A Vampire Christmas Carol (17 page)
Read A Vampire Christmas Carol Online
Authors: Sarah Gray
There was music, a harp and fiddle, which played from somewhere Scrooge could not see. The tune being played was lively enough, but he took note that none of the guests danced, or appeared particularly gay.
“You say they celebrate the Winter Solstice,” Scrooge murmured, noting the long faces of the king and queen and their guests. Those in the room conversed, but there was none of the light-heartedness Scrooge had seen in the other places the ghost had taken him that night. Even the poorest of poor seemed more enthused than these men and women, who appeared well fed and housed and garbed in the finest clothing, albeit of sober cut and color, but fine stuff all the same. “It does not appear much like a celebration to me. From the talk we have heard, from what we have seen tonight, it seems that the vampires would have much reason for making merry, the way they have wreaked havoc in London.” He studied the king and queen of the vampires, feeling at least a little confident that he was, at present, safe from them. “They do not seem so threatening tonight. Look at how they slouch in their mighty chairs, how they speak softly, their gazes flitting here and there. I would think they would be more jovial than the humans we have seen this night.”
“It is the spirit of the humans on this night that steals the joy from the vampires,” the Ghost of Christmas Present explained, “and saps them of their strength. If every day could be Christmas Day, the vampires would die out in no time at all.”
“Every day, Christmas Day,” Scrooge snorted. He had intended to follow his comment with a “bah, humbug,” but could not bring himself to speak the words. The sight of the vampires and their minions in this chamber below the city had brought so many emotions to Scrooge’s heart, emotions he barely recognized, that he could not express them. Would not, for fear he might crumble. “Please, Spirit,” he said, “tell me this is the last place we will visit tonight. Tell me I may walk through these tunnels and find my way to my bed.”
“My time is, indeed, almost expired, but there is one place we must revisit.”
“No more, please.” Scrooge put his hands together. “Must I beg?”
“It will do you no good. Touch my robe.”
“Must I?” inquired Scrooge.
“Would you prefer I left you here?”
“For the love of mercy, no! Do not leave me in this den of bloodsuckers, I beseech you!” Scrooge grabbed the phantom’s robe, and in the blink of an eye and a swirl of snow, they were back at Cratchit’s house again, though this time it was much later. Children slept on pallets on the floor in front of the fireplace, and Bob Cratchit snored softly on a bed of rags beside the table upon which they had shared their great Christmas Day feast. The only light burning was from the candle the sister-in-law, Maena, carried up the wobbling staircase.
“Follow her,” the spirit instructed.
Scrooge did as ordered, for if there was one thing he had learned this night, it was that there was no need to waste one’s breath arguing with those of the spirit world. They passed a closet-sized chamber where another pallet was made up; Maena’s room, no doubt. But she kept going up until they reached the attic space where the Cratchit boys slept.
Scrooge stood in the doorway, watching with something akin to a smile on his face as the boys’ dear aunt picked her way across the sleeping bodies to reach Tiny Tim, who slept on a raised pallet against the wall. “Why, she’s tucking him in. How . . .” The word “sweet” was on Scrooge’s mind but he could not find the strength to say it.
The spirit made no reply.
Maena reached Tiny Tim, set down her candlestick, and grasped the edge of the ragtag blanket wrapped around the boy, but instead of drawing it higher upon his chin, she drew it back.
“What the devil?” muttered Scrooge. “Can she not feel the chill in this room? Look, the water has frozen in the cup beside his bedding.”
The candlelight revealed an open, weeping wound on the boy’s calf.
“Is . . . is she tending his wound?” Scrooge asked, but even as he spoke the words, he took a step back, then in horror watched as the woman who was supposed to be caring for Cratchit’s children leaned over and pressed her mouth to the wound, making a sucking sound. When she lifted her head, her smiling lips were covered in the child’s blood. She then took a glass vial from a pocket and began to fill it with the boy’s blood.
“He will not survive because of her,” Scrooge said, in dull shock, as much to himself as to the ghost. “Not if the present is not altered.” He took one last look at the treacherous woman and turned to the ghost, placing his hand upon the spirit’s sleeve. They slipped out of the house and Scrooge found himself on a dark, snowy street.
It was a long night, if it were only a night, but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the ghost grew older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it until now when, looking at the spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair was gray.
“Are spirits’ lives so short?” asked Scrooge.
“My life upon this globe is very brief,” replied the ghost. “It ends tonight.”
“Tonight?” cried Scrooge. “That hardly seems fair, when vampires can live forever if they are not decapitated, or run through with a pike or however it is the slayers do it.”
“Tonight at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing near.”
The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment.
“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”
“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”
“Please tell me you do not conceal vampires within your cloak.” No more, he prayed. His delicate nature could take no more shocking revelations.
“They are not vampires.” From the folds of its robe, it brought two human children, wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, man, look here. Look, look, down here,” exclaimed the ghost.
They were a boy and a girl: yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish, but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, have monsters half so horrible and dread existed.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit, have the vampires done this to these poor children?” Scrooge could say no more.
“Mankind has done this to these children,” said the spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing is erased.”
“But . . . but what can I do? What can any of us do? If . . . if the vampires have controlled me, they have controlled others like me, have they not?” he asked shakily. “We cannot stop them. We cannot prevent this. Mankind is not responsible for—”
“Deny your responsibility,” shouted the spirit, stretching out its hand toward the city. “Slander those who tell it to ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?” The bell struck twelve.
Scrooge looked about him for the ghost, and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, toward him.
STAVE 4
THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS
33
T
he phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came, Scrooge bent down upon his knee, for in the very air through which this spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
he phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came, Scrooge bent down upon his knee, for in the very air through which this spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He knew no more, for the spirit neither spoke nor moved.
