A Vampire Christmas Carol (2 page)
Read A Vampire Christmas Carol Online
Authors: Sarah Gray
2
B
efore I continue with the tale, I must fair warn you of the tenants Scrooge did so cleverly lay bargain with the day of Marley’s funeral. That black scourge that did follow him to the cemetery and then home was none other than his new tenant, the supposed wine purveyor. He was King Wahltraud, and his wife, Queen Griselda, was waiting for him at their current abode beneath a tavern off The Strand when Wahltraud returned from making the deal with Scrooge that night.
efore I continue with the tale, I must fair warn you of the tenants Scrooge did so cleverly lay bargain with the day of Marley’s funeral. That black scourge that did follow him to the cemetery and then home was none other than his new tenant, the supposed wine purveyor. He was King Wahltraud, and his wife, Queen Griselda, was waiting for him at their current abode beneath a tavern off The Strand when Wahltraud returned from making the deal with Scrooge that night.
“My dearest, my darling,” Griselda greeted him exuberantly from the bottom of the dark staircase. A beauty she was, pale and white as the waxen berries of mistletoe, as beautiful as King Wahltraud was handsome. “And so the deed is done?” she asked with excitement.
“Done and buried,” Wahltraud responded, plucking his gloves from his fingertips, relishing the snap of the leather and its scent of a slaughtered beast. He laughed at his jest. “And we are to take up residence in his cellars within the week.”
Griselda squealed with delight and threw her arms around her husband, embracing him close. “And so Ebenezer Scrooge is ours?” she begged, looking up at her walking-dead husband in eager anticipation. This project, tedious in time and effort, had taken nearly a full human lifetime. But it would all be worthwhile for Wahltraud and Griselda if Scrooge went the way of Marley. In fact, it would be better, for they had great plans for this human.
Wahltraud brought his lips to Griselda’s and they kissed. Then nipped like pups at play. She was the first to draw blood, he the first to howl with pleasure. “Tell me all,” she cried. “Have we the cellars, my precious? Have you gained them for me?”
You see, Wahltraud and Griselda were not wine purveyors, Prussian brewers, or even ordinary English citizens. Unbeknownst to Scrooge and most of London, they were not even human. Wahltraud was the undisputed King of Vampires, Griselda his crowned queen, and Scrooge her pet project which had kept her busy the last half-century. But how could Scrooge have known? How could anyone have known? You might say if Scrooge had scrutinized his situation with more care, he might have realized that the events played out in his life up to this day were not of his own making. But, again, I get ahead of myself.
Back to Marley . . . Dead as a door-nail.
3
S
crooge never painted out Old Marley’s name the week he died or any of the months or years that followed. There it stood, seven years afterward, above the London warehouse door:
Scrooge and Marley.
The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley even after one partner’s death. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.
crooge never painted out Old Marley’s name the week he died or any of the months or years that followed. There it stood, seven years afterward, above the London warehouse door:
Scrooge and Marley.
The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley even after one partner’s death. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! He was hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm him, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was more bitter than he; no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Ebenezer Scrooge was a cold-hearted man and everyone knew it. Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock. No man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him, and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts, and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!” Did they know the truth of who . . . what controlled Scrooge? Do dogs have some knowledge on this subject that humans do not?
We will never know, for dogs, of course, do not speak. The point is, Scrooge did not care that no one spoke to him unless forced to do so. It was the very thing he liked. He liked to edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.
Or so he believed.
So he had been
trained
to believe, convinced by the events that had unfolded throughout his lifetime. It was all part of the plan, from his childhood . . . no, from his birth and before. Ebenezer Scrooge had been King Wahltraud and Queen Griselda’s pet project from the very conception of his existence.
trained
to believe, convinced by the events that had unfolded throughout his lifetime. It was all part of the plan, from his childhood . . . no, from his birth and before. Ebenezer Scrooge had been King Wahltraud and Queen Griselda’s pet project from the very conception of his existence.
Could one take a human, born pure and good, and make him evil? Or would the innate, sickening goodness of mankind always prevail? Could a man be bribed by money or lust to disregard his innate humanness? To take advantage of the less fortunate, the hungry? It was a conversation tossed about for centuries among vampires on every continent, and one of Wahltraud and Griselda’s favorites . . . Thus evolved the challenge of Ebenezer Scrooge. And so we return to the story at hand again, although I forewarn you now, I am known to skip forward and back in a good tale, relying on the notion that anyone with a little good sense and the interest will follow.
