A Christmas Carol II--Contagion Read online

  Each individual might be but a lonely drunkard; each group might be a gathering of the same, or sober and concerned citizens. It was confusing to try to tell, and difficult too, for Tacker’s whip kept the horse from slowing enough for them to examine each situation closely. Therefore the streets around them, and by extension the whole city, felt like a trap, where, lacking evidence of certain danger, one might feel inclined to relax long enough to find oneself in absolute peril and therefore one was permanently on edge. So, quiet as the streets were, Tacker and Cratchit trained their loaded guns left and right on every flap of a newspaper sheet or a pigeon’s wing that was borne on the cold breeze. As they maintained their nervous vigil, Scrooge knocked on the closed front door of the hotel, half expecting to arouse the interest of some undead creature within.

  Instead he saw a head pop up from behind a counter inside, and pop back down again, and then a body scurry out beneath it and unlock the door. The face which peered out was a pale one, belonging to a boy of no more than fifteen.

  ‘Are you help, sir?’ he asked.

  Scrooge considered the correct response, which was of course that he was neither the char, nor the brass-rubbings boy, and no gentleman had ever stood being referred to as ‘help’ without administration of a clip around the ear firm enough to remain long in the memory of he who had said it. But he also reflected that time was of the essence, and some matters of form might be dispensed with.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘The two Twosomes, and Lady Crimpton. They’re still here?’

  The boy shivered. ‘It’s only them left. Them and me. I can’t make them understand the danger, and I daren’t leave them unless they come to harm and I get blamed for it.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that now. You have somewhere to go?’

  ‘Yes, sir. My mother’s, across the river. I’ve heard this plague hasn’t reached there yet. I think I can make it across Waterloo Bridge, or one of the others. You’ve seen these creatures, sir?’

  Here was the first stranger he had spoken to about the problem, and despite all he had witnessed, it still felt in some way like giving in, to acknowledge out loud what was happening. Yet at this point, it would be pure madness to deny it.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘They’re slow,’ said the boy, ‘and I’m quick. I think I can dart between them. If you are happy about getting the ladies to safety I’ll try it, sir.’ Scrooge nodded and as the boy realized his duties were no longer required, he saw a look of reprieve come into the boy’s eyes, as though he had been granted a stay of execution. He slipped out of the door and ran away into the street. Scrooge watched his fleet darting form for only a few seconds before turning to the other men and gesturing them to follow. He did not want to imagine the boy’s meagre chances of survival compared to their own even slimmer ones, and so concentration on the matter at hand was the only sensible option. Cratchit and Tacker joined him, bringing their weapons and his, and locking the door behind themselves they mounted the thickly carpeted stairs to the fourth floor, all three pointing their guns around each corner even though they met no sound but their own hushed footsteps.

  When they found the room, Scrooge knocked lightly on the door, and found to his surprise that he was nervous in a way quite unconnected with the monsters who might be gathering outside at this very moment. He discovered that he was touching his hair in a distracted attempt to make it look more presentable, and noticing that Tacker regarded him with something approaching a smug grin he felt quite ridiculous, and wondered what he was doing. When the door was presently opened by the demure Miss Felicity, and he saw a look of surprised pleasure cross her face, Scrooge suffered a second mysterious attack of nerves, and became quite unable to speak.

  ‘Mr Scrooge!’ quoth Felicity, taking his hand in hers. ‘You are here because of what has been happening in the streets, I take it? You have come here to warn us, or help to protect us, sir?’

  Scrooge tried to nod and shake his head and utter something all at once, and succeeded only in rocking back and forth and making a kind of blubbering sound. The girl did not notice, and taking his inarticulate idiocy for chivalrous denial, launched forward and clasped her arms around his neck. This she followed by inviting the three men inside and they entered, casting investigatory glances along the corridor as they vacated it, to check they were not spotted.

