by Pat Cadigan
I shrugged. We waited as the reports segued from national to state, and then to regional, followed by the weather, then sports. Coco groaned and told me to shut it off, she was allergic to hockey. I shook my head; something told me to wait.
“And finally, tonight, a sharp-eyed Good Samaritan at the “Oak River mall” saved Christmas for a number of area families,” said a beautiful blonde news reader with utter conviction. “The unknown man spotted a scam that was operating right under the noses of mall security. Three con artists brazenly set up a ‘free gift-wrapping station’ in the middle of the mall. The catch? The wrapped packages they gave back to customers were filled with trash: old rags, shredded paper, even bubble-wrapped bricks. They removed the real merchandise to sell themselves later on eBay or Amazon.”
The scene switched to a police officer, who explained the same thing in more detail.
I smiled at Coco. “Scrooge came out of his shell today.”
“God bless us, everyone.” She toasted the TV with a cup of tea.
“Semper fi,” I corrected her.
* * *
The next day, I had planned to tell the entire cast about how Scrooge saved Christmas, but before I could even open my mouth, he gave me a look and a quick head shake and that was it—I couldn’t say a word about it. I tried to get Coco to do it but she refused on the grounds that she hadn’t been there.
“Besides,” she went on, talking over me when I tried to argue, “if we want him to open up, disrespecting his feelings isn’t the way to go about it, is it?” I grudgingly admitted she was right.
I intended to pull him aside and ask him about it but the opportunity never presented itself—we got busier and busier as Christmas approached. The show was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve as the closing event of the fete. We were invited to spend Christmas Day with the Rotary Club, who were hosting an all-afternoon party at a local restaurant, with food, drink, and football. Larger than most family get-togethers but small enough to be sociable, Roberta-call-me-Bobbie Maxwell told us; a thank you to everyone who worked on the fete. Coco and I gave her a definite maybe. Christmas was one of our few days off. Watching parades on TV in our pjs without any ghosts was gift enough. But we figured if the play went even passingly well, we could show our faces for an hour or so when the worst of the football was over; if it was an unmitigated disaster, we’d just pack as quickly as possible to be on the road by nightfall.
I didn’t think it would be an unmitigated disaster. In fact, I thought parts would be quite good—our original Bob Cratchit broke his leg skiing and was replaced by the cop, who, Coco and I agreed, should have been in the part all along. Maybe it was because his real wife was Mrs. Cratchit. Christmas Present said their relationship was invigorating, and then got so invigorated at one point, he made a psychic connection with them. Fortunately, the Cratchits thought what they were feeling was just the magic of the theater. They were probably going to start doing am-dram regularly after we left. I just hoped regular theater wouldn’t be too much of a letdown.
“If you were going to connect with anyone, it should have been Scrooge,” I told Present afterward. “You’re playing the scene with him—the two of you are only watching the Cratchits.”
“I know.” Present’s face on the iPad screen was contrite. “He’s such a lone wolf, though. I’m afraid that even just a fleeting touch might be too much. And he won’t think it’s just the holiday spirit mixed with the magic of the theater, roar of the greasepaint, smell of the mistletoe, all that. He’ll know something different happened and I don’t know how he’ll take it. Sometimes his aura looks kind of … unstable.”
“Like he’s unstable?”
“No, just his aura. He’s…” Present paused for so long I wondered if the iPad had frozen. “He’s laying low,” he said finally.
“He’s laying low by being in a Christmas play?” Coco said, coming in from the kitchen with an enormous bowl of popcorn. She plopped down next to me on the couch, pointed the remote at the TV, and began scrolling through the listings. “On what plane of existence does that make sense?”
“On yours,” Present said evenly. “He’s blending in. Like camouflage or encryption?” Present is five hundred years old; he was a house haunt at the original Globe Theatre, and always loves to show off how au courant he is. I’ve seen images of him from the 1980s—three letters: MTV.
Nonetheless, I said, “Okay, I can see that. He’s conforming so he won’t look odd to the natives. Still, playing the lead in the Christmas play is more attention-getting than low-laying.”
