The Last of the Spirits (2 page)

So old Scrooge thought that the poor should die rather than trouble him? This was hardly a novel view in London town and Sam might have found a dozen men nearby who felt the same. But few – very few – would say the words out loud.

The light of day had faded already and Sam winced at the thought of the pain the night’s chill would bring. How many more nights could he endure? he wondered. How many more would Lizzie survive? The empty suits in the window of the tailor’s across the way were warmer than they were. Why, a plucked goose in the butcher shop had more love and care lavished on it than was ever gifted to them.

Sam was filled with a bitter, seething, murderous rage against all who lived in comfort and security in that cold-hearted city, and this fury was funnelled and concentrated down, like a hammer to a nail, on to the head of Mr Scrooge.

‘Sam,’ said Lizzie, seeing his fierce trance, ‘I’m cold.’

‘We’re all cold,’ said Sam mechanically.

‘Please, Sam,’ she said quietly.

Sam turned away from his vigil.

‘Look,’ he said after a moment, his eyes lifeless, like glass marbles. ‘There’s a fire.’

Ahead of them a small group huddled round a brazier lit by workmen, heads bowed like mourners at a funeral pyre. The happy yellow glow seemed alien to that colourless place and it attracted the cold and homeless as animals to a desert oasis.

The two children shoved through those already gathered. No one gave way for them. There was no more sympathy to be had there than from the old man who had shunned them. The smaller you were, the closer to the ground and closer to the grave pit, that was all.

They were not the only children there for one thing. A woman, whose features shifted and blurred in the heat of the flames, held a baby to her breast under her filthy shawl, its tiny head just peeping out. The mother stared blankly into the fire, so weak she looked as though she might fall headlong into it. Would she see Christmas Day? Would the child?

The fire was a feeble one, and Sam looked about for anything that would burn. Builders clearing a house nearby had thrown things down into the yard below. Sam rummaged around and came back hugging pieces of wood and several books to his chest.

As he was about to throw one of the books on the fire, it opened and the pages fluttered, revealing for a fleeting second a brightly coloured illustration, partly hidden under a sheet of tissue paper. It was like an exotic butterfly.

‘Don’t,’ said Lizzie, grabbing his arm.

‘What? You’d rather keep it, would you? You’d rather carry it around, would you, so’s you can read it to yourself when you’re tucked up in bed, eh?’

A one-eyed man nearby sniggered wheezily.

‘No,’ said Lizzie. ‘But –’

‘But what?’ said Sam, more loudly now, and more cruelly. ‘What?’

‘It’s just too lovely to burn,’ she said, not quite swallowing a sob.

Sam shook his head. Too lovely to burn! The one-eyed man shook his head too, and Sam was momentarily troubled by this distorted mirror of himself.

‘We could sell it,’ protested Lizzie.

‘Half the pages is missing,’ said Sam. ‘No one’s going to want to buy that.’

‘But –’

‘You’re too sentimental, Liz. That’s your trouble.’

Sam tossed the book on to the fire and it fell, pages open, the flames eating up the words. Lizzie was able to catch the odd phrase before the fire blackened the paper and tore it up, sending glowing fragments high into the night.

Sam saw the words too, but understood nothing. Writing was a mystery to him: a cryptic code without a key. Books! What better use for them than fuel for a fire? He’d have burned every book in London even if it only kept his hands warm for a moment. What were stories but just another kind of lie?

Sam turned away from the brazier. He could still see the office dimly through the fog and the dark. As he watched, the door opened and a man stood briefly silhouetted in the light from inside before hunching himself against the cold and striding away down the street on stick-thin legs.

This wasn’t the old man’s hunched gait, but the brisker step of someone younger. It was the clerk to old Scrooge, a man as thin as Sam with clothes that had seen better days, though the clerk might struggle to bring them to mind. Not long before, Scrooge had threatened to sack him, but outside the office the clerk was like a bird released from a cage.

He whistled gaily and would have no doubt flown if tattered coat-tails had been wings. He went on his way, chuckling to himself as he took a run and slid along the pavement for a yard or two, almost falling over.

Two plump children on their way home with their mother laughed at the clerk’s antics, but their gentle mockery only lightened his mood further. He tipped his hat to them and bowed elaborately before he hopped and skipped nimbly across the road to walk within a few feet of Sam.

‘Merry Christmas!’ he said, throwing his scarf over his shoulder and blowing into his thin pale fingers.

‘Merry Christmas!’ said Lizzie with a smile.

The clerk rubbed his hands together and walked on, whistling again.

‘What have you got to be merry-Christmas-ing about?’ hissed Sam with a snarl. ‘Merry Christmas? Pah! It’s all right for him.’

Lizzie began to sob. There was a time – although it already seemed another life ago – when this would have melted the iciest of Sam’s moods, but his heart was as hard as iron now. He simply looked away towards the old man, hidden behind that inky door.

And then, like ink, the night’s true darkness came flowing in and with it a bone-gnawing cold. The crowd about the fire was growing, but they needed to find shelter. Some nights had killer written on them and this, thought Sam, was one of them. Only the fit and healthy would survive the deadly creeping frost that would be coming soon – and who on the street was fit or healthy?

Sam peered at the door of Scrooge’s office and his heart blackened to match it. The fog seemed to blur all the rest of London town and leave only that black rectangle in focus. Then all at once it opened and out stepped old Scrooge, looking about as cautiously as a fox and locking the door behind him.

