by Sarah Gray
“But they are all so dear to me, gracious lady, and all will grow to serve you and yours.”
“Better some serve me now by quenching my insatiable thirst. You are a woman without heart or pity or the faintest scrap of gratitude.”
“Still, my lady, you have promised, and I shall hold it to you. Surely so much time in the sty and coop have soured their blood and given it a most unwholesome flavor that you—”
At that moment, Emma Scrooge opened her eyes. “Give me my son,” she whispered. Though already half-dead, she still had a certain strength of conviction to her voice. “You cannot have him.”
“You fool,” Queen Griselda said. “He is already mine, and there is nothing you can do about it!” She leaned over Emma and drew back her pale lips, revealing long, fanged incisors.
Scrooge flinched, for even though these were merely images of the past, the fangs, and what they indicated, were quite startling. He had never believed there really were vampires, not in all these years. He had discounted the rumors as so much lower-class drivel and never wasted his time in pondering their reality or purpose; he’d never believed they could touch him.
Emma Scrooge, however, did not flinch. Instead, she looked Queen Griselda in the eyes and whispered, “You will never get away with this. I lied. I know the prophecy and I know what will come to pass. My grandson will fulfill the prophecy. He will hunt you down. He will take your life and the life of the King of the Vampires!”
The queen threw back her head and laughed, gnashing her great pearly fangs. “We will see about that, won’t we?”
Scrooge turned to the phantom. “I do not fully understand.” He shook from the top of his bedcap to the toes of his slippers. “The vampire queen thinks I will father a son who will be the Scion of the Great Culling? She thinks that my child will become a great vampire slayer? That is preposterous! Particularly considering my present state. I am too old to father a child!”
“Time will tell,” the ghost said cryptically. “A child could still come to you.”
“A child,” Scrooge grumbled. “Why would I ever burden myself with a squalling, troublesome addition to my house-hold? Any fool knows that a child must be fed once, even twice a day until they are at least seven before gainful employment can be found for them. There are shoes to buy, and even secondhand, which can be found at any stand on Trotters Row, are a good h’pence apiece, and in winter, it must have a coat or at least a blanket of some kind to wear against the wind and cold. Not to mention the cost of an education and the constant coming and going of young ones, leaving doors ajar and wasting candles. Why indeed would a sensible man of business such as I ever bring a child into the world?”
But the spirit only regarded him with that long and mournful stare and then suddenly, the room changed. They were no longer in his mother’s bedchamber but in the second-best parlor of the house, a cozy room not far from the kitchen where Ebenezer and Fan had taken their lessons as young children.
Without the spirit saying so, Scrooge knew that time had passed.
15
Standing in a far corner, near a bookshelf of his father’s books, Scrooge watched himself, as a lad, enter with his books, and an exercise-book and a slate. Fan was ready at her writing desk, but not half so ready as Ebenezer’s father in his easy-chair by the window (though he pretended to be reading a book), or as Mrs. Grottweil, sitting near Ebenezer’s father stringing steel beads. (She had never been dismissed though the Scrooge children at seven were well past the age of needing a wet nurse.) The very sight of the two who had such an influence over Scrooge brought back all the fear and sadness he had felt as a child.
“I was not a good student,” Scrooge said to the spirit to cover his own feelings of anxiety. “Though I know that must greatly surprise you, I did not even have a head for numbers in those days. I would study, know my recitation, and then when forced to perform for my father, I do not know where the word and numbers went. I wonder where they do go, by-the-by?”
If the ghost had an opinion, he did not offer it.
Scrooge watched as he handed a book to Fan, for she was far quicker in her studies than he had ever been. Perhaps it was a grammar, perhaps a history, or geography. The lad took a last drowning look at the page as he gave it into her hand, and started off aloud at a racing pace while he thought he still had it fresh. The young Ebenezer tripped over a word and the elder Mr. Scrooge looked up. He tripped over another word. Mrs. Grottweil looked up. He reddened, tumbled over half-a-dozen words, and stopped.
Scrooge remembered the day well. At the time, he had thought Fan would have shown him the book if she dared, but she did not dare, and she said softly:
“Oh, Ebenezer, Ebenezer!”
