A Christmas Carol II--Contagion Read online

A low, regretful moan came from somewhere in the dark hallway, and the sound of someone shifting on the rug.

  ‘It’s Damble,’ said Scrooge. ‘He’s drunk! I can’t believe it.’ Tacker disappeared for a second and came back with his rifle.

  ‘Hold that up,’ he said to Scrooge, nodding at the lamp. Scrooge did so. There was silence.

  ‘Damble?’ asked Scrooge again. ‘Are you unwell? I don’t mind if you are, only answer me.’ (‘I do mind, a great deal,’ he muttered to Tacker over his shoulder. ‘I’ve been very patient with that lad, and—’ ‘Shhh,’ said Tacker.) Something shuffled to the bottom of the stairs and let out a light moan, and then began to climb them.

  Scrooge’s staircase was very wide and very deep, so wide you could have ridden a hearse down it sideways, should you have any particular reason for doing so. He had never had reason to regret the opulence of this feature before, but as that something started to climb towards them, they had no notion yet of what it was, and once more he quaked with fear.

  ‘Damble!’ shouted Scrooge. ‘Show yourself!’

  ‘Shut up!’ whispered Tacker, raising his rifle and aiming it at the centre of the region of darkness.

  By degrees it emerged. At first only a shadow, then a vague shape, then the shape of a man. Finally they were able to see its face, which was featureless, and covered with wispy hair. They froze in revulsion as the form lumbered up another step. Tacker’s aim wandered away from it as he stared. It was climbing on all fours, yet seemed to have no eyes.

  With a sense of disbelieving dread, Scrooge recognised the rotting clothes, and the mud-streaks upon them, and uttered, ‘Marley!’

  ‘M————!’ said the American.

  Hearing its name (or the insult directed at it), the figure stood up and shook its head so it lolled back on its broken neck and its eyes and mouth were visible. It continued its mournful ascent with its face sideways, as though it recognized Scrooge’s voice, and was following its ear.

  ‘How do we stop it?’ asked Scrooge.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tacker said, and fired a shot into Marley’s chest.

  ‘He’s dead, what do you think that’s going to do to him?’ asked Scrooge.

  Tacker fired another shot, splintering the corpse’s shoulder, to no effect. It kept coming. He fired once more but the blind creature stumbled on a stair, and the shot went over its head.

  Nearly upon them, Marley’s corpse lurched forward with teeth bared. Struggling to reload in time, Tacker brought the gun back up just as the creature’s mouth closed over the barrel, its teeth biting it with a click. Both men closed their eyes as he pulled the trigger. When they opened them again it was at their feet – finally, irrevocably dead. Tacker looked out into the darkness.

  ‘Damble?’ he called into it. ‘You’re f——– fired.’

  They repaired to the kitchen to furnish themselves with a reviving tot of whisky and to decide what to do. Shooting the creature in the head did indeed seem to have killed it once and for all. Scrooge’s solution seemed the most satisfactory: they would rebury it, and make sure it couldn’t dig itself out again. Scrooge motioned, Tacker seconded, and there were no objections. Thus they found themselves, within half an hour, carrying Marley’s corpse through the quiet lanes.

  The fog was close and freezing, restricting their vision to no more than twenty paces, so that they expected at any second out of it would stumble another creature, or worse, an officer of the law who would no doubt be most eager to enquire after their purpose. The snow was thicker now too, rendering the streets silent except for their own dragging footsteps which made a shushing sound, adding furtiveness to their grisly enterprise. Added to this was the fact that the cadaver insisted on making small deposits of a black gooey substance about every ten steps so that any local man or (more likely) dog coming across their trail might be stimulated to follow it out of curiosity to discover the prize at its end. Thus they walked as fast as they could in apprehensive silence, looking around themselves at every moment, although they met no one and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Shortly before they reached the church the mist lifted enough for them to see a short distance down the side streets they passed.

  ‘You see them?’ asked Tacker quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Scrooge. In every alleyway were to be seen little knots of people walking slowly, occasionally bumping into each other. Sometimes it was one person on their own, wandering at a lugubrious shuffle. They posed no obvious threat, and made no sudden movement – in fact to look upon them and feel afraid seemed perfectly laughable. Even so, without saying another word to each other, the two men picked up their pace to a jog.