The old man set off along the pavement, his cane tick-ticking as before, his head tucked into his hunched shoulders that were themselves pulled into his bony, crooked back. There was no festive lightness in his step, no ‘Merry Christmas’ from him as he passed others on the street. No greeting was offered and none returned.

‘Come on, Lizzie,’ said Sam, walking after the old man.

Lizzie didn’t even ask where they were going. She trusted Sam and knew she would not be alive without his wits. He always managed to find some scrap of food, some kind of shelter. He had saved her life a hundred times.

Sam saw the beetle-black shape of the old man ahead in the failing light and fog and hurried to make sure they did not lose him.
Tick-tick-tick.
The cane and its echo rattled ahead of them like loose teeth.

Eventually they came to a dimly lit and dreary yard. The old man looked about him but did not see them. He walked into the yard and Sam and Lizzie waited at the entrance as he fumbled in his pocket for a bunch of keys. So this was where he lived. This was his den.

Sam looked on. As soon as the old man opened the door, he would attack him. He had a length of lead piping in his coat pocket that he had picked up when he had fetched the books for the fire. He would knock Scrooge down and they would rob him. He would not set out to kill him, but some men’s skulls were thinner than others.

Sam was puzzled to hear the old man talking. At first he thought there was someone else there, but he soon realised that Scrooge was talking to himself, muttering wildly and shaking his head like he was fresh out of Bedlam. He seemed for all the world to be talking to his own door knocker!

Somehow this eccentric behaviour blackened Sam’s mood still further. It outraged him. It goaded him. Why should a witless old fool like this live in comfort and plenty whilst they starved and froze?

A crisp, wintery contempt for the old man settled on Sam’s heart like a rime of frost that all the heat of the Indies could not have melted. It felt good. All these years of hating the world had made him feel powerless, but now he had but one target. He would make this one man pay and that would be enough.

Yet for all the mounting violence of his thoughts, Sam did not launch his attack. He felt a sudden unfamiliar heaviness in his legs. The old man had gone inside and closed the door behind him before Sam was able to cross the yard. He walked towards the door and looked at the knocker hanging there. It was an ugly thing to be sure, with a strange face, its features caught somewhere betwixt man and lion, a dull brass ring clamped between its teeth. Sam stood there staring so long that Lizzie tugged the sleeve of his jacket.

‘Sam?’ she said. ‘Sam?’

He snapped out of his trance at the sound of Lizzie’s weak and plaintive voice. He looked around and pointed to a tall, old, arched iron gate on the other side of the cobbled yard.

‘Come on, Liz,’ he said. ‘Over here.’

The gate opened with a reluctant, guttural groan that seemed disconcertingly human, and they squeezed through to find themselves in a walled churchyard, soot-blackened headstones all about them etched with skulls and hourglasses and other such reminders of mortality. Black and leafless trees stood here and there like clutching hands. Sam walked up to the chapel door, but it was locked and with a lock that was not going to be shifted or broken.

‘Here,’ said Sam, walking back to Lizzie. ‘This’ll have to do.’

He was pointing at a tomb that had once stood like a great stone bed, etched all over with moss-filled letters telling the story of the man whose body lay forgotten by all but the worms. It was now in a state of partial collapse, one side having fallen away to make a little web-strewn cave beneath the huge slab.

The quiet churchyard was sheltered by walls and the church itself, and the tombstone cave added a little more. It was a grim place to spend the night, but they had slept in worse. They squeezed together for warmth as the fog thickened around them.

Sam marvelled at how easily Lizzie could fall asleep, no matter the circumstances. He felt the length of lead piping he had picked up on the waste ground by Scrooge’s office. It felt colder and even heavier now. He clung to it as a small child might cling to a favourite doll.

Sam woke with a start, bumping his head on the stone slab above him. He took a few seconds to remember where he was, but he could see nothing in the gloom that shouldn’t have been there. Lizzie was still breathing gently beside him. All seemed as well as could be, so he settled back down to sleep.

But no sooner had he closed his eyes than a low moan emanated from somewhere nearby. Yes – that was the noise that had woken him, he realised. Was it the gate? he wondered. Was a constable or church warden coming to turf them out? On Christmas Eve? Unlikely. They would all be snugly at home with their loved ones.

The moan sounded again, more loudly this time, and Sam knew straight away it was not the old hinges of any gate. For one thing, it was coming from
under
the ground. He could
feel
it, as well as hear it.

Sam shifted his position and peered out from their hideaway. On the opposite side of the snow-covered pathway was a plain, arched headstone. The stone bore the name and dates of the man whose bones lay beneath, but Sam could not read them.

The groan came again and the little linked chain that marked the boundary of that grave now rattled, sending showers of sparkling frost to the ground.

Sam tried to make sense of it. His thoughts seemed to blunder about his head like men in a dark room. A shaking of the ground – what did they call it? . . . A quake . . . an earthquake! Is that what this was? An earthquake?

But even as he wondered if the buildings all about would come crashing down around them, with old Scrooge and his money buried under his own house, and Sam and Lizzie buried under the rubble of the church, something started to emerge from the ground in front of the headstone.

Sam stared wide-eyed with incredulity as the mysterious translucent dome became, by slow degrees, the forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth and chin of a long and cheerless face, all bound together by a scarf wrapped under the chin and tied in a bow atop a balding head.