A Vampire Christmas Carol (9 page)

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Authors: Sarah Gray

BOOK: A Vampire Christmas Carol
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16
W
ith the blink of Scrooge’s eye, then, he was no longer in his childhood home, he and the ghost, but on a country road.
“Wait,” Scrooge begged, looking back over his shoulder, the hem of his gown tangling around his bony ankles.
The spirit looked up the road they now followed. “You recollect the way?”
“Remember it,” cried Scrooge with fervor, thankful to be away from that frightful deathbed and a past he could not change. “I could walk it blindfolded.”
As they walked along, Scrooge recognized every gate, and post, and tree until a little market town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river. Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting toward them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.
The jocund travelers came on, and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them? Why did his cold eyes glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past? Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other merry Christmas, as they parted at crossroads and bye-ways, for their several homes? What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas. What good had it ever done to him? “They’ve all gone off on holiday,” he remarked.
“Not all of them. The school is not quite deserted,” said the ghost. “A solitary child, neglected by his family and friends, is left there still.”
They left the high road, by a well-remembered lane, and soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken fortunes, for the spacious offices were little used, their walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables, and the coach-houses and sheds were overrun with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state within, for entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthy savor in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too much to eat.
They went, the ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain benches and desks. At one of these, a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire, and Scrooge sat down upon a bench, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.
Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the paneling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.
“The place where my father sent me that day.”
The phantom pointed to a foggy window, left open a crack so that the voices outside carried within. Beyond the window, standing not in the schoolyard, but the yard of his home was Scrooge’s father and sister. Scrooge didn’t know how such a thing was possible and, at this point, cared little, for it seemed less a feat than the time travel he was experiencing or less incredible than the presence of vampires in England or anywhere on earth, for that matter.
“But why cannot we not go to fetch Ebenezer on our way to church?” his twin sister begged.
She was a blooming schoolgirl, now, with flowing brown hair tied with a blue ribbon beneath her white bonnet, her beauty remarkable for her age. Upon her face, Scrooge could already see the young woman she would become.
“Get into the carriage and do not question my authority,” Mr. Scrooge said harshly. “I will not speak of this again, child!”
“But, Father, why?” cried Fan, tears filling her eyes, eyes like her mother’s . . . like Scrooge’s. “Why must Ebenezer stay at school alone when I am able to live here in the comfort of our home?”
“You know why,” the elder Scrooge said.
“But it’s not true.” She dabbed prettily at her tears. “It was not Ebenezer’s fault that Mother died! And he has become a fine scholar. You have listened too long to Mrs. Grottweil and her lies! I tell you, I do not need a wet nurse or a nursemaid or whatever it is she calls herself, and I want her dismissed. The truth of my mother’s day she hides from you is far darker than simple death in childbirth. Far more sinister.”
“Get into the carriage,” ordered Mr. Scrooge, taking his daughter’s arm roughly. “And I will hear no more on the matter. Ebenezer will stay in school!”
“Fan,” Scrooge called out, reaching for his long-lost sister. But the image faded until he was no longer certain it had ever been there.
The spirit touched Scrooge on the arm, and pointed to his younger self inside the schoolroom, intent upon his reading.
“What Queen Griselda said came to pass. My father believed I was responsible for my mother’s death. That was really why he sent me away. Not because I did poorly in my lessons that day.” Tears welled in Scrooge’s eyes again. “I see it all. I did not understand, but all becomes clear to me.”
“Look forward now,” the ghost said.
Suddenly, a man, in foreign garments, wonderfully real and distinct to look at, stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.
“Why, it’s Ali Baba,” Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. “It’s dear old honest Ali Baba. Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy. And Valentine,” said Scrooge, “and his wild brother, Orson; there they go. And what’s his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus? Don’t you see him? And the Sultan’s Groom turned upside down by the Genii, there he is upon his head. Serves him right. I’m glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess?”
To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying, and to see his heightened and excited face would have been a surprise to his business friends in the city, indeed.
“There’s the parrot,” cried Scrooge. “Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head, there he is. Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. ‘Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?’ The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn’t. It was the parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek. Halloa. Hoop. Hallo.”
Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, Scrooge said, in pity for his former self, “Poor boy,” and cried again. “I wish . . . ,” he muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff. “But it’s too late now.”
“What is the matter?” asked the spirit. “Surely you can see what a burden he must have been to his father . . . the cost he must have been . . . the shoes . . . the books . . . the quills and ink and slates . . . all wasted on one who had killed his own mother.”
“But I didn’t kill her. I was an innocent babe,” Scrooge whispered.
