Night of shades
It was as if her knowledge of the Thing that lived in the tree kept shifting away, hiding behind other thoughts so she wouldn’t see it clearly.
“Anyway,” she said, before Jake accused her of going away someplace without him again. “This is the story I heard.”
She took a deep breath, and began, “There was a hill just off the center of town, a lonely and inexplicable hill, a hill that should not be for it blighted an otherwise perfectly flat and reasonable landscape . . .”