Scrogged Read online

  He paused to study its Art Deco Italianate two-story façade. The city’s most chi-chi decorators of dubious gender and the annual Designer House committee makeover hags had been itching to get their French-manicured claws on Scrogg’s house to “reinvent” it. From the outside, it looked shabbily elegant, neglected almost to the point of a visit from Royal Ridgecrest’s Community Aesthetic Standards Committee, but not quite. Ben had learned long ago to never let his personal habits show enough to invite meddling from outsiders.

  He was considered a business genius and a certain eccentricity was tolerated . . . in him, at any rate. He kept the financial numbers dancing the can-can in their designated rows, just as the Axxanon CEO and CFO and all the other high muckety-mucks had liked and wanted. He’d never looked up to see the bigger picture, and that’s what he would say if subpoenaed. He’d seen only his pixels and his numbers, and what wrong was there in that? That is what a Chief Accounting Officer is supposed to do: keep an eye on the bottom line. CAO. That was Scroggs.

  He paused at his front door, a coffered, copper-painted affair with a showy brass knocker of the masques of comedy and tragedy. The home’s builder had been a Hollywood silent movie star. She’d wed a Texas businessman and retired to Houston to haunt charity affairs and install her gaudy Cecil B. DeMille-epic taste wherever she could.

  Odious things, those twin masques with twisted features. Even the masque of comedy seemed to be screaming.

  Scroggs reached for the keypad at the door’s right. He needed no primitive knocker or key to enter, for he kept no servants, despite the house’s size. It was bad enough that he had to overpay the Merry Maids every two weeks. He punched in his code, and the thing burped it back at him.

  The LED numbers looked utterly alien until he realized that they broke down into a date: 12/24/01. 122401. Ridiculous. He punched the keypad again, harder. Again: 122401. 12/24/01. That was today, the date that Axxanon employee 401Ks officially dissolved, although even now their assets were frozen, what was left of them, as their salaries soon would be frozen.

  Scroggs made a fist and punched the entire contrary keypad with his bare, cold knuckles. Investing in costly leather gloves in a climate such as this, which only flirted with winter now and again, was ridiculous. This night was cold, though. Maybe that’s what made him shiver when his punch delivered a response . . . a deep, distant tolling of bells. The sound seemed to come from far inside the house, but of course he heard the knell of a church calling the ovine faithful to some Christmas Eve service.

  Near him, someone groaned.

  He studied the Hollywood twist trees bracketing his door for lurkers, but the jagged arms of the distorted pines remained motionless.

  An odd phosphorescence played over his front door, brightening the aged-blackened brass of the grotesque masques for which Houston’s leading interior designer had offered him $5,000. The faces seemed to spring to life and, despite their distorted features, resembled somebody Scroggs couldn’t quite place, but whose features frightened him.

  Heartbeat thumping through his spare, computer-stooped frame, Scroggs heard them groan and scream with pain and then searingly hysterical laughter, like living things being tortured beyond even the dead’s endurance. . . .

  He shrank back from his own door, but it popped ajar as it was supposed to. The keypad’s red warning light had turned green, and the alien numbers had vanished.

  “Nerves,” Scroggs muttered to himself.

  He moved into the house, past spare rooms with polished wood floors furnished with leather and steel Barcelona chairs and other minimalist modern pieces. As he passed through the rooms, the controlling computer system switched lights and music on. The house’s sleek, impersonal interior reminded him of the clean microprocessor order inside a computer. An interior elevator door was open to waft him up one floor to where he really lived, the master bedroom suite. Instead of piping in Muzak, the elevator sound system offered the high-pitched bleeps of tech equipment chattering to itself.

  Scroggs moved into the carpeted upper hall, passing the home theater . . . passing, then stopping and returning to stare through its open padded double doors to the huge screen on which black-and-white people moved.

  The drone of dialogue made him frown. The theater wasn’t programmed to go on automatically at his passing, though it was operating now. He ogled a three-foot-high face in closeup, a dead actor looking troubled fifty-some years after he’d filmed the scene. The face was familiar. Whose was it? He didn’t watch TV or movies much anymore, just hunkered down in his bedroom for microwave meals with professional reading material.

