The Mulberry Tree

by Allison Rushby

  At just after nine, Immy and her dad walked the short distance to the village school and went through the large green metal gates, which had been unlocked and pushed back. They passed by a bike rack and saw a couple of other parents and kids rounding the corner of a brick building beyond.

  “That way.” Immy pointed, and they followed the other people. Both she and her father dragged their heels a little. Surely what her dad had said would have been gossiped about in the village by now.

  When they rounded the corner of the building, Immy could see a bunch of kids playing in a playground, which had some wooden climbing equipment and some monkey bars and swings and so on. The kids weren’t the ones from the village green, she was pleased to see.

  Immy and her dad kept following the group from before, who had just entered a door that seemed to lead into a long building that looked like a hall.

  It was a hall. Inside it, voices reverberated around the room, with its high ceiling and wooden floor. A long table had been set up with lots of gray-and-blue uniforms on it — gray skirts and trousers and shorts and blue shirts and polos.

  Immy and her dad approached two women who were standing behind the table sorting out pieces of paper.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Andrew, and this is Imogen. Immy’s starting at the school next week, and we’ve come to buy her uniforms.”

  “Oh, how lovely!” one of the women gushed. “A new girl! We don’t have many girls at the school. Certainly not in the upper years. There aren’t many in the village of course, and . . .”

  The other woman turned and gave her a knowing look. “This is the family from Lavender Cottage.”

  “Oh!” The first woman started, her eyes wide. There was a long pause. “Oh, I see.”

  The two women stared at Immy’s dad.

  “I, ah . . .” he started. “I’m afraid I put my foot in my mouth the other day and —”

  The first woman cut him off. “We find that three of everything works well.” Her voice was curt. “Size twelve should be right. Take this skirt and blouse and try them on in the first office down the corridor, just beyond the doors there. Then you can be on your way.”

  Immy tried on the clothes in silence. Neither she nor her dad said a word before opening the office door.

  “Right. So all of this, plus two more blouses and two more skirts,” her dad said.

  “And socks.” Immy’s voice was expressionless.

  “Yes, socks, of course. Why don’t you go outside to the playground while I finish this up? There were some kids out there before.”

  Immy didn’t want to go out to the playground, but she also didn’t want to stay with her dad.

  “You really should try to meet a few of them before next week. Invite some of them over for a playdate.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to be lining up to come over. Not when they won’t even walk on our side of the street.” And when you’ve made them all hate us, she added in her head.

  “Oh, dear. Maybe we should have taken that apartment after all . . .”

  Immy shrugged and followed her dad as they made their way back into the hall. Maybe they should have, but it was too late now.

  As they entered the hall, Immy noticed that a woman with dark hair had joined the two women from before. The three of them stood, their heads bent in toward one another, their hands moving as fast as their mouths. It was obvious what they were talking about. As Immy and her dad approached, one of the group noticed them and alerted the others. When the woman with the dark hair lifted her head, Immy took in her deep brown eyes and realized she looked a lot like Caitlyn from the village green.

  Oh, great.

  Her dad was so on his own for this one.

  Immy turned on her heel. “I’m going outside.”

  Immy sat on a log that she guessed was supposed to be a balance beam and chatted with a girl named Ava, who was in the year below her. Kids were running all around them, and Immy noticed that most of them were boys. The woman at the table in the hall had been right. There really weren’t many girls in this village.

  After a few minutes, Ava’s mother called her into the hall, and Immy was left sitting by herself. It wasn’t long before she heard it — the song. Her back stiffened. But wait. This time . . . this time it wasn’t in her head. Someone was singing it out aloud. It was more than one person, she realized — there were two or three. Just as she swiveled on the log, a woman’s voice called out.

  “Girls! Come here. Right now, please.”

  It was Caitlyn the woman was talking to. Caitlyn and the two other girls. As she watched, they shuffled across the playground to the woman, who was standing near what Immy guessed were the classrooms. She carried a pile of books under one arm and was obviously a teacher.

  “I do not want to hear that rhyme at this school. That tree is hundreds of years old and of great historical significance. Fear, ignorance, and hate can lead to terrible things, and it’s silly talk like yours that makes people destroy things. I sincerely hope you’re not going to start the year off on the wrong foot.”

  There was silence.

  “Are you, Caitlyn? Zara? Erin?”

  “No, miss,” all three girls said at the same time. Caitlyn’s gaze slid to meet Immy’s, and the look she gave her! If she’d hated Immy before, she was out to get her now.

  “Good. Well, off you go, then. Into the hall. I’m sure your parents are looking for you.”

  All three girls trudged off toward the hall in silence. The woman waited until they’d entered. Then she turned, and her gaze met Immy’s for a moment. She smiled a small smile, and it was then that Immy realized the woman knew who she was. She knew she was living in Lavender Cottage.

  Was there anyone in this village who didn’t know they’d moved in? Immy doubted it.

  Immy stood and lifted a hand in an awkward wave, but the woman with the books had already turned and was making her way back inside.

