The Witching Tree

When you’re too old to run to your parents’ bedroom and hide under their protection, the only thing to do is face your fears and try to dispel them, often by the repeated incantations that we all utter when we’re very young – It’s only a dream, it’s only the wind, it’s not real, there’s nobody there and so on. Standing on that cusp where childhood has not yet let go and its fears dispelled by advancing adulthood, Devi knew that what she was hearing was being given a form of terror and danger by her racing mind, and she tried her best to first ignore it, then explain it away to herself, as we all do, speaking to ourselves as if we are two people, often having cross conversations and getting very scornful of ourselves. The scratching she was hearing, she told herself over and over again, was not nails on the window, some horrible monster trying to get in to eat her. She was nearly eight years old now, and should not be frightened by sounds in the night which were easily explainable in the cold light of day. But the regularity of the tapping at the window, to say nothing of the sudden bang that followed, almost causing her to soil herself the first time she heard it, and driving her whimpering under the covers, ashamed as a child but scared as one too, all sounded so directed, so deliberate, that it was hard to believe the wind outside was responsible.

She knew what was responsible for the sounds, of course. How could she not? The big, ancient, gnarled tree that had stood in their garden long before her parents had even bought the house – had probably existed there for hundreds of years, for all she knew – was a constant sentinel outside her window, but not a protector. Or at least, she didn’t see it that way. She hadn’t liked the tree from the first, and had even asked to take the other bedroom on the far side of the house, but her parents had laughed and said this had the best view, and anyway they had plans for the other room. Dad was going to turn it into a home office. They would hear none of her protests, and so she had reluctantly taken up residence in the bedroom that faced out on the garden, glowering at the massive tree, which had seemed to her to glower back. Battle lines were drawn: she hated the tree and it hated her, and the fact that it was not alive – or at least, not sentient – did nothing to dissuade her from believing it harboured nothing but ill will towards her.

To her mind, this had been proven last summer when one of the overhanging branches had smashed through her window during the day, sending razor shards of glass to carpet her bed, shredding one of her favourite pillows and taking out her action figure of Captain America – actually almost clinically beheading the super soldier. Luckily for Devi – and unluckily, she told herself darkly, for the tree – she was not in the room at the time, having been out collecting her weekly supply of comic books, and when she came back and made a fuss about it, her parents had agreed that perhaps after all the tree was a hazard, and they should cut it down.

But it was of course never going to be that easy, and this tree would not go without a fight. As most evil things do, it gathered to it an army of followers who swore to protect it by protesting its removal. They probably didn’t realise, the girl thought later, grumpily, as the thought gave her no comfort despite the likelihood of its truth, that they were serving the forces of evil. No, they were just what her dad called disparagingly “do-gooders”, “hippies” and, worst of all, “tree huggers”, as he rolled his eyes and smoked his pipe, staring out the window and shaking his head in despair at what passed for the youth of today. The expression gave Devi a nasty shiver as she envisioned these so-called “tree-huggers” – quite wrongly, she knew, but still – gathering in the twilight and circling the huge gnarled old trunk, linking hands and pressing against the ancient wood, listening to and vowing to obey its commands. Of course, they were, as they explained loudly and with that kind of righteous indignation that comes with years of facing up to authority and standing up for what you believe in, ensuring that this ancient tree was protected, pointing out that it been here as long as the town itself, perhaps even longer, was what they called a national treasure (even though the rest of the nation outside of the small town surely cared nothing for it) and that nobody had the right to cut it down, least of all some blow-in out-of-towners who had only settled there recently.

And there the sound of the hammer coming down on the head of the nail rang out.

After what was only ever referred to as “that business in Chennai”, the Guptas had arrived in America with little but the clothes on their back, and young Devi still in her mother’s belly. No sooner had her delicate feet touched American soil than Sita, his beloved wife, had gone into labour and had to be rushed to hospital, where sadly she died giving birth to their baby girl. The last of his meagre savings had gone on her medical bills and then her funeral, and Devendra had fallen into despair. The natural bond between father and daughter was weakened, strained like a cord cut almost through and holding on by just a few strands. The pain of seeing his dead wife’s eyes looking back at him in the innocent gaze of little Devi was too much for Devendra, and the distance between them, already a gulf from the girl’s birth, became a chasm which would never be crossed as she grew up.

