O, Christmas Tree
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
and W. H. Pugmire, Jr.

Wilum's and my only other collaboration (so far) appeared in Dennis Etchison's best-selling anthology Cutting Edge. Entitled " 'Pale, Trembling Youth' " it was also chosen for Year's Best Horror. Our earlier tale together was "O, Christmas Tree" published in Gordon Limner's Space & Time, issue fifty, January 1979.
Wilum has written many tales of Sesqua Valley. Some he says he is no longer fond of, but they've given him a lasting reputation among Cthulhu Mythos fans. His stories have appeared in Deathrealm, Grue, Fantasy Macabre, Astral Dimensions, The Diversifier, and others. He has published numerous magazines of his own including Midnight Fantasies and Old Bones. He is currently editor of Tales of Lovecraftian Horror published by Robert Price.

December's icy fingers wound around Richard Whitson, tendrils of a cold-blooded thing probing for any opening in his cloak.
Somewhere distant, carolers weakly defied the weather with the feeble warmth of song. He crossed the nearly deserted depot parking lot, hunching in his sweater and overcoat like a turtle in its shell, and boarded the bus for Sesqua Valley. The bus hesitated a few moments, as if expecting other riders, and then lurched forward in departure.
Although the bus's heaters allowed a modicum of physical comfort, loneliness persisted, a sort of melancholy that had been increasing with the approach of Christmas. We are all poor tortured christs reborn every day; his mind framed the thought as profound and original, but it only made him offer a pitiable smile to his reflection in the window. This year, at least, he would spend the holiday with kin. That thought alone must suffice to thaw his chilly spirit, for all attempts to converse with the driver had met with the grumblings of a confirmed misanthrope-.
After a frustrating monologue, Richard abandoned futile efforts at conversation with the driver's broad back, abandoning hope of human contact. He relied instead on the splendor of the northwest countryside to ease his aching spirit, finding comfort in dark evergreens and winter sky.
After some twenty kilometers of monotonous beauty, a hypnotic weariness overtook the lone traveler. The sky remained an even, misty gray; yet to his dulled senses it suddenly came to harbor grave foreboding. He shuddered more firmly than he had from the cold and blinked attempted slumber from his eyes, searching for some brooding presence o'er the mountains, finding nothing to explain his mood.
Before he could apprehend any source of his irrational anxiety, a deeper feeling engulfed him, one of drifting through the vacuum of an infinite cosmos. And he imagined, or dreamt, the driver with malignant eyes glaring forward into the still gray mists of their quiet, fathomless journey.
Richard jerked upright in his seat, slowly aware that he had dozed. His heart slowed to a normal pace and he reoriented himself in the safe, sane surroundings of wakeful reality.
The bus entered the valley. Above thick evergreens, silhouetted by a vast scarlet sunset, mountains rose in awesome magnificence. Particularly striking were two jagged peaks like wings folded upon some gigantic demon's shoulders.
The majesty of Sesqua Valley was dizzying. He closed his eyes, laid back his head, and would have enjoyed a more restful sleep had the bus not come to a jolting halt.
The sky had grown dark, arrayed with formless shadow. From the bus window he saw, in the distance, a huge, century-old house whose architecture predated anything commonly found in the Northwest. It was certainly a place to cherish in this sad age, when houses barely last their young owners the time it takes to pay a mortgage. Yet it was deserted and in disrepair, lower windows boarded up and upper ones glowering blind and broken. A large crooked oak, devoid of leaves in this season, had been allowed to grow so close to that antique residence that its trunk had damaged a portion of the building. The welfare of the tree apparently mattered more than the house itself.
With his father dead, there was nothing to steal him back to city life: no family, no job worth saving. As he pulled his two suitcases from the rack above his head, he was already considering the renovation of that old mansion. He had, after all, a small inheritance that would allow him a new start almost anywhere. Here, at least, he had kin, and after the lonely despair of the last two years, and his father's wasting agony, the discovery that his grandfather lived took on an importance of inordinate proportion. Even the eerie countenance of the nighted valley seemed a welcoming aspect to the gloom crouching in his heart.
He stepped off the bus and its door hissed closed behind him. Before, a lamppost swarmed by moths illuminated a faded sign reading SESQUA DEPOT. The depot was a single building that served more often as the grocery and gas station. It was closed at this hour, and unlit. A lone figure approached from its shadows, a man Richard recognized from a photograph as his grandfather, older, of course, than the picture had admitted.
Nathan Whitson looked quite dignified in his overcoat and cap and neatly trimmed white whiskers, clasping his cane, the ends of his scarf moving with a breeze. The old gentleman stepped forward as the bus skittered away like a rabbit from a hound. Richard stood in a cloud of mist and exhaust, his pale expression filled with hopeful expectation.
His grandfather's handshake was firm, and warm for all the bitter cold around.
"You're your father's image," the old man said in greeting, his smile the first pleasant thing in Richard's long day. He took one of his grandson's bags and led the way to an old pickup truck.
All along the short ride to a cottage tucked into the woods alongside a calm black lake, the old man asked after news that betrayed an appalling ignorance of life outside the valley. Richard instantly liked dying gentle-mannered oldster and feeling that shadow drawn out of his heart. Why, he even found occasion to laugh!

