The first child disappeared in June. It was on a bright sunny Californian day – all the adjectives being superfluous except the last one. In June in the Santa Cruz mountains, all days were sunny and bright; the feathered plumes of redwoods swaying high in the cloudless azure sky. The child was a boy and he was eight years old. He stepped onto the deck of his parents’ house, watching giant dragonflies swoop and dance in the light-saturated air. The tangle of manzanitas, tanoaks and madrones that fell away from the deck glowed like a pile of emeralds, but the boy knew better than to step down. There was poison oak mixed in with other vegetation, and there were coyotes and even mountain lions lurking in the woods. He was a good boy and did as he was told. He just wanted to see the dragonflies.

When, after calling several times his mother went looking for him, he was not there.

They lived in the forest and considered it home, but the forest had other opinions, which were never consulted because the people who owned expensive houses surrounded by pristine redwoods felt they were friends of the trees. They drove their SUVs down into the valley where they all had high-paying jobs and came back in the fragrant dusk, watched Netflix, and went to sleep lulled by the gentle soughing of the wind in the dense foliage. Their wives – those who did not have high-paying jobs of their own – stayed home, drove the children to school and back, cooked organic vegetables and low-carb pasta and thought of themselves as ecologically sound. But the forest kept to itself, as it had done throughout the centuries before white man – or any man at all – penetrated the green darkness lying on the mountains of Northern California. The forest kept to itself, mocking and aloof, and brooded, and bid its time.

The man who owned a house built into the side of a hill and overlooking a steep ravine overgrown with redwoods, Chisos oaks and red firs, had some inkling of the true nature of the forest because occasionally the trees would speak to him. This happened at night. The slim black silhouettes like exquisite skeletons against the velvet blue of the sky would nod and wave their many-fingered hands and in their haphazard gestures he would sense malice and mockery and obscure hints of something buried but not dead. Still, he loved his house with its glass walls and a double garage and would not consider leaving. He lived alone because his wife had divorced him and moved away. His name was Mark.

One day, while vacationing in Italy, Mark met a woman and fell in love with her. Her name was Lucia and though she lived in Milan, she was Croatian and had grown up in London. She had dark eyes, white skin, and hair the color of ash-covered embers. She spoke English with an accent that sounded like Slavic Cockney.

After a brief interlude of intense lovemaking and marathon conversations, Mark returned to California. But he could not get Lucia out of his head. They started WhatsApp-ing in odd hours of night because of the time difference between the Old and New World. She described a lifestyle that seemed to him hectic and unreal: crowded piazzales, the smell of overheated asphalt, clubbing, tiny apartments, and a strange assortment of friends who moved across the map of Europe like a flock of multilingual birds. After a month of red-eyed fatigue in the morning and vivid memories in all hours of the day, he bought her a ticket to California.

Lucia came fresh and excited, ready to marvel at the glass house, the woods, the deer, and the banana slugs. At first, she did not mind the nodding silhouettes of the trees at night, primarily because she hardly saw them, as they were busy making up for their separation. But Lucia did not drive. And after a couple of days when Mark had to go to work and leave her alone, surrounded by miles upon miles of redwoods, live oaks, manzanitas and hophornbeams, she grew restive. She complained of silence and of strange noises; she started when a crested jay landed on the sundeck and became unreasonably angry when a squirrel watched her from outside the bathroom window. And on the eighth day of her stay, she disappeared.

When Mark came back to the empty house, his first bitter thought was that Lucia had had enough. But in the bedroom her bras and panties still poked from the drawer and her Italian dresses, eminently unsuitable for country living, still hang in the closet. Her wallet and phone were there.

Mark called the police.

Two deputies came, poked through Lucia’s belonging, eyed Mark with prurient interest, and disappeared, promising to pursue all available venues of inquiry. He did not expect to hear from them again.