  Immy was still standing there, in exactly the same position, when one of the girls reappeared from the hall. Not Caitlyn, but one of the other two — either Zara or Erin according to the woman who’d told them off. The first thing the girl did was check for the teacher. Seeing she wasn’t there, she shifted her gaze to where Immy had been sitting. She looked a bit taken aback when she realized Immy hadn’t left.

  The girl hesitated and glanced back toward the hall. Immy guessed that her mother had sent her outside. Now she was trapped.

  Before the girl could disappear somewhere else, Immy started across the playground toward her. She had to find out what that rhyme was. And why the teacher had been angry with them for singing it.

  The girl’s eyes widened when she realized Immy was coming straight toward her. She checked behind herself quickly, as if to see if help was coming. Immy guessed she didn’t know what to do without Caitlyn leading the way.

  Immy stopped right in front of her. “What’s that song you keep singing?”

  “I . . .” The girl took a step backward.

  “I want to know,” Immy insisted. Her stomach was churning. She didn’t like arguments or fighting with people. She could feel unexpected tears welling up behind her eyes, and she gulped, trying to push them away. “Tell me!”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes! Now!”

  “But the teacher said . . .”

  “You didn’t seem so worried about teachers when you had your friends with you. Now hurry up and tell me.”

  A final backward glance told the girl that no one was coming to save her.

  “Well?”

  “Okay! Okay, already! It’s . . . it’s about the tree. People have sung it here for . . . I don’t know . . . forever, I suppose. It goes like this: ‘Do naught wrong by the mulberry tree, or she’ll take your daughters . . . one, two, three. In the dead of night, spirited away, never to see an eleventh birthday.’” Her cheeks red, she rushed through the words, then waited for Immy’s reaction.

  Immy stood fro
zen, her mind working backward. “It can’t be,” she said. The rhyme. She’d heard it in her head even before they’d decided to rent Lavender Cottage. No one from the village had told it to her. It had just appeared.

  In her dream.

  Girls had been singing it in her dream.

  The girl looked at her like she was crazy. “What do you mean it can’t be?”

  “I . . .”

  “Don’t you get it?” The girl took a step forward. “‘She’ll take your daughters . . . one, two, three.’ Two have already been taken. You’re the third girl.”

  Immy and her dad started the walk home with their big bag of uniforms, neither of them saying very much.

  “Speak to any of the kids?” her dad eventually asked her.

  Immy wasn’t sure what to say. Should she tell him about the rhyme? She decided not to, because she wasn’t sure what to think about it herself yet. “I met a nice girl named Ava. She’s in the year below me.”

  “Good.”

  They walked the rest of the short way in silence as Immy thought about the teacher who’d told the girls off. The woman’s words kept playing over and over again in Immy’s mind. Fear, ignorance, and hate can lead to terrible things, she’d said. Immy’s brow creased as she struggled to make sense of this. And, on top of that, the rhyme, which had started to repeat itself in her head again now that she knew the words, distracting her and muddling her train of thought: Do naught wrong by the mulberry tree, or she’ll take your daughters . . . one, two, three. In the dead of night, spirited away, never to see an eleventh birthday.

  “What did you say?” Her dad glanced down at her as he held open Lavender Cottage’s gate.

  “Nothing,” Immy said quickly, her breath catching as she felt the shadow of the tree looming over the back of the house. “I was just . . . singing to myself.” She slowed as they walked up the side of the house around to the French doors, where they’d taken to entering and exiting the house.

  Her dad let himself in, but Immy remained outside, pretending to tidy up her shoes on the rack. It wasn’t until he was out of sight that she dared to look up. The tree was waiting for her, brooding in the blocked-out sky. It was almost as if it were biding its time, tapping its long roots, counting out the seconds until her birthday. Her stomach flip-flopping, she stared at the two knots in its trunk.

  She’ll take your daughters . . . one, two, three.

  The song in her dream was meant to scare her off. It had been a warning. A warning from the tree. They shouldn’t have rented the house.

  Immy knew then that she had to find out what had really happened to those two girls.

  She had to find out the truth.

  Or she’d be next.

  While Immy’s mum went to work, Immy and her dad spent the rest of the week doing nothing much at all. Her dad kept saying he “really should see to the garden,” then never did. After a few days, Immy’s mum started making him lists of things to do, and he’d try to do some of those things (or even one) each day. Whenever he’d done something, Immy would tick it off the list and make sure her mother saw it that evening.

  “I really should see to the garden,” Immy’s dad said over lunch on Friday.

  Immy looked up from her sandwich. She thought of the list. On it were only three items. These were: look into Paris trip, cut up vegetables for dinner, and weed the lawn. Immy had already cut up the vegetables herself and ticked the task off. If her mother thought her father had done it, well, what did that matter?

  “Let’s weed the lawn after lunch,” she said to her dad, even though she (a) didn’t want to go into the garden and (b) didn’t want to spend time with her dad. “I’ll help.”

  “Good idea.” He nodded.

  The moment her dad had finished his sandwich, Immy slid his plate out from under him. “I’ll do the dishes,” she said. “You go outside and start the weeding.”

