A Vampire Christmas Carol

by Sarah Gray

  “So the workhouses are still in operation?” Scrooge questioned, not appearing to be the least affected by the tragic experience of the gentleman.

  “They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

  “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then?” said Scrooge.

  “Both very busy, sir.”

  “Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

  “Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund to buy the poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when want is keenly felt, and abundance rejoices. There is one family in particular we would like to see kept warm this Christmas; a lamplighter’s widow and her seven remaining children. I’m certain you heard. It was in all the papers. Her husband and child were murdered by the vampires.” He whispered the last word as if fearing the very spoken word might evoke them. “On Ludgate Hill this very week. The father was dragged from his ladder, murdered, his body left behind a venison shop. The young boy was carried off in a pickle barrel. Needless to say, his body is not expected to be recovered.”

  “Vampires?” Scrooge spat. “Bah! Humbug!”

  The other gentleman could hold his tongue no longer. “Surely a man of your education cannot doubt their existence?”

  “I’ve seen no vampires!” Scrooge explained. “Have you?”

  He said it so loudly, with such distaste, that the man stepped back. “Not . . . not with my own eyes, no. But that does not mean they don’t exist. They are clever creatures that travel in the darkness and disguise themselves as ordinary citizens. Surely you know that, an educated man such as yourself?”

  “I know nothing of the sort!” Scrooge lifted his pen and returned his attention to the work at hand. “Good day.”

  The gentleman, holding his pen poised, pressed his plump lips together. Obviously his belief was so strong in the cause that he would not give up easily. “What . . . what shall I put you down for?”

  “Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

  “You wish to be anonymous?” He dared a tiny smile.

  “I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough, and those who are badly off must go there.”

  “Many can’t go there and many would rather die.”

  “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides, I don’t know that.”

  “But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

  “It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

  Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen tipped their hats and withdrew from Scrooge’s office. Just as they were to enter the street, Disgut appeared behind them. One moment he was on his stool, the next, standing in the doorway, casting his sour breath on them. “Do not come here again,” he warned, managing to hiss despite the lack of Ss in his words.

  The gentlemen looked at each other in disbelief, then back at the hunched, pale clerk. Never had they heard such insolence from a clerk, or witnessed such an oddity as the man’s translucent pinched face. “Sir?”

  “You heard me,” Disgut said. “Do not come here again, or those who plucked the lamplighter and his son from their ladder will be at your doorstep.” He lifted his upper lip, baring his teeth. They were certainly not fangs, but mostly definitely oddly shaped, as if they had been filed to points . . . or perhaps he consumed rocks and had broken them off.

  “Are you threatening us?” the more portly of the two gentlemen demanded.

  “I am making a promise,” Disgut replied with a sneer.

  Both gentlemen, frightened by the sight of the sharpened teeth and not entirely certain what to make of them, took a step back, giving little attention to the traffic in the street.

  “Go!” Disgut threatened. “Run, while you are still able.”

  The portly gentlemen did not run, for it probably would have been difficult, considering their portly states, but they most certainly did not take their time in crossing the street and disappearing into the relative safety of the darkness.

  6

  Back inside his office, Scrooge resumed his labors with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

  Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterward, as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some laborers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered, warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowing sullenly congealed and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke, a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk in the streets, stirred up tomorrow’s pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

  Despite their fear of the vampires that seemed to ooze from the darkness, the citizens of the town found a merriness on their tired faces and in their croaky voices. They were afraid to be certain; mothers kept their little ones by the hand, and husbands and wives walked arm in arm, but it was not enough to deter them from going about their business this Christmas Eve.

  As soon as full darkness fell, it became even foggier yet, and colder. It was a piercing, searching, biting cold. Was it the vampires that brought the unearthly chill? If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose.

  The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol, but at the first sound of “God bless you, merry gentleman. May nothing you dismay!” Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

  Much to Scrooge’s dismay and his employees’ delight (for not even Disgut liked working for the miser), the hour of shutting up the counting house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerks in the tank, who instantly snuffed their candles out, and put on their hats.