Bad luck seemed to dog the Gupta family. After leaving his fortune behind in India (Devi had a vague feeling that her father had been a big businessman back home, but he never spoke of it, his eyes darkening and sliding away if the girl ever asked him about it) he was determined to reinvent himself in his new home, and after much struggling, during which he began to doubt the reality of the American Dream, Devendra had finally made it, and built up a flourishing chain of record shops. But the rise of digital downloading and streaming killed his business like a lion chasing down a gazelle on the African veldt, and he went broke.

It was when he was at his lowest ebb that he met Caroline.

Devi didn’t doubt that her stepmother loved her father; that was plain to see. But the well-bred and somewhat snobby daughter of a New England banker did not love her, and had no time for this child who was not hers, and to whom she had no personal connection. She often wondered, in her darker times, whether Caroline, (who allowed her to call her mommy only after her husband had pointed out rather testily that for a child to address her own mother, even a stepmother, by her first name was just not right), might have taken more to her had daddy shown more interest in her, shown any sort of love. Perhaps, in some weird way, Caroline Mackenzie was following her husband’s lead – you don’t like Devi, so I won’t like her either. Or maybe she just didn’t take to her from the beginning, and Devendra’s aloofness and lack of fatherly affection towards the girl excused, even allowed her not to care about her.

The crazy thing was, she loved her. She was, after all, the only mother she had ever known, having come along as she entered her fourth year, just old enough to realise perhaps that there was something missing in her life, that other kids had two parents and she had only one. Of course, at that age Devendra had not attempted to yet explain what had happened to Sita; there would be time for that later, when the child was older, so all Devi knew was that there was a vaguely mother-shaped hole in her life, and just as she grew able to appreciate and understand this, that hole was suddenly filled.

But it wasn’t like a hand reaching out to grab hold of her and pull her away from the darkness, rather a plug that was suddenly and without emotion inserted in the plughole. It performed the function for which it had been made, but no more. A plug doesn’t sing you to sleep at night, brush away your tears or help you with your homework. It’s just there. And though Caroline would never be cast as an evil stepmother – she did not hate the kid, just didn’t care about or for her – she would have had problems qualifying as a good one. She was just Stepmother (mommmy if the brat insisted), no qualifier either way, and when little Devi called her mother, she hated it, always mentally adding the suffix.

The child later learned that much of the resentment, or at least coldness she received from her stepmother was due to Caroline being unable to bear children of her own. The fact that she was invited into a readymade family should have excited and pleased her; it didn’t. All it did, in her mind, was remind her how she would never know the joy of childbirth, and was left to bring up some other woman’s brat. Knowing, too, that Sita had been the love of his life – how she had had to paste on that cardboard smile and nod as Dev showed her pictures of his dead wife, how she had had to stop herself snatching them from his hands, tearing them up and screaming “I’m your wife now!” - hurt her even more. And as time went on, the two began to drift apart. But whether each was too frightened of being alone again, or whether there was some spark of love still guttering like an almost dead candle, they stayed together, possibly the worst thing any couple who have fallen out of love can do. It’s often excused as being “for the sake of the children.” It wasn’t for the sake of the children, or in this case, child: Caroline would have left if she wanted to, and not cared how it affected Devi, if indeed it did. But she didn’t want to. Maybe she just didn’t like the idea of letting Devendra off the hook. Sometimes, a woman works so hard on a man, changing and moulding him into her image of what she thinks he should be, that to abandon him is like throwing in the towel. You’ve worked so long to turn this charcoal sketch into a work of art: you can’t quit now, and waste all that work.

So she held on for grim life, not even letting go when his record shop folded and they lost their house along with their fortune (his second, her first), and he, refusing to allow her wealthy parents to bail them out, had dragged them halfway across three states to this godforsaken backwater. Oregon. What the fuck was in Oregon? They had Gold Beach, which wasn’t a beach, and Lakeview, with no view of a lake. At least, she grumpily admitted to herself, this town was well named: Bedlam Fields. Certainly felt as if she’d entered a madhouse.

But in the tradition of her family, she had borne up and dug in, and she was just beginning to make some headway with the townsfolk, her neighbours, who, though every single fucking one of them would without doubt begin “I ain’t a racist, but...” surely considered her a race traitor, almost as bad as having a darkie in the town, the only one, too. Fucking hell! She spat to herself. Are these people living in the 1950s or something? Talk about smalltown America being set in its ways!

