Scrogged Read online

  So the ghost did, wafting Scroggs and his N-M shorts over the topless towers of downtown Houston, Axxanon the highest and sharpest, like a paper spike on an old-time desk, except it was made of shining chrome and heartless glass, reflecting only ambition and envy and greed.

  “I was not like that,” Scroggs wailed. “Once.”

  But he looked at the spirit and saw it had changed, metamorphosized. Now it was as gigantic as a jolly gray giant, a great floating jellyfish of ectoplasm in the sky, wreathed in perhaps six thousand dollars worth of Christmas icicle-lights. Scroggs’ accountant brain knew what his neighbors’ Christmas excesses cost down to the last twinkling Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer lawn ornament.

  “Spirit, who are you?” he cried, for by now all this nocturnal floating had convinced him that he had either eaten Oreo cookies doctored with LSD, or he was dreaming or dead, and he was beginning to hope for the latter. Better dead than misled.

  For the first time he got a glimmer of how Axxanon’s employees and stock investors might feel.

  The spirit laughed so heartily that the illuminated faux icicles shook like a bowlful of luminescent spaghetti. Scrogg’s stomach lurched, a victim of heights, bright lights, and motion.

  In an instant they were plunging down again, onto a peaked roof the size of a small county, which Scroggs recognized as Chairman Lay’s principal residence of some seven luxury hideaways worldwide.

  There was no shouting and bullying under that immense roof . . . or, rather, it was disguised under the cloak of jollity and a rather perverse celebration of infamy. For Scroggs recognized the Axxanon Thanksgiving party at Chairman L’s he had not attended. Parties bothered him, you see, always had: the noise, the crowds, the loud voices. . . for the first time he saw that it was not festivity he shied away from, but the memory of noise and loud voices from his past.

  Fran! Why had he never followed her, tried to find her? Being nine years old was no excuse! She had been his champion, and he had shrunk from the idea of championing her.

  This spirit was a solid, middle-aged sort of soul. His grip was almost physical as he yanked Scroggs down through the acres of slate roof—Oof! That felt like being buffeted by solid steel surf on South Padre Island—and into a massive Great Hall filled with Axxanon employees.

  It wasn’t really a Great Hall; it was just your average Houston executive mansion of 15,000-square-feet.

  They were making merry, though it wasn’t Christmas. Scroggs had remembered hearing about this party. He’d been invited, of course, but he never went where invited. And it was well that he hadn’t attended. The event had been the usual extravagantly boring affair designed to celebrate the triumphs of Axxanon’s upper echelon management.

  Scroggs was decidedly under-upper management and happy to be ignored . . . overlooked as he had been at home when the punishments had been handed out. Somehow that had translated into being ignored when the rewards were being handed out too. He had to admit that at least he hadn’t benefited from these shameless sorts of rewards. He’d always tried to do a day’s honest work, unlike most around him. When had that day’s work become dishonest, and why had he failed to notice?

  They were laughing below him and missing him not at all. The room was full of attractive female support staff and trophy wives, no wonder Playboy had leaped to do a “women of Axxanon” photo spread after the scandal broke. Scroggs snorted his disgust as the ghost let him drift over a cluster of executive wives with shellacked blond hair and crimson fingernails.

  “She’s asking a hundred-and-forty thou a month maintenance in the divorce,” said one.

  “That includes ten thou a month just for jewelry,” another noted.

  “And,” said another, ticking off the items on her clawed fingers, “nine hundred for a personal trainer, six hundred for a makeup person, eight hundred for a hairdresser—”

  “She certainly didn’t get her money’s worth.”

  Another hooted with laughter. “They say his mistress got a hundred and fifty thousand a month.”

  “The one in Paris or the one in Belize?”

  Thankfully the spirit pulled him away. The wives had sounded more like accountants than mates.

  There were silly skits and musical interludes that made much ado about nothing, to Scrogg’s mind. The President was there, not in the flesh, but on videotape, but he hadn’t been President then, only governor. Maybe that’s why he’d made the videotaped appearance, he saw the future, as Scroggs was now seeing the past, caught as he was in the grip of Christmas Present.

