another photo (the very bed they were sitting on now, it looked like). She was smeared with either blood or excrement, and was reaching dreamily toward the camera.

  Some of the photos were accompanied by text. GAB sure loves that cock! And The serpent that devours itself. There were passages that seemed to be written in Latin, although Jane, who was well-read enough to be able to break down Latin phrases, could make no sense of them. One page was blank, save the word WENDIGO written cryptically in the center.

  “What’s a wendigo?” Tish asked, tracing the word with the tip of a manicured fingernail.

  “Some Indian tribes believed in a creature called the wendigo,” Jane answered. “It was supposedly an evil spirit that roamed the forests in wintertime. They believed it could take possession of human beings and turn them into cannibals.”

  “That’s sweet,” Tish said.

  Jane nodded distractedly.

  “You think we should show this album to the others?”

  “I… don’t know,” Jane answered slowly. “I think… maybe we should put this back on the shelf and keep it to ourselves. You
know how the guys would react. They’re about as mature as sixth graders sometimes. And it would probably embarrass Mr. Forester. These are his relatives, after all.”

  “Oh, yeah… I didn’t think about that!” Tish responded. “I’d be mortified if people found pictures of my gramma and grampa bumping uglies. Nasty!”

  They heard footsteps coming down the hallway and jumped guiltily. Jane stuffed the loose photos into the album and closed the cover on them. “Hurry,” Tish whispered as Jane took the heavy volume from her hands and carried it back to the bookshelf. As the footsteps drew near, Jane slid the book into its space on the shelf. Both women smiled, overly casual, as Little Dan peeked through the doorway.

  “Oh, lay-deees!” he cried in his best Jerry Lewis impression. “Raj needs us all outside to do the drive up shots.” He looked from Jane to Tish and frowned. “What?”

  “Nothing!” Tish said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Jane echoed.

  “You guys look funny.”

  Tish sniffed in disdain, and Jane said, “You go ahead, Dan. We’ll be right down.”

  “O-oookay,” Little Dan said, pursing his lips. He turned hesitantly and returned the way he’d come. They listened as his clomping steps receded down the hallway.

  Jane and Tish looked at one another and snorted laughter.

  “You ready?” Jane asked.

  “Sure.”

  As Tish followed Jane from the room, she glanced back at the album in the bookcase. They’d only looked through the first ten or fifteen pages before Little Dan had interrupted them. She wondered what was in the rest of the album, and if there were others like it in that bookcase. The pictures, and the thought of all that dirty sex going on here in the Forester House, had actually aroused her.

  They might have been killers, she thought, but those Forester boys sure knew how to party!

  5

  “I thought you quit smoking,” Jane said, peeking around the corner of the house.

  Raj jumped like someone had goosed him, then smiled at Jane guiltily. He blew out a little puff of smoke and regarded the smoldering cigarette between his fingers. “I did. Or maybe I should say, I’ve been trying,” he replied. “However, I’ve found the endeavor unusually taxing recently.”

  He had, in fact, bought the pack less than an hour ago, when he drove into town for foodstuffs with Big Dan. He’d asked the big Irishmen to keep his purchase a secret while he was paying for it at the express checkout of the local grocery store, the Bag-N-Sav. Raj had quit more times than he cared to recall, and was ashamed of his lack of willpower when it came to the devil-weed.

  “Aw, don’t worry, boss,” Big Dan had consoled him. “I know how it was when I tried to quit. Took me five years to kick the habit. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  He’d promised himself: Just one… Knowing it was a lie, but the lies we tell ourselves are the easiest lies to believe, aren’t they? He’d smoked that “just one” on the way back, hanging his head out the window so he didn’t stink up the SUV, and here he was, sneaking another.

  “How’d you find me?” he asked Jane.

  “The clove,” Jane answered. She crinkled her nose. “It stinks.”

  “Ah.”

  “Is anything the matter?” Jane asked. She leaned against the side of the house beside him, then scowled and stepped away. Ivy had run riot here on the west-facing side of the house, clutching at the clapboard siding like the hand of a woodland god.

  Raj noted the way Jane instinctively recoiled from the leafy tendrils but didn’t say anything about it. He looked toward the west. The sun had nearly vanished below the horizon, and the sky looked like a bucket of flaming entrails. It would be dark soon, time to start their investigation.

  “Not really. Yes.” He sighed. “Just… a lot of little things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Francis, for one,” Raj replied, and took a drag off his cigarette. “He was very upset when we didn’t document his experience at the highway-- his ghost boy, and the ‘dark force’ that attacked him.”

  “He does have that lump on his forehead. Tish had a hard time covering it up with makeup.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe him. I just think it’s too sensational for our viewers, and that’s what I told him, too. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.” He chuckled. “Hell, if Americans believe 9-11 was really terrorists, they’ll buy anything.”