It was, therefore, an uphill struggle for the girl who had been handed everything all her life, as her husband refused to follow her advice – demand, really – to change their name to something more, well, more American: “My family name,” he had told her in that maddeningly calm but imperturbable way of his, the manner he had that said he would not be swayed, “means protector, and I am proud of it. Our family is an ancient and noble one in India, and I will not insult my ancestors by allowing it to be changed.”

Fuck your ancestors! She had meant every word, but dared not speak them, only think them. One thing Dev was very passionate about was his heritage, and he would hear no calumny against it, or his home country. Once, he had sat her down, again in that infuriatingly calm manner, and tried to explain to her that his great-grandfather had been some local shaman or witch doctor, or fuck knows what, as if it mattered to her. Should he dishonour old Patel’s name, he feared what might become of him in the next life. And she had rolled her eyes but only internally. That’s right, she reminded herself. These people all believe in reincarnation, which was odd to her: why would anyone want to come back to this crummy place again and again? Not that she wanted to die, or had a bad time of it, as such – probably luckier than most, she admitted with a sharp pang of guilt – but once your time here was up, who wanted to go around again? Not her.

But though there was much, almost all in fact, in which she would have her way, it was clear this was one subject where her husband would not be moved, and she had dropped it.

While reluctant to give the locals any more reason to distrust or take against them – he still remembered how their arrival in Bedlam Fields had seemed to occasion a great outpouring of sympathy for the new family, how they must surely be homesick for their own country, and how loudly the advice had been shouted that they should return there with all possible haste – Devi’s father was not about to back down to what amounted to an angry mob. Certainly, the bulk of those who descended on his house, filled his garden and flattened his flowers as they sat down before the great tree, intent on protecting it (or obeying its commands, thought the young girl with a shiver) were generally peaceful, law-abiding citizens who really didn’t want trouble and only wished to make their point of view clear, in a peaceful way. Devendra could almost admire them, remembering the great statesmen of his own country who had fought for independence from the British. There weren’t any Gandhis sitting in his garden, but there weren’t any Pol Pots or Hitlers either.

But the sad fact of the matter is that these kind of demonstrations always attract hangers-on, casually violent or racist or just people looking for a fight, or some relief from the boredom of their lives, and such people are drawn to anything involving anyone different.

So it was that, as often happens, the protest became a little rowdy, and as Devendra stood there, looking rather ridiculously like the last man man defending The Alamo or something, or a rather too-brown George Washington, axe in hand, with the natives ranged in a rough semicircle around him, slurs and curses and epithets colouring the air, something sailed through the air and hit him on the forehead. As it bounced off him and landed on the grass he had just time to see it was a half-full can of Coors before, taking a step back both in shock and due to the small inertial force exerted on him by the can, the crowd – which, having gathered members by now, most of which seemed to come from the “send them home” contingent (ain’t Facebook a wonderful thing?) could now properly be called a mob, surged forward like a great wave of hate and anger.

Watching from her top window, wishing he had the courage to go down and join her father, stand at his side, even if it was only her Star Wars light saber that stood between her and the roaring, cursing, chanting mob, Devi cast a baleful glance at the hateful tree, and wished that lightning would strike it. But the sky was clear, and God did not oblige. The tree stood, tall and triumphant, and though she knew it was surely only in her mind – the wind rustling through its nasty branches – the girl thought she heard cackling, sibilant laughter. She tore her eyes away from the tree, back to where her father stood, a seemingly tiny figure, Canute against the waves, ready to be swept aside. The laughter came again.

Almost as if it had been a signal, or a command (which Devi was convinced it was) the sea broke over Devendra as the crowd moved like one living organism, no longer people but cells in a brain, one brain, controlled by...

Devi watched in horror as her father was pushed closer to the tree. He was surrounded, the crowd closing on him now like the dark pincers of some huge crab. From her vantage point above, Devi could only see the top of her dad’s head, his calm, gentle voice still pleading for calm, for everyone to take it easy, which seemed only to rile the mob up further. A sharp clang! sound told the girl that her father had been relieved of his only weapon. The axe had not, of course, been brought out with menace, but merely to attend to the tree. But the tree, Devi knew, did not like that, and was going to stop it. Any way it could.

