A Vampire Christmas Carol

by Sarah Gray

  “I yearn to be abed. Lead on. To business!” With these words, Scrooge folded his arms, and frowning with a sullen majesty, passed with his companion through a little door at the upper end of the cellar.

  The spirit and Scrooge followed.

  The vault they entered, strewn with sawdust and dimly lighted, was between the outer one from which they had just come, and that in which the skittle-players were diverting themselves, as was manifested by the increased noise and clamor of tongues, which was suddenly stopped, however, and replaced by a dead silence, at a signal from the long comrade. Then, a young gentleman, going to a little cupboard, returned with a thigh-bone, which in former times must have been part and parcel of some individual at least as long as himself, and placed the same in the hands of Scrooge who, receiving it as a scepter and staff of authority, cocked his three-cornered hat fiercely on the top of his head, and mounted a large table, whereon a chair of state, cheerfully ornamented with a couple of skulls, was placed ready for his reception.

  “And this you thought to be business?” questioned the spirit.

  “It . . . it seemed harmless at the time. I . . . I killed no one.”

  The young Scrooge had no sooner assumed this position, than another young gentleman appeared, bearing in his arms a huge clasped book, who made him a profound obeisance, and delivering it to the long comrade, advanced to the table, and turning his back upon it, stood there. Then the long comrade got upon the table, too, and seating himself in a lower chair than Scrooge with much state and ceremony, placed the large book on the shoulders of their mute companion as deliberately as if he had been a wooden desk, and prepared to make entries therein with a pen of corresponding size.

  When the long comrade had made these preparations, he looked toward the younger Scrooge, and Scrooge, flourishing the bone, knocked nine times therewith upon one of the skulls. At the ninth stroke, a third young gentleman emerged from the door leading to the skittle ground, and bowing low, awaited his commands.

  “Who waits without?” barked Scrooge.

  The man answered that a stranger was in attendance, who claimed admission into that secret society of Golden Knights, and a free participation in their rights, privileges, and immunities. A man called Jacob Marley. Thereupon Scrooge flourished the bone again, and giving the other skull a prodigious rap on the nose, exclaimed, “Admit him!”

  “Enough! I have seen enough,” Scrooge cried, gripping his sleeping gown and twisting it in his fingers.

  “What purpose did this society possess?” the spirit pressed.

  “To . . . to protect our interests. The interests of businessmen such as myself. To see those who could not pay sent to prison, to the workhouses.”

  “That night,” the spirit said, “Jacob Marley made his pledge. What oath did he give?”

  Scrooge closed his eyes and then slowly opened them, knowing he had no choice but to give a response. “Every member of that small remnant of a noble body took an oath to gain what he could, to take advantage where he saw benefit, and never to waver in the pursuit of wealth. We vowed not to suffer from weakness, not to accept the excuses of the poor, the sick, the unfortunate.” He hung his head.

  “Another night, in this chamber, you had a conversation with a man. The same man who brought you here. Do you remember?”

  “I did not know him as Mr. Wahltraud, or as the King of Vampires or anything of the sort,” Scrooge exclaimed. “You confuse me with tricks and fancy talk so that my head aches and I cannot be certain or what was or what is or is not.”

  “What did the King of the Vampires say to you that night?”

  “What night?” Scrooge cried.

  “You know the night. What did he say to you of Belle?”

  “He . . . he said she did not really love me. He said . . . I could never make her happy. That I was a businessman, not a husband. He said that she would be a poor choice for a man such as I, that she would burden me with wailing, wet-nappied brats and that I would be a poor father. Worse than my own.”

  The spirit smiled sadly. “And so . . .”

  22

  Scrooge felt himself again swept up in time, and a moment later he saw himself seated on a bench in the park. Beside him sat Belle. She was wearing a bright green morning dress and matching green cloak and he a fine black overcoat and wool top hat. It was another Christmas Eve, but he was no longer in the employ of Fezziwig; he was a man of his own wits, his own financial success. Scrooge should have been happy to see himself so successful, but recollection of the moment brought a sadness he had not felt in more years than he could count. The sadness came from the sight of Belle’s eyes, for in her eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

  “I think it best, Belle, don’t you?”