Over a morning repast of hens' eggs and home-baked bread, they spoke of many things. Eventually the conversation came around to the subject both had been avoiding.
"Your father never liked this valley, Sesqua," the old man told Richard. There was a sadness, but no bitterness, in his mild tone. Richard was still hard-pressed to understand the callousness of his father in never allowing the lad the knowledge and benefits of a grandfather.
"It's an old town. Families have lived here for numerous generations; pioneers considered it their stroke of luck, discovering this fertile valley somehow never claimed by the Indians, who elsewhere were peaceful competitors but still competitors. None questioned this fortune; none asked why Indians shunned a place abundant with game and rich of soil. They just settled in, and it is mostly those same old families who reside on this land.
"Outsiders, for the most part, find the people clannish and unfriendly. They soon leave, just as your father did when he thought himself mature enough to take care of his own life. An old Sesquan like myself finds it difficult to settle elsewhere, the roots and psychic ties run so deep. I tried city life when I married your grandmother. But after she passed on (your father was a wisp of eight years at the time) I longed to return home. Here I've stayed all those years since. And so have all my clan before me."
Nathan's face took on a curious expression, one that caused the young man's heart to beat faster. His grandfather hinted at a mysterious quality about life in Sesqua, and there was the faintest note of urgency when he reached across the table to rest a withered hand on his grandson's wrist, saying: "I had feared the Whitson line would die out of Sesqua with my passing. But now..."
Richard helped his grandfather clear the table of breakfast dishes and insisted on doing the washing. As he performed this domestic activity, be watched out the window over the sink, absorbing the magic of country life. Beneath the window, chickens clucked and scratched at the morning's feed.
A squirrel clung to the bark of a tree, planning her maneuver past the rooster to the spilled grain. Across the small lake no other houses were visible -- only a wall of hemlock spruce with their ragged tips bowed in the manner of prayer or obeisance to the snow-clad mountains beyond, all reflected perfectly in the flat, still waters.
Later, when Nathan returned from outside chores, rubbing hands together and blowing at his chaffed fingers, Richard was invited into the sanctuary of his grandfather's little study. There was a fragrance of aromatic pipe tobaccos mingled with the more familiar scents of spruce and cedar burning in me fireplace. The furniture was slightly dusty, except for the wide deck, which seemed regularly in use.
Old portrait photographs hung in glassed frames upon one wall, some of Richard's father as a boy, more than one of a frail and attractive woman he supposed to be his grandmother. Two walls were built with bookshelves, on which nearly every centimeter of space was packed to capacity. These books dealt with such widely varied topics as North American Indian lore, European and Chinese mythology, archeology, local and Northwest history, and the histories of Puget Sound and the near Pacific including, it appeared, some carefully bound original manuscripts regarding early Northwest expeditions.
Habit made it inconceivable that Nathan could relax behind his desk in that plush seat without a well-chosen pipe of tobacco. While he indulged in all the intricacies of this pleasant, personal tradition, Richard stood regarding the titles on the shelves. Many were in French and Spanish medieval script and looked centuries old. He feared to touch them lest their ancient leather crack and the pages fall to dust.
Pleased by his grandson's obvious interest, Nathan pointed out a particular tome (by no means the oldest) and had it brought to the desk. It was in relatively modem French, and Richard marveled at his grandfather's multilingual reading ability.
"The French explorer Maurice de Reau penned these pages in his own light script in 1794 -- a decade before Jefferson financed the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Northwest wilderness." He chuckled as he set his spectacles upon his nose and turned through the brittle yellow manuscript in search of a favorite passage. "Poor Maurice! He might have been more beloved by later geographers and historians had they not found him too Poloesque in his prose; as it is, the museums with their decrepit scholars likely wouldn't do so much as catalog one more of these fanciful documents. This, his last imaginative chronicle, never made it back to King Louis (who anyway had been guillotined the year before!), who had commissioned Maurice's services, intending, perhaps, to extend the vast boundaries of the French Louisiana territory. And what became of de Reau, none discovered."
Richard took the armchair beside the oak-top desk and listened intently to his grandfather's translation:

I have come, my cherished and honored King, to a land that makes all the grim occurrences in the Black Forest mere fairy tales passed on by frightened spinsters. There are trees whose sap is blood and toads with the faces of men, pixies with poisonous fangs and laughing devils that fly unseen through the night. There is evidence of all this and other abhorrent truths, for much I've seen with my own eyes and feared for my life more strongly than in any country of my travels. There is an aborigine legend that you would not find so hard to believe if you could but feel the air of this unwholesome place. Two titanic demons (say the natives) met in battle on this unhallowed ground. The Red demon was of goodwill, the White would enslave all humanity, and thus the freedoms of mankind were the stakes. The White demon unleashed all manner of odious beings upon His foe, and still the White was overcome and turned to stone.

Here, Nathan paused to enjoy his fine tobacco and allow the effect of his narrative to impress upon his listener. Though he reiterated the fantasy of this tale, there was nonetheless a tinge of irony in these avowals of falsehood, and Richard was more captivated now than by the ghost stories told on the stormy nights of his childhood. Nathan continued:

The demon-turned-stone the aborigines called Selta, and it is a strange sight to see, a mountain which lends ' credence to the legend. Yet as the story goes, the Red titan could not entirely banish the minions of the White, for they thrive in good proportions and await the day of their master's return from his stone prison. All this is to inform your most gracious majesty that such a land repugnant is not fit for French dominion.

The old man folded the manuscript and rested a hand on its binding. Though he apologized for the terse translation of a passage much more colorful in the original tongue, Richard could not have been more affected. He forced himself to laugh and say, "What would Christmas be without a scary tale?" But the lips of the old man were a hard, serious line within the white, combed whiskers.
The mention of the holiday did restore an iota of cheer, however, and a pleasant change of subject. Richard remarked on the singular lack of holiday decorations in what he'd seen of Sesqua. It seemed hardly the right spirit for a town to let the season pass without a string of colored lights or a tree.
"We celebrate the Yule season differently from folk outside of Sesqua," Nathan explained. "Very few families exchange gifts and we don't succumb to the crass commercialism of wasted electricity and injured trees."
His grandfather went on to explain the spiritual side of Christmas, but Richard had seen as little Christmas spirit as he had decorations. He hadn't really seen the town by day, however, so he let the subject drop as was Nathan's apparent wont. But of one thing he was certain: he would not entertain the thought of another Christmas without a tree.
That afternoon he explored the good-sized cottage. It was not big, but spacious enough for one old man. In the cramped attic, he found what he had secretly been searching for: a box containing Christmas candles, bulbs, and tinsel -- packed away and long forgotten. He hauled them down to his own small room, determined to bring Christmas back to Sesqua. Or at least to Nathan Whitson.

During that pleasurable week before Christ's birthday, Richard came to know his grandfather and the countryside well. Nathan liked to hunt squirrels, partly because they were a nuisance around the cottage and chicken coop, partly because they made a fine stew and augmented the store of meat. Richard accompanied Nathan on more than one of these hunting expeditions around the lake.
The woods were like a beautiful cathedral, the lake just beginning to freeze around the edges with lovely lacy patterns in the ice. For all the forest's comeliness, Richard was unnerved by the constant silence. Even in winter there ought to be the reassuring sounds of some wildlife, but for two days they hadn't seen so much as a pirating squirrel.
"The drop in temperature," Nathan explained, "has sent the hardiest into hibernation."
Richard excused his unease as the result of city rearing.
On one of these outings, Richard became separated from his grandfather and lost sight of the lake. Completely disoriented, he was on the verge of panic as he found his way through the furiously whipping underbrush. The clearing was a relieving sight when he stumbled upon it, for in its perfect symmetry it seemed a sign of habitation. The ground appeared well-trod. Above, the surrounding trees closed out the sky, so only a few of the sun's fingered rays reached the dappled ground.
A perfect circle of mushrooms encompassed the clearing's only other occupant -- a brilliantly colored red spruce half again as tall as Richard. A perfect, squat, widely branched sturdy conifer, Richard was entirely unfamiliar with the type. Seeing it stand there alone in the trampled circle, the lines of a song he'd heard as a lad ran through his mind:

... for gods in their places
wore smiles on their faces
for pagans who danced on Christmas.

A wind chilled his collar. Something unseen skittered through the perimeters of the clearing (and his vision), the first sign of life that day. He did not believe in premonition, but something made him wheel around into a defensive crouch.
It was only Grandfather Whitson who stood there with his low-caliber rifle coddled in his arms. His face looked stern, more so than Richard had previously seen it.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded.
Richard stood from his foolish crouch, all the fear gone out of him like a child found by its mother. "I... I... was lost."
The old man eyed him as coldly as the weather gripped him, but directly his expression mellowed and he said, "Come along to the house. There'll not be a squirrel adventuring at this temperature."
Richard was only too pleased to oblige. He cast one final look back at the crimson-hued evergreen, and then followed after his grandfather.

He slammed the door of the borrowed truck.
Now, on the street of this quaint small town, Richard could only scoff at his own imagined feelings of doom when he'd been "lost" so near to the cottage. The town of Sesqua consisted of a very few buildings for commerce, nearly half of these boarded up. There was an herb shop. A fish and tackle. The grocery and general store was the largest of the businesses and also served as post office, and two old rustic petroleum pumps stood outside the doors.
Dusk came early in that wintered valley, and Richard had to do his bit-of shopping in haste as the untalkative proprietor was in a hurry to close shop, as other shops had already done.
A pouch of the finest tobacco in stock would have to do for now. If only he'd thought to bring something from the city, but he'd never been one for early shopping, even before Christmas came to be associated with calamity, and death, and nothing worth celebration. Now he was determined to turn his attitude around, for once again he was a man with something of a family to consider!
The subject of Christmas gift-wrap mutually peeved him and the shop's proprietor, which was not a part of that store's wares. A bit perturbed by the customer service (if you could call it that), Richard left the store with his small purchase. The owner locked up and scurried down the darkening street, not once looking back at the newcomer to Sesqua.
It took no time at all to wander the length of the town. By chance or subconscious design, Richard found himself approaching the run-down nearly gothic mansion sitting on a knoll. "It oughtn't cost a lot to buy," he thought, noting the poor condition of the outer walls and roof. "But it'll cost a fortune to repair." One of the twin gables was nearly devoid of shingles.
He tested the ornamental doorknob. Locked. A back stairway led to a second-story entrance -- a padlock on this. He circled and inspected the building, tramping through high grass and the thorns of wild roses. He found a half-rotten length of lumber and broke it while prying boards off a basement window. There was no glass behind the boards. He climbed in.
One by one, he explored the floors. He hadn't thought to bring a flashlight, the venture being impulsive, but his eyes soon adjusted enough to find his way about.
The place was an appalling mess, with rare antique furniture overturned and ruined, scratched and dented walls with torn wallpaper. But the architecture was sound; even the stair banisters were sturdy.
From the broken window of a gable, he looked through the naked branches of the oak to the lightless town and surrounding woods overlooked by the house on the knoll. Brilliance caught his eye: a campfire far away, at the edge of what might be a meadow or cultivated ground. It was too far to tell, but children appeared to be playing ring-around-the-rosy and tossing twigs into the flame. This seemed a dangerous sport, unattended by adults. And -- good Lord! -- were the children naked? Could their parents know they were out this time of evening catching their death of pneumonia?
They danced around the fire like wicked dark creatures, and struck contorted poses, which were distinctly unchildlike. For a moment, a terrible fright clutched at the watcher from the window. A thought glanced through his mind: those don't look like children at all! But he closed some psychological lid on that absurd thought and started to turn away.
But he didn't turn, for the dancing had stopped. The faint "oo na na na na, oo na na na na" chanting ended. Richard pressed against the wall beside the window for, though it was too dark and distant for them to know, he feared they'd stopped their play -- or ritual? -- because they sensed eyes upon them. Carefully, he peered around the corner of the sill. The fire was gone, and without it he could see nothing in the meadow.
Branches of the naked oak scraped at the walls and a cold new wind whistled under the eaves. As he stood looking out, he thought he caught glimpses of two shadows melding into one at the base of the tree. He watched with knitted brow. Then a limb stretching toward his window cracked so very slightly.
The eeriness of the house was suddenly impressed upon him with unmanageable intensity. He fled that place, like a man pursued, running through the town and locking himself into his grandfather's old pickup and blessing the strong battery and the wheels that took him bouncing down the back roads to the cottage.
He lay awake a long time that night, breathing heavily beneath the comfort of his blankets. He toyed with a blue bulb of glass taken from the cardboard box secretly stowed beneath the bed.
In his mind spun the plans for a brighter day. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. And the day beyond that would find a surprise awaiting grandfather. These thoughts nearly made him happy; for a few hours, at least, on that special morn, he wanted to recapture the innocence of his forsaken childhood.