Next day he paced his spacious living room and stared into the golden-green chiaroscuro of the woods outside. The myriad leaves watched him like Argus’ eyes. How many of them were there? He thought of miles and miles of trees, each bearing an uncountable number of green protrusions, toothed, lobed, smooth, hairy, oval, oblong, arrow-shaped…. He waited for the night to blind those green eyes but instead came a long pale dusk, in which he could almost imagine additional eyes opening, unfurling like spring buds, all focusing on him. He regretted his glass walls and thought longingly of the tiny windows of Lucia’s flat in Milan.

The police had been useless after the children’s disappearances. First, the boy on Skyline, then a girl down at Felton…and wasn’t there another one? Mark had tried to not to think of the abductions, reasoning that he, a grown man, was in no danger. Now he cursed himself for an idiot. Lucia was not a child, but who knew how a serial killer’s mind worked?

He nervously scrolled through apps on his phone when a ping informed him that he had a new text. The number was withheld.

He opened it.

The message said: ” If you want to see your girlfriend again, click this link”.

Now he felt in his element again. The digital jungles had many predators, but they were of a familiar kind. The link could infect his phone, of course, but so what? He had another one.

When he touched the link, the tiny screen went pitch-black. Mark cursed: a virus, after all. 

But then a green dot appeared in the center, grew into an irregular ameba-like cloud of radiance, out of which a face assembled itself.

Mark stared at it open-mouthed. It was obviously a CGI with a smooth glabrous skin and unnatural regularity of features. But it was one of the most unpleasant images he had ever seen.

Its face was hard and ashen. Its head was wrapped around with a sort of greenish turban, so that not a single hair showed. But the most shocking part of it was the color of its eyes and lips: both were bright coral-red, wetly gleaming like fresh wounds.

The creature opened its mouth to reveal small, seed-like, black teeth. The mouth gaped wider and wider, the turbaned head tilting backwards, so he could see the greenish fibers that packed the creature’s nostrils. The mouth filled the screen: a funnel of sultry red shading into the blackness of some vertiginous whirlpool. The blackness sucked him in, causing him to sway and pitch headlong onto the desk. But instead of hitting its edge, he felt himself being drawn into a cool and wet nothingness, filled with a smell of leaf mold and monotonous susurrus of the wind.

Mark came to lying on his back, staring into the tracery of boughs against the star-studded sky. A millipede crawled upon his bare neck. He sat up with a yelp and hit his head upon a crooked tree trunk that snaked close to the ground.

“Watch out,” said a woman’s voice.

A tiny flame sprang up, cradled in two hands. A woman was holding a fat moss-smelling candle. The flame dimly illuminated a neat body in a gray dress and threw enough light upon the turbaned head to reveal that it had been no CGI. The smooth skin, the doll-like features and the glistening redness of the irises and lips flaunted their impossible reality, as the shadows played across the living face made of blood-stained wood.

“Who are you?” whispered Mark.

“Rowan,” responded the woman. “We don’t have much time, so just listen. Little Mother has your girlfriend on her farm. We put up with this bitch for too long. She is an interloper, an intruder. She does not belong here. She crawled in dragging her domain with her and we thought: as long as she keeps you people in check, who cares? But now it’s getting too much. She is too strong. We can’t get rid of her, or her farm. You have to help.”

Mark bit the inside of his cheek and tasted blood. Not that he needed it. He knew he was not dreaming. The cold air that made him shiver, the rustle of invisible bugs and the reek of rotting vegetation were not generated by his sleeping self.

“Did you say ‘bitch’ or ‘witch’?” he asked inanely.

“Both.”

“And who are you?”

The female creature smiled lewdly, caught his hand, and guided it toward her rounded breast jutting from under her dress. It was as smooth and hard as a wooden bowl. There was no nipple.

“We don’t play your animal games,” she said, turned around and went downslope, gliding through the contorted trunks of manzanitas. Mark gulped and followed. The puny flame of her moss-candle was the only light, and he did not want to be left alone in the dark.

 Mark thought he knew the woods, but he realized now he only knew the sunny face they presented to their tenants. After five minutes of following Rowan down the overgrown slope, stumbling through the springy layers of dead needles, snagging his clothes upon clutching boughs, and brushing aside tough spider webs, he was totally lost. What unnerved him most was the complete absence of sound: no passing cars, flapping night birds or howling coyotes. Nothing but the underhanded whisper of trees.