Perhaps stupidly, Devi thought this is the time when I should be calling all my friends, we go out into the garden with lemonade and cookies, and our simple childish gestures and perhaps a few well-placed tears break the spell, and everyone is friends again. And the credits roll as the man who had thrown the Coors can slaps dad on the back and they both laugh.

Just one thing wrong with that plan though: Devi had no friends. She wasn't like other girls, and not just because of her colour. She wouldn't quite be classed a tomboy, as such, but she had little time for dolls or ribbons or teddy bears, preferring instead to pursue activities more traditionally assigned to boys. She had a large collection of dolls, but they were Action Man and G.I. Joe, not Barbie and Ken. She watched sports with her father - he was a great fan of baseball, and it was one of the very few things which bonded them, if only for the length of a ball game - and she loved collecting comics, but not girls' comics, having a great interest in both superheroes and war stories. So more than just an outcast in this country (despite having been born here) Devi was an outcast almost of her gender, a traitor to her sex, accepted by neither, and so was the quintessential lonely child.

So there would be no rescue party rounded up as excited little girls left tea-parties with stuffed animals or set aside the toy curling tongs and fake hair dye, and poured out of their houses at her call to converge on hers, banding together as a group of young sisters to take on the bad men and show everyone they could and should be friends. Because all the little girls around here, excited or not, tea-party attending or not, sneered and laughed at the boyish "Indian girl", and would have nothing to do with her. She was, as ever, as she seemed always to have been almost from the moment of her birth, and as she assumed she always would be, alone.

With mounting terror, the girl watched a big, burly man whose naked arms sported tattoos with symbols she had seen more than once on documentaries about World War II. The man’s head was bald, his eyes small and piggy, flat and dark, but what his eyes lacked in size his booming voice made up for. He was addressing the crowd, pointing at Devendra, who was now held on each side by a member of the crowd – one, Devi noted with dismay, was Terry Gallagher, from three doors down. Devi went to school with Terry’s son, Jim, and in fact they were on good terms with the Gallagher family. Only last week they had all gone out to dinner together. She knew Mr. Gallagher had nothing against her father, and yet there he was, acting as a kind of guard, holding Devendra’s left arm and looking away with blank eyes.

Blank eyes...

Now that she checked, that same blank stare was in the eyes of everyone in the crowd, or at least, any she could see, from where she was. Even the big bald guy with the tattoos, who seemed to have been elected or had elected himself leader of the mob, stared at the world out of eyes, probably normally filled with hatred and intolerance, today flat, blank and empty.

Devi knew she had to go down, try to rescue her dad. But what could she do? Again she had that conversation, that argument with herself: she was a kid of seven, nearly eight, and she was only one person. There had to be a good twenty or more people outside, all adults or at least teenagers, some possibly armed (though she couldn’t say this for sure: Baldy Tattoo wasn’t, but then, with arms almost as thick as some of the thickest branches on the hated tree, it didn’t look as if he would need weapons) and all fired up into some sort of murderous frenzy. She knew who – what – was fanning the flames, what was directing the crowd, what was controlling them, but knowing and doing something about it were two separate things.

Baldy Tattoo was reaching the climax of what Devi supposed he considered a speech, a rabble-rouser worthy of Der Fuhrer himself, with phrases like “good, hard-working Americans”, “darkies”, “coming over here” and perhaps scariest of all, “know what to do.” A guttural roar greeted the conclusion of the speech, and from somewhere a rope was produced, slung over one of the tree’s higher branches, and, eyes wide with horror and disbelief, her father was dragged towards the tree by Terry Gallagher on one side and old Mr. Yasline, a Russian Jew who had fled Putin’s pogroms, and now ran the internet cafe in the town. A kindly old man, he was liked by all – except maybe Baldy Tattoo, whom Devi had never seen before and wondered if somehow the tree had managed to put out a distress call and draft in its toughest lieutenant – and now his eyes, too, were blank as he forced Devendra towards the tree.

Somehow, above the ugly roar and the pleas from her father for everyone to see sense, Devi heard the evil laughter of the tree.

And then, another sound.

A sound that blew the laughter away, and stopped the mob in its tracks.

A sound that caused Devendra Gupta to turn in surprise, even shock. He was not the only one.

