The Plastic Pine

In the autumn of 2009, my wife Clara and I moved into a drafty Victorian house in upstate New York. We had little money, so we furnished it with thrift-store finds and hand-me-downs. The house had a peculiar feature: a small parlor with wall-to-wall burgundy carpet, which the realtor called ‘the music room,’ though there was no music in it. Clara, prone to seasonal melancholy, insisted we make the holidays warm and bright. Our old artificial tree had shed its brittle needles for years, so we bought a new one from a discount store—a garish thing with shiny plastic foliage that looked like it came from a cheap toy store. It was almost comically ugly, but it was all we could afford.

We set it up in the music room, the only carpeted room in the house, and placed a baby gate across the doorway to keep our two cats from batting at the ornaments. Above the entrance hung a heavy antique clock that had belonged to the previous owner, a strange old man who had died mysteriously in the house. The clock never worked, its hands frozen at 11:58. Every time we passed under it, I felt a chill, but I chalked it up to the draft.

The first night, after decorating the tree with a motley assortment of ornaments from our mismatched collection, I noticed one of the shiny plastic needles on the floor. I picked it up, thinking it had fallen from the tree, but when I turned to toss it in the trash, I saw that same needle back on the tree in a different spot. I told myself I was tired and went to bed.

The next morning, Clara found a small glass ornament shattered beneath the tree, even though the gate was still in place and the cats had been with us all night. The shards were arranged in a crude spiral pattern. I swept them up, uneasy. Over the following days, more strange things happened. The tree’s lights would flicker even when they were plugged into a different outlet. The plastic needles, which felt stiff and fake, began to feel oddly wet when I touched them, like they were coated with something viscous.

One evening, as we sat in the adjacent living room, we heard a faint rustling from the music room, like dry leaves skittering across the carpet. When we peered in, the tree was shaking gently, and the ornaments were swaying as if a hand had brushed them. The cats were both asleep on the sofa, so it wasn’t them. The air in the room was cold, and I could see my breath. Clara whispered, ‘Maybe it’s a draft,’ but even as she said it, the rustling stopped.

That night, I woke to a strange sound—a faint, rhythmic clicking, like teeth chattering. It came from the music room. I crept downstairs, my heart pounding. The tree had been unplugged, but its lights were glowing with an eerie inner light, casting shifting shadows on the walls. At the base of the tree, something moved—a dark, hunched figure, no bigger than a child, but with limbs too thin and long. It was plucking the ornaments from the low branches and placing them in a pile, methodically, like a ritual. I must have made a noise, because it turned. Its face was a cluster of plastic needles, glistening like they were covered in sap, and its eyes were two tiny lights that flickered like faulty bulbs. It stared at me for a moment, then scurried up the tree and vanished into its crown.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. The next morning, I told Clara we should take the tree down. She looked at me, bewildered, and said, ‘But we just put it up last night.’ I realized then that she had no memory of the days that had passed. I showed her the pile of ornaments, but they were all back on the branches, perfectly intact. I tried to pull the tree from its stand, but it was as if it were rooted to the floor. Clara began to cry, saying I was ruining her Christmas.

Over the next few weeks, the house grew colder, and strange, sticky sap began to ooze from the walls. The clock above the door suddenly started ticking, but the hands remained frozen. I found the cats huddled in the corner of the music room, staring up at the tree, their pupils dilated in fear. The tree had grown taller, its branches reaching toward the ceiling, and its needles had turned a darker, sickly green. At night, I would hear the chattering again, and sometimes a low voice whispering Clara’s name.

One afternoon, I found Clara under the tree, asleep, her arms wrapped around the base. When I shook her awake, she told me she had been talking to ‘the pretty ones in the branches.’ She had scratches on her arms, as if the needles had pierced her skin. I knew then that the tree was the cause—the cheap, ugly thing we had brought into our home was not just an object; it was a doorway or a lure for something that fed on the holiday warmth we tried to create.

I resolved to destroy it. I fetched an axe and went to the music room. But as I raised the axe, the tree’s lights blazed, and every ornament on it exploded like firecrackers, sending shards flying. The needles lashed out, wrapping around my arm, cold and sharp. I heard Clara scream, and when I turned, I saw her inside the tree’s foliage, her eyes blank, her mouth open in a silent scream, as if she were becoming part of it.

I don’t remember much after that. I came to in the hospital, with my arm bandaged. When I asked about Clara, the doctors said I had been found alone in the house, clutching a piece of plastic pine needle that had pierced my palm. They told me I had been there for three days, and there was no sign of my wife. The house was found in disarray, with the tree gone, leaving only a scorched mark on the carpet where it had stood.

I returned home to find the house empty, the clock on the wall had begun to run backwards, and in my hallway was a single, shiny plastic needle, no doubt a sign that the tree, and the thing inside it, would find me again. And sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see Clara’s face in a tangle of fake branches, whispering that she is waiting under the tree, for me to come and be part of her forest.