Rowan stopped so suddenly that he ran into her unyielding back.

“There,” she said, pointing ahead.

There was a scarlet glow bleeding through the black strokes of tree-trunks, sullen and feverish, illuminating nothing – not even itself.

“It’s her farm,” she said. “Go through the rock gate. Your girlfriend is there.”

And before Mark could open his mouth, she blew out the candle and dissolved into the shadows.

Lucia pulled the bucket out of the well. The rope was slippery and rough, leaving burns on her palms. The bucket was full, and droplets of reeking viscous liquid splashed into the inky surface below.

She looked around fearfully. The Red Moon was just clearing the tops of the trees surrounding the farm, its rocky face, mottled with dark markings, frozen in an eternal scream. The Red Moon was bad. The Black Moon was worse.

She hitched the bucket to the yoke and lifted it to her shoulders. There were calluses under the worn fabric of her smock. Lucia dimly remembered the time when her body was sculpted by daily gym sessions; when her hair was expertly cut; when her face was protected with creams and enhanced by makeup. Now the knotted muscles of her arms and legs ached with the deeply ingrained fatigue of hard labor; her unkempt hair snaked down her back in an untidy braid; and her face…well, Little Mother’s demesne had no mirrors and that was a mercy.

She carried the bucket to the farmhouse that squatted against the tangled, spiky fringe of the trees, black on black. There was a quivering blue light in one of the windows that, Lucia knew, was Little Mother’s bedroom. She had to prepare her bath before the striga’s bedtime, but how was she supposed to know when? No clocks, no sunrise or sunset, time moving as sluggishly as an algae-choked stream and then suddenly rushing forward like foaming rapids…

It did not matter. There was no place for excuses on Little Mother’s farm. She had to do what she had to do. Otherwise what had happened to the kids would happen to her. Lucia’s skin crawled just thinking of it.

She passed the pigpen and averted her gaze from the reeking enclosure. The Red Moon had crawled high into the sky and while normally Lucia would appreciate the additional illumination that helped her navigate the tree-grown yard, now she would be happy for the Black Moon to rise instead. She had gotten used to the diet of dry bread and water; to blows and curses; to the hard pallet for sleeping and heavy labor when awake. She had even gotten used to Little Mother’s loom. But she could not get used to what was in the pen.

Trying to look away, she stumbled and the liquid in the bucket splashed onto her smock. The sickening metallic stench assaulted her nostrils.

Lucia started to cry.   

Mark pushed through the vegetation toward the red glow, assaulted by thorny bushes, scratched by branches, whipped by leaves. He felt betrayed by the woods. He fervently wished for his cellphone, but tech had betrayed him too, sucked him into the black hole of this nightmare.

The only thing that kept him going was the thought of Lucia. The Rowan monster had said she was there, and he was going to find her, no matter what.

Rowan…Something about her name niggled at Mark. Then he remembered. Rowan tree was another name for mountain ash. The tree was of European origin, brought to America by colonists in the 18th century. “She is an interloper, an intruder” the creature had said about Lucia’s captor. But so was she: an invasive species. Or maybe not. How long until an immigrant became a native?

The glow was getting brighter, flooding the forest floor with the feverish scarlet light. Mark slowed down: what if he was blundering toward a forest fire? These were common in Northern California. But no, there was no heat or smoke, and the light was even, not flickering like flame. It allowed Mark to look around and get his bearings. He almost wished he had not.

The forest had shifted, changed, like a familiar face disfigured by a hateful scowl. Layers of dead leaves crunched underfoot, releasing the pungent smell of mold, and some of them twitched and scurried away on slimy pseudopodia. Thorny, twisted stems the color of old bones nosed up from the mulch. Among their exposed roots, pale fungoid bodies pulsated rhythmically like asthmatic toads. And the trees were the worst. They were familiar trees: redwoods, oaks, madrones, Douglas firs. But the bare lower branches on the redwoods clawed the air when he squeezed by; the squat boles of the oaks grew into baroque swollen shapes fissured by tender-looking scars; the straight reddish trunks of the madrones were hung with peeling bark that looked like skin and oozed dark drops that looked like blood; and Douglas firs’ needles were steely and sharp. Moss rotted in big squishy cushions and the only sound was the harsh incessant cry of some invisible bird that went on and on.