Caroline stood framed in the doorway, thin smoke rising from the barrell of the Mossberg, a scowl on her face that didn’t look like it belonged there. Caroline was the daughter of a banker, but her first husband had been an avid hunter. Her lips were a thin line, her eyes hard as cobalt as she snapped in the general direction of the suddenly-unsure crowd, the smoke from the discharge of the first barrel still drifting lazily in a bluish-grey cloud abover her.

“Next shot will not be going into the air!” she warned, and looking in her eyes, nobody, not even the hardest cases in that mob, not even those who may have been armed, not even Baldy Tattoo, with his unseeing, blank eyes, doubted she knew how to use that gun.

Nor that she would use it.

But. But. But. Devi was a little confused, watching her, as conflicting emotions warred within her. She felt she was a coward, yes, for not going down to help her father, for not standing up to the mob, even if it meant she would be hurt, or die, too. She felt relief that something had stopped what had almost become a lynching – the lynching of her father. She felt surprise, quickly followed up breathlessly by pride. She hadn’t know her stepmother possessed, much less could fire a gun. It wasn’t something she had spoken or bragged about, but she was glad she did. It had stopped the mob in its tracks, and all those blank eyes were now looking towards Baldy Tattoo, as if for instructions, orders. He in his turn stared over at where the horrible tree stood, also waiting, it was clear to the young girl, for his orders.

But.

But.

But.

There was something else that confused, and worried the girl. Her mother was there, yes, with a shotgun with one barrel still available to her. The child couldn’t say whether or not she was capable of murder; whether she would fire at the crowd or into it, or whether, even, she had a particular target in mind. Baldy Tattoo was a big, hulking target and if she were her mother sorry stepmother, this would certainly have occurred to her. But even if she shot him, even if she got her one cartidge off, even if the crowd panicked and ran, there were, as Devi had noted already with a sinking heart, hard cases there, men who would not be scared off by one woman with a gun. They would know she only had one shot, and when it was used, she would be at their mercy.

But.

But.

But.

They hung back. And Devi thought suddenly she knew why. They weren’t afraid of the Mossberg – well, many of them were of course: who would not be scared of a shotgun that could blow your arm off or cut through you as if you were paper, smash your skull to shards? Of course they were scared. But not all of them. She knew some of the men here had fought in Iraq, military vets who would not back down before an enemy with just one shot. She knew, as they knew, they had the numbers, and army men and marines and navy men, men who had commanded tank batallions like Mr. Henry from over the road, men like Johnson, the schoolmaster who had fought on the ground in Bosnia and Kossovo, men like Spiller, whose wife was the local librarian and who liked to spend his time building model airplanes. These men knew how to draw fire, how to wait out an opponent, how to trick them into using their ammunition (and here they only had to convince her to fire once, and she was done) and then rush them. These were warriors, men of battle, men who had seen combat, and one slip of a girl with a shotgun whose first barrel had already been discharged was no match for them.

It wasn’t the threat presented by her mother that gave these hardened fighters pause.

It was her.

The fact that she was a woman certainly weighed in her favour: few men would shoot down a woman, even an armed one, outside of a combat zone. But Caroline Gupta also had one other thing going for her.

She was white.

And she was known to come from a good family, a respected, old, traditional family in Boston.

Woman.

White.

Old Money.

It all added up to make her, in their eyes at least – even if they were staring and glassy – one of them.

One of Them.

Devendra and his girl, both brown-skinned, both immigrants, both unwelcome.

But Caroline. She was From Here. She was American. She was the daughter of a wealthy banker. Hurt her, and there would most definitely be Consequences.

But not only that: they didn’t want to hurt her. Because she was One of Them. She Belonged.

You don’t kill your own.

No matter she may be armed, no red-blooded American man was about to attack a red-blooded American woman.

If they were honest, there was more than one there who were turned on by the idea of a woman ready to defend her family with a shotgun.

That moment of hesitation, which she read keenly in their eyes, was all she needed. She pointed with the barrel of the Mossberg at Baldy Tattoo, and in a cultured, New England voice asked him “And just who the fuck, may I ask, are you?”

