A Vampire Christmas Carol (10 page)

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Authors: Sarah Gray

BOOK: A Vampire Christmas Carol
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18
T
he paneled door opened and Scrooge’s sister Fan darted in, and put her arms about his neck, and kissed him and addressed him as her “Dear, dear brother.” She was taller than he had seen her a few moments before . . . and more beautiful. She was so like their mother that a lump rose in Scrooge’s throat.
“I have come to bring you home, dear brother,” said the girl, clapping her hands, and reaching out to grasp his cheeks between her hands. “To bring you home, home, home.”
She was dressed in shot-silk of the richest quality and smelled of dried lavender. Upon her head she wore a beaver bonnet, and over her shoulders, a red cloak of fine worsted wool, embroidered at the hem with green leaves and vines and other such ornamentation. In her ears sparkled earbobs.
The younger Scrooge did not seem to believe his good fortune for, no doubt, he thought his fate sealed by men such as the schoolmaster and women such as his wet nurse. “Home, Fan?” returned the boy. “But what of Mrs. Grottweil? She swore she would not see me cross the threshold again. Our father—”
“Mrs. Grottweil is gone!” Fan cried, brimful of glee. “I sent her packing myself, with Father’s blessing. He caught her drinking blood from the milkmaid who delivers Tuesdays and Thursdays. I do not know that he believed she was a blood-sucker, but he agreed she no longer had a place in our home.”
“And now I shall come home?” the boy repeated, still in disbelief.
“Yes. Home, for good and all. Home, forever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like heaven. He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home. I think that once Mrs. Grottweil was gone, and he no longer under her influence, he began to see the truth of what happened to our mother. He understands now that you were not responsible for Mother’s death and that the vampires are the ones to be held accountable. He intends to see the magistrate and have Mrs. Grottweil questioned, if they can find her. We heard that she had fled after Father let her go.”
“Such good news, Fan! I can hardly believe your words!”
“Well, you should, because he sent me in a coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man,” she said, opening her bright blue eyes wide, “and you are never to come back here, but first, we’re to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world.”
“You are quite a woman, Fan,” exclaimed the boy.
She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his head, but he had shot up and was now much taller than his twin, so she laughed again, and stood on tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her eagerness, toward the door and he, with no reason not to go, accompanied her.
A terrible voice in the hall cried, “Bring down Master Scrooge’s box, there,” and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind by shaking hands with him. “No one is displeased with the education we have provided here?”
The young Scrooge looked up at him. “No, sir. It’s only that my father has need of me.”
He then conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best parlor that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake, and administered installments of those dainties to the young people. At the same time, sending out a meager servant to offer a glass of something to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman, but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not. Master Scrooge’s trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster good-bye right willingly, and getting into it, drove gaily down the garden sweep, the quick wheels dashing the hoar frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray.
“My dear, dear sister, Fan.” Scrooge sighed, watching as Fan and his younger self drove away.
“Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered,” said the ghost. “Particularly because the wet nurse who became her nursemaid, Mrs. Grottweil, saw her bled regularly while she slept so as to keep her weak. But she had a large heart.”
Saddened to hear such a revelation, Scrooge felt the tears well in his eyes again. “But she had such a large heart,” he repeated in agreement.
“And you know what followed next.”
Scrooge hung his head. “Please tell me we do not need to return to my childhood home. I am an old man, and there is no point to revisiting the past.”
“Oh, but we must return, because there is a point to all this in the end, Ebenezer Scrooge.”
19
A
nd once again, Scrooge, still in his nightclothes, was propelled through time; one moment he sat in a carriage with Fan, driving away from the school, the next he was in the front hall of his father’s home. He followed Fan and the boy into the house. The spirit brought up the rear, closing the front door soundly behind them.
“Father! Father!” Fan called, her merriness still bright on her cheeks and dancing in her blue eyes. “We are here! Ebenezer is home! I have brought my dear brother home to us!”
Her words echoed in the big hall, empty and hollow, and the hair rose on the back of Scrooge’s neck as he recalled the incident from long ago. The house had smelled of blood, he recalled, as it did now.
