by John Everson
“I told you that you couldn’t resist me,” she said, pushing her hips hard to his, and then sucking them backwards.
Scott snorted. “Resistance is futile when you’re chained to a tree.”
She wiggled her groin against his. “Yes, but I can feel that you still want me.”
“You’ve got me dosed up so that I’d want anybody. I don’t think that really counts,” he countered.
“All that matters is the end result,” she huffed, increasing her rhythm.
“I’d punch you if I could,” he said. His voice cracked, as a stab of pleasure lit his middle.
“And that would only make me come faster,” she said, her voice throaty. A desperately horny whisper.
“You like having me tied up like this,” he said. “What would my grandfather have said?”
“I visited him like this every day for forty-seven years before he passed. He would have said thank you.”
Scott’s eyes popped. “You fucked my grandfather? I thought you said he saved you, that you were an orphan?”
“He did and I was. Your grandfather was the most intense, amazing, alive man I’ve ever known.”
“But he died more than…”
Sherrilyn pushed her lips on his, silencing his words.
Her fingers slipped across his scalp and down his neck, massaging and pulling, sending chills down his spine as she dug her nails in and then relented. And then dug in again, opening some of the fresh scabs on his side as she drew her fingers down. He stiffened, but the shock only drove him deeper inside her, and she used the penetration to her advantage, shifting and driving herself down and around him again and again.
When he came, Scott felt such a rush that he almost didn’t mind being used.
Almost.
He closed his eyes as he caught his breath. When he opened them, Sherrilyn was gone.
“Wham, bam…” he whispered, staring around at the empty shadows. He was suddenly very aware that he stood atop a cairn of human bones. Probably the bones of his grandfather. The bones of his family.
The bones of Belvederes.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The next few days passed in a long, slow blur. Ellen reopened his wounds several times, and Caroline, Rocky and Sherrilyn continued to trade off conjugal visits. They all fended off any questions about his future. Caroline insisted that they had a long life to look forward to together. He pointed out that any future that involved spending years in a dark basement room in chains was hardly something to be wished for. She promised that he would grow to think differently over time.
On the morning of the eighth day, Caroline brought him a bowl of oatmeal and sap-sweetened coffee.
“How did you sleep?” she asked. Her smile beamed.
Scott shrugged. His eyes were still heavy and he didn’t feel much like cheerful banter. Caroline put the key into his wrist cuff and set his arm free but when he tried to lift it from the tree to reach the table, it didn’t move. For a moment he thought it was asleep, but then he looked down its length and wiggled his fingers. They moved easily. Straining, he willed his arm to lift from its resting place against the bark and this time it did, but the final motion was accompanied by a faint kissing sound.
As his wrist and forearm finally pulled away from the tree, Scott saw thousands of thin, nearly transparent filaments that had apparently connected his arm to the bark stretch and break. The broken threads were left hanging from the skin that had been touching the tree. It looked as if he’d just pulled his arm from a spider’s web. Or a pool of sticky glue.
“What the hell…” he began.
Caroline gave out a squeal. “It’s working!” she cried. “It’s really working. The tree is connecting to you. Soon you’ll really be a part of it, just like Maximillian was.”
Scott’s eyes looked at the faint threads hanging from his arm. They weren’t “attached”, so much as they were a part of him. He held his arm closer to his face and stared. The threads looked almost as if his pores had stretched and pulled into microscopic taffy. Some were clear, and some seemed to have a bit of amber to them. Almost as if they were tiny capillaries…
“My God, Caroline,” he whispered. “What is this thing doing to me? What is it going to do?”
“You’re becoming part of the tree,” she said. “The tree will drink from you, and you from the tree…eventually, we won’t even need to feed you anymore. But I think that takes a while.”
“Caroline, no,” he whispered. “You have to help me. Please. I don’t want to become a monster.”
She frowned. “You won’t be a monster…” she said.
“What was it like for Maximillian?”
She shrugged. “The tree just kind of…I don’t know…grew around him…in him. His skin got darker as the years went on, and he didn’t talk so much. But he still knew us. They always still brought him a mug on the night of the tapping.”
Caroline knelt down and felt along his thigh. When she looked up, she was smiling. “Can you see my finger?” she asked.
He craned his head, and saw her pointing at the bark along the edge of his leg.
“The new branches are starting right here. Just little green nubs right now, but soon, they’ll grow all around you, like a blanket.”
As he stared, he could just make out the new buds of growth on the tree. He looked down the area where his arm had been, and could see more; they popped from the gnarled bark like tiny whiteheads, all gearing up to eat him alive. Holy shit.
“You’ve got to help me, Caroline,” he pleaded. “I want to go back to Chicago. I don’t want to stay here. Please. If you have any feelings for me at all, you’ll let me go. I’ll take you with me, if that’s what you want. But please don’t make me die here.”
She looked away, back at the stairway out of the bone room. When she turned back to him, her eyes glistened. “You aren’t gonna die,” she whispered.
“Maxilimillian died.”