“Attention-getting in a good way,” Present insisted.
Several inches of long gray hair floated out of the screen as Yet to Come crowded in next to Present. I fanned the air to blow them back in before they could stick to everything (ectoplasm can be worse than gum). “He’s right,” Yet to Come said. Without the Grim Reaper-style hooded robe, she looked very un-gaunt and non-dead. In her case, clothes made the spirit, a description kinder and gentler than fashion victim. She was the youngster of the bunch, under a hundred, and had experience working in silent films, although she never talked about it.
Which reminded me there was something I wasn’t talking about. Although, strangely, I had no problem telling Present and YTC how Scrooge had managed to silence me with only tiny shake of his head, sans any physical contact.
“Sounds a lot like the power of suggestion to me, Dita,” Present said in his I-know-things voice. “You people seriously underestimate the force of POS, and you really shouldn’t. You’re all in a trance for most of your waking hours anyway, with all that staring into a light-source. Like you’re doing at this very moment. Her, too—” he pointed at Coco, who was still scrolling through the program guide in the hope that somehow five hundred channels with nothing on might cough up something worth watching, or at least re-watching. “If you tell her to go jump off a cliff right now, you’d never be able to stop her.”
“This town doesn’t have any cliffs,” Coco said tonelessly, never looking away from the TV.
“Then you’d be in for a long walk in the cold,” Present said.
“Not that cold,” Coco said, still scrolling. “Global warming.”
“Tell her to bring you a glass of wine, or run a bath for you,” Present said. “She won’t even blink.”
I turned to look at Coco, still clicking the remote and gazing fixedly at the TV. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’d blink.”
“Only if we told you to,” Present retorted.
My sister put down the remote and looked over at the iPad. “Seriously? Are you forgetting who physically wears the tangible big girl pants around here?”
“Okay, Coco, maybe you’re not quite that … ah, tractable,” Present said. “But Dita, you might be less resistant to this guy since you’re trying to connect with him. It’s like barter. Or a contract. Like, your subconscious thinks if it keeps you quiet, he’ll come across with what you want.”
“Or maybe he’s a low-level sorcerer.” The words were out of my mouth before I even knew I was going to say anything.
Coco burst out laughing. “Yeah, right! The mystical Marine!” She went back to searching the TV listings.
“Career soldiers have a mystical aspect,” Present said. “It’s a closed brotherhood. Like thespians. You’re not in it unless you already are and even when you leave it, you’re not really out. And Marines don’t just follow orders—once they get stripes, they give them. This guy must have been at least an NCO when he retired. That’s a sergeant,” he added to YTC.
“I know what an NCO is,” she said, barely not snapping at him.
Present laughed. “That would have made him Sergeant Rock. I bet he took some ribbing about that.”
“Or not,” I said, picturing his face at the shopping mall that day. “I wouldn’t tease him.”
“I would.” Present had the nerve to sound smug.
“Sure you would—now,” I replied. “You’re dead, y
ou have no instinct for self-preservation. I don’t think you’d be so quick to smart off if anyone could actually hurt you.”
Instead of giving me an argument like I expected, he said, “Touché. I keep forgetting. Even after all this time, I sometimes think I’m about to move my hand or my arm, or I think I feel the wind stir my hair—”
“Phantom limb syndrome,” YTC said. “Except it’s your whole body.”
Present looked at her incredulously. “Are you utterly mad?”
“It’s a real thing. People feel it all the time.”
“Because they have a corporeal brain—”
“Lights out,” I said and the screen went dark.
“If you hadn’t, I would’ve,” my sister said. Now she was scrolling through the movie channels, one by one. “Sometimes I think we spend entirely too much time talking to the dead.” She highlighted The Sixth Sense.
“You do know that nobody loves a smartass,” I said. “Right?”
“Sometimes the irony is so thick no subtlety is possible.” She paused. “He’s not a sorcerer. He’s just a guy.”
I should have paid closer attention. Maybe Present was right about TV putting us in a trance.
