Nita hugged herself a little against the cold. “You know… your branches are lovely.”
“You’re going to tell me,” Filif said, “that the frost and snow are prettier than all the ornaments and garlands.”
Nita let out a breath. “Yeah,” she said, “sounds like cliche city, doesn’t it.”
“Most cliches have at least some truth in them,” Filif said; “that’s how they get that way…”
He sounded contented, though, and cheerful. “It’s good to recognize a challenge when it comes along,” Filif said after a moment. “It’s even better to pass it.”
Nita nodded. She knew the feeling. “You know what?” Filif said. “I think I’ll put on my ornaments and stand out here just a little while more.”
Nita glanced around. “Okay,” she said. “But better leave the lights with the mochteroof inside. You’re outside the shield here, and you don’t want to attract any undue attention…”
“All right.”
“We’re all crashing back in Dairine’s puptent,” she said, “so when you’re done here…”
“I’ll be back.”
Nita ran a hand through some of Filif’s outermost fronds and headed back inside, feeling, for some reason, a little uneasy. It wasn’t really until she was down in Dairine’s puptent again, pulling a throw over herself in the TV-lit dimness, that she came up with a reason why. Because defiance, when issued, is always noticed…
5:
In The Bleak Midwinter
The sound of footsteps was what slowly woke her up. Nothing but rugs in here, she thought blearily. Thick. Soft. What’s crunching? Somebody drop the popcorn?
Nita yawned and blinked and realized suddenly that she was standing outside next to Kit’s house, in the snow. It was very dark. The light from the streetlight down at the corner didn’t reach this far, and the lights of the nearby houses were all off: even the ones that had Christmas lights on them had them turned off this time of night. It was still clouded over, but there was a strange dark pinkish shading on the clouds above.
Well, this is unusual, Nita thought. Like city light. But above the clouds, not below. It was also unusual that she wasn’t feeling any cold, even though she was standing out in the wintry night in nothing but pajamas and a bathrobe and her bedroom slippers. From nearby she could hear the crunching noise again, like somebody walking on a sidewalk that’d been salted.
“Shit,” somebody said: a male voice. “What’s that?”
The voice was coming from the direction of the street, down at the end of Kit’s driveway, and whoever was speaking was turned toward her: she could just make out the dark shape down that way. A second or so later, another came stumbling along the snowy sidewalk to join it.
“There’s something there looking at us,” said another voice. “See it?”
The voice was thick and slurred and angry. Something about the sound of it brought the hair up on the back of Nita’s neck, made her want to reach back in her mind for the shield-spell that she’d developed a long time ago to protect herself from the depredations of bullies.
“One of them out here now,” said a second voice, slightly lighter and higher than the other, but just as slurred. “All by themselves in the middle of the night. Hey! What the fuck you staring at?”
That was when Nita realized that she was dreaming. This had been happening with increasing frequency of late. Mostly it happened that a dream would suddenly turn entirely too rationaclass="underline" dialogue would start making too much sense. Then Nita would know, I’ve gone lucid, and she’d start paying attention, or telling Bobo to.
Now she flushed briefly hot with fear… then said to herself, No. They can’t hurt me. This is my dream. But Nita fleetingly wondered if the two dark parka-clad shapes, one a little taller than the other, knew that.
“I said what’re you staring at?”
Nita stood still, said nothing, just watched. The two shapes at the end of the driveway staggered against each other. “Man, too much of that beer,” said one of them. “Gotta get Dad to buy a better brand.”
“No such thing as too much. Not around here. Stupid place, stupid fucking—“ One of them staggered again as he tried to regain his balance. “Rude,” he said in Nita’s direction, “that’s rude when you don’t answer when somebody asks you something nicely. Gonna get your fucking guts punched out.”
The two of them lurched together again, rebounded, and started coming up the driveway, pushing their way through the six inches or so of new snow that had fallen since a car last used the driveway. As they got closer Nita recognized the two staggering, approaching shapes. Oh great. The Terror Twins from next door. She reached for the shield-spell on her charm bracelet: then realized she didn’t have the bracelet on. Doesn’t matter, I know that one by heart. They staggered closer. Nita raised her hands to either side, got ready to say the words—
But as they got even closer she realized, even in this darkness, how blank their eyes were, and the way they weren’t focusing on her at all, but on something past her. They didn’t see her. My dream, Nita thought as they walked right at her, and then right through her. She could smell the beer on them as they passed through the space her dream-self occupied.
“Hey,” one of them said: Bobby, she thought, by the lower voice. “Not somebody. Something. Look, it’s shiny.”
“Still feels like something looking at us,” said Ronnie, the younger one, squinting at something ahead of them. Nita turned to see. “Creepy. …Wha’d those smartasses do now? Look, they left their tree outside.”
“Why’d they do that when it’s decorated?”
A chill that had nothing to do with the night or the snow ran up and down Nita’s spine. No! No no no no! Fil, get out of here!
But the quiet tree-shape, wound about with garlands, draped with tinsel, glittering indistinctly where it stood in the slightly drifted snow next to the garage, paid her no mind, did nothing at all. Bobby and Ronnie trudged over to it, trying to be quiet and failing utterly.
“Why’d they leave it out like this? Stupid.”
“Trying to keep it fresh longer, maybe.”
“Still stupid. Somebody might steal it.”
“Yeah.” There was a nasty snicker.
“Or torch it.” Nita heard a click, saw a lighter flare bright, then go out again. “Teach them to make noise, spoil other people’s Christmas. You hear the fucking racket out of them before?”
“Woke me up.”
The deeper voice swore again. “Assholes, all the cutesy holiday crap they spray around. All the time getting in your face with the carols and the family-values thing.” The sound of someone hawking, spitting in the snow. “You hear them in there tonight? Couldn’t hear yourself think, all the singing, some foreign freaks or something singing along. And now they leave this thing out here like nobody’s going to touch it—”
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.