Mark took a deep breath and went on. The slope was getting steeper, the ground falling into a wide ravine whose bottom was choked with the dense huddle of vegetation. The light was emanating from somewhere behind it but he could not figure out what the source was. The Rowan creature had said something about a “farm”, but this was the unlikeliest location for a farm he could imagine.

The closer he got, the stranger the forest became, and he suddenly realized why. Mixed among the familiar flora were European broadleaf trees – larch, chestnut, ash – that did not belong here.

He also realized that the direction of the red light had shifted: instead of coming from below, it was now streaming from above, painting his hands lurid scarlet as if they were dripping blood. Mark looked up and froze.

Swimming in the dark sky was an inflamed red orb. He had seen blood moons – but that was something else, a monstrous swollen planet, twice as big as the full moon and luridly red. The markings on its surface looked like a screaming face.

Mark stared at the thing while his mind tried to come up with – not an explanation, it would be too much to ask for – but rather a story that would make sense of what was happening. He was a sci-fi fan and would not be averse to imagining himself in some sort of parallel universe, but he could not think of a parallel universe that would encompass Rowan, the red satellite, and the strange trees. 

In front of him was a large boulder, shaped like a rough-hewn arch, draped with moss and lichen. A curtain of damp tendrils hung from the top, obscuring the hole of the arch.

Rowan had spoken of “the rock gate”. Mark prepared to dive in.

“I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” said a male voice.

Mark spun around. A man was leaning against a tanoak. He wore what appeared to be a samurai outfit with a lacquered breastplate and russet-colored skirt. He was a thin and stooped fellow with a decidedly un-Japanese cast of features under his close-fitting lacquered helmet. Huge swathes of purple rash covered his face, arms, and legs.

“Why not?”

“Because Little Mother will unravel your life and spin it anew on her loom and then put whatever you become in her pen. And trust me, you don’t want to be there.”

Mark took a deep breath.

“Rowan told me my girlfriend is there.”

The man nodded.

“True. But it is a trap. Rowan is working for her. They all are. Interlopers. Intruders, invasive species.”

Rowan, mountain ash…

“And you are not?”

“I am native. California born and bred.”

“Wait!” Somehow it all clicked. “You are Poison Oak, aren’t you?”

They used to make Japanese lacquer out of it.

The man smiled, showing uneven broken teeth.

“Indeed. You uprooted quite a lot of me, didn’t you? But I don’t bear grudges. So, I tell you, man, go back home. Little Mother is not to be trifled with.”

“But I need to find Lucia!”

“She is the one to blame for this whole thing! You should have never brought her here, man. An invasive species, this one is!”

“What?” Mark blinked. “What are you, a Republican? We are the country of immigrants!”

“There are immigrants and immigrants. Do you know what forests are, man? They are history. We feed on your stories; we root in your memories; we are fertilized by your dreams and pollinated by your nightmares. There are bad forests where she comes from. Very bad juju. And she brought them with her. Seeds in her mind; saplings in her memory. Little Mother would never reach our redwoods if it were not for your girlfriend!”

“But she’s only been here for a week!” Mark cried.

Poison Oak smirked.

“You think trees care for your Apple watches and digital calendars? We have our own time, man, and it flows as we need it to flow.”

Mark took a deep breath.

“All right,” he said. “Whatever you say, man. But it doesn’t change anything. I want my girlfriend back. And if this Little Mother is as bad as you say, shouldn’t we get her out of here? I once spent a whole week cleaning out invasive species in Point Reyes. I know how to deal with them.”

Poison Oak looked at him dubiously and then shrugged.

