The Family Tree

by John Everson

  Scott stared at the mug and it only made his mouth feel drier.

  He knew in his heart that this was not a battle he was going to win. He was not going to get the upper hand by fighting them. He’d only weaken himself, and ruin any chance he had at escaping when a moment of opportunity presented itself. Scott mentally threw in the towel. This was not the place to make a stand. He picked up the glass and put it to his lips. As soon as his nose took in the malty aroma, his mouth instantly filled with saliva. He craved a sip of this stuff more than freedom at the moment. He tilted it back and the feel as the liquid slipped down his throat was heavenly. Undeniable. The bite of the hops was perfectly smoothed by the honeyed sweetness of the sap. A yin and yang taste bud effect. He gulped as if he’d been walking beneath the desert sun all day. He stopped and gasped in a breath, but then quickly put the glass to his lips and began to drink again, swallowing as fast as he could get the ale into his mouth. He downed a pint in a minute.

  He set the glass down and took a deep breath as the sensations in his head swirled. He could feel the effect of the ale almost instantly behind his eyes and along his spine. His stomach gurgled faintly, churning to make room for the deluge he’d sent. He felt some strength returning to his arm, and a calm overtook the fear he’d been battling all afternoon. That was a positive side benefit of the alcohol. Whatever Ellen intended of him, he was not going to become like the Thornes.

  Rocky rose and quietly refilled his glass.

  “No,” he said.

  “You need your strength,” she said. “Trust me on this.”

  He didn’t argue this time, but he did take his time in drinking the second glass dry. When he was done, Rocky picked up the table and moved it to the side. Then she stood beside him.

  “Give me your hand,” she said. “And please don’t give me a problem on this, okay?”

  He held out the free arm he’d used to eat and drink, and she took it with both hands and positioned it back in the cuff. Rocky flipped the loose half up and around until it clicked itself locked again before he could have even tried to resist.

  “I’ll come back to check on you in a while,” she promised, and picked up the plate and glass from the small table. “Try to get some sleep.”

  Yeah, right, he thought. Because I always sleep naked and standing up while chained to a tree trunk in a damp basement. But instead, he said nothing as she walked out of the room. When her feet disappeared up the stairs, the lights went out and he felt more alone in the dark in those next few minutes then he ever had in his life. But he also felt weary. Buzzed. Warm. The alcohol swirled through his veins and numbed his brain. He closed his eyes against the emptiness of the black room, and the melancholy (and ale) led him down the road to sleep.

  Scott woke to feel a warm, wet pressure on his penis.

  A very pleasant, warm, wet pressure, that moved up and down along his member, caressing him with liquid heat. He felt the faint tease of teeth against his delicate skin and then the rough but yielding massage of a tongue along the tip of his cock. He shifted and pushed against the chains when the sensation grew almost uncomfortable, but when he moved, the sensation and warmth slipped away. A pair of hands roamed up his flanks to his ribs to his face. The room was still pitch-black, but he could feel the soft, sensual press of naked breasts easing in against his own chest, and the heat of slippery-smooth thighs pressing against his own.

  “Don’t move,” a husky voice whispered in his ear. It was Rocky.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I think that’s pretty obvious,” she said, pressing her groin against his, pinning his already hard cock to his belly. “I thought I’d prime the pump a little.”

  “I was asleep,” he said, realizing immediately how lame that sounded.

  “Shhhh,” she breathed in his ear, and shifted against him, grinding her pubic bone against his. “I just wanted to feel you again. You’re so much better than Jerry. So much harder…”

  She reached between them with her hand and grabbed his bone-hard erection and pushed it down to dip between her thighs. He felt her raise one knee up along his hip and then his cock was slipping into something warm and wet again, but this time, something warm and wet and tight.