  Once inside, the men discovered that the speedy extraction of the ladies to safety was going to be neither as safe nor speedy as they had desired. The table was laid for tea, and the two old ladies were perched on the edge of adjacent sofas. They watched as the one, Miss Emmeline, nipped at the corner of a scone and the other, Lady Crimpton, took a doddery sip from her tea that took almost three minutes to execute.

  ‘My ladies,’ said Scrooge, bowing.

  ‘Mr Scrooge! We have a visitor!’ said Miss Emmeline, getting to her feet, giggling, running towards him, pecking him on the cheek, and then talking at the other men delightedly without hearing a word that they said, and generally acting like a hen in every respect except actually laying an egg, before returning to her seat and talking to Lady Crimpton very fast.

  ‘My ladies,’ began Scrooge again, with no softening of the gravity in his features, ‘I fear that you are not safe here, and we must take you somewhere else.’

  ‘Oh please, Mr Scrooge, do sit down and have a fancy. They are of my mother’s recipe, you know, which she wrote these fifty years past – but nothing surpasses them!’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Scrooge, sitting and allowing himself to be handed a plate in order to engage her attention, before trying again. ‘I am sorry to interrupt such a pleasant occasion with such grim tidings …’

  ‘Mr Scrooge is a great PHILANTHROPIST!’ Miss Emmeline bellowed to her aunt. ‘He’s a very KIND MAN!’ The ancient gentlewoman slowly turned her head and regarded Scrooge with a look as dim as though through the wrong end of a pair of dusty binoculars, and made a nod so tiny that it might have been an involuntary tremble of her neck muscles.

  ‘Miss Emmeline …’ he began again, and stopped to accept a cup of tea. He tried to speak, but her bright eye was fixed upon him in a quite alarming manner, and he perceived he was to taste it, before he could distract her from the topic. He took a tentative sip and, catching sight of the disbelieving looks he was receiving from the two oil- and blood-covered men on the other side of the room, steeled himself to interrupt.

  ‘Miss Emmeline,’ he said once more, firmly, but with a patient smile.

  ‘You haven’t tried the cake,’ said the lady.

  ‘I must persuade you to come with us—’

  ‘It was my mother’s recipe. DO YOU REMEMBER MY MOTHER, DEAR AUNT?’

  Scrooge spilled half his tea into his lap, which made an immediate impression on his temper. He was beginning to feel a long-forgotten impatience rising within him, which made him inclined to haul Emmeline and Lady Crimpton from the apartment by their throats, yet a single glance at Miss Felicity, her artless simplicity and exquisite prettiness, stayed his temper at once.

  ‘Miss Emmeline,’ he began again, with a firmer tone than before, and finding that he was starting to smile madly from the effort to appear calm.

  ‘She was a great dancer,’ said the tiny ancient woman on his left, pronouncing each word with brittle precision.

  ‘What?’ asked Scrooge.

  ‘Yes!’ chimed in Emmeline. ‘How she danced. The last-but-one King George was quite entranced …’

  ‘That is all very well,’ interposed Scrooge, ‘but I must insist that we retire.’

  ‘No,’ Emmeline pertly replied, spanking him on the wrist, ‘I must insist that you eat your cake and tell me what you think of the recipe!’

  ‘Wonderful balls,’ mused the old lady.

  ‘What?’ said Emmeline and Scrooge, together, quite shocked. The old lady turned her head slowly to witness their confusion.

  ‘George III,’ she said.

  ‘I really must insist …’ began Scroo
ge again.

  ‘When bathing,’ the dowager went on.

  ‘How naughty you must think us,’ said Emmeline, ‘to be drinking tea so late!’

  Across the room, Cratchit’s violent trembling had returned so that the gun jiggling in his hand looked decidedly unsafe to be resting there. (Scrooge could just about hear Tacker muttering, ‘J—— f——– C——, I don’t know whose head to blow off, his or hers.’)

  ‘Aunty,’ said Felicity, ‘I think Mr Scrooge has something very important to tell us. You know the noises we heard in the street outside?’

  ‘Oh, fiddlesticks, Mr Scrooge isn’t here to bore us with the habits of costermongers, Felicity!’