* * *
You’re probably wondering about the set and costumes. Basically, everything was scrounged, which meant not all of it was exactly in period. We had a crew from the high school drama club for scene changes, rearranging the furniture so Scrooge’s sitting room could become the Cratchit place, then Fred’s. A particularly handy girl rigged Scrooge’s bed to fold up out of the way Murphy-style, with retractable posts. Coco was genuinely in awe.
The lighting was all under our control—i.e., the ghosts did the illumination. Doing it normally was out of the question—even low electric light can interfere with manifestations and make them spotty. It’s something to do with wavelengths. Candles or kerosene lanterns are no problem but even if it hadn’t been against fire regulations, we wouldn’t have risked an open flame (there’s tempting fate and then there’s daring it to bite your head off). We let the drama club handle the auditorium itself but we told them we had programmed the lights through our projection system. It kept them out of our hair and away from the “projectors.”
The costumes came out of cellars and attics and Goodwill, which meant some of the coats zipped up rather than buttoned. Another handy high schooler came up with the idea of sewing buttons on them and using long scarves to camouflage the zippers. Of course, the scarves were really no less anachronistic, but it was the thought that counted—literally, if you’ll pardon the expression. Every bit of extra effort the kids or their parents put in was credit for us. (It counted as something good for them, too, of course, but none of them had a curse to worry about.)
* * *
The eve of Christmas Eve rehearsal went so well, I should have been suspicious. Instead, I was just relieved—nobody had caught the flu, everybody remembered their lines, and the ghosts were all right on cue. And Scrooge—well, he wasn’t as closed off as he had been in the beginning and he definitely had acting talent. But there was still a sense of his being slightly removed from everyone else. Maybe we should have socialized more, I thought; if we’d taken them all bowling or Christmas shopping. Or even just had a few snowball fights.
“You know, sis, sometimes the hit of adrenaline everyone gets in front of an audience can take a show from almost there to on the money,” Coco said as we walked back to the condo together. “We’ve both seen it happen before.” It had snowed on and off all day, the good stuff you could make snowballs with. The holiday ambience was thicker than the irony had been.
“Does everything look a little too charming to you?” I asked Coco.
“We’re in New England,” my sister said. “It gets like this a lot.”
“You sure about that?”
“Trust me. The whole world isn’t like Dongola, Illinois.”
“Right. I forgot you’re so much more well-traveled than I am.”
This precipitated a snowball fight, which ended with both of us having snow stuffed down our shirts. We’d left the main street by then and there was no one else around to witness our sudden fit of silliness, or join in. The thought was a tiny pang of melancholy at the back of my mind—we should have had taken the cast out to play in the snow for bonding—soon eclipsed by having to take care not to track slush into the condo.
* * *
Christmas Eve started early and taut. Coco put on a calm, collected front but I knew she was as tense and anxious as I was because she never once told me to relax. We were ready to go by noon and perhaps if we had put the play on then—but there’s no point in second-guessing. Besides, there’s something indecent about the idea of a noontime performance of a play that’s set in the middle of the night. The ghosts probably would have mutinied.
We had told everyone to be at the school no later than 4:00 to get into costume and makeup. I didn’t really expect anyone to be early; if I had, it wouldn’t have been Scrooge. But he appeared in the dressing room at 3:30, looking a little nervous but very bright-eyed.
I asked him if he needed any help with his makeup; he shook his head, mumbling something about how Coco and I probably had plenty to do without worrying about him. Mainly what we had to do was run around triple- and quadruple- and quintuple-checking the set, the fake projection boxes, and the bonne chance charms and talismans positioned over every entrance and exit to the stage (sometimes a little good luck is all it takes to prevent a major disaster). We’d had to rethink a couple that had been knocked down between scenes when the kids shifted the furniture a bit too vigorously.
The rest of the cast showed up and the dressing room took on a party atmosphere.
