A Vampire Christmas Carol

by Sarah Gray

  Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid color, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.

  As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.

  To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

  He did pause, with a moment’s irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said, “Pooh, pooh,” and closed it with a bang.

  The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every cask of the wine merchant’s wine, did shudder at the assault and appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall.

  Just as Scrooge was to take the stairs, his tenants appeared at the open door of the cellar. Odd that he had not noticed the door ajar a moment before, or the shadow of their forms in the alcove.

  “Mr. Scrooge.” Mr. Wahltraud was dressed for dinner in black, his coat, as always, impeccable, his face as pale as moonlight.

  “Mr. Wahltraud. Mrs. Wahltraud.” Scrooge removed his hat. He did not care to be sociable with the wine dealer or his wife, but he collected enough rent from them that he could not deny them at least a good evening, which was precisely what he offered. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  “I trust your day was profitable?”

  “Profitable enough.” Scrooge continued on his way to the staircase that led to the rooms he occupied above, his cane striking soundly on the hardwood floor.

  The missus was an attractive woman with long black hair twisted high on her head and lips a ruby red, but her face was as pale as his, perhaps paler. It was no wonder, of course, that she did not have more color in her cheeks, as much time as they spent in the cellar, minding their inventory.

  “Plans for the morrow?” she sang as sweetly as a songbird sings in springtime . . . but with an edge to that sweet melody that gave Scrooge discomfort somewhere in the recesses of his mind. “Christmas Day and all?”

  “Bah, humbug,” Scrooge mumbled. And with a final good evening, he made his way up the steps.

  11

  Griselda grasped Wahltraud’s sleeve as they watched her pet project march upward. “You do not think he will go to the nephew’s for dinner tomorrow, do you? I do not want him near that young man. He is too full of good cheer. There will be laughter and dancing and smiles and talk of giving gifts to the poor. It is revolting!”

  “Why would he go? The invitation has been extended for years, and never has it been accepted. Thanks to your well-orchestrated meddling.” He nuzzled her slender white neck.

  She ran her hand the length of his sleeve, nearly purring with pleasure. “I know. Is it not pleasing that he has such a weak constitution? That he has become so . . . malleable?” She sighed. “But I am concerned about the woman. Belle. She seems made of stronger stuff, and growing stronger with each year that passes. We’ve not been able to get to her. No one can. She is one of those rare humans who is truly good to the core of her soul.” She made a gagging sound.

  “You have no need to be concerned with her,” Wahltraud scoffed, turning to take his wife, his queen, into his arms. “She had her chance long ago with him. You had your way. She is nothing.”

  “Nothing now, but once his true love,” she reminded him with a pout. “And, therefore, dangerous. Always dangerous. You never know when a woman like that might lead a man like Scrooge down the path of truth. What if she revealed to him what we have been doing all these years? The sheer knowledge of what we do could weaken my position with him, and I am so very close to having him, for surely he cannot live too many years longer.”

  “She cannot warn him, my love, because she does not know.”

  Griselda frowned. “I think it is time we rid ourselves of her. She is a pest. She has taken another slayer in, you know. It was reported to me today.” She peered into his black eyes. “The trouble, of course, is that she is difficult to reach, the way those spirits surround her, protecting her from us.”

  “There, there, my dearest. Do not fret yourself.” He kissed her cheek and then drew his mouth down along her jawline.

  Griselda lengthened her neck, closing her eyes. “Just a nibble,” she whispered.

  He kissed her neck and then drew his fangs along the sweet, pale flesh. “Not here.”

  “Below stairs?” She looked up at him with longing.

  “It will be a quiet night, tonight, I think.” He offered his arm. “And I am all yours.”

  12

  Scrooge went up the stairs, trimming his candle as he went, paying no mind to his tenants who watched him from the shadows. You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament, but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broad-wise, with the splinter-bar toward the wall and the door toward the balustrades, and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare, which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge’s dip.

  Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before he shut his heavy door, he left his can in the corner, and walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face in the knocker to desire to do that.

  As he opened the door to the sitting room, he heard a strange noise, a thump and a scrape across the floor, and froze, hand on the doorknob, door open a crack. The room was dark inside and he lifted the candlestick high, but it cast a measly yellow light. He cleared his throat. The only reply he received was a silence quieter than a graveyard at midnight.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to call out to Marley, but that would have been ridiculous, of course. His partner was door-nail dead and could not be in the sitting room . . . or on the front door, for that matter. Scrooge, having near convinced himself of those truths, was just about to close the door when he heard a scrape against the wooden floor again.

  “Who’s in here?” he demanded, pushing the door full open, but not making the leap of faith to enter.

