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running more obsessively through her mind.  The quicken-tree, yet another name, for the tree meant “life giving”.  Sprigs of rowan, which she now tossed by hand all over the grounds, were once hung on door posts as protection against evil spirits.
     
    Also, known as wiggin-trees, her mind swirled with all the little nicknames she used to find annoying but now necessary referred to Wiccan, meaning witch.
     
    Could such a harmless looking thing really be associated with magic, evil spirits and more?  Was there more to the universe than she could learn in any of her books?
     
    Lydia stared at the sky.  It was so big.  So vast.  Was everything they told her in the past 24 hours really true?  Was everything that brought her to Cotter, Arkansas a reality? She was warned one day something like this could happen.  Had that day finally arrived?
     
    That sky was so big and it went on and on forever.
     
    A nineteenth century horticultural writer Henry Phillips referred to the rowan in his writings as “Sylvia Florifera” in the year 1823, he shrouded the tree in a world of mysticism and magic. In the present, we lived in a world where we chose to see the reality before us and blur it as fantasy through technology, popular culture and television.  But Henry Phillips described a day to day life in which the rowan earned a special place.  This included the rowan trees being planted in churchyards and graveyards to prevent the dead from rising out of their graves and back to the living.
     
    “Mam, hey Mam,” the large sweaty man from before, paused to look at the sun that damned him from above, in another attempt to call out to her.
     
    “There’s another one,” he told her, pointing to the sunken cement object in the ground.
     
    She sighed, frustrated, angry and confused, looking down at her notebook again and jotted.
     
    “Okay,” she mumbled.
     
    “I know we’re not supposed to ask,” the man started with the words that would eventually open up an entire pandora’s box in the town of Cotter, “but why are we out here planting all these trees in the graveyard?”
     
    In the humanity only she could identify with she answered matter of factly, “So no one can raise the dead.”
     
    He looked at her quizzically, “You serious?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    He stared at her as if she was a crazy lady, a crazy lady obsessed with trees and near heat stroke from the sun.
     
    “The whole town’s going to find out anyway,” she told him, “they’ve raised a man from the dead in Cotter and he’s gotten away.  He’s bound to come for more of the dead.  These trees might be the only thing to stop him.”
     
    “You serious?” He repeated.
     
    “Yes,” she affirmed, “Come on we’ve got ten more cemeteries to get to before night fall.”
     

Chapter 7- The Unexpected Visitor
     
    Gilbert and Ivan Chuttle were still running, their house now close in sight.  Both boys gasping for air, stealing a glimpse behind them for the man from hell, back and forth the routine went.
     
    Gilbert stopped, holding the arm of his younger brother Ivan back.  Gilbert whacked his left ear again.
     
    “Nothing,” he said to Ivan.  He still couldn’t hear anything.
     
    Ivan whacked his right ear and reported back to Gilbert, “Me neither.”
     
    Both boys had lost partial hearing in one ear from the strange noise outside of the building in the woods.
     
    They stared at each other for a moment.  They were only ten and twelve years old but inside they felt older.  They had grown up that day in an unfamiliar way.  This was no rite of passage.  This was aging that came from knowing too much.
     
    They listened for footsteps.  There were none.  They looked for the man from hell.  He wasn’t there.
     
    “What happened out there?” Gilbert asked, stumped.
     
    “I don’t know Gil.  I just don’t know.”
     
    “What are we gonna tell our folks?” Gilbert asked.
     
    “The truth,” Ivan