  “It matters little,” she said softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me, and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”

  “What idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.

  “A golden one. Or perhaps one more sinister.”

  “Please, I will hear no more of your tales of vampires! This is the even-handed dealing of the world,” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty, and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth.”

  “You fear the world too much,” she answered gently.

  “Me? You are the one looking for vampires behind every coal bin.”

  “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, gain, engrosses you.

  “I have been expecting you to end our engagement.” When he said nothing, she went on. “But it is not what I want, and I do not believe it is what you want. Do you not see, Ebenezer?” she cried passionately, taking his gloved hand in hers. “You are being influenced by those who do not wish for your well-being as I do.”

  “More talk of vampires, I suppose. Bah!” He checked his timepiece. “I have but learned the ways of the world. Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor.” He took his hand from hers. “It is plain you do not approve of me or my ways. You will be happier with someone else. You . . . deserve another. Someone . . . more to your liking.”

  “You loved me once,” she said softly.

  His response was one of impatience. “I was a boy! I knew nothing of marriage. Of the world.”

  “And you will not reconsider?” Belle asked. “You will not give us a chance?”

  “It is best that you marry while you still can. You are younger than I.” He cleared his throat. “You should have children . . . you would be good at that. Rearing children. It is not a pursuit that I have the slightest interest in. So, I release you.”

  “Have I ever sought release?”

  “In words. No. Never. But you have made it plain that you do not approve of the way I live my life.”

  “Because I am afraid for you, Ebenezer! You are turning your back on mankind . . . and on yourself. It is true, but I would gladly think otherwise if I could,” she told him. “Heaven knows. When I have learned a truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. I only hope repentance and regret will find you one day, and I will wait for that day with a full heart, for the love of him you once were.”

  “You will wait for me?” He rose, for he was late to a business luncheon. “That is ridiculous, Belle. I release you from our engagement, and go you must.” He tipped his hat. “Good day.”

  “Merry Christmas,” she said through tears.

  He left her, and they parted.

  “I saw her today, Spirit. I see her from time to time. She kept her word and never married; she is an old maid who gives refuge to poor travelers to keep herself in bread. She has learned nothing of business sense in all these years, never had tw
o pence to put together.”

  “And still, after all these years, she is kind to you, as she is kind to others.”

  “I think I was right from the beginning. I think she is touched. Now, come,” said Scrooge. “Show me no more. Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”

  “One shadow more,” exclaimed the ghost.

  “No more,” cried Scrooge. “No more! I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more.”

  But the relentless ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.

  23

  They were in another scene and place, a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young woman with a babe in her arms.

  “My sister, Fan,” Scrooge observed.

  The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count, and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief, but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother laughed heartily.

  “Her nieces and nephews,” Scrooge muttered. “Her husband had a large family. They were always having them to dine; so many mouths to feed!”

  “She is ill, your sister,” the ghost observed.

  “After the birth of the boy. She was never well again. She died because of him, like my—”

  “Like your mother?” the ghost questioned.

  Scrooge gazed at his sister, who was still beautiful, but her face was pale, her eyes lacking some of the spark he had once known. “I intended to visit more often. She invited me, she and her husband, for Christmas and other such events, but I was busy. And they always had so many people in the house, so many children. I am not good with children.”

  A knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne toward the center of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet Fan’s husband, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenseless porter! The scaling of him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection. The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received!

  And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the children were ushered out the door to their homes, and the master of the house took his infant son in his arms and sat down with Fan at his own fireside.

  “Fan,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile. “I have found another doctor who will see you. I am certain this one will make you stronger.”

  She smiled, leaning back in her chair to rest. “I am certain you are right, dear husband.”

