"You better not take that short cut over Hemlock Ridge."

That was what her colleague Jake had told her at work. "It's too steep and curvy. It's got no guard rail. On a foggy night like tonight, it will really be hell."

But Wilma Lukens was tired. She couldn't wait to get back to her apartment in town and snuggle up with a good book. It had been one of those days. The meeting at Agron had run late, and her nerves were still jangling. The angry shouts of the locals rang in her ears.

"We'll take Agron to court! Throw that bastard Neilson in jail!"

Not that she blamed them much. Her employer, Agron Chemical Company, wasn't exactly popular with the folks who lived along the creek.

The road climbed steeply uphill and the gloom deepened around her as she entered the Hemlock State Forest. Black ranks of tree trunks stood outlined in her headlights, like sentinels guarding the mountain. These ancient giants had somehow managed to escape the chainsaw. Now they closed in around Wilma, brooding presences that struck her as faintly hostile...although that was just her imagination, of course.

"You know, a couple of people have gotten hopelessly lost on that road," Jake from the public relations department had told her. "They say a man once disappeared in there and was never found. And the locals have all kinds of superstitious tales--"

Her thoughts were cut off as the road curved sharply to the left. She wrenched the wheel, barely missing a spiky tree. Jesus! She didn't remember any sharp turns in this road, years ago when she'd last driven through. Maybe it hadn't been so smart, coming this way.

She sat up straighter and glued her eyes to the center line. It took several minutes for her heartbeat to return to normal. Well, at least there were no more surprises; the road stayed straight like it was supposed to.

Several miles went by and Wilma pushed away the memory of Jake's warnings. Instead, her memory returned to that meeting room today. The accusing eyes, the angry voices of local residents.

"Your goddamn poisons have killed every fish in West Fork Creek," cried a man in a down vest.

"Yes, you've turned a whole hillside brown, right across from my farm," a white haired woman added. "What sort of poisons do you folks make in there?"

Worst of all was the young mother who held up her deformed baby, the one with the cleft palate. "See what you fuckers did to my baby!"

And all Wilma could do was read a prepared statement that Chairman Neilson had drawn up--a bunch of lame excuses and vague promises. "An investigation will be made." "Full compensation..." blah blah blah. Instead of having the guts to show up himself, Neilson had left Wilma and Jake, the head of the Public Relations Department, to take the heat for Agron's latest chemical spill.

Don't blame me, she should have told those folks. I just work here. Yeah. She'd finally gotten her degree, and Agron was the only employer in the area. What the hell should I have done? Starve?

They'd looked at Wilma like she was some kind of monster. Well, they were wrong. She was just as much a victim as any of them. She'd grown up right here in these mountains, and her life hadn't been easy either, with Mom dead and Dad sick with cancer. Everyone's a victim.

Thoughts of Dad brought a new pain to her chest. Dad barely had a civil word for her anymore. That goddamn Agron company killed your mom, he'd yelled at her when she'd got the job, and your baby sister too!

Wilma suppressed the pain. He's wrong, she told herself for the thousandth time. There's no proof. Anyway, the college degree and the job at Agron had gotten her away from the dreary trailer and the welfare checks, and that was why she worked there. Period. And I'm not taking the rap for--

She swerved sharply as something fluttered in her headlights. Her tires skidded on the wet pavement; her fingers locked around the steering wheel as she struggled to regain control. What was it? An animal? A tree branch? She had no idea. It had been there one moment, gone the next. If it was ever really there at all.

She took the next curve at 20 miles an hour. Her innards were a lump of ice. Jake wasn't kidding about this road...!

Jake was only a few years from retirement and he'd grown up in one of the nearby hollows. He'd told her some pretty weird stories. How about that freak accident last year: somehow, a huge branch had fallen square on top of a guy's pickup. Then there was that hunters' truck that had gone right off the edge and the driver was never found. And the Agron herbicide shipment that had gotten lost while crossing the mountain--! How do you lose a tank truck full of chemicals? The management had been kept chasing their tails over that one.

Some of the old timers swore the woods around here were haunted. They whispered of monsters and an ancient spirit that inhabited the woods. On a night like this, you could almost believe it--

Something large and brown darted in front of her car. A bobcat? She slammed on the brakes and then realized it was just a huge, windblown leaf. Too late. The car fishtailed across the road for a heart-stopping moment and skidded over the edge. Wilma's guts twisted in teror as the car tipped on its side and began tumbling over the slope. For a moment as long as eternity, the world spun in a kaleidoscope of terror and pain. It all came to an end in a blinding explosion and she knew nothing more.