  Jimmy Stewart, that was it! Mr. Nice Guy. Scroggs blinked at the dialogue . . . no, not that treacly movie again. Of course. This was Christmas Eve and It’s a Wonderful Life was an inescapable rerun staple of the season.

  What was so wonderful about being financially ruined through your own fault and attracting the unwelcome attention of some self-appointed guardian angel determined to make you see the bright side of business failure? This slop was worse than panhandling socialites in his office.

  He darted into the darkened room, hunting the controller. When he found it on the arm of a theater seat, it refused to shut off the movie, or the whining of Jimmy Stewart as feckless “George Bailey.” Scroggs pressed buttons in a panic, not wanting another syllable of cheap and manipulated Christmas sentiment to hit his ears . . . when the image faded.

  At last.

  Yet the thing wasn’t totally off. The screen still showed a shadowy office scene. . . an office at Axxanon. And seated at the desk was another familiar figure—George Marlowe! In black-and-white, like Jimmy Stewart, but otherwise as live as he could be.

  “Marlowe!”

  The man stood at his call and came forward to perch on the desk edge like some latter-day Walt Disney selling Disneyland. “This is my last will and testament,” Marlowe said, staring straight at Scroggs. “I guess you could call it my ‘unliving’ will.”

  “That’s right, Marlowe. You’re dead, so get off my movie screen.”

  “Can’t. Guess this is my purgatory, or limbo. A limited engagement at your home theater.”

  “You’re seven days dead.”

  “I suppose you were expecting advanced decay by now. No, I just turned . . . pale. This two-dimensional existence is pretty painful, though.”

  “You’re a delusion.”

  “But I’m your personal delusion, so you might as well sit down and listen. I’ve come to warn you, Ben.”

  “We were never friends in life.”

  “We weren’t enemies, which is saying a lot at Axxanon.”

  “I don’t get it. You were an honest and decent man. You had the least to hide of anyone. Why did you of all of them—?”

  “Kill myself? When the truth came out, I saw that I was a part of the conspiracy, unwittingly maybe, but it was all a vast network of links and nodes. I saw in an instant all the thousands of hapless employees whose pensions had been financed with company stock, whose futures were tied to the stock-market value, who suddenly had nothing. I saw those hundreds of investors, thousands of ordinary souls, retired workers whose pensions had been invested in the glittering, rancid bubble that was Axxanon, who’ll now be working into their eighties to survive.”

  “Neither of us had much to do with that.”

  “We were there!” Marlowe thundered over the high-end Bose speakers, sounding like Charlton Heston’s Moses on the mount. “There is no escaping such facts in the afterlife. I may not be blue-faced and dripping seaweed or rattling chains or sliming unsuspecting mortals like a Ghostbusters wraith, but I wear an invisible cloak of regret as heavy as stainless steel. I’m imprisoned in shades of gray forever, mocked by others you thankfully cannot hear or see. So hear me, Scroggs! You face the same eternal fate unless you do something about it.”

  “What?”

  “Three spirit guides will visit you tonight. You must go where they take you and face what they show you.”
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  “Spirit guides! I don’t believe in that New Age claptrap.”

  “Believe, or you will linger in a limbo worse than any you could imagine, half-seen, half-heard, but sensing everything around you as if it were felt through steel wool. It wounds, Scroggs, to know your own failures so well, to see the hapless, hopeless, helpless faces of your fellow humans and know you put the agony into their features. It is more than I can bear!”

  The figure moaned and wailed with a sound so like a garbage disposal crossed with a demon that Scroggs put his palms to his ears. Still he heard Marlowe’s voice even as it descended into guttural howls. The spirit’s image twisted and melted into that of a Great Dane, an ancient woman, Jimmy Stewart.

  Horrified, Scroggs protested. “You of all of us did the least wrong, Marlowe! You couldn’t help it that our superiors used our cleverness with numbers to defraud our fellow workers and the stockholders.”

