A Vampire Christmas Carol

by Sarah Gray

  “Get into the carriage and do not question my authority,” Mr. Scrooge said harshly. “I will not speak of this again, child!”

  “But, Father, why?” cried Fan, tears filling her eyes, eyes like her mother’s . . . like Scrooge’s. “Why must Ebenezer stay at school alone when I am able to live here in the comfort of our home?”

  “You know why,” the elder Scrooge said.

  “But it’s not true.” She dabbed prettily at her tears. “It was not Ebenezer’s fault that Mother died! And he has become a fine scholar. You have listened too long to Mrs. Grottweil and her lies! I tell you, I do not need a wet nurse or a nursemaid or whatever it is she calls herself, and I want her dismissed. The truth of my mother’s day she hides from you is far darker than simple death in childbirth. Far more sinister.”

  “Get into the carriage,” ordered Mr. Scrooge, taking his daughter’s arm roughly. “And I will hear no more on the matter. Ebenezer will stay in school!”

  “Fan,” Scrooge called out, reaching for his long-lost sister. But the image faded until he was no longer certain it had ever been there.

  The spirit touched Scrooge on the arm, and pointed to his younger self inside the schoolroom, intent upon his reading.

  “What Queen Griselda said came to pass. My father believed I was responsible for my mother’s death. That was really why he sent me away. Not because I did poorly in my lessons that day.” Tears welled in Scrooge’s eyes again. “I see it all. I did not understand, but all becomes clear to me.”

  “Look forward now,” the ghost said.

  Suddenly, a man, in foreign garments, wonderfully real and distinct to look at, stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.

  “Why, it’s Ali Baba,” Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. “It’s dear old honest Ali Baba. Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy. And Valentine,” said Scrooge, “and his wild brother, Orson; there they go. And what’s his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus? Don’t you see him? And the Sultan’s Groom turned upside down by the Genii, there he is upon his head. Serves him right. I’m glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess?”

  To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying, and to see his heightened and excited face would have been a surprise to his business friends in the city, indeed.

  “There’s the parrot,” cried Scrooge. “Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head, there he is. Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. ‘Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?’ The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn’t. It was the parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek. Halloa. Hoop. Hallo.”

  Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, Scrooge said, in pity for his former self, “Poor boy,” and cried again. “I wish . . . ,” he muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff. “But it’s too late now.”

  “What is the matter?” asked the spirit. “Surely you can see what a burden he must have been to his father . . . the cost he must have been . . . the shoes . . . the books . . . the quills and ink and slates . . . all wasted on one who had killed his own mother.”

  “But I didn’t kill her. I was an innocent babe,” Scrooge whispered.

  “What? What do you say?”

  “Nothing,” said Scrooge, hanging his head. “Nothing.”

  The ghost waited.

  “It is only that there was a boy singing a Christmas carol at my counting house door last night. I should like to have given him something, that’s all. After all, if it is true that vampires roam our streets, then he took great risk to sing that carol in the hopes of brightening my day.”

  The ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand, saying as it did so, “Let us see another Christmas.”

  17

  Scrooge’s former self grew larger at the words, and the room became a little darker and dirtier. The panels shrunk, the windows cracked, fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead, but how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct, that everything had happened so, that there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

  “I do not know why no one ever invited me home with them,” Scrooge said sadly. He saw himself not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly, occasionally glancing at the window at the commotion in the yard. Through a crack in the window the joyous sounds of families being reunited could be heard. There was laughter and the sound of sleigh bells as students set off to spend the holidays with their families.

  “If only, in all those years, just one boy would have asked me,” Scrooge murmured, feeling quite sorry for himself, at that point. “If only just one had cared.”

  The spirit turned with a sweeping hand, and a door opened. From inside, Scrooge heard the sound of his headmaster’s voice, only it was not the pleasant voice he recalled from his years there.

  “You most certainly will not invite him home with you,” hissed the headmaster. “Take that boy home with you and you will regret the day you ever met Ebenezer Scrooge.”

  At the mention of his name, Scrooge moved closer to the door. It was the headmaster’s office. Inside, the man held Joshua Cuttleman, Scrooge’s school chum, by the throat, up against a paneled wall.

  “Sir?” cried Joshua, who was a short boy with a long face, but nice enough in manners. He was not brainy, and not the cleanliest of boys, but he had always seemed to have a good heart and had often shared treats sent from home with Ebenezer . . . until the headmaster had caught him and punished poor Joshua. Sharing of sweets was particularly frowned upon at school, though why, Scrooge had never known.

  “You . . . you cannot tell me I cannot take a friend home with me, sir,” Joshua crowed boldly.

  “I can and I will.” The schoolmaster wrapped his hands more tightly around Joshua’s stringy throat and the boy’s pinched face went red, then purple.