******

Soft voices spoke in her mind, delicate tendrils curled about her head. She dreamed of roots and leaf-mould and the scurry of insects, and of a great assembly of tall protectors standing watch above her. Like an infant in the arms of its mother, she drowsed in the embrace of someone huge and strong and kind.

And as a baby listens to her mother's heartbeat, Wilma listened to the ageless song with the tall ones whispered. We are the nurturers, they sang with the rustle of leaves. We feed the small, shelter the swift. Our branches protect, our roots hold the world in place. We are the keepers of the Life Web. The chorus swelled up around her.

For ages Wilma lay dreaming that her substance was sap and wood pulp and green, shimmering leaves...that she stretched out yearning branches toward the sunlight...that she distilled the light into juicy sap and exhaled fresh, sweet air and water vapor that replenished the earth. And in doing these things, she knew great joy.

But at last came the day she moved a finger whose existence she had forgotten. Soon after, the entire hand began to twitch. Long-dormant brain cells woke slowly; neurons fired and prickling sensations returned to her extremities.

She opened her eyes and blinked them clear, and gazed at the great oak tree which towered above her. She struggled to sit up. Her glance fell on two long, pale roots... no, those were legs.

My legs! One was bent at a crazy angle. Her other branches--no, arms--didn't seem quite right either. One appeared to have been damaged and mended with something that smelled like pine pitch. She lifted a weak, trembling arm , and ran clumsy fingers over her face. It felt lumpy and misshapen, with a texture like tree bark. She noticed a fine tracery of rootlets that wound all about her head and body.

Wilma began to whimper in unreasoning animal fear. What was she? What had happened to her?

Don't be afraid, a voice said.

She jumped, glancing quickly around. There was no one there. She was alone in a forest of oaks and hemlocks whose tops swayed in the breeze. Rays of afternoon sunlight made the tree tops sparkle and slanted down through the leaves.

"Who... who is it?" The words came out of her mouth in a rusty croak. "Who's there?"

I am here. I, Mother Oak.

Wilma blinked. She'd heard no sound, and yet the words had got inside her head somehow. She gazed at the giant oak tree, her eyes travelling up its thick trunk and great spreading branches to its crown. Its leaves shone brilliant green, tinged with the first gold of autumn, against a deep blue sky.

An extraordinary tree, thought Wilma... beautiful, and it had a sense of presence about it...almost as if it were a person. It reminded her of a wise old grandma, patient and calm. Had she dreamed that this tree had rocked her like a baby, crooning away her hurts?

A momentary sparkle in the yellow leaves of the tree's crown caught Wilma's eye, as if the tree had smiled.

Yes, daughter, it is I who speak to you, said a silent voice like leaves in the wind.

Wilma caught a breath. "Wait a sec--" bits of common sense were coming back to her. "Trees don't talk!"

Of course we can. But we spoke only the Green language before. You could not understand. Now we have learned your speech from you.

"Sure." Wilma's brain refused to absorb this strangeness. Instead her thoughts turned to herself. Her memory had gone blank. Who was she...where had she come from?

You came from one of the two-legs' metal shells. It smashed into one of my sisters. Your sap flowed; your branches snapped. We thought you would have to go back into the earth, but I studied you and learned to heal you.

Wilma pressed her lips together. A "metal shell"? Something made her turn and look back over her shoulder. There she saw a smashed hunk of metal, its shiny blue color obscured by rust and dead leaves and creeping vines.

"Oh! That's..." she groped for the word. "That's my Honda." She shut her eyes, trying to make sense of it all. The sight of the car brought back vague memories of a hard-edged world of concrete. Had she come from that place? If so, then this couldn't be for real. A tree couldn't doctor a person!

I did fix you, daughter, said the Mother Oak. I did it because I regretted the actions of some of my sisters.

Wilma struggled to a sitting position and stared up at her rescuer's massive trunk. "What the hell do you mean?"

Some of the other trees in this wood wish harm to the two-legs. Regret tinged the silent voice. They try to confuse and scare them, and drop branches to break their metal shells.