4
S
o, once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—and seven years after Marley’s death—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather. It was foggy and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
o, once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—and seven years after Marley’s death—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather. It was foggy and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
The door of Scrooge’s interior office was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerks, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, were copying ledgers. Bob Cratchit was one. He had been with Scrooge and Marley from the early days; for how many years, Scrooge could not recollect. It seemed as if he had always been there upon his stool. And then there was Lucius Disgut, who arrived unexpectedly the very week Marley died. Willing to work long hours for miniscule wages, willing to be degraded and taken advantage of by his employer, he was practically a gift from the heavens. Or so Scrooge thought, at the time, not realizing that he was never the recipient of gifts, from the heavens or from humans.
Scrooge had a very small fire that afternoon of the anniversary of his partner’s death, but the clerks’ fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. They couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room, and so surely as one of the clerks came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerks put on their comforters, and tried to warm themselves at the candle, in which effort, not being men of a strong imagination, they failed. It was Cratchit who seemed to suffer more from the cold than Disgut; at times, Disgut appeared almost to enjoy the suffering.
“A merry Christmas, Bob Cratchit! God save you!” a cheerful voice cried, followed by the sound of the front door closing.
It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, his dead sister’s son, and from his perch behind his battered desk, Scrooge eyed him suspiciously. The young man was always in and out of Scrooge’s place of business, talking with Cratchit, whispering, smiling. Sometimes their talk was serious, but other times there was laughter. What business did a man like Fred have with a clerk? What business did either of them have with laughter? For neither was in a good financial situation.
Fred had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome, his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked.
“A merry Christmas,” Cratchit greeted Fred cheerfully. “Good to see you, sir.” He lowered his voice so that Scrooge could not hear him. “The VSU meeting last night, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, but my Tim was feeling poorly. It went well, I trust?”
“Well, I should say, indeed. We had an excellent speaker on the use of the club and the pike. I only wish you could have been there.” Fred rubbed his hands together for warmth, for it seemed colder inside his Uncle Scrooge’s counting house than on the streets. “And there was a report made concerning the nest we believe has been found in Cheapside. A raid is being organized to fall between Christmas and New Year’s Day.”
The Vampire Slayers Union, or VSU as they were known on the streets, was a group of dedicated and courageous men, and the occasional woman, who had joined forces in London to fight the constant infestation of ghoulish vampires. The vampires had been in existence for years, centuries, perhaps since the beginning of time, not only in Transylvania and the sewers of Paris, but lurking in the very shadows of London Bridge and flying from the ramparts and windows of Buckingham Palace; but in days of strife among the common people, they became bolder. It was nothing these days in London for a vampire to swipe a grocer or shoeshine off the street in the shadows of dusk and suck the life’s blood out of him and throw him on a rubbish heap; nothing to find a countess or a knight of the chamber drained to an empty husk and stuffed in a chamber pot.
“You can count me in,” Cratchit whispered, glancing in Scrooge’s direction.
“We know we always can, Cratchit!” Fred clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re the best I know with a sharpened pike and a vampire on the loose. I want you at my side in a raid, I’ll fair say that!”
“What’s that? What are you talking about, Cratchit?” The other clerk peered through his round, smudged spectacles. Disgut was a short, thin, bony man with skin so ivory white that it glowed, save for the dark circles that ringed his orbs. He had an interrogative nose and little restless perking eyes, which appeared to have been given to him for the sole purpose of peeping into other people’s affairs.
Cratchit looked up at Disgut, then back at Scrooge’s nephew, and lowered his voice until it was barely a whisper. “Did you hear of the attack on the charwoman near Charing Cross?”
Cratchit glanced Scrooge’s way, shook his head, and dipped his pen into his inkwell, pretending to concentrate on his numbers. “Found dead yesterday morning on her mother’s door-step, flat as a dead mouse swept from beneath a beer barrel.”
“No,” Fred murmured. “A tragedy. And there was also that lamplighter and his son only two days ago.”
“No,” Cratchit cried. “I had not heard.” Then, upon seeing the stony-eyed gaze of Scrooge, he lowered his head, hunkering over his desk, which was less a desk and more a slab of wood than most. “Do tell. . . .”
“On Fleet Street at Ludgate Hill,” Fred explained. “Only the night before last. He was doing his duty, his son at his side, when both were swept off their feet. A hackney coachman saw it all from his box, but could do nothing to save them. The poor souls. The father was dragged off his ladder and carried behind a venison shop by two beasties in red cloaks.”
“So bold,” cried Cratchit.
“The child, no more than six, was bitten, sucked right there at the foot of the ladder (for no one dared intervene for fear of becoming dessert), and then carried off in a pickle barrel into the tunnels to be finished off at the leisure of another.”
Cratchit gasped. “Six years old? Why, he would be the age of my Tiny Tim. The poor lamplighter. The poor family.” He shook his head, his knit cap sliding this way and that. “I must say, I’ve never known a lamplight, but I hear they are a simple people.” He peered up at the man who he truly considered a friend despite the differences in their social class. That was one thing the vampires had done for London society; it had brought the classes together in order to fight them.
