The Family Tree Read online

  Its roots are old...and twisted!

  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 Family Tree

  John Everson

  Dedication

  For Geri, who can tell plenty of stories about my family tree.

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve always been fascinated by the secrets that are buried by time, dirt and lost memory. Not to mention hidden in the trunks of old attics. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a big rambling house on a gentleman’s farm–they didn’t raise crops but there was a barn with goats and a horse… and a henhouse. And up in the eaves of their attic, behind the wall of the upstairs room I used to sleep in when we’d visit, there were many old boxes with black and white photos, my uncle’s forgotten electrical experiments and other treasures. The Family Tree is not about any of that… but I’m sure my childhood fascination with the secrets of the family hidden away in those eaves fueled the tale you’re about to read.

  I’m sure shadows of all the places I’ve been over the past year have also colored the final story. Anyone who follows my Facebook feed knows that I travel a lot for my dayjob (and frequently document my travels with photos of my favorite food and ales enjoyed along the way). This novel was written in the back corners of brewpubs in many places, from the Jolly Pumpkin in Ann Arbor to Dublin Square in San Diego. From the Elephant & Castle in Toronto to the Cowgirl Café in Santa Fe to my own hometown Irish pub, Quigley’s. I have to thank Shane McKenzie, who encouraged me to spin the tale of The Family Tree, which I began in May 2013 and finally finished in March, 2014.

  Thanks to my true family tree–Geri and Shaun–for keeping the home fires burning as I travelled (and wrote).

  Thanks also to the many friends and fans who have supported and helped spread the word about my books over the years: Jonathan Maberry, Colum McKnight, Meli Hooker, Peter Schwotzer, Sarah Ham, Bill Gagliani, Dave Benton, Martin Mundt, Bill Breedlove, Jim Morey, Tony Tremblay, Paul Gifford and my loyal tweeters A.R. Braun, Richard Auffrey, Erin Al-Mahairi and, especially, Talia Marie Rosales, whose Follow Fridays always make me smile!

  Thanks to my Chicago con friends–Willy Adkins at Chicago Horror Film Fest and Dan and Amy Royer at DanCon–and to my carnivore friends at Synapse, Jerry Chandler and Don May, Jr., who finally introduced me last year to the amazing gluttonous experience of the Brazilian Steakhouse. Thanks also to all my labelmates who have been so supportive at Samhain, especially Brian Moreland, Jonathan Janz, Tim Waggoner, Brian Pinkerton, Kristopher Rufty and Russell James. And of course, thanks to the whole editorial and marketing team at Samhain, especially my editor, Don D’Auria, for sticking with me and my twisted tales all these years!

  Prologue

  It was always dark here. The heavy, inky dark of a windowless cellar. A root cellar, where the pale insects scurried in the center of the floor, unconcerned about being discovered. The light rarely caught them. They hunted and nested and lived and died unseen. Just as he lived here…unseeing.

  Sometimes he didn’t even bother to open his eyes for days on end. He didn’t miss it too much; the sky came to him every day in dreams anyway.

  When he looked inside his mind and allowed himself to simply drift…which was more and more these days…he could feel another skin. He could feel the air slipping and kissing with the hint of coming spring through his arms and hair like a gentle caress. He couldn’t move, not really, not like he once remembered. His limbs were leaden. Locked in a rictus that belied the life within. And yet, he enjoyed the most freeing sensations every day. Swaying in the wind, with his eyes locked on the sky. Heaven was in his sight…though he was not the one doing the seeing. Not really.

  His body changed in the dark. Sometimes he felt the shiver of veins distended, contracting. Sometimes he imagined his hair had twined around his legs; he felt the tickle of movement. Growing pains? Insects? He couldn’t tell. It was dark, and he didn’t move. Couldn’t.

  Though he was naked and below ground, it never felt cold to him. The air here was damp with the breath of the earth, and he could feel the pulse of life, ever-present. It moved through veins he could feel, but not see. It was the gift of the earth…the blood of the tree.

  Time passed slowly here. But that urgency of getting to the next thing? The desperate striving? The planning for tomorrow? He’d given all that up, and he felt he was a better man for it. If he could still call himself a man. Here, he was a quiet provider. The heart of the house. In his soul, he was at peace.

  And now and then, he woke and she came.

  A dream of lilac perfume and fiery hair. He couldn’t move…but she did.

  She moved a lot—in beautiful, sensuous ways.

  She moved like heaven in the dark.

  Sometimes, he even opened his eyes to gaze at her in rapture.

  He needed nothing more.

  Chapter One

  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 every day 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 forty 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 Appalachia. 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 graying 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 fifteen 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 fifteen 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.

  Walking into the foyer of the inn was like stepping back in time a hundred years. The floor was of rich, dark walnut planks and the walls were covered in a floral-patterned wallpaper. A wooden coat rack stood to the side of the door, while a grandfather clock faced him across the room. There were portrait paintings and framed photos covering much of the walls, but before he could take them in, a voice called to him from the left end of the room.

  “Well, hello there!”

  He turned and saw the inn’s check-in desk, an ornate long counter carved in wood that matched the rest of the room. Everything seemed to be richly veined, dark and well-polished. Behind the desk were a couple dozen thin wooden cubbies for mail set into the wall. And the woma
n who likely filled them for the guests stood in front, offering him a clearly practiced “how can I help you” smile.

  She was the one who’d called to greet him, with an accent that couldn’t deny her pedigree. She was a Southern woman, no question. And one who’d seen a summer or seventy. Her hair was gray and hung in loose, short curls. Her dress was a quiet blue-checked affair. Her voice was welcoming, and calming.

  “Hi,” Scott said, walking towards the desk. “I’m Scott Belvedere, I…”

  She cut him off before he said another word.

  “Yore tha heir,” she said. Her honeyed accent made Scott think a moment, to process what she’d said. And then it clicked and he nodded. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  “My name’s Ellen and I’ve managed The Family Tree Inn fer your uncle fer the past forty-four years,” the old woman said. She came out from behind the desk and held her arms out to him. “Welcome home!”

  Scott accepted her easy embrace somewhat clumsily. He wasn’t used to strange older women hugging him. And he felt uncomfortable with what she might be thinking: that he’d come here to “clean house” or some such. Hence her instant declaration of a lifetime of loyalty to the inn.

  He stepped out of her embrace and smiled. “Thanks for keeping the place running all these years,” he said. “I hope you’ll do it for forty-four more!”

  She snorted. “I don’t know that I got that much left in me, but I’m not layin’ down anytime soon, I kin promise ya that!”

  Ellen put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back from her…but held him from getting too far away as she looked him up and down. “So, you’re the last Belevedere, eh?”

  He shrugged.

  “This inn has been owned by Belvederes since before the war.” She blinked and smiled. “The Civil War, I mean. Coming from where you do, I don’t suspect that ‘The War’ means quite the same thing to you that it does to folks around here.”