Wilma remembered how a huge leaf had blown across the road, making her crash... and come to think of it, there had been no wind that night! "You mean they... they made me crash on purpose? Why?"

A hint of shadow seemed to pass over the tree. The two-legs are our greatest foes. Unmistakable sorrow emanated from the great oak. They strip and uproot, poison and defile. They kill us by the millions. So many of our Old Ones, who have grown to the wisdom to plan and think, have fallen before the blades... I have shared in the deaths of so many...

Wilma shrank before the bitter tone that Mother Oak's thoughts had taken. She had heard that exact same tone one time listening to a survivor of the Nazi holocaust.

Sometimes a tree can look sinister and threatening. She felt suddenly small and vulnerable, surrounded by these giants.

But you are no longer an enemy. Sunlight once more caught Mother Oak's leaves. You are of us, since my roots joined with yours and our minds grew together. The tree's crown dipped joyously in the wind. My sisters and I are joined by the universal root network, so now you are one with us all: a part of the forest. You share in our understanding of the Life Web, and we share in your mind-knowledge. Through you, little sister, we gain voice and movement.

A hawk called from above. Wilma watched it soar and dip in the sky. Far below, a squirrel ran up her trunk with prickly claws. The sun passed behind a cloud. Faint wind currents stirred her leaves, and her tall sisters danced slowly with her. Welcome. They wove a song of friendship around her, deeper than any she had ever known, for hers had been a lonely life with no mother or sisters or brothers. Their thoughts lay open to her: stately thoughts of flowing water, dreaming mountains and turning seasons; the complex cycle of nutrients. Vast, musical networks of meditations on the workings of the Life Web, in its infinite complexity... we are the Keepers, they sang, the Keepers of the Life Web.

"Wait--wait just one second!" Wilma tore at her hair, fighting off the illusions. Though the details of her past were still fuzzy, she was sure of one thing now. "This is nuts! I'm a person, not a tree!" Great clumps of dormant brain cells were coming back to life, so that now she was starting to see her situation logically.

She'd been in a serious accident. God knows how she'd survived; how long she'd lain there. And she must have suffered serious brain damage, to be sitting here imaging she was talking to trees!

She struggled to a crouch and brushed leaves off herself with clumsy hands. Weeds and earth stuck to her hair; a fine tracery of some kind of tendrils surrounded her head. Roots, or vines or something. God Almighty, had she been lying unconscious that long, that weeds had begun to grow over her? Why hadn't she died? Her recovery was a medical miracle, all right. Moving slowly, like someone awakening from a long nap, she pulled the hair-fine tendrils away. What now?

Try to get help. She needed clothing, for one thing. Hers were in filthy tatters.

She grasped a loose stick of deadwood and used it as a crutch to help her stand. After the vertigo cleared away she began to walk, leaning heavily on the stick. Her legs responded stiffly. She thought with deep regret of her former body, not too fat or too thin: a comfortable no-nonsense body that had required little maintenance. Now she was a rehab case.

All that afternoon she struggled over fallen logs, dragged herself across small streams and around tangles of vegetation. The motion jarred loose more fragments of her past. Her name was Wilma Lukens, 25 years old, BS in Biology with a minor in public relations. It all seemed like ancient history, far away and unimportant.

The sun set and the light faded, but Wilma kept going. It was almost dark whe she dragged her battered, disfigured self up a steep embankment. At the top, her fingers met a hard ribbon of road.

She crawled onto it, struggled to her feet and began to walk. Presently she heard the whoosh of an approaching car. She turned to wave at it, but it whipped right past, spraying gravel in its wake.

The second one passed by too. Night fell over Hemlock Ridge. An own hooted. Wind kicked up, filling the darkness with the sound of a million leaves rustling. Little sister, said the leaves, come back.

Wilma pressed her hands against her ears.

At last a third car came by, sending long beams of light to announce its presence. It passed, slowed down, and backed up.

Oh, thank God! She hobbled toward it. Her tattered clothing flapped behind her.

She could hear people arguing inside. "George, you're nuts to stop for a stranger at night!"

"Ah hell, you never know...maybe it's an emergency."

The driver opened the door and shone a flashlight on her face. He stared at her a moment and his mouth opened in a scream. "Holy shit!"

He slammed the door and the car took off with squealing tires.

Holy shit is right! What was the matter? Wilma touched her face. Her skin felt rough, like bark, and her hair had the crinkly feel of dry leaves. What have I turned into? Some kind of tree-thing?