A rivulet of blood trickled down between the cracks of the bark. The chicken's head dropped to the ground between Nathan's feet, its beak opening and closing. The feathered carcass, hung by tied legs on a nail driven in the tree, twitched madly, as though it felt the pain.
"Not exactly a fancy turkey dinner," his grandfather said, winking. "But she's a big one!"
"She's a beauty," Richard agreed.
Whatever the rest of Sesqua was up to, here at least the Christmas spirit had indeed been wrought anew. Nathan had lived a lot of lonely years in his hermitage on the lake. And the agony of Richard's loss was still hard for him to bear. Together, these once-grim men brought laughter to each other's heart.
The only serious moment came while Richard was helping Nathan prepare the feast. There were onions and celery and green pepper to cut into fine pieces, potatoes to peel, dried bread crusts to crumble and all manner of little things to busy a grandson while the Chief Cook labored.
Richard said, "I saw children dancing in a field last night."
A knife struck the floor. Nathan bent to pick it up but betrayed no lack of calm. "Did you, now? Well, children do play."
Richard was searching for words that wouldn't make him sound like a maniac. "Yes, but, these children were different. I didn't see them well, you understand, but... They were naked. Ice around the lake and children dancing naked?"
"Perhaps," Nathan's rational voice ventured, "it was an illusion of reflected firelight. They might actually have been well clothed."
He almost accepted that, wanting to believe any logical explanation at all. But there was still something wrong.
"Did I mention any fire?"
"Was there one?" The old man was too casual.
"Yes. But... I didn't tell you that. What aren't you telling me, grandfather? What's wrong with the people in this valley? You're afraid I'll go back to the city -- but I have a right to know!"
Cornered, the oldster cleaned his hands on a towel and bid his grandson follow him to the study. There he pulled down a book of Northwest lore published in the early nineteenth century, illustrated with weird steel-plate engravings.
To one illustration in particular he turned. It might have depicted the solstice ceremony of an ancient European earth-goddess cult, but it was not so tame as those pagan rites. And the fauna was distinctly North American.
It was a picture of a short, broad evergreen, around which a ring of naked imps -- or children with teeth filed sharp -- stood arm in arm. Above the tree, a great winged creature (perhaps an oversized bald eagle depicted by an artist who had never seen one) held a beaver in its talons and let the blood from its pierced belly drip onto the tree.
But most striking was the background of the illustration. It was unquestionably Mount Selta, with two eye slits added for effect.
"A popular legend," said Nathan. "So popular, in fact, that it has become the commonest of children's games to act out the legend."
Richard felt the idiot. Until that moment, he'd thought his grandfather was revealing some legitimate and incredible horror of Sesqua Valley. But it was only an elaborate children's game. And why not? Children of Europe originally devised ring-around-the-rosy during the era of the Black Plague, and the line "Ashes, ashes, all fall down" referred to people dying in the streets, and the ashes from cremations. In their innocence, the grimmest situation was just another source of play.
"And that's all I saw?"
Instead of answering, Nathan patted his grandson's shoulder and said, "Let's get that dinner ready, shall we?" And the day progressed lightheartedly.
That day was a busy one, and wearying for a man of Nathan's years. Richard was only too pleased to see his grandfather apologetically retire early. It had been a pleasant day for both, and Richard intended to return the favor on the morrow. Armed with a flashlight from the kitchen drawer and hatchet from the woodbox, he slipped silently from the house and into the black of night.