“He was here for years,” she said. “And he was already really old when he took Grandpa’s place.”
“Please.”
Caroline shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “If I do, there’s nobody else to take your place, and if the tree isn’t bound to a Belvedere, all of the Belvedere family will die. If I let you go, I’d kill my mama and Sherrilyn and everyone I’ve ever loved. We’re all connected. Everyone here is family, just a little at least. I can’t do that.”
“People know where I am,” he said. “They’ll come looking for me. I’m surprised my boss hasn’t flown out here himself by now.”
Caroline shook her head. “Mama took care of that. She had me get on your computer and open your Gmail. We found the notes that your boss had written you, so we wrote one in reply saying that you had decided to stay here after all. That you liked being the Master of the House and all that. Your boss sent back an email trying to talk you out of it, but…well…” She paused and grinned. “You were pretty adamant with him about how much you loved it here.”
She smiled, clearly proud of herself. “I don’t think he’ll be looking for you. We even sent him a bottle of Belvedere Bourbon, courtesy of you, thanking him for everything.”
She pointed at the oatmeal. “C’mon, it’s getting cold. Eat up now or I’m going to have to take it upstairs.”
Scott’s mind was reeling, but his stomach was also growling. So he began spooning the oatmeal, as he tried to think of some way to convince Caroline to help him, before it was too late. As he drank his coffee, she just watched him, her face unreadable.
“Why would Ellen and Sherrilyn and the rest die if I am not tied to the tree,” he asked.
Caroline’s face clouded. “Mama can explain it better than me, but it all goes back to when William Belvedere took the tree over from the Indians. They put a curse on him and his family and said that since William wanted
the tree so badly, that he would have to feed it. And every generation to follow would have to give one of their own to sustain the tree and its power.”
“Why couldn’t Ellen or Sherrilyn do it?” he asked. “I’ve got no connection to you people, other than ancestors. If they’ve enjoyed the tree and its sap all these years, isn’t it time they should pay for it?”
Caroline shook her head. “The curse specified that the male head of the household in each generation must dedicate his life to the tree in order to save his family. The chief.”
“Sounds pretty suspect to me,” he said. “I’m betting that this tree will provide curative powers whether there’s a Belvedere male being sucked dry by it or not.”
Again, Caroline shook her head, and then poured him more coffee when he set his cup down empty. “Believe me, people have tried that. Back when my mama was young, your grandfather refused to give himself to the tree. He’d just taken up with Sherrilyn, and he didn’t want to give that up for nothing. But that only lasted three seasons. By the end of that year, all of the older folk had begun aging five times as fast as normal folk. So for the next season, they captured someone and forced them to feed the tree, figuring that the tree just needed to have human blood to do what it did. But while the tree accepted ’em, and they had a good tapping and made lots of ale and bourbon…the family all just continued to age. Like, every month they seemed to lose a year. When Agnes tells the story, she says she aged twenty-five years during that time. And your grandfather did too. He knew he couldn’t refuse any longer, because all of his hair had gone gray. When he picked up Sherrilyn on the side of the road—that story is true—he’d been a young-looking man. A year later, and he was showing his age in silver. He finally gave in, not wanting all of his family to die, and allowed himself to bond to the tree. Once he fed the tree, after the next tapping, it all changed. But everyone lost quite a few years of their youth there while they figured it out. Mama said she went from looking twenty-five to looking fifty.”
“So Sherrilyn is old enough to be my grandmother,” he said. The thought sent a cold shiver through his spine. He’d been with her. And what about Caroline? Was she really a crone in disquise too?
“How old are you, really?” he asked.
Caroline grinned and shook her head. “Just as old as I look,” she said. “I was kind of her last chance. Mama was hoping for a boy with Maximilian, but she got me!”
Scott thought a moment as he sipped the end of his second cup. “What if it doesn’t matter whether the Belvedere is male or female,” he said. “Maybe there’s some kind of genetic thing that it sucks from the person it is attached to, and that fountain of youth thing it does, really just works for those people who are blood-related to the person feeding the tree? Then it wouldn’t be a curse at all, just a weird kind of symbiosis.”
Caroline picked up his empty cup and bowl and put them in her bag. “I’m not going to risk my mama’s life to prove you right, Mr. Belvedere. I’m sorry.”
And then she was gone.
Scott knew she was sympathetic, but she was never going to let him go. He had to make his own luck here. And he had the inkling of a plan.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Over the next three days, he waited for an opportunity, and it didn’t come. It was maddening; at each meal, Caroline or Rocky or Sherrilyn watched him, never giving him a chance. He worried that before they grew lax enough for his plan to work, that his arm would be entwined in the hungry fingers of the tree so tight that they’d begin hand feeding him and stop setting his wrist free to allow him to feed himself. But every couple hours he shifted and jiggled it, making sure to stop the aggressive little tree arteries from slipping their mouths inside his arm. At the same time, he also tried to stretch and pull his back to loose the growing capillaries that he could feel eating into his spine. If he actually managed to get his cuffs unlocked, it would be bitterly ironic if was already too late to separate the rest of his body from the tree.