  “He says those marks on your neck, he knows what they are.”

  “We know what they are, my love,” she said softly.

  Scrooge, standing beside the spirit, stiffened. “She has marks on her neck? Vampires? He let the vampires get to her?”

  “I thought you did not believe in vampires,” the spirit observed with more sarcasm than one might think such a figment of one’s imagination should have. (And Scrooge was still not entirely certain that was not all that the Ghost of Christmas Past was.)

  “Let us talk of something else, my love,” Fan said, closing her eyes. “What did you do today? Who did you see?”

  “Funny you should ask. I saw your brother,” he said.

  She opened her eyes, and Scrooge felt a strange tightness in his chest.

  “Did you invite him to Christmas dinner? I sent a note, but it came back without reply again.”

  “I passed his office window, and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. I tapped on the door and the window. I know that he saw me and recognized me, but he would not grant me admittance.”

  “Poor Ebenezer,” she said, closing her eyes again.

  “Yes, poor Ebenezer,” agreed the husband. “Since he turned Belle away, he is quite alone in the world, I do believe.”

  “Spirit,” said Scrooge in a broken voice, “remove me from this place.”

  “I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,” said the ghost. “That they are what they are, do not blame me.”

  “They kill her, don’t they? The vampires, they kill my sister, Fan. They killed my mother and then my sister.”

  “You did not even attend her bedside when her husband sent word that she was dying.”

  “Remove me,” Scrooge exclaimed. “I cannot bear it.”

  He turned upon the ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.

  “Leave me. Take me back. Haunt me no longer.”

  In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which the ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright, and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head.

  The spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form, but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.

  He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed, and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.

  STAVE 3

  THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS AND MORE VAMPIRES

  24

  A waking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of one. He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the nick of time, for the particular purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched to him through Belle’s and Jacob Marley’s ghost’s intervention. But finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new specter would draw back, he put every one aside with his own hands, and lying down again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. He decided he wished to challenge the spirit on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and made nervous.

  Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter, between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much. Not after the vampires.

  Scrooge still could barely believe the truth of what he had seen at the side of the previous spirit. All those past events Scrooge had watched with the Ghost of Christmas Past! Could they really have taken place as the ghost had shown him, rather than the way he had experienced them . . . or remembered them? The vampires at his birth, in the school, following him as he climbed the ladder of success . . . Could the vampires truly have been there all along, as the spirit suggested? Could they have manipulated his life as the ghost had demonstrated? Could Scrooge really have been right about so many things in his lifetime (at least in matters of business and investment) and yet so wrong about this? Or was what the ghost had shown him all untrue? Was this “visiting of spirits” som
e monstrous hoax perpetrated on him for who-knew-what reason? Perhaps a business rival thought to throw his ventures into chaos, or it might be that the quality of gruel at Mother Chow’s cook shop had taken a turn for the worse and all this madness was the result of too much Thames water and sawdust stirred into the cook pot and passed on to unsuspecting customers.

  It was a question so enormous to ponder that it made Scrooge’s head ache to think of it.

  Which brings the question to light, dear reader, as to whether or not the same vampires exist in our lives. Are they there as they were in Scrooge’s life and we merely do not see them? What choices have you made, paths have you taken, not of your own free will, as you assumed, but due to control by the vampires? Are you—are our government leaders—merely puppets of scheming vampires seeking to control the human world? And taking into consideration the outlandish and costly boondoggles that our elected officials put into play in direct conflict with the wishes of those who put them into office and the manner in which perfectly sane-appearing individuals seem to lose all reason once they are in power, do vampires not seem the most logical answer? The idea makes my head ache, as well. But back to the story at hand.

  Now, being prepared for almost anything there in his bedchamber, Scrooge was not by any means prepared for nothing, and, consequently, when the bell struck one, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay upon his bed, the very core and center of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour, and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at, and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think—as you or I would have thought at first, for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too—at last, I say, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in his slippers to the door.