  As Scrooge watched from the doorway, the headmaster, a tall, thin man with a slight hare-lip, drew back said malformed lip and bared a set of tiny incisors. They were not so nearly as impressive as Queen Griselda’s, and appeared homemade, but were still startling. Scrooge had had no idea!

  “He-he’s l-like Mrs. Grottweil,” Scrooge stuttered in shock. “My schoolmaster, he was working for her, wasn’t he? For Queen Griselda?” He rushed forward and tried to enter the schoolmaster’s office, but it seemed he could not, for when he stepped through the threshold, the office seemed to move another step away, and then another step away and another and so forth.

  “Attempt to offer an invitation, Cuttleman,” the headmaster threatened, “and I will sink my fangs into you, I will bite you and drink your blood. I will come to you at night and have a taste of you, and then when you are too weak from blood loss to fight, I will give you up to the true bloodsuckers, who will drink you dry and toss your bones into the outhouse hole so that your mother and father will have nothing to bury.”

  “So he is not actually a vampire?” Scrooge observed. “Like Mrs. Grottweil, he . . . ,” he searched for the right phrase, “works for the vampires? But they are not vampires, are they?”

  “They are humans who have acquired a taste for human blood, thanks to the vampires,” the spirit said. “They are called minions. They are at the beck and call of the vampires. Queen Griselda and King Wahltraud have many minions.”

  “My . . . my father,” the boy Joshua dared bravely, gaining Scrooge’s attention again. “I will tell my father that you have tried to intimidate me, and he will tell the other boys’ fath
ers and they will see you dismissed.” His face was growing brighter red by the moment, his thin cheeks now shiny. “They will see you thrown in prison for aiding and abetting the vampires.”

  The headmaster, still holding tightly to Joshua’s throat, threw back his head and laughed heartily. The sound came out slightly garbled due to his facial affliction. “And then I will go to your family home in the dark of night and I will pluck your little sisters, one by one, out of their beds and hand them out the window to one of my accomplices. Do you know how much vampires will pay for fresh, young, rosy-cheeked English girls on the auction block in Transylvania?”

  “My sisters?” Joshua sobbed. “You would murder a little girl?”

  “The lass missing from the village last week?” The headmaster lifted a bushy brow. “Drained and tucked beneath a rain barrel on the high street. She will be nothing but a crust by the time she is found. Unless you’d like to go looking for her body now. We could go together.”

  A tear slipped down Joshua’s face. “Let me go,” he whispered, “and I will say nothing to Ebenezer. I will not extend the invitation.”

  “And you will suggest to the other lads they follow your lead,” the headmaster warned as he slowly released him.

  “Yes,” the boy agreed, defeat on his red face. “Ebenezer will not be invited anywhere by any of us.”

  Scrooge recalled that, sadly, after that Christmas holiday, Joshua did not return to school. His one friend, gone. And Scrooge had never known why; now he knew that the poor boy had been forced to run for his life because he had wanted to show a schoolmate a little kindness.

  Scrooge turned to the ghost, with a mournful shaking of his head, and a tear upon his cheek that matched Joshua’s those many years ago. “I thought they simply did not like me. I had no idea the headmaster threatened them.”

  “It was not the schoolmaster’s intention for you to know, nor was it the intention of the vampires,” the spirit responded as he turned to point to another door off the classroom. “Another Christmas . . .”

  18

  The paneled door opened and Scrooge’s sister Fan darted in, and put her arms about his neck, and kissed him and addressed him as her “Dear, dear brother.” She was taller than he had seen her a few moments before . . . and more beautiful. She was so like their mother that a lump rose in Scrooge’s throat.

  “I have come to bring you home, dear brother,” said the girl, clapping her hands, and reaching out to grasp his cheeks between her hands. “To bring you home, home, home.”

  She was dressed in shot-silk of the richest quality and smelled of dried lavender. Upon her head she wore a beaver bonnet, and over her shoulders, a red cloak of fine worsted wool, embroidered at the hem with green leaves and vines and other such ornamentation. In her ears sparkled earbobs.

  The younger Scrooge did not seem to believe his good fortune for, no doubt, he thought his fate sealed by men such as the schoolmaster and women such as his wet nurse. “Home, Fan?” returned the boy. “But what of Mrs. Grottweil? She swore she would not see me cross the threshold again. Our father—”

  “Mrs. Grottweil is gone!” Fan cried, brimful of glee. “I sent her packing myself, with Father’s blessing. He caught her drinking blood from the milkmaid who delivers Tuesdays and Thursdays. I do not know that he believed she was a blood-sucker, but he agreed she no longer had a place in our home.”

  “And now I shall come home?” the boy repeated, still in disbelief.

  “Yes. Home, for good and all. Home, forever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like heaven. He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home. I think that once Mrs. Grottweil was gone, and he no longer under her influence, he began to see the truth of what happened to our mother. He understands now that you were not responsible for Mother’s death and that the vampires are the ones to be held accountable. He intends to see the magistrate and have Mrs. Grottweil questioned, if they can find her. We heard that she had fled after Father let her go.”

