Laughter. “Torch it. Bet it’d burn real fast.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
One of them put out a hand. “But wait, what if that geek kid’s got a webcam looking at it or something?”
“Who cares. Pull up your hood, hide your face, what’re they gonna do? It’s still snowing, an hour or two and our tracks’ll be covered, nobody’ll know who we are or where we went.”
The lighter flared again.
“No, wait,” said the higher voice. “This tinsel, this other crap’s got fire retardant on it. Pull it off first, it’ll burn better.”
Hands reached out, grabbed loops of the garland, strands of the tinsel, pulled—
That was when the tree moved.
Nita saw Bobby and Ronnie reel back in shock at the sudden movement. And then they staggered back further as they realized the tree had lights, lights that looked like eyes, eyes that were glaring at them. Every one of these burned a dark and baleful red, a more concentrated version of the ruddy bloody light lowering above the clouds. Nita saw how the tree was now moving toward them as they backed up, and how it abruptly seemed much larger than it should have been: much broader, much taller, like something about to consciously topple onto them, massive, unavoidable. Shadow wreathed around it like fog, spreading, shutting them in, blotting out even the faint rose-tinged radiance of the snow. And from the depths of the shadow, a terrible voice spoke, it seemed, directly into each one’s heart.
Who’s. Touching. My. Decorations?!
The two parka-clad shapes collapsed onto the snow and froze there.
The shadow seemed to get deeper around them, and the night colder, as if the two would-be vandals had been snatched out of real life into some dark and deadly impossibility that had been lurking unseen on their doorstep.
I know what you are, the tree growled. It was an angry voice, full of power, and wild in a way that suggested that power might be turned loose at any moment. And I know the one you serve. You can do me no harm. Of more concern is what harm may come to you.
The Terror Twins lay huddling and shaking there on the snow, arms over their heads, wanting desperately to run away, not daring to move. Nita stood a few yards away from this and regarded the scene in wonder.
The angry voice spoke again, this time with more restraint: and the restraint was in its way even more terrifying than the power alone, for it implied what could happen if it slipped. Yet the One requests us to deal equably even with such as you, in hopes that the one you serve may sooner find Its way home at last. And I am reliably informed that mercy is valued even more highly than usual at this time of year.
Indeed the echo of voices singing “Peace on Earth and mercy mild” (one of them apparently Bill Murray’s) could be heard faintly all around, as if leaking from the playback of recent additions to the soundtrack of someone’s mind. Nita smiled to herself even as she shivered a little, considering once more—for she’d had it brought to her attention by Dairine in an informal debrief of events surrounding Filif’s visit to their house the previous year—that his toughness under pressure wasn’t to be taken for granted.
So perhaps, the darkly towering shape said, in honor of this season, you will be allowed to leave here unharmed. But should you ever… ever… consider such actions against another’s state of being or place of dwelling again, you will hear me speaking to you again. And I will not be as pleasant with you. We will not be as pleasant with you.
And the back yard was abruptly full of trees. It was a forest, sudden, deep, thick, dark, frightening in the way that great forests have been since the earliest times—that sense that in the darkness, wild things, dangerous things are looking at you, seeing you though they themselves cannot be seen. Except here, they could. Here the darkness had eyes, hundreds of them, thousands, staring, glaring, in every shade of angry, hungry red. The snow under the mist at their half-seen feet was bloody with that light, and the mist curled pink and warm like blood in water.
Be warned by us, therefore. Depart now into your own place— And suddenly the tone broke, shifted to a roar of fury. And be better!
The darkness surged closer, full of eyes, roaring. The two terrified shapes staggered to their feet, fled around the side of the house next door and (from the sound of it) nearly broke its side door down getting back inside.
And in Kit’s yard, the trees turned their attention to Nita, as if awaiting a reaction.
“My cousins—” she said, and bowed to them. “For your intervention, my thanks!”
All that multifarious rustling darkness swayed, bowing back. And then they were gone, and there was Filif all by himself, glittering ever so faintly and somehow managing to look quite innocent.
Nita folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. “Filif…!”
He rustled all his branches, glittering more brightly as the clouds above them thinned just a little, and the Moon, starting slowly to edge out of its coppery umber with the end of totality, cast a little more light on the scene. “Too harsh?” he said.
She laughed softly, went to hug him. “Oh, Fil! I almost wet myself.”
“Um. Is that good?”
“You have no idea.”
They laughed together for a few moments. “One thing, though,” Filif said. “Are you physical at the moment?”
“Uh,” Nita said, stepping back and looking at her fingers as she wiggled them. “Not sure.”
“Then this situation might wisely be considered paradoxical,” he said, “and you ought to retire until our respective states of existence are back in sync.”
“Breakfast time?” Nita said.
“Sounds good,” Filif said.