Taken by surprise, authority suddenly ripped from him and, despite his own low opinion of women, unable to justify violence against a White Woman (the word whispered in his brain, though it wasn’t accurate: Aryan Maiden) Baldy opened his mouth to speak, but like a schoolmarm from some nineteenth-century play Caroline snapped “You’re not from around here, are you?” She raised her voice, turning it on the rest of the crowd. “Is he?” she demanded, her eyes flashing with anger. “Why are you taking orders, why are you following a stranger? Someone who doesn’t live here, doesn’t know us? But you!” Her voice rose like thunder in the heavens, and more than one individual in the crowd took a step back. “You know us!” She pointed the gun at Ralph Spiller, who suddenly looked like would much rather be at home fitting the wings to that Messerschmidt 110 he had been working on.

“Ralph!” She singled him out, and he quailed under her gaze, a naughty child in class who had been caught doodling or talking and was about to get it. “You’ve nothing against us, have you? I send my home-made jam up to Ellie first of every month, don’t I?” Her eyes narrowed, and the ghost of a smile played over her lips, just for a moment. “What’s wrong, Ralph? Didn’t like my gooseberry this month?”

A tiny smile broke out on Ralph Spiller’s moustache-crested lips, and a small ripple of laughter ran through the crowd. It didn’t last, but it was a start. In the confusion, as what had previously been stony conviction wavered, Devendra felt the hold on him slacken and hastened to his wife’s side. Neither Terry Gallagher nor Jacob Yasline stopped him, instead looking at each other as if only just now noticing each other for the first time.

“And you, Mort!” Caroline, on one level aware that her husband had escaped and that it was, technically now, two to – well, however many were out there, even if Dev wasn’t armed, switched her focus, determined to keep attention off the fact that the crowd had lost its prisoner. There would be no lynching today. “My daughter, Devi, keeps you in business with all those comic books she buys, doesn’t she?”

Another nervous round of laughter, like a summer wind blowing through a glacier. Others in the crowd were beginning now to look around, like people woken from a dream, wondering where the hell they were and what was going on. Eyes that had been blank, empty, made of glass saw the colour, the light, the humanity return to them. Blinked. Blinked again. Stared in confusion and, some of them, in embarrassment.

“She does that, Mrs. G!” Mort spread his hands in a helpless gesture, shrugged. “Buys more than most of the boys round these parts." He grinned, testing her as normality began to shoulder its way through the crowd, possibly demanding what the hell was going on here? "You tell her the new X-Men just arrived; I put a copy by special for her.”

Nodding, but ignoring him, Caroline addressed the crowd as a group. Her voice was full of disapproval, the schoolmistress disappointed in her children, but also a tinge of mercy, perhaps even forgiveness.

Devendra had never been more proud of his wife, nor loved her so much as at that moment. Devi, too, watching from above and hating her own cowardice, was in awe of her. Caroline was a real social climber, more concerned about “what the neighbours thought”, it seemed to Devi as she thought about it darkly, than the safety of their daughter. But then, her stepmother had always been one for appearances; if there was one thing she craved above all things it was acceptance and to be part of something. She was the type who, when she discovered there was no book club in Bedlam Fields. promptly declared she would start one. It hadn’t been too successful – Devi gave the mob gathered outside in her garden a disparaging look, thinking most of them probably had never read a book in their lives, or had any interest in doing so – but that hadn’t stopped her mother doing her best to fit in.

And it was, in great part, this knowledge of her neighbours that had stayed the hand of the mob. Devendra knew the guys he worked with, sure, a few of their wives, but like most women Caroline had her finger on the pulse, whereas he was just about vaguely aware of it. She knew who was cheating on who, where this person went on holiday and why that person couldn’t have nuts in their diet. She knew whose daughter was pregnant, who was responsible, and what the girl’s parents thought. She was a regular at church, even if her husband refused to go, sticking to his own religion, and she was well known at bake sales and charity drives.

All this personal information, this involvement in the community was what held back the tide. When it had been only Dev out there, they could convince themselves – or be convinced – that he was an outsider, a foreigner, not wanted, not welcome. But when the vision of Caroline Gupta appeared on the porch, Mossberg in hand, fire in her eyes, certainty had begun to waver, conviction failed and hesitation set in.

“You all know us!” she shouted, all but a growl. “We’re new, yes; haven’t been living here as long as most of you, that’s certainly true. But we’ve never done you any harm,” she bellowed, her voice carrying to the farthest reaches of the fence, where some of the less brave, foolhardy, or those just not quite sure had hung back. “All we want is to be accepted, to be your neighbours. To be your friends.”