“You have a point. We can’t let her stay. And she brought her goons with her – ash, and larch, and alder, and spruce, and European oak. The whole mountain is infected. All right go ahead! But sorry, man, can’t help you. You’re on your own.”

“Aren’t you supposed to give me some magic gifts?” Mark asked. “Or at least valuable advice?”

“That’s not how it works. All I can say is that you better get your ass in gear before the Red Moon sets and the Black Moon comes up. Sure, the White Moon would be better, but I wouldn’t count on it happening any time soon.”

“How about waiting till the sunrise?” Mark asked.

Poison Oak smirked.

“You would be waiting for a very long time.”

Lucia walked into Little Mother’s empty bathroom and with a sigh of relief, lowered the bucket onto the scrubbed floorboards. The light shifted from ghostly blue to warm sunny gold and for a second, she let yourself forget where she was and luxuriate in the cozy ambiance of a traditional bathhouse, with pine-aromatic wooden walls, a portly china pitcher and a claw-footed freestanding tub in the middle.

From behind the door leading into Little Mother’s quarters came the clacking of her loom, bringing Lucia out of her reverie. She hefted the bucket and poured its contents into the tub, instantly shattering the illusion.

The thick liquid left scarlet splatters on the tub’s rim. Lucia knew she would have to scrub off after they coagulated to black. The butcher smell made her empty stomach heave and filled her mouth with bile.

“Lucia, dear?” the dulcet tones of Little Mother came through the half-opened door.

“Yes, Mother,” Lucia responded. She hated herself every time she spoke that word, even though she knew she had no choice. It helped only a little that she was estranged from her real majka.

“Is the bath ready?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Thank you. Be a good girl and check on out last addition to the pen. The poor thing took a lot of work to adjust. She must be still getting used to her true form. Go talk to her.”

Lucia stood still. Her nausea intensified to the point when even the emptiness of hunger would not prevent her from being sick.

The witch had stolen another child!

“It is my fault!” she whispered, savagely pinching her wasted forearm that sagged like an old woman’s. “My fault! My fault!”

“Lucia?” This sugary-sweet voice again, leaving a residue in your mind like the scum of a cheap candy on your teeth.

“Going, Mother!” she responded grimly and headed for the yard.

Mark stepped through the vine-choked archway and was not even surprised when he found himself in a cavernous tunnel. Compared to everything else that had happened, a hole in the rock extending into a tunnel seemed almost normal.

He groped in the thick darkness for what seemed like hours. Finally, he reached the end of the tunnel and swiping aside another curtain of creepers, went out. Nothing jumped at him, so he crouched by the side of an identical boulder that marked the exit on this side of the tunnel and looked around.

Apart from the Red Moon hanging over his head like an overripe pomegranate, the place looked quite ordinary. He was in a big unkempt yard. The yard was overgrown with tough clumpy grass and cut through with a web of unpaved paths. There were some small trees scattered here and there, getting thicker close to the piling of tall stakes driven into the ground that encircled the yard. Beyond the piling, redwoods loomed. Across the yard, a structure of some sort – a barn or an outhouse – nested in the shadows. When Mark looked over his shoulder, he saw a modestly sized farmhouse on the other side of the property. There was light in one of the windows.

Mark hesitated. Lucia must be in the house; perhaps the light was coming from the room where she was held. But common sense reminded him that he had nothing that could be used as a weapon. The barn would have farming implements and hefting a pickax or a hammer would make him feel better.

Keeping low to the ground, Mark scurried toward the barn. He brushed by a thin tree that rustled even though there was no wind, but otherwise the place was deserted.

As he came closer, he realized that “barn” was a wrong designation. Mark knew little about farming, having grown up in the suburbia of San Carlos, but the structure seemed to him more like something he had seen in a zoo: an open enclosure with a shed attached. There were huddled forms dotting the enclosure, too small to be cows. Sheep?

One of the forms stirred and rose up, tottering toward the wire fence. Mark recoiled.

There is a moment when the brain becomes so saturated by atrocity that it shuts down, refusing to let in any more of unbearable sights, smells, and sounds. Mark’s brain was reaching this point, but he fought against it. He had to see. He had to understand.