“Where is everyone?” Fan tossed her rabbit-fur muff on a side table, carved with elegant legs. “Father! We’re home, Ebenezer and I! Have you not heard? I’ve brought your son home to you.”
Fan turned into the parlor and screamed.
“Not this again,” Scrooge murmured, trying to cover his ears with his hands, for he could not stand to hear her terror.
The spirit gently pulled his hands away.
Blood. There was blood everywhere. Upon the polished wood floor, the fine woolen carpet, and the horsehair settee. In front of the fireplace, in his favorite chair, sat Mr. Scrooge, awaiting his children’s arrival. Dead, his throat torn out. All the servants dead, too, in the kitchen hanging from the pothooks, in an upstairs bedchamber dangling from a closet nail, and yet another suspended from the attic window, his dry husk of a skin blowing in the wind like some faded flag of carnage. The authorities had said it was wild animals that had set upon the house, possibly the same pack of vicious hedgehogs that had earlier ravaged the town of Hogs-Wallow-Upon-Upwald.
“It was not wild animals, was it?” Scrooge asked, turning to the ghost as the bloody parlor scene slowly faded and Fan seemed to grow farther away from him. “I never believed the hedgehog story, but I thought it might have been wolves,” he said hopefully.
“It was not wild animals that murdered your father,” the phantom agreed kindly.
“My poor Fan,” cried Scrooge. “I do not think she was ever the same after she witnessed that bloodshed. The only survivor in the house was the cook’s small spit dog, and it was said that he suffered from nightmares ever after.”
“Did anyone ever think to examine that spit dog’s canine teeth?” the spirit asked. “Or to wonder if perhaps the evil creature was a minion of the vampires who might have opened the back door and invited them in?”
“The dog?”
“Any stranger that a dog should be caught up in such betrayal and massacre than that hedgehogs should suffer mass insanity and overrun three villages and a convent before throwing themselves over a cliff and swimming en mass for the Black Sea on a rainy Tuesday?”
“I suppose not, but the dog was very old,” Scrooge mused. “I wouldn’t suppose he had many teeth left.”
“One needs only paws and a tall stool to unlatch a kitchen door.”
“That my poor, dear Fan had once fed that cur scraps of her own bread.”
“Speaking of your sister, may I remind you that she lived for some years. She died a woman,” said the ghost, “but had, as I think, children.”
“One child,” Scrooge returned, shivering, not so much from cold as the memories he had so long buried.
“True,” said the ghost. “Your nephew.”
Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind and answered briefly, “Yes. Fred.”
20
A
lthough they had but that moment left the Scrooge country house behind them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city, where shadowy passengers passed and repassed, where shadowy carts and coaches battled for the way, and all the strife and tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by the dressing of the shops, that here, too, it was Christmas time again, but it was evening, and the streets were lighted up.
The ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he knew it.
“Know it?” said Scrooge, wiping at his eyes. “Why, I was apprenticed here. My father had made the arrangements prior to his untimely death.”
They went in. At the sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh wig, sitting behind such a high desk that if he had been two inches taller, he would have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement, “Why, it’s old Fezziwig. Bless his heart, it’s Fezziwig alive again!”
Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands, adjusted his capacious waistcoat, laughed all over himself, from his shows to his organ of benevolence, and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice, “Yo ho, there. Ebenezer. Dick.”
Scrooge’s former self, now grown a young man, came briskly in, accompanied by his fellow-’prentice. “Dick Wilkins, to be sure,” said Scrooge to the ghost. “Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick. Dear, dear.”
“Poor Dick?” questioned the ghost.
“He was kind to me. Dear. The only friend I had after Joseph Cuttleman, but—”
“But he died young, your friend Dick? Of a bleeding ailment?” pressed the spirit.
Scrooge looked up at him. “How did you know?”
“A
bleeding
disease,” the ghost repeated.
“Not the vampires!” Scrooge exclaimed. “I cannot believe it. I won’t.”
“Then do not. Your belief will not make it all the more or less true,” observed the ghost. Then he pointed to the scene unfolding in the warehouse and Scrooge was drawn into a happier time, a time before Dick was bitten by vampires and left on his pallet to waste away.