“What? What do you say?”
“Nothing,” said Scrooge, hanging his head. “Nothing.”
The ghost waited.
“It is only that there was a boy singing a Christmas carol at my counting house door last night. I should like to have given him something, that’s all. After all, if it is true that vampires roam our streets, then he took great risk to sing that carol in the hopes of brightening my day.”
The ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand, saying as it did so, “Let us see another Christmas.”
17
S
crooge’s former self grew larger at the words, and the room became a little darker and dirtier. The panels shrunk, the windows cracked, fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead, but how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct, that everything had happened so, that there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.
“I do not know why no one ever invited me home with them,” Scrooge said sadly. He saw himself not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly, occasionally glancing at the window at the commotion in the yard. Through a crack in the window the joyous sounds of families being reunited could be heard. There was laughter and the sound of sleigh bells as students set off to spend the holidays with their families.
“If only, in all those years, just one boy would have asked me,” Scrooge murmured, feeling quite sorry for himself, at that point. “If only just one had cared.”
The spirit turned with a sweeping hand, and a door opened. From inside, Scrooge heard the sound of his headmaster’s voice, only it was not the pleasant voice he recalled from his years there.
“You most certainly will not invite him home with you,” hissed the headmaster. “Take that boy home with you and you will regret the day you ever met Ebenezer Scrooge.”
At the mention of his name, Scrooge moved closer to the door. It was the headmaster’s office. Inside, the man held Joshua Cuttleman, Scrooge’s school chum, by the throat, up against a paneled wall.
“Sir?” cried Joshua, who was a short boy with a long face, but nice enough in manners. He was not brainy, and not the cleanliest of boys, but he had always seemed to have a good heart and had often shared treats sent from home with Ebenezer . . . until the headmaster had caught him and punished poor Joshua. Sharing of sweets was particularly frowned upon at school, though why, Scrooge had never known.
“You . . . you cannot tell me I cannot take a friend home with me, sir,” Joshua crowed boldly.
“I can and I will.” The schoolmaster wrapped his hands more tightly around Joshua’s stringy throat and the boy’s pinched face went red, then purple.
As Scrooge watched from the doorway, the headmaster, a tall, thin man with a slight hare-lip, drew back said malformed lip and bared a set of tiny incisors. They were not so nearly as impressive as Queen Griselda’s, and appeared homemade, but were still startling. Scrooge had had no idea!
“He-he’s l-like Mrs. Grottweil,” Scrooge stuttered in shock. “My schoolmaster, he was working for her, wasn’t he? For Queen Griselda?” He rushed forward and tried to enter the schoolmaster’s office, but it seemed he could not, for when he stepped through the threshold, the office seemed to move another step away, and then another step away and another and so forth.
“Attempt to offer an invitation, Cuttleman,” the headmaster threatened, “and I will sink my fangs into you, I will bite you and drink your blood. I will come to you at night and have a taste of you, and then when you are too weak from blood loss to fight, I will give you up to the true bloodsuckers, who will drink you dry and toss your bones into the outhouse hole so that your mother and father will have nothing to bury.”
“So he is not actually a vampire?” Scrooge observed. “Like Mrs. Grottweil, he . . . ,” he searched for the right phrase, “works for the vampires? But
they
are not vampires, are they?”
“They are humans who have acquired a taste for human blood, thanks to the vampires,” the spirit said. “They are called
minions
. They are at the beck and call of the vampires. Queen Griselda and King Wahltraud have many minions.”
“My . . . my father,” the boy Joshua dared bravely, gaining Scrooge’s attention again. “I will tell my father that you have tried to intimidate me, and he will tell the other boys’ fathers and they will see you dismissed.” His face was growing brighter red by the moment, his thin cheeks now shiny. “They will see you thrown in prison for aiding and abetting the vampires.”
The headmaster, still holding tightly to Joshua’s throat, threw back his head and laughed heartily. The sound came out slightly garbled due to his facial affliction. “And then I will go to your family home in the dark of night and I will pluck your little sisters, one by one, out of their beds and hand them out the window to one of my accomplices. Do you know how much vampires will pay for fresh, young, rosy-cheeked English girls on the auction block in Transylvania?”
“My sisters?” Joshua sobbed. “You would murder a little girl?”
“The lass missing from the village last week?” The headmaster lifted a bushy brow. “Drained and tucked beneath a rain barrel on the high street. She will be nothing but a crust by the time she is found. Unless you’d like to go looking for her body now. We could go together.”
A tear slipped down Joshua’s face. “Let me go,” he whispered, “and I will say nothing to Ebenezer. I will not extend the invitation.”
“And you will suggest to the other lads they follow your lead,” the headmaster warned as he slowly released him.
“Yes,” the boy agreed, defeat on his red face. “Ebenezer will not be invited anywhere by any of us.”
Scrooge recalled that, sadly, after that Christmas holiday, Joshua did not return to school. His one friend, gone. And Scrooge had never known why; now he knew that the poor boy had been forced to run for his life because he had wanted to show a schoolmate a little kindness.
Scrooge turned to the ghost, with a mournful shaking of his head, and a tear upon his cheek that matched Joshua’s those many years ago. “I thought they simply did not like me. I had no idea the headmaster threatened them.”
“It was not the schoolmaster’s intention for you to know, nor was it the intention of the vampires,” the spirit responded as he turned to point to another door off the classroom. “Another Christmas . . .”

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