  ‘But I am, Emmeline …’

  ‘Wonderful balls,’ said the old lady.

  ‘He’d much rather have a quiet cup of tea …’

  ‘I’m afraid I must tell you that we are in danger.’

  ‘But you haven’t touched your cake!’

  Scrooge saw Felicity looking sad at her failure to collect her aunt’s attention, and then looking over her shoulders realised he was in the same room as two men about to turn utterly murderous. He tried again with determination.

  ‘We MUST LEAVE!’ he bellowed at the old lady.

  ‘Not without finishing our tea?’ she asked.

  ‘Not without finishing her tea?’ whispered Emmeline.

  ‘Yes,’ insisted Scrooge, showing as much physical exertion in forcing himself to say so as though he had just climbed a fifty foot wall. It might be said at this point that he wished he was not in this position. ‘We MUST,’ he said. ‘At ONCE.’

  ‘Not at this time of night?’ asked the old lady.

  ‘Not at this time of night, Mr Scrooge, surely?’ muttered a scandalised Emmeline sotto voce. ‘It is not done!’

  ‘But we’re going to die if we …’ he said weakly, and knew that if he finished his sentence both women would pretend not to hear it, as within the polite lives they lived, it simply was not comprehensible to be killed. He felt defeated, and catching Felicity’s eye, took a deep breath to try once more, when Tacker came to his aid.

  The American came to stand in front of the ancient gentlewoman on her sofa, upon which she seemed to rise no higher than his knee. He bent himself slowly until his head was level with hers, and in his red-faced rage he looked as though he might accidentally snort her up one of his nostrils if he took a deep enough breath.

  ‘LISTEN UP, RAISIN FACE!’ he bellowed. ‘We’re all going to be CHEWED INTO MASH in about SEVEN SECONDS FLAT if you don’t get your pea-sized a— out of here and into our wagon outside. I don’t care for MYSELF,’ he continued, yelling even louder so that the old lady’s hair was ruffled by it, ‘but FELICITY here is a FINE PIECE OF A— and I don’t want THAT TO GO TO WASTE, YOU WEIRD LITTLE SHRIVELLED MONKEY’S BALLS*. Okay, so come on, let’s go.’

  Lady Crimpton allowed herself to be pulled upright and guided towards the door, muttering something about wonderful balls. She hadn’t the vaguest idea what the man was talking about, but hadn’t been spoken to in such a vigorous way by a handsome young man since before the passing of the Corn Laws, and at the recollection she brimmed with excitement. Miss Emmeline, for her part, was so confused by all this behaviour that she bowed her head and allowed Felicity to lead her by the hand. Bob Cratchit had been watching the whole scene pass off with an increasing exasperation and clutching his gun too tightly, for as he saw they had finally removed the ladies from their seats, he pressed even harder and loosed off a shot into the crystal chandelier above their heads.

  As these rooms were populated by members of only the lower gentry, the chandelier was a modest affair consisting of two hundred and eighty pieces of cut glass and thirty-six candles, and which cost approximately the same amount of money that Bob Cratchit was likely to earn in his entire life. Despite, or perhaps because of this, it is not possible to express in words how profound was Cratchit’s pleasure to see the thing explode.

  ‘How exciting!’ said the dowager, who had only seconds before moved from beneath where razor-sharp shards now fell in a murderous rain, slicing into the furniture, and not the slightest bit moved by the exposure, as it belonged to the hotel. She tightened her grip on Tacker’s hand.

  ‘Wonderful balls,’ she said absently.

  ‘You can’t even imagine,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you later.’

  * Editor’s note: it would seem this colloquial expression was so alien to the Victorian demotic that it escaped censure, or censorship. This edition retains the original text.

  VERSE VI

  Within a few minutes they had escorted the ladies down the stairs. There was some initial trouble with the elderly dowager, who was so excited by the attentions of Dwight Tacker that she kept finding excuses to turn back so that he would shout at her, but once they discovered her ruse, she was given the sweaty hand of Mr Cratchit, and Tacker was sent to the front of the party to scout ahead for trouble.