  Jane ignored his 9-11 comment, trying not to roll her eyes. “We should at least document his story. We can always archive it if it sounds too farfetched. He probably feels like we’re dismissing him.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking now as well. I feel bad.”

  Jane watched Raj’s face for a moment or two, then said, “But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Raj admitted.

  “What is it?”

  Raj didn’t answer for a beat, then confessed in a rush, his voice pitched low with shame, “I’m questioning my own motivations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With Francis.”

  “Oh… how so?”

  “You know how we do things. We film everything and sort it out later, but I didn’t want to tape Francis’s story because I didn’t want to hear it again. It made me nervous. This house… it gets under my skin. I’ve been jumpy since we got here. When Big Dan and I drove into town to pick up dinner for everyone, I was so relieved to get away from this place, even if it was just for a little while. It was like we were escaping from a cloud of poison gas. I’ve never felt that way about a location before. I dismissed Francis’s story because I sense the same thing he does, and it scares the piss out of me. There’s something here… up on this ridge… in the house maybe… and it’s no disembodied spirit. I don’t know what it is, but it’s powerful.”

  “And it wants us to leave?” Jane asked.

  Raj shook his head. “That’s the worst part. It’s not some crabby old ghost that wants us out of his house. This thing wants us to stay.”

  Raj looked at her, and in the day’s ember glow, he looked gaunt and sick and scared to death.

  “It wants us here,” Raj hissed.

  Goosebumps rashed across Jane’s arms despite the evening’s humid warmth. She thought of the dark form that had leapt across the road last night. It had landed directly in front of the SUV. The headlights should have lit it up like an actor on a stage, but the spotlight the SUV had cast on it had revealed nothing. Just darkness, like a hole in reality.

  “Let’s go inside and eat,” she said, eyeing the strangely silent woods. The dark was gathering there. Gathering swiftly. “We can always cut and run if things get too wild.”

  Raj nodded. He pitched his cigarette to the ground and snuffed it under his heel. The two of them headed toward the front entrance.

  Halfway there, Raj started to put his arm around her waist, but he caught himself. Stuffed his hands in his pockets instead.

  Jane cupped her elbows in her palms.

  A bit of comfort would have been nice.

  Last Supper

  1

  “That looks good,” Little Dan said, eyeing Big Dan’s cookies.

  They were gathered in the formal dining room: Rob Forester, Francis and the Dans, Billy and Allen and Tish. Spread across the twelve foot mahogany table were the remains of their meal-- bags of chips and dip, a vegetable platter, loaves of bread and lunch meat and condiments. For many of them, it would be a modest last meal.

  At least it was comfort food.

  The formal dining room was a large interior chamber with no windows, open on one end to a short corridor that served the parlor, the ballroom and the library, and on the other end, to the hallway serving the kitchen, toilet, servants’ quarters and various storage rooms and closets.

  Like the rest of Forester House, its atmosphere was thick with menace. It loomed over the men and women seated inside, a visual paradox, at once too large and yet somehow claustrophob
ic.

  The gold Arabesque patterns in its rich red wallpaper shimmered in the unsteady light of the chandelier, appearing to twitch-- all but imperceptibly-- when viewed from the corner of the eye. Water stains marred the walls of the room, making them look moldy and diseased. Half the bulbs in the chandelier were dead, and the ones that did work dimmed and brightened, sometimes with an audible humming sound.

  As for décor: an enormous moose head stared down from one wall, its eyes filmy with dust. On another, green-skinned nudes cavorted in a painted pink forest, their bodies unnaturally elongated. Depending on how a person squinted, the contortions of those forest dancers could be construed as either pain or pleasure.

  “They sure are good,” Big Dan teased his little buddy, talking with his mouth full. He tossed another cookie into his gob and said, “Nice and chewy.”

  Tish laughed cruelly.

  Little Dan scowled down at his apple slices, then pushed them away and said, “Give me one.”

  “You know you’re not supposed to eat these,” Big Dan replied. “They have gluten in them.”

  “Oh, just give him one,” Tish interjected. “Let him live a little.”

  Allen chuckled beside her.

  “Why can’t you have gluten?” Robert Forester asked as Big Dan surrendered his package of soft bake chocolate chip cookies.

  Little Dan bit into a cookie, eyes rolling back in his skull orgasmically. He chewed, swallowed, then told the house’s owner about his immune disorder. “I have Celiac disease. I can’t digest wheat,” he explained. “My immune system attacks the lining of my stomach if I eat anything with gluten in it. Wheat, barley.”

  “Won’t you get sick from those cookies then?” Rob asked, nodding toward the plastic package.

  “Yep,” Little Dan said, and reached for another.

  “I can’t blame him,” Billy said. “I don’t know if I could give up bread and cookies and pasta.”

  “Oh, I’ll pay for this,” Little Dan said. “Believe me. But sometimes it’s worth it.”

  “Kind of like a diabetic with a sweet tooth,” Rob sympathized, and Little Dan nodded in agreement.