A sob broke from her. I'm a freak. Better to be dead!

A low soothing murmur entered her consciousness, but she thrust the voices of the forest aside. "Go to hell!"

Eventually she collapsed in a ditch and slept. She awoke to the feel of sunlight on her face.

The next time she heard a car coming, she hid. She did not want to see anyone else's face when they looked at her. Pretty soon she guessed she'd become part of the folklore of Hemlock Ridge. Tree-woman stalks haunted woods!

Yet instinctively she headed down the mountain towards civilization and a goal she could not name. She came to an intersection at last, and turned right onto a larger road. When had she seen this place before?

She crossed a bridge and soon found herself standing at the edge of a vast expanse of concrete. At its center stood a massive gray building whose outlines looked very familiar.

Her eyes fell on the sign next to the building. AGRON CHEMICAL COMPANY.

Wilma gasped with recognition. "I used to WORK here!"

Shuddering, she backed away. No--she didn't want to remember his place, or what it had meant. She ran across the road and took a dirt path that led back into the shelter of the woods. Just keep walking. Don't think about anything.

But she had not gone far when the woods came to an abrupt end. She stopped dead, gasping at the desolation before her.

The forest had been laid waste. Tangles of brown, dead vegetation and twisted branches covered the hillside. Trees had fallen or been knocked over, leaving splintered stumps. In some places, crude slashes showed where bulldozers had been at work, scraping the land bare. Only one tree remained standing in the center of the killing fields, its brittle leafless branches reaching toward the sky as if in agony.

Wilma gagged with revulsion. Agron did this.

She slumped over as if she'd been hit. Agron. Oh, yes. It all came back to her now, what that name meant. Defoliants, herbicides, you name it. Want some land cleared fast for a new shopping mall? Call Agron, the strip-and-skip specialists. Get it done before the EPA knows what's happening, and don't worry about the law, Agron owns the county and the local inspectors and the judges.

Or maybe this was one of Agron's numerous accidents. Doesn't matter, it's all the same. Wilma's fists clenched. Agron killed my parents...and my tree sisters. And I worked for the bastards--I helped make the chemicals. I did this!

The thought stabbed her guts like a knife. No wonder the trees hated me!

And yet they'd forgiven her. It all came back now, how Mother Oak had rocked and comforted her and kept her alive. Tears scalded Wilma's eyes. The great tree should have crushed her with its branches for what she'd done. Instead, it had saved Wila's wretched life. Why did I deserve her kindness? I'm nothing but a murderer.

The tears rolled down her cheeks. She sank to the ground, grasping a dead twig in her fists. "Why did I do it? Oh, Mother Oak, how can I make it up to you?"

In a response, a vast stillness opened in side Wilma's head. Out of its center came the voice of Mother Oak, sure and clear. Go back to the place of the poisoners, daughter.

"Yes." Wilma stood up. "Yes, I will." She hurried back into the forest and walked until she stood once more on the blacktop of Agron's parking lot.

Now, daughter, said Mother Oak, If your roots are one with ours, reach down and touch your fingers to the ground.

Puzzled, Wilma obeyed. Her fingertips began to itch, and then, to her astonishment, fine root-tendrils began emerging from her fingertips. As she watched, the roots thickened and spread along the concrete.

She snatched her fingers away, but by now the roots had already separated from her to grow on the own.

She sucked in a breath. "Christ! What is it?"

Mother Oak's answer came strong and joyful. It is the secret of fast-growth. For ages we have sought it, but our wisdom was not enough. Not until you came and we took from your mind the life-knowledge we needed.

What life-knowledge? Wilma wondered. Had Mother Oak somehow picked her brain for her knowledge of biology and cell replication? Meanwhile the roots spread quickly as spilled water, expanding in all directions. Wilma could not tear her eyes away. For a moment her senses dissolved and a part of her mind spread out with the roots and she lived their hunger, their exuberant lust to grow... with them she searched ahead probled for sustenance, splitting the concrete and sucking nourishment from its fragments.

Yet a part of Wilma stayed behind and watched, awestruck as the roots became thick as living ropes. As they writhed across the parking lot, leaves unfurled and grew huge along their length. The blacktop began to crack beneath them. Lucky the place is empty, came Wilma's irrelevant thought. It must be a weekend.

