Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

The light was still on. “Great,” he said, gazing down upon the fallen Christmas tree. Although it had slouched so long toward the window, when it fell, it went over backwards, across the middle of the living room floor. Ornaments everywhere. The useless water in the metal base drained onto the carpet. The dry needle fallout was epic. He looked at the dog. The dog looked at him. Henry stepped forward and kicked the tree. It shuddered, dropping more of itself. He shook his head and looked across the room. The TV was off.

He and Bothwell searched each of the downstairs rooms, to be on the safe side. Then he made a pot of coffee. He decided not to wait for morning but to dive in, dismantle the thing, and get it out of the house. While the coffee brewed, he cleared the dining room table and took another look at the remains. Leaning against the archway that led to the living room, he told himself he’d just have to get his head around it. He went and poured a cup and came back and sat on the couch. The cat, Turtle, was at the other end. It struck Henry that she’d probably sat through the entire misadventure – the tree weaving, gasping, calling out for help, and then crashing to the floor. He remembered she was sitting there in the same position when he’d lumbered down the stairs. “Please, don’t get too worked up over anything,” he said to the cat. Turtle looked at him and then stood. At that moment, the TV came on. Henry lurched and grunted in surprise. The cat jumped down from the couch, and as soon as it left, he saw that it had been laying on the remote.

His hands found the needles sharper than when the tree was alive. He got the rubber gloves from beneath the kitchen sink and put them on. The work proved exhausting, all that bending and the often tedious exercise of untwining an ornament hanger from a branch. At times he had to wrestle the dead weight of the thing, rolling it to get to ornaments crushed beneath it, lifting it to open the sharp branches so he could reach in and rescue the angel from where she’d fallen into the belly of the beast. “Don’t forget the icicles,” he heard Mero say in his mind. Plastic icicles, thin as pipe cleaners, perfectly transparent. There were 6. After locating 4, he said, “Fuck it,” and gave up.

At sunrise of a bitter, overcast day, Henry dragged the tree through the dining room and kitchen, out the sliding door. The wind was howling fiercely, but he left his jacket inside and was dressed only in a T-shirt. He slid the corpse over the already fallen snow. It left a wake of brown needles. Depositing it next to the garden shed, he took a few steps back. He’d made sure earlier to slip on his boots. He charged forward and kicked the tree. His boot got under the trunk and lifted it into the air. His next move was a crushing stomp to the mid-section, but when he brought his foot down, the bad knee of his other leg went out. He slipped on the snow and fell.

After sweeping and vacuuming and moving the coffee table and chairs back in front of the window, he lay down on the couch and grabbed the remote. Not even ten AM and he found Jack Palance in black and white, The House of Numbers . He maneuvered the couch pillow under his head, and then closed his eyes and let the sound of the twins and prison plot lead him to sleep. He woke at 4:15 pm and looked to the window. The sky was dark gray. He heard the wind. Before he got up and looked, he knew it was snowing, big flakes angling down from the west.

He went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Still dazed from sleep, he leaned against the kitchen sink, staring out the window. He watched the empty branches bend, and watched in the distance across the field as the world filled up with snow. “The new ice age,” he said to his reflection. His gaze shifted to the garden shed and looked and blinked and looked again. He leaned over the kitchen sink to get his glasses closer to the glass. For a moment, he went numb, even his knee stopped aching.

This time he put on his jacket and hat and mittens. He called for Bothwell and they went out the sliding door. The snow was on its way to becoming ice, and the wind was fierce. Covering his face with his arm, he made his way toward the garden shed. He believed the tree was there but covered by a small drift. When he reached the spot where he’d dumped it, he turned his back to the wind and looked down. There was a rise in the snow. He toed the white mound but felt nothing beneath it. A minute later, he’d cleared the spot, pushing the snow aside with his boots, and was staring at frozen ground.

“Where?” he said to Bothwell and although he laughed, a current of fear cut through the confusion. He looked up quickly and scanned the darkening yard to see if the thing had been blown away. The wind on the plains was strong enough. Over the summer it had lifted a glass topped table on the patio and flipped it, turning its top to jagged chips of ice. He didn’t see any sign of the corpse in the distance, so he started back into the orchard to check the shadows beneath the trees. He and the dog walked all around the property but found nothing, save that he’d at some point left the garage light on.

Entering the garage through the side door, he found instant relief from the snow. Bothwell followed him in. He looked out over the stacks of unopened boxes he’d never unpacked after moving two years earlier. It was all books, thousands of them. He smelled their damp molder, and had a memory flash of the warehouse scene at the end of Citizen Kane . A scrabbling sound followed fast by a desperate squeal came from far back in the hangar-sized structure. The dog barked. Henry flipped the light off and they headed back to the house.

Later, in his office, sipping coffee, sitting in front of his computer, he leaned back and took a break from the irritation of his writing. His thoughts wandered and then he pictured the Christmas tree miles away in the dark, slouching through drifts to the edge of route 70 and sticking out a branch. “Cali or the North Pole?” Henry considered the desiccated pine’s journey west – the truckers, the rest stops, the mountain vistas until that reverie was interrupted by a horrendous clank that shuddered through the house from somewhere below. Bothwell leaped up from where he lay near the door, his ears at attention.

Henry wished he’d brought the baton upstairs. Still, the noise didn’t sound like someone forcing a door or window. It had that unmistakable sense of finality to it, like the God of trouble had smote some major appliance once and for all. “Burst pipe? Water heater? Something electric?” He went through a list as he limped down stairs, the dog leading the way. The lights in the hallway, the living room, dining room, kitchen all came on when he flipped their switches, and he was grateful for that. He looked around to see if Turtle had knocked over a vase or picture frame, slid a glass off the counter in the bathroom, but for once the cat was innocent. The porch door and sliding door in the back were both locked. He ran the water to check for a lack of pressure, but the flow was steady and strong.

The dog followed him around the kitchen as he searched for the flashlight. “This is unparalleled bullshit,” he said to Bothwell, who seemed sympathetic yet could barely hide his excitement over the promise of action at such a late hour. It took Henry twenty minutes, going through the various kitchen junk drawers, checking each at least twice, before finding the flashlight. It took him another ten minutes to find batteries. The beam it emitted when finally operational was a vague pretense of light. He found the baton where he’d left it in the living room and then went into the hallway, to the basement door. He opened it. “Forsake all hope,” he said to the dog.

Standing at the top of those worn steps leading into darkness an image of the tree returned to him, and this time it wasn’t headed west. This time, it had never left. A reek of dampness and subtle mildew rolled up and engulfed him. He thought of the basement cliché of horror movies as he flipped on the light switch and took his first step. Turtle appeared out of nowhere and brushed past him, a black blur diving down the stairs. “No,” he yelled after the cat, but that was pointless.