  “This isn’t the present,” Scroggs objected,

  “Yes, it is,” trilled the spirit. “It’s making all the newscasts now. Merry, merry.”

  The men were clustered around the huge plasma TV screen, hearing how much the Axxanon executives had supported the presidential dynasty of the past, present, and future.

  Scroggs watched, with an accountant’s dismay, a skit showing the departing Axxanon president play a Doubting Thomas (though his first name was Rich, a telling abbreviation) as he told his successor, Billings, “I say, old man, I don’t think you can pull off six hundred percent revenue growth after I leave.”

  “Hah!” Billings retorted. “We’ve got HPV on our side.”

  HPV? Was that like HIV? Scroggs wondered.

  “HyPothetical-future Value accounting,” Billings chortled. “We’ll make a killing. We’ll add a billion dollars to our bottom line.”

  Scroggs writhed in the grasp of the Ghost of Christmas Present.

  “Release me, spirit! Let me fall to my death like poor Marlowe! I see now what he saw! I contributed to the insanity. I made the figures balance on the head of a pin, when there was nothing there but air, as is under me now. Let me drop! I am not worth holding up. Always I retreated to the corner and let the worst do the worst to the best. Let me go!”

  “I cannot let you go.” The Falstaffian ghost’s voice boomed louder than the din of the partying crowds below. “You must face one last spirit, and He may indeed fulfill your wish. But first you must see others celebrate the season, grim as it is for them.”

  Swooping downward, Scroggs was soon a fly on the ceiling at the cramped but crowded apartment of . . . his nephew Jimmy Joe.

  “You actually stopped by the geezer’s office?” a plump young man was asking, laughing rather.

  “He is my only living kin, crabbed as he might be in that empty office of his. I said ‘Merry Christmas.’ It’s no more than I would have said to a Salvation Army Santa outside the mall.”

  “But that Salvation Army Santa would be doing some good in the world,” a young woman dressed in not nearly enough put in, “and your uncle has been part of the worst rip-off of the American worker the century has seen.”

  “It’s a new century now, Bobbie Rae.” Jimmy Joe shook his head, with its too-long hair. “He’s a weird old bird. Never had a thing to do with family, not that ours was worth much socializing with. But my mother always had a soft spot for him, kept telling me what a rotten childhood he’d had. Hell, the old man’s alone in the world, and so am I. I thought I’d say a kind word to my only kin.”

  “And he snarled at you,” Bobbie Rae said, both teasing and lecturing.

  “Snarling dogs don’t bite. They just hurt themselves because no one will want to go near them. I give up. You’re right. Uncle’s a lost cause. There is no Spirit of the Season, at least not in his office or house or world. So. . . Merry Christmas to what friends and family care to share it with us!” Jimmy Joe lifted a bottle of Shiner Boch beer.

  “I used to drink that in college,” Scroggs told the spirit. “When I drank, which wasn’t long. Accountants who wanted to be trusted didn’t drink. Or do drugs. Or . . . date. I don’t know why I didn’t do any of that after a while. It just seemed. . . too much trouble.”

  The spirit was dragging him down again, under another humble roof that would hardly occupy the square footage of his entry hall at Royal Ridgecrest. His empty, sparsely furnished, u
nwelcoming entry hall. . ..

  “Ghost, I’m beat. I can barely see straight, and this journey has been like riding the Viper roller coaster at Six Flags AstroWorld. Let me rest.”

  “One last stop, Scroggs. One last visit to the one person who is closest to you now.”

  “Close to me? Who?” Scroggs couldn’t think of a single soul who would fit that definition. While he was searching his memory banks, the spirit pulled him down into the meanest, smallest domicile yet.

  A woman was sighing. She was hanging up a phone receiver.

  Why didn’t she have a cell phone, like all civilized Houstonians?

  “That was M.D. Anderson,” she said, referring to the famed cancer facility and turning to show the face of his personal assistant, Lorretah, ridiculous spelling!

  There was nothing ridiculous about her expression, the sort of resigned despair that Scroggs recognized as his late mother’s most consistent mood. “They can’t,” she was saying, choking on the words, “or won’t take Little Lanier. They’re sympathetic, they hate the system. but if we don’t have the money and we don’t qualify under the right programs . . . would you believe, honey, that my ‘good’ job at Axxanon is an obstacle, as they put it? Oh, I don’t know what I’m going to do?”

