The tree began to spin.
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ.’
Amanda slept on.
The tree picked up momentum.
Gina walked as steadily as she could across to the sofa and tried to shake her sister awake. Amanda, locked in her dreams, resisted for a moment.
‘Father,’ said Gina. Her voice was strong, and carried through into the hall. It also woke Amanda.
Downstairs, Polo heard a noise like a whining dog. No, like two whining dogs. As he ran down the stairs, the duet became a trio. He burst into the lounge half expecting all the hosts of Hell to be in there, dog-headed, dancing on his beauties.
But no. It was the Christmas tree that was whining, whining like a pack of dogs, as it spun and spun.
The lights had long since been pulled from their sockets. The air stank of singed plastic and pine-sap. The tree itself was spinning like a top, flinging decorations and presents off its tortured branches with the largesse of a mad king.
Jack tore his eyes from the spectacle of the tree and found Gina and Amanda crouching, terrified, behind the sofa.
‘Get out of here,’ he yelled.
Even as he spoke the television sat up impertinently on one leg and began to spin like the tree, gathering momentum quickly. The clock on the mantelpiece joined the pirouetting. The pokers beside the fire. The cushions. The ornaments. Each object added its own singular note to the orchestration of whines which were building up, second by second, to a deafening pitch. The air began to brim with the smell of burning wood, as friction heated the spinning tops to flash-point. Smoke swirled across the room.
Gina had Amanda by the arm, and was dragging her towards the door, shielding her face against the hail of pine needles that the still-accelerating tree was throwing off.
Now the lights were spinning.
The books, having flung themselves off the shelves, had joined the tarantella.
Jack could see the enemy, in his mind’s eye, racing between the objects like a juggler spinning plates on sticks, trying to keep them all moving at once. It must be exhausting work, he thought. The demon was probably close to collapse. It couldn’t be thinking straight. Overexcited. Impulsive. Vulnerable. This must be the moment, if ever there was a moment, to join battle at last. To face the thing, defy it, and trap it.
For its part, the Yattering was enjoying this orgy of destruction. It flung every movable object into the fray, setting everything spinning.
It watched with satisfaction as the daughters twitched and scurried; it laughed to see the old man stare, pop-eyed, at this preposterous ballet.
Surely he was nearly mad, wasn’t he?
The beauties had reached the door, their hair and skin full of needles. Polo didn’t see them leave. He ran across the room, dodging a rain of ornaments to do so, and picked up a brass toasting fork which the enemy had overlooked. Bric-a-brac filled the air around his head, dancing around with sickening speed. His flesh was bruised and punctured. But the exhilaration of joining battle had overtaken him, and he set about beating the books, and the clocks, and the china to smithereens. Like a man in a cloud of locusts he ran around the room, bringing down his favourite books in a welter of fluttering pages, smashing whirling Dresden, shattering the lamps. A litter of broken possessions swamped the
floor, some of it still twitching as the life went out of the fragments. But for every object brought low, there were a dozen still spinning, still whining.
He could hear Gina at the door, yelling to him to get out, to leave it alone.
But it was so enjoyable, playing against the enemy more directly than he’d ever allowed himself before. He didn’t want to give up. He wanted the demon to show itself, to be known, to be recognized.
He wanted confrontation with the Old One’s emissary once and for all.
Without warning the tree gave way to the dictates of centrifugal force, and exploded. The noise was like a howl of death. Branches, twigs, needles, balls, lights, wire, ribbons, flew across the room. Jack, his back to the explosion, felt a gust of energy hit him hard, and he was flung to the ground. The back of his neck and his scalp were shot full of pine-needles. A branch, naked of greenery, shot past his head and impaled the sofa. Fragments of tree pattered to the carpet around him.