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Authors: Sarah Gray

A Vampire Christmas Carol (14 page)

BOOK: A Vampire Christmas Carol
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“Enough,” the spirit interrupted. “You are here to learn, not to give advice.”
Peter looked at Belinda, and the two laughed. “Get along with the vampires, Aunt Maena? Surely you do not mean that?” Peter exclaimed. “I am no Bible scholar, but I do not believe the good Lord ever suggested we should
get along
with the vampires that threaten our lives.”
“I am only a woman. I know nothing of politics,” said Maena with a sweep of her little hand. “I mind my business, as should you, Belinda. And you, Peter, should be thinking on how you can bring more coin to the table.” She glanced around. “Martha wasn’t as late last Christmas Day as this, was she?”
“Here’s Martha, Aunt Maena,” said a girl, appearing as she spoke.
“Here’s our Martha, Aunt Maena,” cried two young Cratchits. “Hurrah. There’s such a goose, Martha.”
“Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are,” said the girl’s aunt, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal. “Surely you were not at a vampire slayers meeting, which made you late?”
“Oh, no. I attended earlier in the week.” She offered a mischievous smile to her brother and sister.
Apparently this was an ongoing game between the children and their aunt. Disrespectful, in Scrooge’s eyes. And uncalled for. If the girl had time to attend
meetings
of any sort, she had time to work more hours and contribute further to the family, did she not? She seemed a healthy girl, if a bit thin and bony, but as his father had always said, a rangy hound covers the most miles. Fat dogs and fat servants cost more to maintain, worked slower, and fatigued sooner.
“We’d a deal of work to finish up last night at the home of my employment,” replied the girl, “and had to clear away this morning.”
“Well, never mind so long as you are home,” said the aunt. “Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have a warm cup of water, Lord bless ye.”
“No, no. There’s Father coming,” cried the two young Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. “Hide, Martha, hide.”
So Martha hid herself, and in came Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe hanging down before him, and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed to look seasonable, and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his twisted limbs supported by an iron frame.
“Why, where’s our Martha?” cried Bob Cratchit, looking round. “I thought she would be here by now. I had hoped she might stop by the VSU meeting. There were many who asked for her, but alas, we did not see her.”
“She is not coming,” said Maena.
“Not coming?” said Bob, with a sudden declension in his high spirits, for he had been Tim’s blood horse all the way from church, and had come home rampant. “Not coming upon Christmas Day? Please tell me she is well. And that nothing bad has befallen her.” He paled considerably, obviously fearing she had met the same fate as his wife.
Martha didn’t like to see him frightened, if it were only in jest, so she came out prematurely from behind the closet door, and ran into his arms. At the same time, the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the washhouse that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.
“And how did little Tim behave?” asked the sister-in-law, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.
“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow, he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see. He talked long and hard of the future and what it will bring him, what it will bring all of us.” Bob chuckled. “He has it in his head that he will regain his strength one day and become a fine vampire slayer. The best there is.”
“Like his father,” said Martha, giving him another hug.
“No.” He chuckled again, this time self-consciously. “I make do as necessary with my pike, but Tim dreams of being truly gifted. He imagines giving aid to the Scion of the Great Culling, who he believes will be born soon. He thinks he will stand at the Scion’s side one day and see the eradication of these devils from the earth once and for all.”
“ ’Tis a good dream,” said Martha. “An honorable one.”
“ ’Tis a bunch of nonsense,” argued Maena. She lowered her voice. “And the two of you should not encourage him. None of you should.” She pointed. “He is unwell. A cripple. He will be lucky if he survives another winter, and we all know it. We should not be filling his head with such impossibilities, not with him so soon bound for the grave.”
“But he has a good heart,” said Bob. “Greater than most.” His voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.
Tiny Tim’s active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back he came before another word was spoken. He was escorted by his brother and sister to his stool before the fire and while Bob, turning up his cuffs—as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby—compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer. Master Peter, and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.
Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds, a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course—and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Maena made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigor. Miss Belinda sweetened up the applesauce and Martha dusted the hot plates while Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table. The two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Maena, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast, but when she did, and when the long-expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried “Hurrah.”
There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavor, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by applesauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Maena said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t eaten it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows. But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Maena left the room alone—too nervous to bear witnesses—to take the pudding up and bring it in.