The creature was a child. There was no question about it: an eight- or ten-year old child, still wearing a Go Giants! T-shirt and ratty shorts. But his face lengthened into a blunt snout, as if somebody had grasped a handful of his flesh and twisted it like putty. His eyes migrated to the sides of his misshapen head and blinked desultorily, trying to focus; his stick-thin arms ended in totters; and his legs were bowed and curved. 

The Pig-Boy made a squealing sound, and others sleeping on the ground woke and rose, joining him at the fence, looking pleadingly at Mark, their medley of animal noises still bearing some remnant of articulated speech. There was a girl whose arms were plucked wings and whose legs had lost their flesh and were reduced to bone sticks. There was another girl whose face dropped in soft curly-haired folds of a sheep. And there was a small boy, hardly older than a toddler, whose nose and mouth fused into a duckbill. This seemed to have been done so recently that the bill was still raw, dripping blood and lymph.   

Mark backed off. The desire to turn around, dive back into the tunnel and run away from this hellish place was irresistible. He resisted it.

He came back to the fence, slipped his hand through it, making soft calming sounds. The Sheep-Girl grasped his hand – she was the only one capable of doing so, even though her palms were slippery with wool. She bleated something that almost resolved into words but not quite.

“I don’t understand, I’m sorry,” Mark whispered.

The Pig-Boy turned his malformed head, balding in uneven patches. Mark followed his line of sight.

Weaving among the thin trees and approaching the enclosure was a woman.

As Lucia made her way toward the pen, she also made a resolution.

She was not going to bear it anymore. She would try to kill Little Mother. She finally remembered how it could be done. The knowledge had been buried in her memory all along, and she cursed herself for not thinking of it earlier. Of course, doing so would require facing the past she had not wanted to face. But the time for running away was over.

And if she failed, and the striga managed to unweave her on her loom and weave her into some monstrous degrading form, so be it! Nothing could be more degrading than collaborating with a witch, drawing blood out of the well for her daily bath, soothing the poor kids turning into livestock for her table.

Probably the most nightmarish thing about this nightmare was its familiarity. Lucia had grown up with dark Slavic fairy tales told by her mother. When she got older, the fairy tales got increasingly mixed up with her mother’s equally dark memories. Her mother Lena was a teenager during the bloody Balkan Wars but her stories of the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Banovina blended with tales of strigas and moras into a heavy burden of history that her daughter did not want to bear. Eventually she changed her name Lucija to the bland international Lucia, moved to Milan, and reduced the communication with her mother to the bare decency of Christmas and birthday phone calls. She had never known her father and from Lena’s evasiveness on the subject, she suspected he had been a one-night stand.

Her meeting with Mark was another opportunity to leave it all behind: the stench of blood and smoke, the pulse of ancient hatred that seemed to be encoded in her genes. In the sunny woods of California, she could reinvent herself, become somebody else, somebody new, with no history and no memory of the atrocities she was not responsible for. After a week in his gold-and-green retreat, so different from the dark woods of her heritage, she had resolved she would stay there.

Only it turned out that the dark woods had followed her.

Very well, then. Her mother’s stories also contained moments of high courage and doomed resistance, from the partisans of World War 2 to peacemakers of the Balkan Wars. If you can’t run away from your history, you better embrace it.

She would set the children free and kill Little Mother.

And when her decision hardened into grim certainty, she saw a man standing by the side of the pen.

Mark rushed toward the stopped, thin figure in a ragged smock and they clung together for what felt like a long time. But when they separated and he saw her clearly in the light of the Red Moon, he was shocked.

Lucia had been missing for only a couple of days. But the woman standing before him was emaciated, her hair long and matted, her face gaunt.      

 Time flows as we need it to flow.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Mark,” she said. “It’s not your place.”

“Wherever you are is my place,” Mark said and meant it.

She smiled and took his hand.

“Let’s go,” Mark said pointing to the holed boulder. “It leads back to…well, to California.”

She shook her head.

“We can’t. The children.”

