A Zombie Christmas Carol Read online

  “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

  “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. It was surplus population if you remember that provided the fuel to the monstrous outbreak those seven years ago! Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”

  “But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

  “It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

  Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

  Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up to-morrow’s pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

  Foggier yet, and colder.Piercing, searching, biting cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of

  “God bless you, merry gentleman!

  May nothing you dismay!”

  Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

  At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

  “You’ll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?” said Scrooge.

  “If quite convenient, sir.”

  “It’s not convenient,” said Scrooge, “and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself ill-used, I’ll be bound?”

  The clerk smiled faintly.

  “And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think me ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”

  The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

  “A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”

  The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s-buff.

  If Scrooge had bothered to lift his eyes from his route home, he would have noticed the first signs of evil starting to spread into the dark spaces of the streets. An insidious evil was making its way through the city, seeking the dead or those close to their passing. Each minute that passed seemed to make the evil stronger. In the shadows of a derelict tavern lay a heavily laden cart with several clothed figures slumped across its bed. There was no sign of the animals that would normally pull such as heavy load and underneath the spoked wheels ran a dark trail of blood. It was this cart that had come from the docks that would bring so much calamity to this story. The trail of blood continued off into the distance towards the infamous Bank.

  Scrooge however noticed none of this and took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his Banker’s-book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices. The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.

  Like his counting house, there were few items or artefacts bar those required of necessity. Near the door lay his stick and propped as well near the door were a selection of old military relics that were rusting away. An old musket lay on the floor though it lacked a flint or any ammunition of note. It is doubtful it would have worked anyway with the amount of dust and rust on the moving parts it was probably more a danger to the firer than any hostile target.

  Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London, even including—which is a bold word—the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven years’ dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face, the face that he had last seen alive under a mass of the living dead before being torn apart by tooth and claw.

  Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression. Down the side of Marley’s face were a number of small wounds and a scar ran along his cheek, presumably from wounds he suffered during his attack and death.

  As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.

  To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily
, walked in, and lighted his candle.

  He did pause, with a moment’s irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said “Pooh, pooh!” and closed it with a bang.

  The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant’s cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.

  You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge’s dip.

  Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before he shut his heavy door, he removed one of the old cavalry swords from the wall and held it up to his shoulder. It was a simple move but he looked strangely at ease with the old weapon that now lay in both a comfortable position but also ideally placed to use in anger if required. He walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that whilst keeping his right hand firmly on the weapon, just in case. The weapon gave him a re-assuring, safe feeling though it did nothing to hold back the coldness of the house.

  Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.

  Quite satisfied, he placed the sword down and then closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel. To the side of his bed lay a fine bladed dagger though like all of Scrooge’s possessions it was old, poorly cared for and saw little if any use.

  It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley’s head on every one.

  “Humbug!” said Scrooge; and walked across the room.

  After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

  With surprising speed, he reached out and grabbed the dagger, pulling it close to his side. He lowered the tip so that it pointed ahead towards the direction of the sound.

  This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

  The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

  He held the dagger out in front of him, the thoughts of his last battles with the undead racing to the top of his mind. If nothing else, Scrooge refused to suffer the same face as Marley had when dragged down and eaten alive by those vile things.

  “Could it be that they have come back and they want to finish me like they did Marley?” asked Scrooge to himself.

  He looked around the room for any others weapons, cursing himself for leaving his old sword back out of the room. As he scanned the darkness of the room, his anger and then disbelief returned. He scowled as he turned back to the direction of the sound.

  “It’s humbug still!” said Scrooge. “I won’t believe it. We killed them all in the end, every last one of them!”

  His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, “I know him; Marley’s Ghost!” and fell again.

  Marley’s Ghost

  The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. He still carried the wounds he had sustained during his struggle and death, but apart from that he was the vision of the man he once knew.

  The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.

  Around his waist, he carried a sword belt of some kind that Scrooge vaguely recognised.

  Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

  No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

  “How now!” said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. “What do you want with me?”

  “Much!”—Marley’s voice, no doubt about it.

  “Who are you?”

  “Ask me who I was.”

  “Who were you then?” said Scrooge, raising his voice. “You’re particular, for a shade.” He was going to say “to a shade,” but substituted this, as more appropriate.

  “In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”

  “Can you—can you sit down?” asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.

  “I can.”

  “Do it, then.”

  Scrooge asked the question, because he didn’t know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.

  “You don’t believe in me,” ob
served the Ghost.

  “I don’t,” said Scrooge.

  “What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

  “I don’t know,” said Scrooge.

  “Why do you doubt your senses?”

  “Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

  Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

  “In the past I have dreamt of all kinds of curiosities but not once have I seen you in such a manner,” he said whilst taking a step back.

  He thought to himself and then came to the simple realisation that he must be feeling unwell and the reason for seeing this vision of old Marley was because of the visit earlier that day by the gentlemen. He looked up to the Spirit though and his doubt returned. It appeared real enough and it certainly sent a chill of fear down his back of the kind he had not felt since his short time in the militia or even worse, the few minutes he spent fighting the undead seven years ago.

  To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.