My daughter, Mother Oak exulted, you are the one we searched for. Our thoughts are too slow; we could not do it by ourselves. We sought one who could become a merging of the different kinds: the green and the moving. And now you have come. You, who can hear our plight and defend the Life Web with intlligence and control.

At the far end of the parking lot, a few maintenance men were loading equipment into a truck. One of them glanced over, pointed and cried out in alarm. The others froze in place and they all stood gaping in asonishment, as the roots reached the gray walls of Agron Company and began to climb. The maintenance men fled--but Wilma watched, hypnotized, as the roots became a jungle of tentacles that strangled the building. A crack appeared in the wall and grew larger until a piece of the building wall split apart and fell away in a tumult of dust. Slowly, bit by bit, the roots ate away at the rest of the structure. Within the hour, she guessed, a great new jungle would completely cover the ruins of Agron Corporation.

In spite of her fear Wilma found herself smiling. Oh, Dad, you'd be proud of me. And others sang a chorus of joy in her mind. Mother Oak and the other Tall Ones had struck out against their foe at last!

"Hey, you there!" A harsh voice brought her back to reality. She looked up to see several men emerging from a Sheriff's truck. "It's her--the Tree thing!"

Suddenly Wilma realized how tired she was. Whatever she'd done, it had drained her of energy.

"You--whatever the hell you are--come here! We've got a few questions--"

Wilma turned and fled. Behind her, the Sheriff fired his shotgun. Ignoring her exhaustion, she leaped through the giant roots and crashed through tangles of leaves until she could no longer hear her pursuers.

She stopped to gasp for breath. It all caught up to her then. What happened? What did I do? she shuddered in terror. Monster vines that eat buildings...

A tree could slowly put cracks into concrete. After a hundred years, a blacktop could be obliterated by vegetation. But now...the trees must have put their growth-force into her somehow, and since her metabolism was a lot faster than theirs... She tried to figure out how such a fusion between plant and animal could happen, and reviewed everything she had ever studied concerning symbiosis and DNA transfer from one species to another, and tried every theory which might explain how she had become a sort of walking super-jungle waiting to happen.

But none of them came close.

Sighing, she dropped down to rest with her back against a tree. Well? What was to become of her now?

If the authorities found her they'd probably put her in a freak show or lock her up in some lab and cut her up and test poisons on her. Would anyone listen to her story? Was there any hope of getting help, maybe plastic surgery or some miracle drug?

Oh, Lord, if there were only some way I could become human again, get on with my life.

And what an empty, lonely life it would be, after having known the communion of the forest. We'll miss you, little one, sang the tall sisters in the back of her mind. She tried to imagine living the rest of her life without ever hearing that music again. The thought made her throat ache.

Hi friend, said the tree on which she was leaning. Startled, she turned and looked at it. It was a young maple, with smooth gray bark. Perhaps it was 30 or 40 years old. She reached out a shaky hand to touch it and shared a moment of its clear, childlike awareness. It's just a baby.

The truth dawned on her. They can all talk. They're sentient. Only it takes them several hundred years to grow into wisdom. Most of them never make it----they're cut down in their childhood.

Wilma touched the maple angain and looked around at the other trees, who were just as young. All children, no mothers. Her heart ached with pity. Once, a long time ago, trees had been things. Now they had become... people.

"Dear God, how many of you did I kill?" Wilma's fingers caressed the bark. "I'm sorry, honestly. There won't be any more. I promise."

She stood up. At last she knew what she had to do.

It wouldn't be nice. She would have to turn her back on being human forever.

But it had to be done--for Dad, and her lost mother and sister. For Mother Oak, and all her slaughtered kin and orphan child-trees. For Wilma's own part in the murders.

It had probably been part of Mother Oak's plan all along. Trap a human and turn her against her own kind. And she was right. The Life Web had to be defended at all costs.

People think they're so important. They're wrong. It's the trees who keep everything going. But now they're in trouble. They need my help!

Wilma stared at her hands, sensing beneath them the throb of root-cells that hungered for concrete. She began to walk, back up the dirt road and onto the highway. Gravel crunchhed under her feet as she trudged along the shoulder, heading eastward toward the city. A grim smile spread over her face as she thought of the highways and shopping malls, parking lots and chemical factories that lay ahead of her.

"Wait till I get my hands on you."

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