“That is the third lamplight taken in the last fortnight; they seem to like them. Think you, perhaps, the vampires find them tastier than, say, a poulterer or a charmaid?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps. I know that they are a strange and primitive people,” Fred observed. “They rigidly adhere to old ceremonies and customs which have been handed down among them from father to son since the first public lamp was lighted out of doors. They intermarry, and betroth their children in infancy; I was told the boy was already promised to a gravedigger’s daughter. They enter into no plots or conspiracies (for who ever heard of a traitorous lamplighter?), they commit no crimes against the laws of their country (there being no instance of a murderous or burglarious lamplighter). They are, in short, notwithstanding their apparently volatile and restless character, a highly moral and reflective people, having among themselves as many traditional observances as the Jews, and being, as a body, if not as old as the hills, at least as old as the streets. It is an article of their creed that the first faint glimmering of true civilization shone in the first street-light maintained at the public expense. They trace their existence and high position in the public esteem, in a direct line to the heathen mythology, and hold that the history of Prometheus himself is but a pleasant fable, whereof the true hero is a lamplighter.”
“A tragedy.” Cratchit sighed, glancing into the wavering light of the sputtering candle on his desk.
“Sir.” Disgut interrupted quite suddenly, pouncing off his stool (for he was trying mightily to hear every word, most of which he could not distinguish). For you see, Disgut was not what he appeared to be. But I imagine you have already deduced that morsel.
Actually, Disgut
was
what he appeared to be: a pale, nosy man with beady dark eyes and dirty spectacles, but he was no ordinary clerk. Did you take notice of my mention that he was hired the very week Marley died, coinciding with the first time Wahltraud made himself visible to Scrooge? Ah, yes, one of the King of the Vampire’s minions he was. Of course! For years he had played spy for Wahltraud, and forever fearing punishment for not being able to repeat every word said in Scrooge’s counting house, he interrupted the conversation between Cratchit and Scrooge’s nephew, afraid they were plotting against the King of Vampires. (Which of course, they were.)
was
what he appeared to be: a pale, nosy man with beady dark eyes and dirty spectacles, but he was no ordinary clerk. Did you take notice of my mention that he was hired the very week Marley died, coinciding with the first time Wahltraud made himself visible to Scrooge? Ah, yes, one of the King of the Vampire’s minions he was. Of course! For years he had played spy for Wahltraud, and forever fearing punishment for not being able to repeat every word said in Scrooge’s counting house, he interrupted the conversation between Cratchit and Scrooge’s nephew, afraid they were plotting against the King of Vampires. (Which of course, they were.)
“Would you care to make your way to Mr. Scrooge’s office?” Disgut cut his rodent-like eyes at Cratchit. “We’ve work to do, still, you see.”
“Most certainly. Thank you.” The nephew looked back to Cratchit, even as he made his way through the narrow doorway. “We’ll speak later.” And then he called cheerfully to his uncle, “A merry Christmas!”
“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”
“Christmas a humbug, Uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough. Not as poor as those two.” He pointed an arthritic finger at his two clerks hovering over their desks. “But poor enough.”
“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have
you
to be morose? You’re as rich as your clerks are poor.”
you
to be morose? You’re as rich as your clerks are poor.”
Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again and followed it up with “Humbug!”
“Dear me, don’t be cross, Uncle,” said the nephew.
“What else can I be,” returned he, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas. What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money, a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer, a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
At the suggestion of a human being boiled in pudding, Disgut perked up his ears, for he was a tragic creature, mostly human, but not entirely, with a taste for human blood. Raw was acceptable; he liked it cooked, on occasion. But boiling a man in pudding seemed a waste, not to mention the possibility of adding unwanted sweet and fat to one’s diet. Boiled in pudding? Disgusting!
Of course, no man in the counting house could have known this little tidbit about the man on the stool pretending to add his figures while listening to his employer’s conversation.
“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.
“Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly. “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”
“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”
“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time. It is a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. This is the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good. I say, God bless it!”
Bob Cratchit, in the tank, applauded with great gusto; Disgut screwed up his thin face and fixed his black eyes upon his companion. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, Cratchit hopped off his stool, poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark forever.
Scrooge looked Cratchit’s way. “Let me hear another sound from you,” he said, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation! Disgut does twice the work of you for less coin!”
It was untrue of course, for Cratchit was a hard worker. Everyone knew it, but no one dared argue with Ebenezer Scrooge.
“You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,” Scrooge added, turning back to his nephew. “I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”
“Don’t be angry with me, Uncle. And don’t poke fun at me. I am sincere in my wishes. Come! Dine with us tomorrow.”
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