  “Oh my God,” he breathed, forgetting for a moment that he should be fighting this, not giving in to this…violation. But she felt so good, even with the tree bark biting into his sore, abraded back. He found himself responding against his will, his hips moving to lift her before shifting to move himself out and away just a bit. As he did, Rocky’s fingernails dug into his sides. She pulled him off the tree, and slipped her arms behind him, scratching his back with her nails in slow, deliberate cruelty. She bit at his earlobe and neck, and then forced her tongue into his lips, all the while grinding him deeper inside her.

  “I’m going to fuck you every night from now on, just like this,” she promised. “You can be my own little boy toy. Jerry never even has to know. Nobody will know.”

  Her voice cracked a little and she sped up her pace, pushing forward and then pulling away, faster and faster, until the sound of Scott’s butt slapping against the tree bark grew audible. He could feel the scrapes the motion was gouging in the soft flesh of his ass cheeks but in that moment, he didn’t care.

  “I want you to come inside me,” she said suddenly, gripping his face with both her hands. “I want you to come…with…me!” Her voice rose almost to a squeal then, with each press of his cock inside her. The sound drove Scott over the edge. Before he even realized it, he was coming, and he cried out with an unbridled moan of orgasm. In a second, Rocky’s sharp squeals escalated with his, and her motion doubled, slamming him again and again against the bark of the tree until she was gasping for breath.

  When she finally slowed, she leaned in to give him a warm kiss, and then slipped off him. He could instantly feel the cool chill of the air against his wet member as she moved away. A moment later, a beam of light clicked on, and Rocky moved the beam of a flashlight to spotlight his groin.

  “That’s the way I like to see ’em,” she said. “Hard and wet!”

  The beam moved around on the floor until she’d found and located her shirt and shorts, and then flipped back up to illuminate her face. “Sleep well, stud. I think you’re going to learn to like it here.”

  Then the light searched for the stairway, and in a minute, winked out, and she was gone with the sound of a lock turning above.

  As the rush of orgasm faded away in the dark, Scott felt a wave of depression seep in to take its place. The pleasure had been amazing, but the reality was, he had pins and needles in his legs, his back ached; his whole body ached, even if in a weird, distant alcohol-dulled hazy way. And he was apparently a prisoner of sex maniacs. Better than being tied to a table and having some psycho cut your fingers and toes off, he supposed, but this was not the way he intended to spend…or end his life.

  “I just want to go home,” he whispered aloud. A tear leaked down his cheek.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Good morning, Mr. Belvedere.”

  Scott blinked his eyes open to find Ellen standing before him. “Please let me down from here,” he demanded.

  She shook her head. “That’s not how it works.” Ellen pulled the table over and set a bag on it. She pulled out a bowl and a spoon, and the rich scent of country oatmeal filled his nose. “However, I will let you have your arm free to eat.”

  She bent forward and unlocked his right hand.

  “If you want me to stay healthy, you have to let me down,” he said. “To get a little exercise, to go to the bathroom, to bathe…”

  Ellen shook her head. “You kin pass water and defecate where ya are. The tree will absorb the nutrients quickly, you’ll see. It’s used ta getting a rich source of minerals and fertilizer here.”

  Rather than fight her overtly, Scott took a spoon of the oatmeal,
and considered her words. Was this the main place where they kept prisoners then? That would explain the cavern of bones wound up in the roots beneath the ledge he stood upon.

  “Who else have you tortured here?”

  Ellen frowned. “You don’t have a grasp on the history of the family yet to understand. This isn’t torture. It’s your duty to protect and keep your family. As the sole male heir of the Belvederes, you must take your great-uncle’s place. If’n ya don’t, we all will die.”

  “Are you telling me that Maximillian was murdered here?” Scott’s mouth dropped.

  “Not murdered,” she said. “He gave the last years of his life to the tree so that we could all live.”

  “You’re crazy! Batshit crazy!”

  Ellen smiled thinly. “I kin see how ya might think so. But believe me, Maximilian came to this room all on his own, willingly. He understood the importance of this fer the family. I wanted to be able to explain it all to ya first, to make you see…but then ya had to go and follow Sherrilyn. I knew once ya saw what she did down there that you’d run before I’d be able to reach ya.”