  “I could have helped it! It was my job to have ‘helped it.’ I answer Here not to Axxanon, but to every last one of those faceless fellow workers and stockholders we took no notice of until government investigators and newswriters told us how they had paid for our indifference and arrogance.”

  Scroggs remained unconvinced. “Humankind has always suffered, on the whole. Those people were not our affair. Our jobs were our business, and doing them satisfactorily.”

  “Humankind was my business! Their welfare was my business! The company existed to supply numberless people with services, and jobs, and some modicum of financial security, not to make its top executives wealthier than Greek shipping magnates. We have sinned, Scroggs, and will pay for it after death, as I should know most painfully.”

  “I don’t see why I should believe the word of a suicide, a man who couldn’t face his own music, now asking me to face something I don’t believe in. Spirit guides! As well as mutter about the ‘spirit’ of Christmas. As you point out, Christmas is only for the rich and the greedy, and as much as you and I were paid for our services, we are minnows in the shark tank. I have nothing to atone for.”

  “Believe in me,” Marlowe’s voice thundered again. “And I wasn’t a suicide, Scroggs. I didn’t kill myself, else I’d be in some even more horrible lower hell. I was murdered.”

  “Murdered! My god, man. Murdered?”

  The image blurred, then “Jimmy Stewart” was poised on a bridge, about to leap to his own death, when a guardian angel named Clarence appeared by his side. The only Clarence Scroggs could remember was a clown on some children’s show in his foggy, foggy youth. Or was that Clarabell? Either way, the name was a silly abomination, and irrelevant.

  Scroggs wrung his hands on the TV remote as if to break its plastic neck, punching buttons with the same impotence as he had belabored the keypad by his door.

  “Murdered,” he whispered to himself as the screen went blank, leaving the room pitch dark. “Spirit guides? Hardly. Indigestion, more like it! Too many Taco Bell lunches. I’ll go to bed and finish dreaming there.”

  Stave the Second: Alien Visitors

  “A prickle as sharp as any thorn”

  —The Holly and the Ivy

  Scroggs scurried to his bedroom hideaway, ate a can of cold mushroom soup and three Oreo cookies and called it Christmas Eve.

  Then he lay down in his bed, a circular affair with a built-in TV in the gray flannel canopy that had cost as much as a good car. Axxanon required its employees of a certain level to live up to a certain level. Scroggs chose his excesses to match his misanthropy.

  Marlowe murdered. Now that was a shocker, Scroggs thought as he muted the nightly news show, leaving footage of his former bosses being paraded in and out of courtrooms silent, like a Keystone Cops short subject from the twenties. Pity no one would know but he. Nor would anyone believe it, if he was so rash as to say such a thing. Scroggs burped, then shook his head. Indigestion. With the cursed Season as well as his diet.

  The lights in his bedroom brightened like the rising sun. He sat up blinking. He hadn’t ordered this blinding, and expensive, blitz of kilowatts. His built-in stereo system was wailing out Christmas carols. And somewhere an old-fashioned clock chimed. And chimed. And chimed. He owned nothing but modern, and quiet, timepieces, but Scroggs thought he counted thirteen chimes of the clock.

  A baker’s dozen that added up to 1:00 A.M.

  On the sleek stainless steel portable refrigerator that served as a night stand (and which held what was left of the mushroom soup, for Scruggs’s stomach had become a tad unsettled after the Marlowe episode) perched an aged waif. The creature looked rather like a child with the premature aging disease the TV news shows were always showing to revolt people and loosen their purse strings for medical research.

  Purse strings? That was a strange way to put it. To lift the contents of their alligator skin wallets and 401Ks was more like it.

  “I suppose you represent yourself to be a ‘spirit guide,’ “ Scroggs snickered. “You look rather old to be a Boy Scout.”

  “I am a boy, and also not a boy any longer,” the waif answered with a certain melancholy. “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” A small, wizened hand reached for Scruggs’s fingers, which looked knobby and old even to his own eyes, yet clutched the down comforter in a child’s terrified grip. “Come with me.”‘

  Before Scroggs could say yea or nay, the ghostly hand had seized his own like icy, oozing Silly Putty and was dragging him toward the metal blind-shrouded window.