And Nita brushed her hand through his fronds and headed back toward sleep, glancing only once over her shoulder to see the shape behind her settle back into the snow and go back to glittering softly in the moonlight.
This, she thought as things went dark around her again, is the best job in the world…!
6:
I'll Be Home For Christmas
The kitchen and dining room area at Kit’s house could in Nita’s experience feel fairly full sometimes just with Kit and his sisters. This morning it was rather fuller than usual when Dairine’s puptent emptied out.
Everyone was in bathrobes or pajamas. Everyone was ravenous (despite having stuffed themselves with popcorn the night before. (“It’s a conundrum,” Kit’s pop said, going back for a second bowl of oatmeal.) Some parties had opted for cooked breakfasts: to take the weight off Kit’s mama, Nita was officiating at the pancake end of things, and was presently making a third batch of batter. The cereals were being hit particularly hard, and when Helena got home for the holidays Nita knew she was going to complain bitterly about the loss of her stash of Grape Nuts—apparently Marcus had never heard of the stuff before and had fallen deeply in love with it. The cornflakes were vanishing down Matt about twice as fast as the Rice Krispies were evaporating in front of Darryl. And Ronan was favoring a box of Lucky Charms with an utterly scandalized expression, and shaking it at anybody who'd hold still. “Nothing to do with us,” he was saying to anyone who’d listen. “Nothing whatsoever. Shamrocks have three leaves! Who is this gobshite in the hat?”
While all this went on around her, Kit’s mama was sitting back in her chair at the dining room table, sipping coffee and scrolling through messages on her phone. Kit’s pop was reading the paper. Off to one side, Sker’ret reared up at the edge of the table and looked longingly at the box of Cheerios from which Kit was dumping the remainder into his bowl. “Is that finished?”
Kit handed him the box. “Sorry, Sker’.”
“Don’t be,” Sker’ret said, and promptly ate it.
Kit’s pop watched this speculatively but without comment. Nita, in the kitchen, glanced at Kit and smiled a little. They’re getting the hang of this…
Looks like it.
Kit’s pop turned a page in the paper and frowned absently at the contents. “So about all that noise in the middle
of the night…” he said conversationally.
“Noise?” said Kit.
“Some kind of racket outside, seems like,” Dairine said. “I missed it. Must have been asleep.”
“Got a text from the hospital this morning,” Kit’s mama said, completely straightfaced. “The boys from next door turned up in the ER at four AM or thereabouts. Alcohol poisoning, apparently: their blood alcohol was well up, anyway. Might have been drugs too, though the tox screens apparently didn’t show anything.”
“Do tell,” said Dairine.
“Yes. Seems they were babbling about giant demon trees with a million eyes.”
Everybody turned to glance thoughtfully at the Christmas tree in the living room. The Christmas tree stretched its limbs gently, causing all the tinsel on it to ripple and a few ornaments to clunk gently together, and settled back into its big bucket of rooting compound again.
“You fall asleep with the wrong movie channel on,” Nita said, “there’s no telling what kind of dreams you might have. Especially if you’d been drinking.”
“Mmm,” said Kit’s mama, taking another drink of her coffee.
“I wonder what they’ll do now,” Kit’s pop said.
Kit shook his head, finishing his cereal. “First guess?” he said. “Leave everybody’s Christmas decorations strictly alone after this. Maybe the mailboxes'll even catch a break.”
In the living room, Filif rustled. “That was more or less the injunction…”
“Well,” Nita said “you didn’t absolutely mandate it.“
“No,” Filif said. “That would probably have required more power than I was willing to expend at that particular moment. And psychotropic wizardries do require heavy energy expenditure, typically to prevent them being misused as much as anything else.” He rustled his boughs reflectively, and even the non-blinking lights twinkled. “Let’s just consider it… a very strong suggestion.”
Nita laughed softly. “If that was a suggestion,” she said, “remind me not to be around when you order somebody to do something.”
“In any case, an unexpected gift,” Kit’s pop said.
His mama nodded in agreement. "In the spirit of the season..."
“So what’s on today's agenda?” said Ronan.
“Easygoing holiday sloth," said Kit's pop.
"Continuation of the Christmas Movie Marathon," Dairine said. "Love Actually, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, Home Alone, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and A Christmas Story."
"'You'll shoot your eye out'!" Darryl crowed (twice).
"Carols this evening,” said Kit’s mama. “You are all invited. You,” she said, pointing at Ronan, “are required. As many of you as want to come along… we’ll find room for you.” She looked over at Sker’ret. “Wonder if we could disguise you somehow?”
In a blink or so a young dark-haired guy of about fifteen, in jeans and a jacket and a T-shirt underneath that said LINEAR TIME IS TOO A LIFESTYLE CHOICE was leaning against the table where Sker’ret had been, with a startling purple streak in his shaggy mop. “Probably we can come up with something,” he said.