“Now, Fan,” said Mr. Scrooge, “be firm with your brother. Don’t say, ‘Oh, Ebenezer!’ That’s childish. He knows his lesson, or he does not know it.”
Scrooge’s father’s eyes then lighted on his son’s. “Now, Ebenezer,” he said, “you must be far more careful today than usual.” He gave the cane he carried a poise and a switch, and having finished his preparation of it, laid it down beside him, with an expressive look, and took up his book.
This was a good freshener to young Ebenezer’s memory, as a beginning. The lad’s words of his lessons slipped off, not one by one, or line by line, but by the entire page. The boy tried to lay hold of them, but they seemed, as Scrooge recalled, to have put skates on, and to skim away with a smoothness there was no checking.
The seven-year-old Scrooge began badly, and went on worse. Book after book was added to the heap of failures, Mrs. Grottweil being firmly watchful of them all the time. And when they came at last to a question about five thousand cheeses, Fan burst out crying.
“Fan!” said Mrs. Grottweil, in her warning voice.
Scrooge then watched as his father rose and said, taking up a cane, “Why, Mrs. Grottweil, we can hardly expect Fan to bear, with perfect firmness, the worry and torment that her brother has caused today. Fan is quite bright and greatly strengthened and improved in her lessons, but we can hardly expect her to teach him day in and day out when he clearly has put in no effort to learn.”
“You are quite right, sir,” said Mrs. Grottweil, looking up from her beading. “I know not what else to do with him. ’Tis time, perhaps”—she peered up at him—“to send him on his way as we have discussed.”
“Ebenezer, you and I will go upstairs, boy.”
As Mr. Scrooge took his son out the door, Fan ran toward them. Mrs. Grottweil said, “Fan Scrooge! Are you a perfect fool?” and interfered. Fan stopped up her ears then, and began to cry.
“Please,” Scrooge begged of the spirit. “Do not make me see this.”
But the ghost said nothing, and Scrooge felt himself gliding behind the boy and the father.
Mr. Scrooge took his son to his room slowly and gravely—a delight in that formal show of doing justice, for surely his mind had been poisoned by Mrs. Grottweil’s lies. Then when they got there, suddenly he twisted the boy’s head under his arm.
Scrooge stiffened in anticipation of what was to come.
“Father! Sir!” the boy cried to him. “Don’t! Pray don’t beat me! I have tried to learn, sir, but I can’t learn while you and Mrs. Grottweil are watching me. I can’t indeed!”
“Can’t you, indeed, Ebenezer?” he said. “We’ll try this, then.”
He had his head as in a vise, but he twined round him somehow, and the boy stopped him for a moment, entreating him not to beat him. It was only for a moment that he stopped him, for he cut him heavily an instant afterward, and in the same instant the boy caught the hand with which Mr. Scrooge held his mouth, between his teeth, and bit it through.
Mr. Scrooge beat Ebenezer then, as if he would have beaten him to death. Above all the noise they made, Scrooge heard Fan running up the stairs, and crying out. Then Mr. Scrooge was gone, at last, and the door was locked outside. At Scrooge’s feet lay his former self, fevered, and hot, and torn, and raging in a
puny way, upon the floor.
Tears glistened in Scrooge’s eyes as the child before him became quiet and an unnatural stillness seemed to reign through the whole house. How well he remembered, when his smart and passion began to cool, how wicked he began to feel! He hated them at that moment; his father, Mrs. Grottweil, even Fan. Even his long-lost mother. Damn them all!
Scrooge watched as the boy sat listening for a long while, but there was not a sound. He then crawled up from the floor, and saw his own face in the glass, so swollen, red, and ugly that it almost frightened him. (It certainly frightened Scrooge now.) His stripes were sore and stiff, and made him cry afresh, when he moved, but they were nothing to the guilt he felt for damning his own sweet mother, who had given her life to give him his. The guilt lay heavier on his breast than if he had been a most terrible criminal, and the longer he thought of it, the greater the offense seemed.
Scrooge watched as it began to grow dark, knowing there was no need to tell the ghost he had seen enough. Only the spirit could determine when enough was enough, and so he would be further tortured by these memories. The young boy shut the window (he had been lying, for the most part, with his head upon the sill, by turns crying, dozing, and looking listlessly out), when the key was turned, and Mrs. Grottweil came in with some bread and meat and milk.