  “We’ll crash!” Scroggs cried.

  Instead he felt a cold bracing wind and then he was treading thin air hand-in-hand with the spirit. And him wearing only Neiman-Marcus (on sale) boxer shorts.

  Houston’s high gleaming buildings—Axxanon’s A-shaped mirrored plinth among them— flashed beneath them like a river of fireflies. Only the chill high stars remained. Scroggs took pleasure in recognizing their remote placement, as predictable as numbers on a spread sheet.

  Soon the pair was plummeting back to earth, humble east-Texas earth, pockmarked by stands of piney woods and reedy swamps.

  Scroggs saw battered pickup trucks plying the rutted country roads—few SUVs here, and no Humvees—then they plunged low enough over the one beacon in the darkness, the lit-up Dairy Queen, to hear arriving and departing diners wishing each other “Merry Christmas” and “God bless.”

  “Meadow muffins!” Scroggs grumbled, but, as the ghost pulled him on, he recognized more than the terrain. “Why . . . this is my home town. I’m amazed that toad puddle is still here.”

  They were plunging down to the very center of it, the Baptist church. This was a simple wooden building very proud of its one dinky spire. It had been a hard-scrabble town and life, and the religion had been demanding and sometimes cruel.

  “There is a child below debuting in the Christmas pageant,” the spirit said. “Perhaps you’d like to see.”

  “Oh, God, no! I was just some dribble-chinned Joseph hanging over a manger, not knowing why. Having children is overrated.”

  But the ghost swooped low and Scroggs with him, until they were hovering over the hovel Scroggs recognized from his youth. Someone was shouting. Scrogg’s ears shriveled at that angry din, though he was not the object of it, and instead sat silent in a corner, in some craven way happy to be the observer rather than the object of the tirade.

  Daddy was drunk and Daddy drunk was usually mad, but this time he had something serious as the object of his fury. He railed at Scrogg’s sister Fran, a frail girl trying to grow into a woman on too little food and no love. She cowered against the paper-patched wall, her thin arms wrapped around a slightly swelling stomach, like a young pine bent by the wind but not quite breaking. The word “slut” peppered the air.

  “Fran!” Scroggs cried out. Now he would go to her defense. She had always stood between him and the Old Man, and seen to his clothes and his snotty face. He didn’t understand, then, what the problem was. If only he had been big enough to defend her.

  He saw her now, again,
while he quailed like the nine-year-old he was at Daddy’s big hands and Daddy’s big voice. She was sixteen, he remembered, a shy, pretty girl with something stronger beneath their mutual fear. Something in her was better and braver than he ever could be.

  “Take me away, ghost! I’ll never see Fran again on this earth and I can’t stand seeing her berated again now!”

  The ghost bent a sharp eye on Scroggs’ face, and must have discerned the horror and unhappiness.

  For after that searing scene, Fran was gone forever, and Scroggs heard no more of it or her until he had escaped on a scholarship to Houston and the university. He learned later that he couldn’t have defended her that night even if he had mustered the will, that he had a young nephew he never knew and a dead sister he’d never known was ill. He learned it from his mother, a shadow not much different from a ghost he’d never paid much mind to, just like everybody else, after his father had died.

  By then he had Latin words awarded with his accounting degree. Magna cum laude. By then he knew what they meant, which no one in his home town could claim except the Catholic priest with his tiny congregation among the born-agains of the county. At university, his classmates had dismissed him as a “grind,” but he landed a good position with a family hardware business. . . until the chain stores of Home Despot put it out of business.

  The ghost floated with Scroggs over the dead carcasses of many businesses of his memory. . . the single-screen theater with the Art Deco marquee. . . Nathan’s Drugstore, where you could call in an emergency and a pharmacist would get out of bed to assist you. . . the hardware store that smelled of oil and rusty metal instead of the modern tang of chrome carts and computerized checkout stations.

  “It’s gone,” Scroggs mourned, “all of it. My sister, my youth. Take me home, ghost. I can’t stand to see these places of my past.”