  Scroggs turned away as Lorettah buried her face in her hands and then in her friend’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with the kid?” he asked the spirit.

  “A puzzling leukemia, but not puzzling enough to merit scientific investment.”

  Is that the child?” Scroggs nodded at an ashy-skinned little boy sitting close by the artificial fireplace—abominable invention—as if for warmth. The child in the corner, he thought, and shivered despite the image of a flaring fire.

  “Yesss,” the ghost hissed on a sigh. “You see the walker beside him.”

  “Poor little tyke! He hasn’t a chance.”

  “But he has a happy family. Look.”

  Scroggs was gazing down on a tiny, people-crammed kitchen about the size of his guest closet. Friends and family were lifting aluminum foil from a scant few bowls and platters of food. Elbows struck elbows and, er, rears collided with rears like silent cymbals clashing as steaming dishes were displayed on the chipped countertops. Scroggs saw candied yams, rich and yellow-orange; beans awash in mushroom soup and bacon bits, the lucky New Year’s pot of black-eyed peas; mashed potatoes, collard greens; a snacking bowl of pork rinds, but no main course, no ham or turkey.

  “This’ll get Little Lanier grinning.” A woman who looked like Lorretah’s sister bumped hips with her sibling as if they were doing a cha-cha. “Good vittles will overcome anything.”

  “No, it won’t,” Scroggs said. “Why do they deceive themselves? I’ve run the numbers on everything from this year’s profits, which are fantasy, to the future in worrying about the future. Nothing computes but losses. I’ve lost everything, why shouldn’t they? How dare they be happy when they have nothing and I have everything and am not.”

  His cry, however heart-felt, did not appear to impress the Ghost of Christmas Present.

  In a dizzying instant Scroggs was dropped with a thump back onto his massive king-size bed, which he now knew as both oversized and empty.

  Moaning, he passed out.

  A nagging alarm awoke him. Not his pre-timed awakening gong via the smart house computer, but a bong-bong-bong like a hammer on a hung-over head. Scroggs had not been hung over since freshman year, when he had decided it was not a good career move.

  A skeletal hand attached to nothing else human was reaching out for him.

  This time Scroggs was not playing along. Hell, no, he wouldn’t go. Pity he hadn’t said something of the sort to Axxanon years ago, but he hadn’t.

  “Go away,” he ordered the spirit. But ghosts, like hangovers, leave in their own sweet time.

  Once again Scroggs was jerked from his bed and his attuned-to-his-body-temperature electric blanket. Once again the dark of night embraced him like a chilly ebony shroud as he was wafted over rooftops and finally down to a stark concrete building that crouched like a machine-gun pillbox atop a hill on some featureless, lightless, unoccupied land.

  “This is it,” Scroggs intoned, trying not to let his voice shake. “Hell at last.”

  “No, Benjamin Scroggs,” a voice intoned, eerily sounding like it came over a loudspeaker, though all Scroggs saw was the bony hand still clasping his wrist like a cold ivory handcuff. “Hell is too good a destination for you and all the things you left undone in life. This is your heritage.”

  Scroggs gazed around the featureless dark. Where was there this much undeveloped land left near Houston? The flight had been far faster than his first journey back to East Texas. Apparently even spirits faced transportation traffic jams.

  An answer came to him: the city dump.

  The grasping hand pulled him down until his icy bare feet touched cold hard ground in front of the austere building.

  “Here, Benjamin Scroggs, is your destiny. Here will you go, and no further.”

  In the distance a bell began to toll. Houston had a good many churches, but the biggest were far too fashionable for anything so down-scale as a single bell: an ominous, tolling bell. A passing bell, as used to be rung for the dead, one toll for every year of life. Uh . . . this must be three, four, five—

  “You’re the Ghost of Christmas Future, aren’t you?” Scroggs asked, still mentally and frantically counting.

  His preternaturally developed left brain totaled the bell tolls like a mathematics program running in the background on a computer whose foreground programming had gone buggy and crashed.