Her voice dropped almost to a whisper as she finished “I thought we were.” Then she looked at the Mossberg in her hand, like someone wondering how the hell that got there, and with a contemptuous grunt laid it carefully on the ground. It banged metallically on the porch step, a similar sound to the one made when Devendra had had his axe snatched from him. The memory, recent and raw, sent cold fingers crawling down his back.

“Is this how we treat each other in Bedlam Fields?” Her voice was husky, almost pleading, but with a sharp edge of accusation. The schoolmistress may have lowered her cane, but she was still in the classroom. “Is this how we want people out there to see us?” She made a vague gesture, appealing to the insular mentality of smalltown America. Out there. Others. Strangers. Those Who Do Not Belong. Heads shook, coughs broke out in the crowd. Someone seemed to be weeping. Devi couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

In the distance, blessed sound! She could hear the slow wah-wah-wah of the cavalry; the sheriff was on the way. He was made of sterner stuff. Sheriff Grant wouldn’t fall so easily under the tree’s baleful influence. Oh no: in him, the tree would have a stern opponent, might even meet its match.

But it was clear now that the contest was over before the protagonists even met .As her mother spoke on, declaiming in tones that no longer needed to be loud how disappointed she was in them as neighbours, as friends, as fellow townsfolk, it was as if a dark shroud had been lifted, something that had clouded people’s thoughts, something that had taken control of them, and people were coming to their senses.

A murmur of agreement, heads bobbed. A small number of conversations broke out in low tones. You could actually feel the tension defuse from the air, like the feeling you got just after a storm had passed. General laughter, as others began to talk, a few people started to drift away, shaking their heads as if to clear them of fog that had somehow settled there.

Devi could have sworn that as she stood there triumphant, the tree’s branches swayed in her stepmother's direction, like sharp talons trying to reach her, rend her, silence her. But it was too late. The moment was passed, the battle won. The tree had lost.

For now.

Baldy Tattoo, seeing his acolytes desert him in droves, spat on the ground, eyed Caroline dangerously, drew his index finger across his throat, then turned and disconsolately walked out of the garden, angrily pushing out of his way people he had only moments before been pushing forward, forward to commit an act of unspeakable horror. He threw his enormous frame atop a waiting Harley, leaned back in the big seat, and without helmet turned out into the road, giving the house one last hateful look.

As his hog disappeared down the road in a cloud of thick smoke, the roar of its engine sounding like the snarl of the thwarted tree, Caroline’s knees buckled and she sagged against her husband, who caught her. Hunting game was one thing; using her shotgun to threaten human life was something very different.

His heart swelling with pride, concern on his gentle face, Devendra Gupta scooped up his wife and carried her back into the house.

Still fuming from his defeat, Baldy Tattoo screamed down the main highway, dodging in and out between cars, the drivers of which shook their fists and cursed. Until they saw his burly frame, and then decided to keep their righteous indignation to themselves. Turning to give a family of four in a stationwagon the finger, the big man never even saw the big rig that swerved across two lanes and swatted his cycle aside like an insect. The Harley jumped several feet in the air, cartwheeled madly and came down hard on the other side, skidding along in a shower of sparks, tearing the body of the bald man along with it. The rider’s disdain for a crash helmet proved to be his undoing, his head smashed like a rotten fruit thumped by a hammer as the bike careened along, though in the end it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had worn one. The Harly slammed sideways into a tall stanchion that held up a road sign, bending around the metal pole and sending Baldy’s head rolling down the blacktop several feet.

Eyes wide with horror, surveying the carnage he had just caused, the distraught driverof the truck turned to his hitch-hiking passenger, the words “what did you do that for?” forming on his angry, shocked lips, but found to his surprise and dismay that the passenger seat was empty.

The old man was gone.

Staring down the length of the suddenly-stopped freeway, an ugly splash of dark red painting the road and mingling with the darker shade of the oil that had spewed out of the motorcycle, the Harley’s own lifeblood mixing with that of its erstwhile rider, he shook his head. It was a straight road back there. There were no turn-offs, no corners, nowhere to hide. The guy he had picked up had to be seventy if he was a day. He couldn’t have got far in the few seconds since the crash.

Where the hell was he?