  She rinsed their plates and stacked the dishwasher as fast as she could, hoping her dad had started the small job that should take only twenty minutes or so.

  She’d almost finished when she glanced out the kitchen window to see him sitting on the small brick wall next to the shed, staring off into space, one single weed clasped in his hand. She watched him for a full minute. Then a minute more. He didn’t move.

  Pushing the dishwasher door closed, Immy moved to the kitchen bench and picked up a small rectangular cardboard box. She opened it and pulled out two silver-foil packets. And then she counted her father’s pills. There were twelve. There’d been fourteen when he was in the shower this morning, and now there were two fewer. So he was taking his pills. Why weren’t they working? He’d been taking them for three weeks now. Pushing the silver packets back inside and closing the box, she pushed it away from her. She grabbed a large garbage bag from under the sink and made her way to the French doors.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked her dad from the doorway.

  “What? Oh, nothing. Weeds, I suppose.”

  Immy glanced up at the tree, which menaced the garden, its branches radiating dark thoughts.

  Last night she’d started her own list. A secret list. A list of how she might be able to find out more about the tree and stop herself from becoming the third girl who was fated to disappear. She knew she’d have to be careful. If her parents found out she was even thinking about the tree and her birthday, they’d freak out. That’s why she’d used her father’s phone in secret. But if there wasn’t anything much out there on the internet, where else could she get information? Old newspapers, she supposed. Or maybe people who had lived here when the last girl had gone missing, though they’d be quite old now — like Jean. The school librarian might know something as well.

  Her dad nearby, Immy felt brave enough to venture over the threshold and make her way closer to the tree. Two steps, three, four, five . . . if she’d reached out with her hand, she could have touched the trunk. Not that she was going to do that. Looking up, her eyes met the tree’s branches, jet-black against the sky. As she stared, she could have sworn the branches began to move toward her face. The sensation began to make her feel faint and she shook her head, breaking the spell. It must have been an optical illusion. At least, she hoped it was.

  Immy opened the garbage bag in her hand and went over to place it in the middle of the patchy lawn. She then went back to where she’d been before, stooped, and pulled a few random weeds out from the ground beneath the tree. Seeing her efforts, her dad got up and pulled a few more as well, and they began throwing them into a pile on top of the garbage bag.

  It didn’t take long before they’d developed a kind of rhythm. Bend down, pluck out the weed, throw the weed . . . bend down, pluck out the weed, throw the weed . . .

  Not hearing the rhyme or noticing anything strange, Immy became braver, circling the tree, getting rid of the weeds, short and tall, as she went. She’d gone about halfway around when she noticed some slashes in the tree’s thick trunk. She paused for a moment, a weed in her hand, and then took the few steps over that she needed to see them more clearly. She stood on tiptoes and inspected the deep, rough scars. The world seemed to quiet as she concentrated on the marks.

  “Dad,” she called out, her gaze not moving. “Come and look at this.”

  “What’s that, love?” She could hear him walking over to her and then heard a noise, as if he’d tripped on something. He swore under his breath, but she didn’t turn. “Best watch out for that. There’s a bit of a dip underneath the grass. There might have been another tree here once,” he said when he reached her. He leaned in to see what Immy was looking at. “Hmmm. Looks like someone tried to cut it down at one time or another. Maybe that’s why it’s so cranky with the world.”

  The stillness ended with a gust of wind, the tree bristling with the insult.

  Immy stepped back, holding her breath.

  Her dad went off to pull a few more weeds.

  But Immy stayed, staring at the place where, long ago, someone had taken a
n ax and attempted to slay the tree. Hack, hack, hack; she could see exactly where they’d tried to stop it in its tracks. Brutally. Cruelly.

  Immy remembered the teacher’s words from the playground. It’s silly talk like yours that makes people destroy things, she had said. Was that what had happened? Believing the tree might take their daughter, too, someone who lived here had tried to chop it down?

  The sound of her father throwing weeds into the bag behind her continued as Immy stared upward at the tree’s murky branches. She started to feel faint again. Almost like this was a dream. She took a step forward, not because she wanted to but because she felt she had to. She felt like the tree was drawing her closer, just like it had the first time she entered Lavender Cottage. “What happened?” she asked it. “What happened to you?” Her fingers reached out tentatively to touch the coarse gashes. They hovered above the bark for a moment, uncertain.

  Immy was just about to make contact when something like a spark of electricity zapped her, making her pull her hand back sharply. She sucked her breath in, suddenly alert.

  It was another clear warning from the tree.

  Stay away, girl.

  Stay away from me.

  The first day of school started off fine. Immy had guessed it would be this way. During lesson times, things would be okay. Yes, there were only four girls in her class (those girls — Caitlyn, Zara, Erin — and herself), but during lessons, there was work to do. Everyone was busy. A teacher was present.

  It would be lunchtime that would be the hard part.

  As the class trekked toward the hall, she tried to fall back and make sure she was as far away from Caitlyn, Zara, and Erin as possible. To make things even worse, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do. They had something called school dinners here. Each week the parents paid money, and the school served lunch to the students. That didn’t happen back at home.