He had made careful note of the route when Grandfather led him from the clearing that other time, for he knew there could be no more beautiful a specimen for a Christmas tree in these woods. He severed it at the base and hauled it back to the cottage. Once, he shone his light behind, thinking he heard a mournful whimper like that of a dog. There was nothing. With slow deliberation, he managed the tree through the door with a minimum of rustling needles and scraping limbs. Balanced on a chair, he was about to place the Star of Bethlehem on the tree's top when a harsh voice interrupted his endeavor.
"What have you done?"
The glass star fell from his fingers and shattered on the floor.
"Grandfather..."
"What have you done!"
"It's a surprise. For Christmas. I..." His voice faded away. This expression of anger and disgust was the last thing he'd expected. He felt himself at once shamed and contemptible, and he didn't even know why.
"You're an outsider. You couldn't have known," his grandfather whispered in a fatalistic manner, muttering more to himself than to Richard. His face was ashen, nearly as white as his beard, and he seemed in frantic search for some way out, some answer. "It's too late to change it now. But perhaps I can save you." Mechanically, he shuffled in slippers and robe to the gun rack, took down his rifle. "A squirrel gun will never stop them but..."
"Grandfather! Do you sleep-walk? I think you're having a nightmare!"
Richard shook the man, and indeed he did seem to wake from a dream. The anger, confusion, and terror vanished from his face; color returned. "Yes. Yes. I was dreaming. It's late, lad, we should be in bed. The tree is very pretty, but I'll see it better by morning's light. Come."
Leery of this sudden change, Richard nonetheless allowed himself to be led to his room. He bid his grandfather a good night and closed the door.
He lay atop the covers, fondling the tobacco pouch that tomorrow would be his grandfather's. It seemed a trivial thing now to give, and his tree was spoiled as well. His mind fled toward the same depression which last year had so incapacitated him. Outside the door, his grandfather still shuffled about fretfully, but Richard was too lost in his own despair to hear, to care.
If he slept, it wasn't for long. A loud crash startled him to awareness. A window shattering? Nathan was shouting, "Get back! Get back!" Richard was on his feet the instant he realized someone, or something, had indeed come through the window, and rocked the cottage in so doing. He tried the door, but Nathan had locked it from the outside and pushed a chest against it.
"Grandfather! Grandfather!"
He rammed the door with his shoulder, and knew that it would give with a few more tries. But when the rifle fired, he froze in horror of the shrieking obscenity that answered the report. Whatever made that cry, it was no beast he knew.
With a cowardice that wound haunt him all his life more intensely than any Sesquan monstrosity, he stood and listened through the night. His grandfather's screaming ended in a frothy gurgle after what seemed like hours. The flapping of some pinioned beast, perhaps a gigantic bat, resounded through the cottage. The stomping of myriad tiny feet dancing around the severed tree, the whining, childlike voices singing a monotonous litany.
All through the night it raged, those hellish festivities, and Richard Whitson crouched shivering and afraid behind his door, weeping silent salty tears.
As the dawn approached, the sounds from the main room faded. Things padded or flew away from the blasphemed site of the cottage, and Richard cautiously pried loose the lock and forced the door open enough to squeeze through.
The room was in shambles, the kitchen window broken inward. Blood smeared the floor and walls. Richard approached the sink, glass crunching under his shoes, and looked toward the hunched mountains. Against the violet of the dawn, the silhouette of some great-winged bird or bat was plain above the lake, and it let loose the torso clutched by talons so that the body fell and upset the water's icy stillness.
Richard Whitson turned from that impossible sight and fought the urge to retch. He stumbled like a man blinded by his terror back into the living room, there to gaze once more at the product of his crime -- that once-beautiful Christmas tree now so obviously ghastly in its color. His battle to keep his stomach down was lost at the sight atop the tree. For where would have been the star rested the brutally torn head of his grandfather.