Finally, one night when Rocky brought him dinner, he saw the opportunity. Ellen had sent down a nice slab of pot roast, and Rocky had to cut it for him before he could eat it. But as she talked about the trails that she and Jerry had walked that day, she began to wander around the room as she talked, trailing a hand along the bark of the tree trunk and then walking across to where the tree gave way to rough-hewn planked panels. She was bored. If Rocky wasn’t hiking or fucking, she didn’t know what to do with herself.
As she walked away from him, Scott took the opportunity and snatched the knife, quickly secreting it between the bark and his body, just above his butt. There was no other place to hide it…but with the steady growth of tree filaments connected to his skin over the past few days, he was pretty sure that the blade would not fall inadvertently to the ground. Now he just had to hope that Rocky didn’t notice that it was missing when she packed up the dishes.
“Wish I could go on a hike with you,” he said, forking a bite of meat and holding it up so that she could see him eating when she turned around.
“Ellen says you won’t be hiking again,” Rocky said, turning around. “She said I can climb you anytime I want though, so that’s good.” She smiled, a broad, lustful, strangely creepy smile.
“Yeah, nobody around here seems to have a problem with that,” he mumbled.
“Do you?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’d rather be back in Chicago at this point.”
“Take what you can get,” she advised.
He nodded. “I have. I will. Don’t have much choice, really.”
“Speaking of which…” Rocky suddenly began to pull her T-shirt over her head, and then dropped her shorts to the ground. In seconds, naked and athletically gorgeous, she slipped her hands behind Scott’s head and leaned in to kiss him. “I’ve got this itch that Jerry never scratches,” she whispered in his ear. “But you scratch it good. Really good.”
She shifted herself back and forth against his midsection so that his growing erection bobbed along against her stomach.
Scott was in a panic. While his body instantly started warming to the idea of sex—the tree was turning him into as much of a junkie as everyone else in this house—he forced himself to focus on the knife he was hiding. If she started slamming against him, shifting his back around against the tree, the knife would probably jiggle free and slip out to the ground. And then his whole plan to escape would be exposed. He’d never get another chance at repeating the gambit. They’d all be watching him closer.
“I don’t feel so good,” he complained. “Could we…not do this right now?”
Rocky stopped rubbing herself provocatively against him, and asked simply, “Are you serious?”
“Totally,” he said. “My stomach feels funny. I don’t want to puke on you or something.”
She blanched and backed up a step. “No, I’d rather you didn’t do that too. Nobody’s ever blown chow on me.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Maybe it’s just this whole acclimation thing, with the tree growing around me, I dunno.”
There were now thin branches of the tree that had sprouted and grown out in long green filaments around his legs, like Morning Glory vines. Rocky looked at those and nodded. “Yeah, there’s probably a lot going on with you right now.”
“Everything and nothing,” he said.
“I’ll come back tonight maybe,” she suggested.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
But in his head, he promised that that was a lie.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Scott could feel the tree exploring him. Caressing his skin with the faintest of tendril touches and then anchoring, latching on. He didn’t know what actually happened when the tree “tapped” him, but the feeling sent a thrill up his nerves from a thousand tiny points, like a thousand ghosts of orgasm. But the good thrill only lasted a heartbeat. Then the itching began. His s
kin was alive with tiny tickles, as if an army of ants were walking slowly back and forth. He wanted to scratch his back and legs until the skin peeled; the sensation was driving him crazy. The worst part was, he could do nothing about it. Thankfully, he could down a couple ales and zone out for a while after his meals. Probably a dangerous act because it dulled his sharpness; he needed to be able to think clear if the opportunity presented itself for him to use the knife and have a chance of escaping. But for the moment…
He closed his eyes and tried to force his mind away from the sensations as his body was being changed. He took deep breaths and focused on the buzz that he’d gotten from his last pint of ale. After a while, he drifted and his mind began to dream of the outdoors…
He saw leaves and sky. Bright blue sky that turned…black night sky sprinkled with tiny lights. A breeze that chilled his skin, but made him revel in being alive. Felt the wind waking his heavy arms… The feeling of a raindrop on his skin, splashing and slapping him before trickling down to water his feet. He was so thirsty…
Soft fingers slipped around his neck.
“Rocky said you weren’t feeling good,” Caroline’s voice whispered in his ear. He felt the warmth of her skin, naked against his own. She was silky and sweet, all girlish (non)innocence as she moved her body. Teasing. Calculated. But so deliciously wonderful to feel.
“I feel better now,” he said, shaking the dreams from his head. For a little while there, he had felt as if he was the tree, swaying in the breeze. Weird…
She kissed his mouth, and he responded, slow and tenderly. “I’m sorry that you have to be here,” she whispered. “I felt so bad after we talked the other day. I want to help you but…I can’t.”
“I understand,” he said. “Would you grant me just one last wish though?”
Her eyes flashed before him in the shadows. “What?”