  “So are you going to slice me to ribbons, like you did the Thornes?”

  Ellen shook her head. “Nobody’s getting’ sliced to ribbons. Just enough bloodletting to let the tree know you’re there. After that, we won’t need to bleed you again.” She smiled. “At least not too much!”

  “Well, that’s comforting. What happens once the tree knows I’m here?”

  “It drinks from you directly.”

  She reached into her bag and withdrew a mug and a pitcher, then poured him a cup of coffee. “Speaking of drinking, you like your coffee in the morning, black as I recall.”

  He nodded, and lifted the mug to his lips. It felt amazing as it warmed the back of his throat. Sleeping naked, alone, and on his feet two nights in a row had left just about everything in him thirsty. But after his second sip, he recognized the honeyed notes in the aftertaste. The coffee was spiked. With the sap of the tree.

  “You even have to put it in my coffee?” he asked.

  Ellen made a sad smile. “As you give life, so shall it give you life. There is nothing you will eat or drink here that does not include some essence of the tree. Don’t fight it. Just enjoy what it gives.”

  Scott shook his head in disgust. He had no answer. But he also was not going to refuse his coffee. He downed the cup, and then slammed it back on the table.

  “You could at least let me have my arms free,” he suggested.

  Ellen shook her head. “To become connected to the tree, you have to be pressed up against it. This isn’t about keeping you as a ‘prisoner’, though I know it probably looks that way to you. This is about introducing you to the tree. It needs to feel ya, see ya, and finally, tap ya. It can’t do that if you’re wandering about the room on a chain. So ya have to stay close to it. Speaking of which…if you could put your wrist back in the cuff, it’s time for me to leave you for now. Caroline will be down later to see how you’re doing, I’m sure. She seems to have taken a likin’ to ya.”

  Scott shook his head. “Leave my hand free.”

  “Not negotiable, Mr. Belvedere. Trust me here.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not going easy down your primrose path.”

  It was Ellen’s turn to shrug. She reached into her bag and withdrew a hypodermic needle. “I’m told that frequent doses of this result in really bad, nauseating headaches. I wouldn’t know myself, cuz we usually use it on livestock so’s we can transport them easy. But I would guess that you wouldn’t like to find out. The reality is, whether ya like it or not, yer going to stay here, to feed the tree. I wish you had been able to see why it’s important that you do this, and then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You woulda come here on yer own. But at the end of the day…you have to do this. Whether you like it or not. Too many lives are riding on you. I’ll try to make you understand this soon. But at the moment I really need to go. So…put your hand in the cuff, please.”

  Scott decided again not to make his stand here; he had no way to stop her from sticking a needle in his left thigh and pushing the plunger before he could even attempt to swat her away.

  He set his arm back in the restraining cuff and she flipped it shut. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a long, thin knife.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “The tree needs to drink from you to start the assimilatin’ process.”

  “What process?”

  “The process of tappin’ you,” she said. “Don’t worry, it’s painless.” She lifted the blade up to Scott’s naked arm, and he struggled against the bonds to lift his skin away. “Well, it’s painless except for this part,” she added. “But I can tell ya, the more you shiver and shake there, the more likely I’m going to stab you deeper. I don’t wanna to hurt you, I just wanna introduce the tree to ya. Just give it a little drip.”

  As she said the word “drip”, Scott felt the cold pinch of the knife and a moment later, crimson appeared in an inch-long line on the underside of his upper arm. Ellen put her hand on his chest and held him in place as she sliced small gashes along his side and then his thigh and calf. Once there were a half dozen small beads of blood beginning to weep out of him, she shifted to his other side and repeated the process.

  “These may sting for a while, but from what your grandfather and Maximillian told me, once the tree responds to you, it’s a very pleasurable experience.”

  “And exactly how is the tree supposed to ‘respond’,” Scott asked.