“Yo ho, my boys,” said Fezziwig. “No more work tonight. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer. Let’s have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say Jack Robinson.”
You wouldn’t believe how those two fellows went at it. They charged into the street with the shutters—one, two, three—had them up in their places—four, five, six—barred them and pinned them—seven, eight, nine—and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.
“Hilli-ho!” cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk, with wonderful agility. “Clear away, my lads, and let’s have lots of room here. Hilli-ho, Dick. Chirrup, Ebenezer.”
Clear away. There was nothing they wouldn’t have cleared away, or couldn’t have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from public life forevermore, the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire. The warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ballroom, as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night.
In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomachaches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master, trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another, some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling, in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couples at once, hands half round and back again the other way. Down the middle and up again they danced, round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place, new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there, all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, “Well done!” and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a brand-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.
There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of cold roast, and there was a great piece of cold boiled, and there were mincemeat pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the roast and boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it to him) struck up “Sir Roger de Coverley.” Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too, with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with, people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.
But if they had been twice as many—ah, four times—old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that’s not high praise, tell me higher, and I’ll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn’t have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance, advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place, Fezziwig cut—cut so deftly that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.
When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up. Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a merry Christmas. When everybody had retired but the two ’prentices, they did the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away, and the lads were left to their beds, which were under a counter in the back-shop.
During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self. He corroborated everything, remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from them, that he remembered the ghost, and became conscious that it was looking full upon him, while the light upon its head burned very clear.
“A small matter,” said the ghost, “to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”
“Small,” echoed Scrooge.
The spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig, and when he had done so, said, “He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money, three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”
“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up, what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”
He felt the spirit’s glance, and stopped.
“What is the matter?” asked the ghost.
“Nothing in particular,” said Scrooge.
“Something, I think,” the ghost insisted.
“No,” said Scrooge, “no. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerks just now. That’s all.”
His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance to the wish, and Scrooge and the ghost again stood side by side in the open air.
“There was something else Fezziwig gave you,” observed the ghost. “Another opportunity.”
“An opportunity in what?” asked Scrooge.
The ghost turned and the warehouse was again filled with bright light, the heavenly smells of a feast and the bright laughter of those making merry. At once, Scrooge spotted himself, leaning over a young woman, offering her a cup of punch.
“Belle,” Scrooge murmured, unable to resist a smile.
“You met her here for the very first time.”
“Her mother was an acquaintance of Mrs. Fezziwig’s,” Scrooge explained. “Mrs. Fezziwig invited her because she thought Belle might . . .”
“Belle might?”
“Like me,” Scrooge said, watching the young couple intently.
Belle was laughing and Scrooge, the young man, smiling.
“She had a bit of a scare that night,” Scrooge recalled aloud. “I was trying to make her feel better. She told me she was followed to Fezziwig’s by vampires.”
“Did you believe her?”
“I did not,” he said sadly. “I thought it a ploy to get a young man’s attention. Mine in particular.” Again he smiled. “She was like that, Belle, fanciful, always full of suspicion. Even paranoid at times. She saw the vampires on every street corner.”
“What if I told you what she saw was real?”
“I would say ‘Bah, humbug!’ ”
The ghost smiled in a way that made Scrooge feel very small and insignificant.
“She told me the vampires followed me, too, that they watched me, but I didn’t believe her.”
“Why not?” the spirit inquired.
“Because she was full of all sorts of nonsense. It wasn’t just the vampires she talked about all the time. Her mother was the same way. Some said they were touched. Belle claimed she saw spirits, too.” Again, he laughed. “She said she could talk to them!” Scrooge eyed the ghost, realizing his own present circumstances, and his laughter died away.
“You did not believe her.”
“I did not,” Scrooge confirmed. “But I liked her, anyway. She was sweet and bright and so full of life. Despite her paranoia, she was intelligent. She made me laugh.”
“You loved her?”
Scrooge did not answer as he gazed sadly upon the couple, remembering what it had felt like to hold her hand in his, to feel her lips upon his own. She’d always had the smoothest skin. The prettiest blue eyes. “I loved her,” he murmured, almost choking on the words. “And I suppose she loved me . . . once.”

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