Page 68 of Sweet Silver Bells
No, not nervous, scared, compliant.
The familiar haze that coaxed Hunter into a state of happy, blind obedience, that convinced him that what he wanted to do more than anything else was what Olivia commanded, snuck its way back into his mind.
The spell of the song, the magic in her voice, dropped any personality from the crowd’s gazes, expressions now empty and vacant. Hunter’s mind continued to fight and recognized that intrusive magic was invading, an unwelcome guest.
This wasn’t intentional. Hunter sensed that instantly. Unlike her song in his home when he had buried the TV, Hunter could hold on to consciousness, though he felt it slipping a little more with every breath, a rope he desperately hung onto as he climbed up a cliff engulfed in thick, eerie fog.
He took in his group of friends. Darius had straightened up like a soldier waiting for orders. Nina and Tom had their headstilted like living dolls in a horror movie, nothing behind their stares. Elaine and Celia looked nearly the same, though there was something different about their lips—less defiance, less of a grimace at the corners of their mouths.
He wondered if he looked like any of them, or if he had more awareness. No one was looking at him, no one noticed that he was glancing around, but the entire crowd had now turned away from the choir, their attention on her, on Olivia with the moon and stars in her hair, with the necklace Hunter had given her still squeezed in her hand.
Olivia choked between sobs, but continued to sing. However, one by one, the choir fell under her spell. Hunter could focus on her voice, the overpowering vibrato coming from the group fading more and more until they were merely background singers.
This was Olivia’s show now.
“I’m still here,” Hunter said, and the words took substantial effort. Pushing past that haze that wanted him blank, in a state of walking sleep, felt like a superpower, something unnatural that he shouldn’t be able to do.
But he was there.
Here I am.
“You’re mine,” he stammered.
Olivia didn’t hear, or at least she didn’t react. Her song continued on a loop as she started singing it again from the top.
“All seem to say,
Throw cares away,
Christmas is here,
Bringing good cheer.”
There was a gasp of air as she threw her head back toward the sky. Her hair took the shape of a crescent moon while she threw her hands behind her and screamed at the darkness overhead. Hunter watched it all in slow motion.
Snow landed on her cheeks. Frost clung to her devastatingly beautiful eyelashes. Her mouth was open as she howled. Olivia’s pain wrecked its way through everyone’s ears in a supernaturally loud yet pulchritudinous caterwaul.
My tree siren.
Tree siren she was, as anything green or rooted reacted to her noise, to her grief, breaking open the gates of hell on the surface of the Earth.
Hunter couldn’t respond; that haze still had such a hold of him.
What he wanted to do was grab Olivia and shield her, so that he could take the brunt of what was coming. Instead, he stood there, his body dazed, nearly paralyzed, rooted down as if the earth had decayed the pavement and wrapped itself around his feet.
It might as well have done that, the terror already clawed through him, as Olivia’s cry threatened to cover downtown Stockbridge so that it may never see the sun again.
At least, that was Hunter’s initial reaction when the Christmas tree behind the carolers lashed out each branch, growing hundreds of feet and crashing down onto the large group of immobile spectators wearing their holiday best, stuck under Olivia’s spell.
There were no screams. The group nearly welcomed it.
It was grief made manifest. A heartbroken woman unleashed the storm she could no longer hold inside.
She couldn’t help it. It was who she was.
Hunter knew it was his choice, but it was certainly a choice to stay in her heart as violence broke out in the calmest manner, a true, cheerful holiday horror.
Thwap. Thwap.