  When they turned in by the gate to the churchyard they saw that the church was still lit. Resting Marley’s remains on a sarcophagus for a moment so they could relieve their arms, Scrooge consulted his pocket watch and saw that it was still not yet twelve.

  ‘They’re open for midnight mass,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s be as quiet as possible.’

  They inched between the graves carrying their load which, in its advanced state of decay and after being swung about by their exertions, looked as though that at any instant it might detach itself from its limbs and slither into a dozen pieces.

  ‘Careful, careful …’ said Scrooge as they attempted to lever it over the statue of an angel. This figure was finely carved in the pose of a gracious abeyance towards the heavens, however, and despite their efforts its upward-pointing hand became wedged in a most inconvenient cleft in the corpse’s lower body.

  ‘Lift it up,’ said Scrooge, holding the legs over his head.

  ‘I am lifting it up, but it sags down in the middle, for C——’s sake,’ replied Tacker with an exasperated whisper. The moment he said this, a look of devout humility passed over Tacker and he let go of the corpse to ask the Lord’s forgiveness for taking His name in vain, as Marley’s body slumped over the angel’s hand, its crotch uppermost and the limbs dangling downwards.

  ‘Dwight,’ muttered Scrooge, ‘I suspect the Lord will forgive you the more readily if we remove Marley from this blasphemous posture. We’re going to the Christmas service in the morning, and you can ask for all the forgiveness you want then. Come on, the grave’s not that far.’

  Tacker silently acquiescing, the two men returned to their labours with the additional zeal of those with the end of an arduous task in sight. Within a minute or so Scrooge said, ‘Here!’ and squeezing with some awkwardness between two tall gravestones they stumbled upon the disturbed earth of an almost entirely bare grave, marked with a plain stone no taller than knee-high, which was engraved with the word MARLEY and otherwise quite unadorned.

  ‘This is the grave you got for your friend and business partner?’ asked Tacker.

  ‘It was what he would have wanted,’ said Scrooge, looking down with a dolorous shake of the head. ‘Seriously. He was an utter skinflint.’

  ‘Okay, let’s get it over with, I want my bed. How are we to do this?’

  Both men examined the earth and felt again the chilling awe they had both experienced when seeing Marley’s animated body for the first time. The ground had been burrowed out from below and at the side of the hole, handfuls thrown to either side in thick clods. It must have taken an extraordinary industry and strength which, glancing as they both now did at the ragged figure they had laid on the grass, defied belief.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ asked Tacker.

  ‘The choir in the church, singing a hymn,’ said Scrooge looking up at the windows, distracted. ‘If we push him down the hole head first, that would seem the best answer. That will make it almost impossible for him to get out if he insists on coming back to life again, and we can pack these sods of earth on top of his feet. Do you agree?’ Scrooge turned back round to Tacker for his approbation and realized what the squelching, rasping noise behind him had been.

  ‘That’ll make it pretty difficult for him to climb back out, don’t you think?’ said Tacker, holdi
ng out Marley’s dismembered arms.

  Scrooge wanted to feel horrified, but tiredness and pragmatism overcame the emotion. ‘Pretty near impossible, I should hope,’ he agreed. They crammed the arms (folded at the elbows) down the hole first, and shoved the exploded head of the corpse after it, levering downwards on the feet like they were the handle of a spade. When he was nearly in, they hammered on his soles with their fists, and then jumped and stamped on them in turns until they were a good two feet beneath the surface. Then they kicked lumps of displaced earth over the hole and packed them down. When all was flat again, Tacker spread a thin layer of snow over it so that it looked roughly as before.

  ‘A perfectionist,’ said Scrooge, amused. Both men got to their knees and wiped their hands with clumps of snow, to clean the deathly smell and splotches of dried fluid from them.

  ‘You know what,’ said Tacker, ‘that noise doesn’t sound like any kind of a Christmas hymn to me.’