  “Don’t leave me here alone! I know my sins now. I know I have withdrawn from all that is human and humble in myself. I’ve treated my fellow man—and woman—as if each had only numerical worth, and low figures at that. I may not have schemed to defraud, but my vanity and my self-sufficiency allowed me to be used to shatter the lives of hundreds of thousands. I do not deserve to live, Ghost, I know that! But . . . somehow I still want to, and more than ever. There are things I must do, and foremost among them, I beg you, let me live long enough to testify, as poor Marlowe was never able to! I will do good. You’ll see.”

  Scroggs gazed entreatingly into the empty air two feet above the disembodied hand. Well, maybe you won’t see exactly—”

  “Silence! You always read numbers, and put your faith in numbers. Now read those.”

  The hand released him and Scroggs fell to his frozen knees. Where the skeletal finger pointed he saw phosphorescent lettering on the building’s dark plain wall.

  December 1, 1933-December 25, 2001

  “My God! It’s my birthday and. . . my death day. Today! It’s too late! It’s too late.” His eyes lifted above the damning numbers, even more damning than the numbers he had calculated endlessly for Axxanon, and saw his name very neatly etched in the bronze plaque. At least someone had paid for that, he thought numbly. Who?

  Scroggs collapsed on the ground, his fingernails clawing the hard Texas clay. He’d been cremated, burned in hell just the same. No doubt this spirit and he were the only people, souls, who had yet come or would ever come to mark this proof of his presence on earth.

  There was nothing left to lose. He bawled out his horror and sorrow. He moaned like a ghost—would he become one now and drift like poor tortured Marlowe? He bewailed the past he could not change a jot or tittle or decimal point of. He bid life adieu like a mewling baby, but all remained dark and cold and unutterably lonely.

  Finally, exhausted, he opened his eyes.

  Stave the Third: Spooked

  “A blossom as white as the lily flower”

  —The Holly and the Ivy

  He lay on a hard cold surface. . . but—

  He pushed himself up on his elbows, looked around. It was his bed! The computer system had failed. The air mattress had deflated to granite-hardness and the electric blanket was stone cold dead.

  There was no wall before him but the blank, gian
t liquid crystal TV screen on which he ran accounting programs.

  On it he saw, in his mind’s eye, himself groveling before his own epitaph, an epitaph that recorded only name and dates, nothing of his life but the factual parameters. And why should it? He had never lived beyond his factual parameters.

  He heard his slobbering self sob. “Is there nothing I can still do, to help others if not myself?”

  And the bony forefinger had pointed to an adjoining bronze rectangle. Those almost-forgotten phosphorescent letters and numbers glowed again on the dark unactivated screen before his eyes.

  George Marlowe April 23, 1948-December 17, 2001

  Now, in his unheated, unfriendly bedroom, where even the resident computer program had deserted him, Scroggs understood the mute message. He must testify as poor Marlowe had intended, testify against his superiors who had turned out to be so morally inferior.

  This he could do, if he could live. Scroggs pinched his forearm flesh. It was icy but registered the burn of pain, mortal pain, something he had not felt in the flesh or in the mind or in the heart for decades.

  Yes. Perhaps he would die as soon as he completed the task, but then there would be something to put on his bronze marker besides name and dates: Whistle-blower. Well, after the fact, but better late than never. Scroggs struggled upright in the icy linens, rubbing his upper arms, and wiggled his numb toes.

  No, there was something else to do. Something that nagged at him, that had nothing to do with spirits and other bad companies. Heh. A small joke. Heh. Heh-heh-heh. He was alive. Cold as hell, but not in. . . hell.

  He clapped his hands at the screen and saw the opening image blossom to fill the frame like a painting. A spread-sheet. Scroggs pulled the portable keyboard he always kept by his bed onto his thighs—oooh, cold!—and began clicking keys, going into the operating system’s desktop properties menu.

  Clickety-clickety. He’d never noticed it before, but a keyboard had a cheerful chirpy sound. Snickering, he raced through all sorts of options. Nothing quite matched his mood, but he found an image of falling snowflakes on a sky-blue background to use as new ‘wallpaper.” It would have to do until he could customize something. . . perhaps photographs of friends and relatives. He hardly had any. Well, he would.