Kit’s mama and pop stared. Then his mama said, “Can you sing?”, and his pop went back to his paper.
Nita put a last few pancakes on the griddle, checked its temperature, and left them to get on with cooking, then wandered out to the living room. Filif watched her come, and rustled his branches a little. “So has this gone as expected?” she said.
“Better,” he said, all his eyes shining.
“Got it all figured out yet?”
Filif laughed at her. “First impressions, perhaps, and admittedly superficial. …Though there are some similarities to the Outlier’s Time. …Joy. The memory of joy. Loss, and the memory of it.”
Nita breathed out, looking at the one ornament that shone like Earth at its full. “And getting past it,” Nita said, very low.
“Or getting through it,” Filif said. “Does anyone ever get ‘past’? I wonder. Why would you want to pass by old joy, or sweet memories that now cause you pain, without greeting them, as if they were just someone in a crowd at the Crossings? It seems rude.”
Nita nodded. “Sounds true.”
They were quiet together for a moment. Finally Filif said, “You have to come up to the Nightless Days festival with me some time,” he said. “The family will want to meet you. More concretely than last night, anyway.”
“I’d really like that,” Nita said.
“So would I, coz,” Filif said. “As family can plainly become extended in mysterious ways. Doubtless the Powers’ plan for us, meant to compensate for the ways our schedules become otherwise disrupted.”
“It’s so true,” Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.
“Meantime,” Filif said. “About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask. How long does this go on?”
Nita was just opening her mouth when Kit’s mama put her head through the passthrough.
“Twelve days,” she said.
Filif looked at Nita. “It’ll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,” he said. “Let’s get started.”
Afterword
How Lovely Are Thy Branches has been in progress, on and off, for several years. It was first conceived in 2011 while I was working on the “outline” for the “Christmas special” The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, which appears here; and it was in relation to the outline that HLATB was first mentioned, at the bottom of this post. (Six Tasks is of course itself a somewhat thinly veiled joke about / reference to other Christmas specials such as the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Many thanks again to Bob Schooley for his assistance with matters relating to Hank.)
Much of this work was written to Christmas music, as you might imagine. An informal playlist, referring to the chapter titles:
“We Need A Little Christmas” : The song comes from the musical Mame. Here is Angela Lansbury singing the lead vocal on the original 1966 Broadway cast recording, or here in live performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir & Orchestra. Or here at Amazon.
“Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” A classic written by Sammy Cohn and Jule Styne when they were trapped in Hollywood during a heat wave, and covered since then by almost everybody you can think of. The original Vaughn Monroe recording of the old favorite (probably best known these days for turning up at the end of Die Hard) is here. A smooth-but-upbeat Big Band-era, boogie-woogie-ish rendition by Frank Sinatra is here. For something more recent, try Idina Menzel’s cover.
“O Come, All Ye Faithful”: The English-language restatement of the Latin title Adeste Fideles. Hugely popular in both the English and Latin versions. The “Three Tenors” version here contains both. A 1950s-ish cover by Mario Lanza is here.
“O Tannenbaum”: Dissected here in some detail by the participants. German-language versions worth listening to are this one by Andrea Bocelli — in Italian, with different words again — and this one by Nana Mouskouri....For many North Americans, the best-known version is the famous instrumental from A Charlie Brown Christmas, performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
“Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” (): Traditional, French, and four centuries old, give or take a few decades; possibly better known these days as an instrumental than a vocal (though here is a typical vocal rendition by the Robert Shaw Chorale. One cheerful instrumental cover is this one by Loreena McKennitt.
“In The Bleak Midwinter” (): Relatively new as carols go; written by the poet Christina Rosetti in the 1870s, and set to music by numerous composers including Gustav Holst, who did what’s probably now the best-known setting. Another nice version is this Allison Crowe cover.
“I’ll Be Home For Christmas”: Its original 1943 recording by Bing Crosby (the B side of “White Christmas”) remains a watershed, but many many other artists have covered it over the years. The Frank Sinatra cover is worth hearing, as
is the Michael Bublé one.
Some other minor issues:
Bubble lights: See the incredible patent hoohah surrounding the introduction (and shameless pirating) of these lights here.
The fire kink: The special Christmas tree candle holders that Markus goes back to fetch from his home in (somewhere near Freiburg) can be seen here at the website of that superlative online (and offline) German department store, Manufactum:. Older solutions to the candles-on-the-tree problem can be seen here at OldChristmasTreeLights.com
The Winter Solstice lunar eclipse of 2010: The first time the Solstice coincided with a total lunar eclipse since the 1990s: the next such coincidence will not occur until 2094. Details of this eclipse can be found here at Fred Espenak’s excellent website.
Diane Duane, How Lovely Are Thy Branches
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