  Scrooge straightened and looked up at the stained-glass windows of the church again, listening. Now that he attended to it properly, he found the sound was low and droning, more like a long and dismal chant with no trace of melody. He glanced away from the windows to try to locate its direction.

  ‘You’re right,’ he agreed, ‘it sounds more like vespers …’ He jumped slightly as he heard a twitching, snuffling sound from nearby, as of a small animal moving in the undergrowth. It came from the grave beyond Marley’s, masked by a tall, highly decorated marble headstone. They peered around either side of it and saw nothing save an undisturbed layer of snow.

  ‘What is it, a rat?’

  ‘I don’t care, Scrooge,’ said Tacker. ‘That ungodly music is getting louder.’

  Scrooge leant closer to the ground. The little noise was coming from beneath his nose, but he could see no movement. Then there was a tiny tremor on the smooth white surface, as though a heavy object had fallen nearby. A pale trembling little thing poked through the surface.

  It appeared at first like the nose of a frozen but persistent mole, but was then joined by another, and another, until four identical points were sticking out of the earth, and were joined by a thumb.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Scrooge quietly.

  ‘Why, what is it?’ asked Tacker from behind him.

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ Scrooge said airily. ‘Let’s go h—’

  The noise in the background became suddenly louder, no longer appearing to come from within the church, but from all around them. Yet this was not why Scrooge stopped speaking. There was now also something wriggling in the snow, in the grave adjacent to Marley’s, just a few feet away. It was an arm, pulling away handfuls of snowy earth to make room for the shoulder it was attached to. Looking around for a direction to run, the men saw shadowy movements everywhere they turned. They jumped up onto a table tomb a few feet away, and the elevation afforded them a fuller view of the surrounding graves.

  In one, a pair of hands had risen from the earth and were placed palm-down on the snow as though to haul the rest of their invisible body up by force. Turning to look for an escape in the opposite direction, Scrooge came face to face with a cadaver blackened by rot not six feet away, arching its back out of the ground from the waist up, its mouth open in a silent scream, whether from the effort to extricate itself, from some deeper spiritual agony or from simple decay of the jaw muscles, Scrooge did not seek to discover. In every corner, shapes were scrabbling up from below.

  The graveyard was rising. In unison, they ran.

  VERSE IV

  The two men described very different shapes. One was an oversized American, who at first glance might be mistaken for a handsome marauding buffalo standing upright and confined within a dress shirt and evening jacket; the other a very old Englishman who was not altogether different in appearance from an ivory-handled walking stick. And yet by some obscure law of motion – perhaps owing to the precise equity of their terror – they both exited the graveyard at the same exact speed, and within a few moments found themselves resting against the gate outside taking deep breaths, and a few seconds afterwards proceeding at a not much reduced speed down the street outside.

  Soon, slowing to a walk and gathering their wits about them once more, they began to breathe regularly, and to appreciate that had they passed anyone in the street in the last few minutes they might have appeared a little foolish. Each began to murmur mildly termed accusations at the other that he had been mistaken, and had caused them to take flight needlessly, and each inwardly quaked with a vivid horror at what they had seen.

  ‘Perhaps we only imagined it,’ said Scrooge, his countenance flushed and his mood (in spite of, or perhaps helped by, his recent shock) invigorated by the unaccustomed exercise.

  ‘I dunno,’ grumbled the American, who had developed a pronounced twitchiness, and seemed uninterested in conversation.

  ‘After all, this is the season of fancy and magical things, and perhaps we are affected.’ Tacker picked up his speed as they neared a public house named the Jolly Butchers, and noticed a group of people outside who appeared dull-witted with drink, and able to do no more than groan. He took Scrooge’s arm and guided him down a side street.

  ‘A time for spirits of every kind,’ uttered Scrooge the philosopher. ‘And if the working folk can’t indulge on Christmas Eve then what is the purpose of the verb, to indulge?’ His bonhomie was improving with these thoughts, and was having a noticeably deleterious effect on Tacker’s mood, to which Scrooge paid not the slightest attention. ‘After all, can there be any greater restorative than to wake on Christmas morning, and be surrounded by your loved ones in fine fettle, and by the joy and love that Christmas brings, so warm and cosy that it could thaw the frostiest heart, and clear the sorest head,’ he said chuckling, which irritated Tacker more than ever, ‘and what’s more, with a fine dinner to look forward to?’