“We will take them with us,” but even as he said it, he realized it would be cruel to do so unless they could be returned to their natural state.

“No. The spell must be lifted. We must kill the striga.”

And as she said it, the red orb in the sky blinked out.

For a moment, they were submerged in the claustrophobic black, filled with the susurrus of the rustling foliage and the panicky cries of the children. But then Mark’s eyes adjusted, and he realized the darkness was not absolute. It was diluted by writhing shadows and patches of gray as the light from the farmhouse’s illuminated window fanned out. It actually seemed that the darkness was not falling from the sky but advancing in a dense front like a fog bank from behind the trees.

“The Black Moon!” Lucia whispered.

The edge of a tenebrous circle rose in the sky, obliterating the stars, as impenetrable as a black hole.

And at the same time, a cold wind blew and the pervasive rustling of foliage increased so much it sounded like cries in an unknown language. Boughs whipped through the murk, slender trunks bent and dipped…

No, not just the wind. Trees in the yard were moving on their own, straining against the soil, pulling their roots out, and waving them in the air like tentacles.

“Her trees,” Lucia said. “She brought them with her. Larch, pine, oak, chestnut. When the Black Moon is up, they walk.”

Mark’s hand tightened in Lucia’s. The horror of walking trees was like something out of his worst nightmare – the nightmare of the owner of a house in the woods, waking up in the middle of the night to listen to the creak of a redwood threatening to fall upon the roof, or sniffing the air for the smoke of an approaching wildfire.

Lucia touched his cheek reassuringly.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They won’t touch me. Their sap is in my veins. My cradle was made of their wood. They are my brothers and sisters.”

Mark stared at her. That was a different Lucia from the cosmopolitan urbanite he knew.

She started walking toward the farmhouse and he followed. The trees reached our with their clawed twigs toward him but calmed down when Lucia passed them, whispering their names in an unfamiliar tongue: kesten, ariš, hrast…The half-formed faces jutting out of their trunks melded back into the bark.

Lucia seemed to be looking for something and was not finding it. The light in the farmhouse suddenly flared up and then dimmed.

“We need to do it quickly!” she exclaimed. “She is taking her bath and we can catch her unawares. But once she is done, she will come out looking for me!”

“So, let’s go!”

“I need one tree! I know it must be here, but I can’t find it. It’s our only chance! A striga can only be killed by a twig of mountain ash.”

Mark started. Dropping Lucia’s hand, he stepped into a clearing where the darkness of the moon poured over him like a stream of ice.

“Rowan!” he yelled. “You brought me here; come and help us!”

Nothing but the increasing wind. The Black Moon was clearing the treetops.

“When it rises, she’ll be out of the bath!” Lucia cried.

“Rowan! You grow in our mountains; come and help us!”

Nothing. Only the lower edge of the black orb was hidden behind the trees.

“Rowan! We are all guests in this land that is our home; come and help us!”

A slender tree with long pinnate leaves and clusters of berries shook and unfolded, the branches flowing together, the smooth bark metamorphosing into the grey dress, and Rowan stood before them. Her blood-red eyes looked like dark pits.

“So, you’ve come into the trap,” she addressed Mark. “You men! So easily led!”

“You don’t want to side with the witch,” Mark countered. “Why to grow in the blood-watered forest when you can grow in the sunny woods of California?”

Rowan snorted.

“As if there was no blood spilled in your backyard!”

“Little Mother will enslave you as she enslaves everything she touches,” Lucia said. “Give us a twig, let us pass, and I promise that when my daughter is born, I’ll call her Rowan in your honor.”

Mark’s mouth fell open at this declaration; but Rowan seemed impressed. And still, she hesitated. The black orb rose into the sky, floating above the treetops.

“Please!” Lucia begged.

Rowan cracked her long fingers and broke off one of them. There was no blood as she handed it to Lucia.

“You better hurry!” she said, disappearing into the shadows. “Little Mother is coming!”

The light in the farmhouse window blinked out and the door swung open.