  What Scrooge saw in the far corner of the room was his housemaid, Gelda, and her more-than-a-little-odd son, Tag. Gelda was a woman of thirty years, or perhaps fifty. One could not say; life had not been kind to her. Short and lumpy in stature, she had a long, hooked nose, centered in a face so wrinkled as it could be mistaken for a large rotten apple upon her shoulders. Worse even than her unfortunate face was the foul stench that clung to her, following her from room to room, a scent that reminded Scrooge of beef left too many days in the cupboard and riddled with maggots . . . or perhaps a potato that had rolled from the bag and lain forgotten on the floor until the slime it produced trickled through the floorboards, creating such a foul stench that it would offend even a tanner’s apprentice.

  “What are you doing in here?” Scrooge demanded, plucking a handkerchief from his pocket to cover his nose; her scent was that fetid.

  “Mr. Scrooge,” she exclaimed.

&nbs
p; The son, with the same hooked nose as his mother, held his hands behind his back. “M-M-Mr. S-S-Scrooge.” A string of drool slowly stretched from the corner of his mouth, downward to the floor.

  The housekeeper tucked her hands behind her back as her son had done.

  Scrooge looked to Gelda, too impatient to wait on the addle-pated boy, who could take up to ten minutes’ time to speak any sensible thought. “Why are you still here?” Scrooge was very clear as to what he paid the maid to do in the home, and standing in the dark was not among her duties.

  “Jes tidyin’ up, sir.” She looked a bit like an alley cat that had just swallowed a brightly colored bird. “Before we make our way home, sir,” she sniveled.

  “W . . . way h . . . h . . . home,” the boy repeated, for he always repeated what his mother said, quite an annoying habit. More like an affliction, Scrooge supposed.

  “In the dark?”

  “Ye told me to quit usin’ yer candles. Wastin’ ’em.” She didn’t wait for him to lay comment. “Left gruel on the hob, I did, sir.”

  “O . . . on the h . . . h . . . hob, sir.”

  Without responding, Scrooge stepped back and closed the door, leaving them in darkness. They had obviously found their way in there in the dark; they could find their way out and, as she pointed out, not waste one of his candles. His movement was so swift that he did not see the thing that Tag was holding behind his back slip out of his filthy hands and hit the floor with a soft thud. It should have been a louder thud, but the orphan child, snatched off the street only an hour ago, weighed no more than a small man’s waistcoat. The child was a Christmas gift for the king and queen.

  Scrooge heard the muffled thud, but gave it no mind as he went on to the next room and then the next, checking to be certain all was as it should be. He found nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa, a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready, and the little saucepan of gruel Gelda had left upon the hob. Nobody under the bed, nobody in the closet, nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.

  Quite satisfied, he closed his door and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat, put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap, and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.

  It was a very low fire, indeed, of little consequence on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters, Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts, and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley’s head on every one.

  “Humbug!” said Scrooge and walked across the room.

  After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound, but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

  This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

  One of the doors downstairs flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below, then coming up the stairs, then coming straight toward his door.

  Could it be the tenants, he wondered. It was not like them to make such a racket, though he did, on occasion, believe he heard a scream from their rented floor or the cellar below. But this sound that approached his door was like no other sound he had heard before.

  “It’s humbug still!” said Scrooge. “I won’t believe it.”

  His color changed though, when, without a pause, that which created the horrendous racket came through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, “I know him, Marley’s ghost!” and fell again.

  It was the same face, the very same as he had seen on the knocker. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots, the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail, and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent, so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.

  Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

  No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him. He felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before. He was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

  “How now!” said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. “What do you want with me?”

  “Much.” It was Marley’s voice, no doubt about it. “I have been sent by one who loves you.”

  “No one loves me,” Scrooge scoffed. “Who are you?”

  “Ask me who I was.”

  “Who were you, then?” said Scrooge, raising his voice. “You’re particular, for a shade.” He was going to say “to a shade,” but substituted this, as more appropriate.

  “In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”

  “Can you—can you sit down?” asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.

  “I can.”

  “Do it, then.”

  Scrooge asked the question, because he didn’t know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair, and felt that in the event of it being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.

  “You don’t believe in me,” observed the ghost. “Or the love someone still bears for you.”

  “I don’t,” said Scrooge. “In one or the other.”

  Marley seemed to settle in the chair. “What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

  “I don’t know,” said Scrooge.

  “Why do you doubt your senses?”

  “Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

  Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means, waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the specter’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

  To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very
deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the specter’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case, for though the ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as if by the hot vapor from an oven.

  “You see this toothpick,” said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned, and wishing, though it was only for a second, to divert the vision’s stony gaze from himself.

  “I do,” replied the ghost.

  “You are not looking at it,” said Scrooge, observing Marley’s gaze still upon him.

  “But I see it,” said the ghost, “notwithstanding.”

  “Well,” returned Scrooge, “I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation.”

  “And love is a bit of undigested beef?” demanded the ghost.

  “Less tangible even that you, Spirit. And more useless. Humbug, I tell you. Humbug!”

  At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast (far further than when he had spoken to Belle, for he had not wished to frighten her).

  Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.

  “Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”