“That’s a good sign, right? When it’s like a party, that means everything will be okay, doesn’t it?” I whispered to Coco as we watched, occasionally helping someone with their costume or makeup. The room was partitioned into male and female areas by several mismatched room dividers. It wasn’t what you’d call watertight; I imagined a lot of drama geeks got their first glimpse of what they’d been missing here. Anyone overly concerned with preserving their modesty retreated to either the men’s or ladies’ room.
The ladies’ was right off the dressing room but the men’s was a little ways down the hall, which was how we failed to notice that Scrooge was missing until we called everyone together for a show circle.
“I’ll get him,” Coco said and disappeared.
“Maybe I should go—” Bob Cratchit said, looking uncomfortable.
“It’s okay, we’re theater people,” I said.
Coco was back before I had to try to explain that one. “Scrooge is working on something important,” she said. “He apologizes and says not to wait for him. He’s here in spirit.”
Before I could object, she did a quick invocation and sent everyone off to their positions for the opening. We had put in a brief sequence set on the street outside Scrooge’s house, with Mrs. Cratchit and the kids waving through the window at Bob, and Fred supposedly showing his wife and some friends his uncle’s building, using gestures to describe Scrooge’s character.
“We should have waited!” I said as soon as Coco and I were alone. “No one should be left out of the circle!”
“What did you want me to do, drag the man off the toilet? I knocked on the door, then poked my head in. He was in one of the stalls and it sounded … intense.”
“Then we should have delayed the start of the show,” I said. “Five minutes, ten minutes, big deal.”
We waited a few seconds. When he still didn’t show up, I turned to her and said, “What do you mean, it sounded ‘intense’? What was he doing?”
Coco gave me a Look. “He was in a stall. What do you think he was doing?”
“Was he throwing up from stage fright?”
“No, I saw his feet. He was sitting.”
We waited a little bit longer, then we both went down the hall to the men’s room. I opened the door a li
ttle without knocking and called, “Scrooge? Everything okay in here?”
Silence. That was never good.
“Scrooge?” I said again, walking in. Coco followed. “Steve?” I gave a small, nervous laugh. “Sergeant Rock?”
Coco bent down to look under the door. “He’s still sitting there.”
We went into the stall next to his, climbed up on the toilet, and looked over the top of the wall. Then we just stared for some unmeasured period of time.
Finally, Coco cleared her throat. “Well, Scrooge was dead to begin with.”
* * *
And not merely dead but, like the Munchkin coroner so aptly put it, really most sincerely dead (you don’t want to know).
“What the fuck do we do now?” I said. Understudy? We don’t need no steenkin’ understudy! Because it was one performance. Just one. Why tease some poor schmuck with the remote possibility that the lead might have a coronary two seconds before he was due onstage?
“Dita, you get into costume, fast,” Coco said, jumping down off the toilet. “I’ll go up and tell them to play for time by singing some carols—”
I was following her out of the stall when she stopped short and gasped. I bumped into her. She was rooted to the spot and barely felt it; I almost fell down.
“What do you mean, ‘Dita, you get into costume’?” Scrooge said, flickering slightly under the fluorescents. He was still dressed for the part and looking surprised and a little hurt. “I’m ready. Let’s do this. Let’s get ’er done.” He wafted through the men’s room door. A second later, he was back. “Well? What are you waiting for?”
Coco’s voice was very small. “But you’re…”
“Dead, yeah, yeah, I know,” Scrooge said impatiently. “So what? I’m a stiff, not an amnesiac. I still know all my lines.”
Coco and I looked at each other. Then we were racing up to the stage.
* * *
Ghosts can be a major pain in the ass to work with, but there are certain situations where they’re lifesavers.
They all knew the moment Scrooge died. Fezziwig and Co. immediately organized themselves into a choral group and performed a selection of in-period holiday songs, mostly a cappella, jingling bells to keep time. They were still at it when Scrooge got himself into position on the set. I’d have thought the audience would have been getting restless but Fezziwig and Co. had outdone themselves in the heavenly choir department. English folk songs are not my favorite kind of music but even I felt a little sorry when their image faded away and the lights came up on Scrooge’s office.