Suppose it should not be done enough? Suppose it should break in turning out? Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose—a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid. All sorts of horrors were supposed.
Hallo. A great deal of steam. The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day. That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute Cratchit’s sister-in-law entered, flushed, but smiling proudly, with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quarter of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.
“Oh, a wonderful pudding, Maena!” Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by his sister-in-law. “We are so fortunate to have had you come to join our family after my dear Mrs. Cratchit’s death.”
“My duty,” murmured Maena, turning red-faced as she took her seat again. Now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.
26
A
t last the dinner was all done, the tablecloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then, all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half of one, and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. There were two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.
“That’s it?” asked Scrooge watching the pitiful little gathering. “Three glasses for the lot of them? How will they all drink from three cups?”
The spirit continued to gaze at the family gathered around the fire.
The meager cups held the hot stuff from the jug as well as golden goblets would have done, and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. It appeared they would
share
the cups. Then Bob proposed:
“A merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us.”
Which all the family re-echoed.
“God bless us, every one,” said Tiny Tim, the last of all. He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool.
Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “talk of becoming a great vampire killer is obviously nonsense as the sister-in-law pointed out, but tell me if Tiny Tim will live. You know, to be a clerk or something equally useful like his father.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, the child will die as the aunt has suggested.”
“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind spirit. Say he will be spared.”
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, none other of my race,” returned the ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
“Man,” said the ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die while men and women such as Cratchit and his daughter, and the woman, Belle, are on the streets fighting to save mankind against what you conspire with?”
Scrooge shook under the intensity of the ghost’s admonishment. “I do not conspire with the vampires! They . . . they have persecuted me!” He was shaking from head to toe. “The . . . the visitor previous to you, he showed me what they did. How they conspired against me! I . . . I had no choice!”
“Oh, you have had choices,” boomed the ghost. “Far more than you have deserved, and yet you have chosen against your own kind again and again in favor of that golden idol the young woman spoke of so many years ago. You had choices, and for that reason, it may be, that in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God, to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.”
Scrooge bent before the ghost’s rebuke, and, trembling, cast his eyes upon the ground, tears in his eyes. But he raised them speedily, on hearing his own name.
“Mr. Scrooge,” said Bob. “I give you Mr. Scrooge, the founder of the feast.”
“The founder of the feast indeed,” cried Martha, reddening. “I wish I had him here. I’d give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he’d have a good appetite for it!”
“My dear daughter,” said Bob. “The children. Christmas Day.”
“It should be Christmas Day, I am sure,” said she, “on which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Father. Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow.”
“My dear,” was Bob’s mild answer. “Christmas Day.”
“I’ll drink his health for your sake and the day’s,” said his eldest daughter. “Not for his. Long life to him. May he not see the shadows when they swarm him in the end. A merry Christmas and a happy new year. He’ll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt.”
“The shadows? Swarming me?” Scrooge turned to the ghost. “Whatever is she talking about?”
The spirit watched on, making no comment.
The children drank the toast after Martha. It was the first of their proceedings, which had no heartiness. Tiny Tim drank it last of all, but he didn’t care twopence for it. Scrooge was the ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party, which was not dispelled for a full five minutes.
After it had passed away, they were ten times merrier than before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the baleful being done with. They toasted to various people they knew, including the woman Scrooge had once been betrothed to.
“To Belle,” Martha declared. “If only I can one day fight the vampires as she fights them, caring for those who risk their lives to protect us.”
“To Belle,” the children echoed enthusiastically, all having something good to say about her for, apparently, they all knew her well.
Bob Cratchit then told his family how he had a situation in his eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full five-and-sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of Peter being a man of business, and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular investments he should favor when he came into the receipt of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor apprentice at a milliner’s, then told them what kind of work she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch, and how she meant to lie abed tomorrow morning for a good long rest, the next day being a holiday she passed at home. She told them how she had seen a countess and a lord some days before, and how the lord was as tall as Peter, at which Peter pulled up his collars so high that you couldn’t have seen his head if you had been there.
All this time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round, and by-and-by they had a song, about a lost child traveling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed.
There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed. Their shoes were far from being waterproof, their clothes were scanty, and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker’s. But, they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time. When they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the spirit’s torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.
BOOK: A Vampire Christmas Carol
4.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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