  At this point, with Mr Tacker’s temper considerably excited, he placed one of his spade-sized hands on the top of the little old man’s head, and, picking him up by it, spun him round so they were face to face. Scrooge seemed not at all perplexed by this but dangled there happily, taking this manoeuvre to be a friendly New World custom of which he had yet to have the acquaintance, and saw no reason to stop talking. After he had continued parlaying his generous platitudes for half a minute or so he noticed the deep glowering aspect of his companion and, his speech dwindling into silence, he hung there affecting a childlike interest in what Dwight Tacker might be about to say.

  ‘Shut up,’ said the American shortly.

  Unable to move his head, Scrooge’s eyes swivelled left and right as though to see to whom Tacker might be talking, as it was clear that he himself had stopped speaking a while ago. Then the American’s face moved so close that Scrooge couldn’t look at anything else.

  ‘These people aren’t going to wake up tomorrow morning,’ said Tacker. ‘Or ever again. There’s something wrong with them – some sort of plague. Can’t you see it? It’s all around us.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Tacker,’ said Scrooge indulgently, letting out a light chuckle (which rather than shaking his head, shook his body), ‘you’re reading too much into things. Christmas Eve is a time for all sorts of strange goings-on, and of course there is some regrettable behaviour on the streets, it has always been the w—’

  Without moving in any other way, Tacker twisted his hand so that Scrooge turned a right angle to the left.

  ‘What’s that then?’ he asked, directly into Scrooge’s right ear.

  A dozen yards away, a figure lay supine in the alleyway, as dead and pathetic as the detritus of broken furniture and mouldering foodscraps that nearly hid it. Scrooge’s heart swelled and broke: another pauper who his charity had failed to reach in time, and who had died, perhaps of starvation, so close to the feast of Chr—

  Then he saw what it was Tacker meant him to see. Not the body but another figure, half-hidden within the shadows, who only became visible after a few seconds. It was another person, someone holdin
g the dead body close to them, and clearly keening for their death, for they clutched the corpse close. It seemed almost like a passionate romantic embrace. But as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness and his ears to the quiet, Scrooge heard the ripe, slippery sound of mastication, and saw the mouth was attached fast to the body’s neck. As his own features registered the horror of what he saw Tacker spun him back with a twist of the hand so they were face to face.

  ‘Now you understand what’s going on?’ the American asked.

  Scrooge struggled to swallow. ‘Couldn’t this be an awful individual case? An exception?’ he asked. Tacker breathed hard through his nose, looked down and thought for a while. Scrooge dangled and watched him, and only after a minute or so asked quietly, ‘Can I get down, please?’

  The huge hand released him at once and he landed with a cushioned splat on the snowy ground. The devouring creature in the shadows looked up for an instant as Scrooge got to his feet before carrying on munching away at his meal.

  ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to hide, and very quickly,’ said Tacker. ‘This disease has spread through the streets unchecked, perhaps for weeks, because it’s so dreadful that no one wants to admit it exists. All the sensible people have fled the city. It’s only your blockheaded love of festivity (here he paused to tap Scrooge roughly on the side of the head) that has prevented you from seeing it. They’re not drunk people we’re seeing out there, they’re diseased.’

  The tap on the side of his head, which on such a frail specimen as a man of Scrooge’s age, might have produced a bruise the side of an egg, in fact served to knock some seriousness into the genial old Englishman and he stood (rocking slightly from the impact) and reflected for a moment before replying with perfect sobriety:

  ‘We have come a long way from my home. But my office is near, and if what you say is true we must go there at once. Mr Cratchit may be at risk, and we should warn him.’

  Without pausing, Scrooge set off at a brisk pace and Tacker followed, encouraged at the old man’s change of spirit, and cast a last dubious glance behind him into the dark at the dribbling, snuffling creature by the roadside still intent on its prey.