“I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come,” said Scrooge.
The spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.
“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,” Scrooge pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”
The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer he received.
Although well used to ghostly company by this time, Scrooge feared the silent shape so greatly that his legs trembled beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow it. The spirit paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.
But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror to know that behind the dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black. This was somehow worse than the notion of vampires watching him, controlling those around him, all these years, their fangs protruding, dripping with human blood.
Is it not thus with all mortal humans . . . that we fear the unknown even more than we fear the monsters we have seen with our own eyes?
“Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come,” he exclaimed. “I fear you more than any specter I have seen. But as I know now that your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear your company, and do it with a thankful heart. After all I have seen, I fear these vampires as perhaps no one else fears them, for they seem to have particular interest in me.” He sighed, looked down at his trembling feet thrust into his slippers, and then looked up again. “Will you not speak to me?”
It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.
“Lead on, then,” said Scrooge with resignation. “Lead on. The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I suspect. Lead on, Spirit.”
The phantom moved away as it had come toward him. Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he thought, and carried him along.
They scarcely seemed to enter the city, for the city rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. Scrooge found himself on a familiar street, his very own, just before dawn when there was that strange light that was neither day nor night, following a tall figure in a handsome black cloak. He knew the man he followed, but could not quite place him from his perspective, walking ten feet behind.
At a gate off the alley that ran along Scrooge’s house, the cloaked figure encountered no less a person than Mr. Martins, the parochial undertaker. Scrooge knew him from his dealings with him seven years before, when Marley died. Strange that he should be here at this time and place, and Scrooge did not dare to wonder which of his neighbors might be the object of Mr. Martins’s attention. Scrooge wondered if it might be one of the vampires who’d rented his cellar rooms, but that seemed unlikely, as he’d never heard of an undertaker being called to dispose of a vampire. What they did with their dead, he did not know, did not care to know, and in truth, wondered if the beasties did ever die of natural causes. As far as he could tell from what he had gleaned this night, the only way to kill one was with a pike through the heart—as he had seen on that street while being escorted by the Ghost of Christmas Present.
Mr. Martins was a tall, gaunt, large-jointed man, attired in a suit of threadbare black, with darned cotton stockings of the same color, and shoes to answer. His features were not naturally intended to wear a smiling aspect, but he was in general rather given to professional jocosity. His step was elastic, and his face betokened inward pleasantry, as he advanced to a cloaked man and shook him cordially by the hand.
“I have taken the measure of a man who died last night, sir,” said the undertaker.
“You’ll make your fortune, Mr. Martins.”
“Think so?” said the undertaker in a tone which half admitted and half disputed the probability of the event. “The prices allowed by the board are very small.” He thrust his thumb and forefinger into a snuffbox, which was an ingenious little model of a patent coffin. “And then there’s always the matter of actually collecting. You cannot send a dead man to debtor’s prison.”
“True enough.” The stranger, his back still to Scrooge, tapped the undertaker on the shoulder, in a friendly manner, with his cane.
“And the coffins are not cheap, not even the poorly made ones,” added the undertaker with precisely as near an approach to a laugh as a man of his occupation ought to indulge in.
“I think you are paid well enough.”
“Well, well,” Mr. Martins said at length, “there’s no denying that, I suppose, since the new system of feeding has come in. The coffins are something narrower and more shallow than they used to be, but we must have some profit, sir. Well-seasoned timber is an expensive article, sir, and all the iron handles come, by canal, from Birmingham.”
“Well, well,” the cloaked figure imitated the undertaker, “every trade has its drawbacks. Even mine.” He chuckled. “A fair profit is, of course, allowable.”
“Of course, of course,” replied the undertaker, “and if I don’t get a profit upon this or that particular article, why, I make it up in the long run, you see—he! he! he!”
“Just so,” said the man in the cloak.
“Though I must say,” continued the undertaker, resuming the current observations which the man had interrupted, “that I have to contend against one very great disadvantage, which is that all the stout people go off the quickest. The people who have been better off, and have paid rates for many years, are the first to sink when they come into the house, and let me tell you, sir, that three or four inches over one’s calculation makes a great hole in one’s profits, especially when one has a family to provide for, sir.”
“What, there is no way to fit the remains into a narrower container?”
“I have tried, sir, of that, I assure you, and the results are usually, but not always, less than one would hope.”
“Turned them sideways, did you?”
“In a manner of speaking, but as I did say, that is rarely satisfying, as what bulk is squeezed up in one area tends to flow into another. And if all fails and a coffin must be altered, the price is costly. Most people do not remember that I, too, have a large family to support, with many mouths to feed, and many hands extended for charity. I tell you, it is enough to keep me from my sleep many nights, with the fear that a particular client will not be secured in a standard coffin, and I will be left the poorer by the transaction.”
“Well, I can promise you that in
this
instance, you will be paid well, for your skill and your discretion. All I ask for now is that you wrap the body and hold it. Do not begin the embalming practice, for I doubt it will be necessary.”
this
instance, you will be paid well, for your skill and your discretion. All I ask for now is that you wrap the body and hold it. Do not begin the embalming practice, for I doubt it will be necessary.”
“Hold the body?” questioned the undertaker uneasily. “Unusual, at best, but not unheard of. And for what purpose are you requesting that I store the remains?”
“A coffin may not be necessary.” The cloaked man’s tone was short as he passed a small bag of jingling coins to the undertaker. “Hold the body, without questions or comment, until I or one of mine contact you.”
The undertaker shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Will it be long? With this weather he will keep a few days, but should we have a warm day—”
“It will not be long. . . .”
The undertaker weighed the bag in his bare hand and then quickly slipped it inside his coat. “Yes, sir.” He turned on his heels and hurried away. “A good day to you, Mr. Wahltraud.”
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