  “You’ll both want all day tomorrow, I suppose?” said Scrooge.

  Disgut wanted the day himself as much as Cratchit, but for entirely different reasons. While Cratchit would be spending Christ’s birthday at church and dining with his family, Disgut would be sitting down to a different sort of dining experience. He had received an invitation to a Winter S
olstice feast to be held in the underground tunnels beneath the city, where the vampires lived by day when not prowling the streets by night. While the Cratchits feasted on bits of fatty beef and parsnips, Disgut would be sinking his teeth into human flesh, sipping the hot, rushing blood, a thought that quite excited him. The dinner guests were being brought in from all over the city at that very moment and being housed in the chambers beneath the city to be kept alive for the celebration, and some, it was rumored, would be taken stumbling from ale-houses and thus highly spiced with beer and rum and other spirits. Others, he heard, who had stuffed themselves with goose or plum pudding, would be taken right off the streets to satisfy even the most particular drinkers of blood during this festive season. The beautiful Queen Griselda had invited Disgut herself . . . actually she had sent one of her hags, but it was near the same as a personal invitation, wasn’t it? Obviously, her highness had singled him out as worthy. After all these years, she had finally recognized his great worth to her, and he was certain he would be rewarded at the feast, if not by coin then by a better position.

  But, again, I digress. I return to the tale and what was taking place in the cold tank of Scrooge’s office.

  Though Disgut was eager to have the day off, he still let Cratchit be the one to step up to the hearth and press his toes to the coals with Scrooge.

  “If quite convenient, sir,” said Cratchit, “we would like the day off.”

  “It’s not convenient,” said Scrooge, “and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown the both of you for it, you’d think yourselves ill-used, I’ll be bound?”

  Cratchit smiled faintly while Disgut feigned great interest in a patch on his sleeve as he thought of all the delicious human blood pudding he would feast on upon the morrow.

  “And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think me ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”

  “But it is only once a year,” observed Cratchit, glancing at Disgut for support.

  “Once a year,” Disgut repeated, half-heartedly.

  “A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Scrooge, buttoning his greatcoat to the chin. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier the next morning.”

  The clerks promised that they would, and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and Cratchit and Disgut, with no love lost between them, parted ways. Cratchit, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honor of it being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, with one eye peering over his shoulder in fear of bloodsuckers, to play at blindman’s bluff with his children.

  7

  On his way to dine, Scrooge had several stops to make, his first to collect the interest due on a loan he made to a baker some weeks back. Having a mind to buy a crust or two of bread, he waited impatiently in line.

  As Scrooge stood inside the bake shop, the King of the Vampires walked past the foggy window, his queen upon his arm. They had been following him at a distance, one of Griselda’s favorite pastimes, for two blocks. “Just a peek, my darling,” Griselda begged from ruby lips.

  “I have business to attend to,” Wahltraud argued, but even as he spoke, he slowed his pace so that she might catch a glimpse of his wife’s protégé through the streaky window as they passed the shop. “He should not see us watching him,” he warned.

  Griselda plucked a slender, pale hand from her rabbit-fur muff to stroke Wahltraud’s cheek. “He will not see us because he is like all humans,” she murmured. “He does not see what he does not wish to see. I do believe we could walk right into his counting house, devour both his clerks before his very eyes, and throw their carcasses upon his hearth, and he would not notice.”

  “What a foolish thing to say, my love. If we devoured Disgut, we would have to replace him. You know how difficult it is to find a human who will turn on its own, especially during this syrupy season.” He leaned down to press a kiss to her cheek, and the cold of his breath made her shiver with pleasure.

  To any human who passed Wahltraud and his queen on the street, the couple appeared to be a pair of discreet lovers, exchanging mellifluous words in the fog that lingered particularly thick and vaporous in front of the bake shop. Only those poor humans who had the misfortune to meet them in a dark alley or come face-to-face and have those dark, haunting eyes stare into their own would ever realize what they were. Then, fear would descend upon the unfortunate, but it would be too late, and the knowledge they had gained would be short-lived.