  Ellen dropped the knife in the bag and smiled. “We’ll talk more later, and you’ll come to understand.” Then she was walking away to the stairs.

  “It’s good to have a Belvedere at the inn again,” she called back over her shoulder. “There has been one connected to the tree for more than one hundred and fifty years. You will be part of the family history,” she promised.

  “I’d rather just go home,” Scott called after her, but she didn’t answer.

  “Shit,” he said to himself as warmth trickled slowly down his back and legs to drip on the old bark.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Caroline brought him lunch. “Pulled pork sandwich and some spinach salad,” she announced, setting it in front of him. “Mama said you should eat all your spinach cuz of it has lots of iron in it.”

  “Why, so I can bleed more?” he asked. “Look what she did to me! She cut me all over.” He raised his arms to show the angry red slices there, and then leaned to one side so she could see what her mother had done to his back.

  Caroline frowned a moment as she saw the wounds. They’d mostly scabbed over, but a couple still wept fresh, bright red drops as he shifted. Then she forced a smile. “I know this part is going to hurt, but in a few days it will all be better, you’ll see. And then you’ll be with us always. I’ll come see you every day here, I promise.”

  “I thought you wanted to get away from here,” he said. “Go see the world. See Chicago and New York and L.A.?”

  Caroline’s lips turned petulant. “I do,” she said slowly. “But like Mama always says, you can’t have everything, so hold on to what ya got! And I got you!”

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the nose.

  “You could have me and Chicago, if you wanted,” he said.

  Caroline frowned. She leaned forward and unlatched his right arm. “Shush and eat now,” she warned, stepping back before he could reach out to touch her. “I have to get back outside to help with the planting. This is a big week for us.”

  “Yeah, a big week is an understatement,” he said. “You’ve got a couple of your guests chained up and bleeding like stuck pigs in one room, but you keep feeding them drugs so they still insist on screwing like rabbits. Then you’ve got another idiot locked up and bleeding in another room, and you all take turns screwing him. Plus you’re
probably still cleaning up from your festival of debauched bacchanalia where everybody basically slept with everybody, I’m guessing. I wouldn’t know, since I got shot up with knockout drugs. It’s quite the ‘family-friendly’ week here at The Family Tree Inn, isn’t it?”

  Caroline opened her mouth to say something, and then stopped. “You just don’t understand,” she finally said. “But you will.”

  “And then I’ll be okay with being chained to a fuckin’ tree for the rest of my life?”

  She laughed. “Exactly!”

  Scott shook his head. What else was there to say?

  When he finished the sandwich and salad, she poured him a glass of ale, and this time, he didn’t bother to protest it. Until he could figure out a way to get out of this, he might as well at least enjoy a good beer. And Caroline was happy to pour him two or more, which helped the afternoon drift by in a warm, easy haze. It was much better than the alternative, though it did leave him open to being “taken advantage of”. But again, he couldn’t really pretend that that was a horrible exercise. He didn’t want to be tied up for it, but having Sherrilyn or Rocky or Caroline press their bodies against his? Naked? Horny as nymphos? That was like a teen boy’s biggest wet dream. And for him, in the circumstances, it appeared to be part of his imprisonment sentence.

  If you had to be locked up in a psycho’s basement, well, there were worse psychos to be locked up by. That was for sure.

  After he finished his second glass of ale, Caroline took his plate and glass and gave him a quick peck on the lips. “I can’t stay today,” she said. “But I promise I’ll make it up to you later.”

  Then she was gone and the afternoon drifted by in a twilight haze.

  He was dozing again when Sherrilyn entered the room, disrobed and after a bit of hand manipulation, mounted that part of him which seemed to operate these days with a completely separate mind of its own. He saw all this through half-lidded eyes, but didn’t really consciously grasp what was happening until a moan escaped his lips and jolted him to full consciousness. Sherrilyn smiled like a Cheshire cat when his eyelids fluttered, and he truly began to see her.