“Please tell me there is no blood in that milk,” Scrooge said in horror.
If the ghost knew the answer, he did not provide one.
Mrs. Grottweil put the nourishment down upon the table without a word, glaring at her charge all the while, and then retired, locking the door after her.
It grew light again and Scrooge watched himself wake the next morning, being cheerful and fresh for the first moment, and then being weighed down by the stale and dismal oppression of remembrance. Mrs. Grottweil came again before he was out of bed, told him he was free to walk in the garden for half an hour and no longer, retired, leaving the door open, that he might avail him of that permission.
The boy did so, and did so every morning of his imprisonment, which lasted five days. If he could have seen his sister alone, he would have gone down on his knees to her and besought her forgiveness for the way he had cursed at her and their dear mother. But he saw no one except Mrs. Grottweil during the whole time.
The length of those five days Scrooge (as a boy or a man) could convey no idea of to anyone. They occupied the place of years in his remembrance.
On the last night of his restraint, Scrooge watched as he was awakened by hearing his own name spoken in a whisper. The boy started up in bed, and, putting out his arms in the dark, said, “Is that you, Fan?”
There was no immediate answer, but presently he heard his name again, in a tone so very mysterious and awful, that he thought he had gone into a fit.
“The keyhole, you silly boy,” Scrooge urged his younger self.
The boy groped his way to the door, and, putting his own lips to the keyhole, whispered, “Is that you, Fanny, dear?”
“Yes, my own precious Ebenezer,” she replied. “Be as soft as a mouse, or the cat’ll hear us.”
He understood this to mean Mrs. Grottweil, and knew that he must be careful and quiet; her room being close by.
“How are you, dear Fanny? Are you very angry with me?”
Scrooge could hear his sister crying softly on her side of the keyhole, and he turned to the ghost. “Must we be here, still? It is no longer even Christmas Eve.”
“The event began on Christmas Eve and becomes a corner-stone to who you have become, Ebenezer,” responded the spirit.
With a sigh, Scrooge turned back to the children.
“I’m not so very angry with you, brother,” said Fan. “Not very. I only wish you had not angered Father so again, is all.”
“What is going to be done with me, Fan, dear? Do you know?”
“School. Near London,” was Fan’s answer. The boy was obliged to get her to repeat it, for she spoke it the first time quite down his throat in consequence of him having forgotten to take his mouth away from the keyhole and put his ear there; and, though her words tickled him a good deal, he didn’t hear them.
“School? Perhaps that would be better, for both of us,” he said cheerfully for a lad who had been near beaten to death by his father. “Perhaps Father will be kinder to you, then.”
“No, no, this is not good, Ebenezer. How will I be able to protect you then?”
“You won’t have to protect me from Father, there.”
“It is not Father I worry about. It’s them.”
“Them who?” the boy asked.
Scrooge turned to the ghost. “Fan knew? She knew what Mrs. Grottweil was? What Mrs. Wahltraud . . . or whatever her name is, was trying to do? But how is that . . . was it possible? She was a newborn babe that day, the same as I.”
The ghost said nothing.
“When, Fan? When shall I go?” asked the young Ebenezer.
“Tomorrow.”
“Is that the reason why Mrs. Grottweil took the clothes out of my drawers?”
“Yes,” said Fan.
“Shan’t I see you before I go?”
“Yes,” she said. “In the morning.”
Then Fan fitted her mouth close to the keyhole, and spoke these words through it with as much feeling and earnestness as a keyhole has ever been the means of communicating, shooting in each broken little sentence in a convulsive little burst of its own.
“Ebenezer, dear, please promise me you will take care. Please promise me you will be the good boy I know you can be and always see to those who are less fortunate. Fight them. You must fight them!”
“What are you talking about, Fan? Fight who?”
“The vampires,” she whispered.
Scrooge, who had been leaning over the boy to hear every word, stood abruptly and turned to the spirit. “I do not recall her saying that. Not in all these years,” he murmured.
“Oh, Fan. I’m frightened. Please don’t talk of such things anymore. Please write to me at school. Promise me.”
The kind soul promised, and the two kissed the keyhole with the greatest affection. The young Ebenezer patted it with his hand as if it had been her honest face—and parted.
16
With 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 b
roken 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.