The darkness was complete now, the Black Moon greedily drinking up the remnants of ambient light, and Mark wondered whether they would even see their adversary approach. But he needn’t have been concerned. Little Mother brought her own illumination with her.

He did not know what to expect. A giantess? A Halloween witch on a broomstick? An ogre? But he did not expect that.

The slight figure wreathed in the misty glowing halo that glided toward them was smaller than Lucia, hardly the size of a teen. Her filmy garments fluttered in the breeze; her white hair fell down her narrow shoulders in a luminescent waterfall; her narrow hands gracefully wove spirals of light. Her face was as pretty as a doll’s, with the pouting rosebud mouth and a pert nose. Only her eyes, shadowed by long lashes, were impenetrably black, with no whites.

“Lucia!” Her voice was like chimes: sweet and tinkly. “Come here, silly girl! It’s dangerous to be outside when the Black Moon is up! Spoils your complexion, brings wrinkles to your skin! And you want to be beautiful for your suitor, don’t you?”

Mark, confused, glanced at Lucia, and was shocked by the look of pure hatred on her face.

“Striga!” she hissed. “Go back to where you belong! Hide among the bones and the ashes! There is no place for you here!”

“Really? But there is a place for you? An interloper, an intruder, a liar! Daughter of a war criminal! Why don’t you ask your mother who your father really was? Do you think your beau would have anything to do with you if he knew your history?”

Lucia reeled but now Mark found his voice.

“Doesn’t matter to me who Lucia’s parents were. Just shut up and go away. And make those poor kids whole again!”

Little Mother threw her head back and laughed. Her rosebud mouth opened wide. And then wider and wider, splitting her head into two. The upper half fell back like the lid of an open box and another smaller head rose up from within the skull on an undulating neck: a flat snakehead with a sloping scaly forehead and yellow eyes. It hissed; a forked tongue spitting gobs of poison emerging out of its mouth.

“Now!” Mark screamed and rushed at the creature, but Lucia was ahead of him. Wielding Rowan’s finger like a spear, she charged the witch that was visibly growing, the petite body swelling into the coils of a serpent, a sinuous tail emerging from under the white gown. And before Mark reached her, she stuck the wooden finger into the monster’s chest.

The scream was so piercing that Mark fell to his knees, clapping his hands to his ears, hiding his face on his chest to escape the intolerable high-pitched noise that seemed to burrow into his brain. And so, he missed whatever final transformation Little Mother had undergone before dying. But whatever it was, it was over quickly. When Mark rose to his feet, shaking and all but deaf, there was only a large pile of ash mixed with charred bones and broken sticks. And lying before it in a heap was Lucia.

Mark rushed to her, but she stirred and sat up. Her face was pale and smudged by soot and ash. He suddenly realized that he could see her clearly, even though Little Mother’s luminescence had winked out with her death. She looked up. The Moon swam in the sky, its white orb too large but bearing the familiar markings.

“The White Moon,” she sighed. Mark put her arms around her, and they clung together.

“We need to break her loom,” Lucia whispered. “Then the kids will be restored.”

“No need,” said the voice behind them. “I’ll take care of that.”

They turned around in unison. The man who stood behind them was almost as wide as he was tall: a short brawny fellow, ropes of muscles winding around his bulging arms, sturdy legs emerging from beneath his tattered tunic. His skin was as smooth and brown as an acorn.

“She used my wood to make her loom,” he continued in a rumbling bass, “and didn’t pay what was owed. Now I’m taking it back.”

Lucia smiled and bowed.

“Thank you, Father Oak,” she said.

Mark felt that he had had enough conversations with trees to last him a lifetime. One more, though, was forthcoming. As they approached the boulder tunnel, he carrying the exhausted boy who had shed his pig features and Lucia carrying the toddler, while the two girls trailed behind them, he saw a scrawny fellow in the lacquered suit waiting for him.

“Well,” Poison Oak rasped, “so you got rid of the witch and got your girlfriend back. Congratulations, man! But you know, the witch will be back. These invasive species are like weeds. The more you whack them, the more they keep coming.”

“That’s fine,” Mark responded. “We are all invasive species here.”