  “Such good news, Fan! I can hardly believe your words!”

  “Well, you should, because he sent me in a coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man,” she said, opening her bright blue eyes wide, “and you are never to come back here, but first, we’re to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world.”

  “You are quite a woman, Fan,” exclaimed the boy.

  She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his head, but he had shot up and was now much taller than his twin, so she laughed again, and stood on tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her eagerness, toward the door and he, with no reason not to go, accompanied her.

  A terrible voice in the hall cried, “Bring down Master Scrooge’s box, there,” and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind by shaking hands with him. “No one is displeased with the education we have provided here?”

  The young Scrooge looked up at him. “No, sir. It’s only that my father has need of me.”

  He then conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best parlor that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake, and administered installments of those dainties to the young people. At the same time, sending out a meager servant to offer a glass of something to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman, but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not. Master Scrooge’s trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster good-bye right willingly, and getting into it, drove gaily down the garden sweep, the quick wheels dashing the hoar frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray.

  “My dear, dear sister, Fan.” Scrooge sighed, watching as Fan and his younger self drove away.

  “Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered,” said the ghost. “Particularly because the wet nurse who became her nursemaid, Mrs. Grottweil, saw her bled regularly while she slept so as to keep her weak. But she had a large heart.”

  Saddened to hear such a revelation, Scrooge felt the tears well in his eyes again. “But she had such a large heart,” he repeated in agreement.

  “And you know what followed next.”

  Scrooge hung his head. “Please tell me we do not need to return to my childhood home. I am an old man, and there is no point to revisiting the past.”

  “Oh, but we must return, because there is a point to all this in the end, Ebenezer Scrooge.”

  19

  And once again, Scrooge, still in his nightclothes, was propelled through time; one moment he sat in a carriage with Fan, driving away from the school, the next he was in the front hall of his father’s home. He followed Fan and the boy into the house. The spirit brought up the rear, closing the front door soundly behind them.

  “Father! Father!” Fan called, her merriness still bright on her cheeks and dancing in her blue eyes. “We are here! Ebenezer is home! I have brought my dear brother home to us!”

  Her words echoed in the big hall, empty and hollow, and the hair rose on the back of Scrooge’s neck as he recalled the incident from long ago. The house had smelled of blood, he recalled, as it did now.

  “Where is everyone?” Fan tossed her rabbit-fur muff on a side table, carved with elegant legs. “Father! We’re home, Ebenezer and I! Have you not heard? I’ve brought your son home to you.”

  Fan turned into the parlor and screamed.

  “Not this again,” Scrooge murmured, trying to cover his ears with his hands, for he could not stand to hear her terror.

  The spirit gently pulled his hands away.

  Blood. There was blood everywhere. Upon the polished wood floo
r, the fine woolen carpet, and the horsehair settee. In front of the fireplace, in his favorite chair, sat Mr. Scrooge, awaiting his children’s arrival. Dead, his throat torn out. All the servants dead, too, in the kitchen hanging from the pothooks, in an upstairs bedchamber dangling from a closet nail, and yet another suspended from the attic window, his dry husk of a skin blowing in the wind like some faded flag of carnage. The authorities had said it was wild animals that had set upon the house, possibly the same pack of vicious hedgehogs that had earlier ravaged the town of Hogs-Wallow-Upon-Upwald.

  “It was not wild animals, was it?” Scrooge asked, turning to the ghost as the bloody parlor scene slowly faded and Fan seemed to grow farther away from him. “I never believed the hedgehog story, but I thought it might have been wolves,” he said hopefully.

  “It was not wild animals that murdered your father,” the phantom agreed kindly.

  “My poor Fan,” cried Scrooge. “I do not think she was ever the same after she witnessed that bloodshed. The only survivor in the house was the cook’s small spit dog, and it was said that he suffered from nightmares ever after.”

  “Did anyone ever think to examine that spit dog’s canine teeth?” the spirit asked. “Or to wonder if perhaps the evil creature was a minion of the vampires who might have opened the back door and invited them in?”

  “The dog?”

  “Any stranger that a dog should be caught up in such betrayal and massacre than that hedgehogs should suffer mass insanity and overrun three villages and a convent before throwing themselves over a cliff and swimming en mass for the Black Sea on a rainy Tuesday?”

  “I suppose not, but the dog was very old,” Scrooge mused. “I wouldn’t suppose he had many teeth left.”

  “One needs only paws and a tall stool to unlatch a kitchen door.”

  “That my poor, dear Fan had once fed that cur scraps of her own bread.”

  “Speaking of your sister, may I remind you that she lived for some years. She died a woman,” said the ghost, “but had, as I think, children.”