  “Do you see your Scrooge, my precious?” Wahltraud whispered, nipping at her ear tucked inside a velvet hood, encircled with black rabbit fur.

  “I cannot.” She pouted her full lips. “The window is too streaked with soot and the inside foggy with condensation,” she complained. “But the baker’s to flavor the bread with a drop of his own blood. Everyone on the street knows what Mr. Scrooge gets with his nourishment.”

  “There, there, we can see him later as he enters our abode, if we hurry, my love. I still have a matter to attend to.” He gently guided her away from the shop and its human stench of burnt butter, scorched flour, and despair. Human despair de profundis , was quite a gloriously revolting scent, better than sadness or fear. It filled a vampire’s nostrils quite to capacity, thick and cloying, intoxicating, for it was the unhappiness of human beings that the vampires thrived upon.

  “You do not think we need to keep an eye on him?” Griselda questioned. She had the blackest eyes, eyes that could see through him to the very depths of his black soul, eyes that could freeze humans in their tracks and bring them willingly, step by step, to their own undoing.

  “Keep an eye on him?” Wahltraud opened the top button of his greatcoat, enjoying the chill of the night that slipped through the gap in the wool like icy bones.

  “So no one might assuage his sour countenance with their gelastic wishes of happy Christmas and such.” She hissed the words, despising the taste of them. “You know how these humans are with their wishes of good health and prosperity in the new year, and other such piffle.”

  “He’s already yours, my darling. I swear to you on the rotting carcass of my beloved mother. You have done an excellent job with him. Nothing could persuade him to see any goodness in his human world. He is long past that.”

  “I suppose you are right,” she conceded, allowing him to bustle her along. “But we might send one of those disgusting creatures to watch over him just the same.” With a rise of her lovely chin, she indicated one of the stinking urchins hanging back a reasonable distance from the king and the queen. Some were vampires; others, humans who, like Disgut, had acquired, over time, a taste for human blood and were willing to do whatever was asked of them to taste of it.

  “As you wish, my love.” Wahltraud had only to raise a finger, indicating someone was to stay behind and watch the bakery, and one of the dirty, stinking minions stepped out from the group and rushed to do his bidding.

  The sound of carol singers from the street corner near the butcher shop brought a scowl to Griselda’s lovely lips as they left the shop.

  “Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,

  Oh come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.

  Come—”

  “Come, and let me sink my teeth into your flesh,” Griselda threatened.

  Unaware there were vampires so near, the carol singer’s lusty voices filled the air:

  “Born the King of—”

  “That sound,” Griselda cried, clasping her hands over her head. “Sweet Hades! That sound! It makes my brain ache. I think we should kill them all and decorate the snow with Christmas red.”

  “Griselda. Griselda, my love.” Wahltraud halted, covering her hands with his and hushing her. He gazed into her black, heartless eyes. “When on the streets, you must take care not to draw attention to
yourself. Remember that incident at King’s Cross last year? We ended up with twenty-seven bodies to dispose of. We live so freely among the humans because they are not smart enough to see us, but we must rely on our own cleverness to keep that true.”

  “Oh, pooh, you’ve become so conventional! You never let me have any fun anymore. Remember Kiev, the summer of the Black Death? We left hundreds of bodies in the streets and you never cared a fig.”

  “Long ago,” he sighed. “We were young and drunk on love, and that was before the prophecy of the birth of the Scion of the Great Culling.”

  “Scion of the Great Culling.” She laughed, lowering her hands, but cringing at the sound of the carol singers launching into another refrain. “I’ve taken care of that, haven’t I?” She brushed her hair with her fingertips. “Am I bleeding from my ears, love? Christmas carols sometimes make me bleed from my ears.”

  Wahltraud kissed her lips. “You are not bleeding from the ears.” He then grasped her hand and led her forward again. “Now, come along. Let me check in with my minions to be certain that arrangements have been made for the feast tomorrow, and we’ll go home and I’ll pour you a fine glass of Belgian blood.”