  They found none, every soul having abandoned the hotel for the streets, and some further destination. It afforded them no consolation whatever to be in the hallways of one of London’s largest hotels on the eve of the biggest holiday of the year, and to be in darkness, faced with empty corridors extending in each direction, and they hurried until they were out of the lobby and onto the street.

  ‘Now,’ said Tacker, leaning down for Lady Crimpton, who presented so small a challenge to lift, she might have stepped onto his palm and been carried in his top pocket.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Emmeline. ‘Now I must protest. No one must lift Griselda but myself.’

  ‘You?’ asked Tacker. ‘You couldn’t lift a grapefruit. Come on, let me.’

  ‘NO!’ shrieked the gentlewoman, and raised her forefinger to admonish him on a number of points. ‘We might be in an emergency, but the world is not entirely gone to pot …’

  ‘Who the f–—’s Griselda?’ asked Cratchit.

  ‘Don’t you start swearing, Bob, you’ll make her worse,’ said Scrooge, handing Felicity up onto the cart.

  ‘And what’s more, this is not the appropriate vehicle for a lady to be seen in – or, or upon – under any circumstances. She should rather die.’

  ‘Balls!’ said Lady Crimpton, offering her hand up to Tacker, but Emmeline got in the way.

  ‘Lady …’ said Mr Tacker, who saw that they had gained the attention of some of the wandering creatures by the roadside, who were perhaps twenty feet away.

  ‘No, it’s not right,’ said Emmeline.

  ‘Shut up and hurry,’ said Tacker, as he heard Cratchit and Scrooge loading their guns. More of the roving monsters were coming round the corner beyond. ‘We’ve hardly got any time.’

  ‘I’ll lift her …’ said Emmeline, bending to her elderly relative and placing her hands at the woman’s sides. She made a lot of quick puffing sounds, as though she had taken a hot dish out of the oven with her bare hands and did not have a place to put it down (although she would have been thoroughly appalled by the analogy, as she had never been in the same room as an oven). By the time she gave up and the men realized she most definitely needed help, not ten feet behind her was tottering an enormous bearded man with a bald head, who might once have been a human cannonball in the circus, but was now an inhuman creature with his dead eyes upon her.

  Scrooge fired, and a seam opened up from above the man’s right eye and across the top of his head, so that a portion of his skull was either shaken loose or shattered within the skin, and the wound slumped open horribly, like a pie or pastry that had been roughly torn open.

  The shock of the blast and this horrible sight did something unfortunate to Miss Emmeline’s nerves. She turned away from the sight of Mr Scrooge firing the gun; she was confronted by the man’s head falling apart; and she herself fell apart. She started a few words or sentences one after the other, and failed to make proper use of any of them, and while the men on the bed of the cart were still hesitating to come to her aid, another figure moved i
n on the little old lady to her side. It was a tubby little man, his arms reaching out, and he got to within a few feet of the dowager before Tacker deployed one rifled round through his left cheek, and then another through the centre of his nose, declaring, ‘Hey, she’s mine!’

  At every second that followed the men wanted to jump off the back of the cart and gather the ladies up, but they had no sooner dealt with one encroaching figure when another appeared, and their activity was drawing attention from the surrounding streets.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted first Tacker and then Scrooge, holding out their hands to the ladies who were only just out of reach, before having to take to their rifles again. ‘Grab our hands! Get on board!’

  It was too late. There were too many of them for the men to help. One lady was too insensible from nerves to help herself, and the other was too insensible to anything to be of any assistance to herself or others. As the men realized this, Cratchit, holding the reins in his hands, decided that waiting any longer meant none of them would escape, as the creatures were getting uncomfortably close to the horses, and he whipped them to go.

  ‘No!’ cried Felicity as the cart lurched forward, and she saw the first monster bite down on her aunt’s shoulder. The attack was swift and merciless, but mercifully swift. Emmeline registered no more horror at being bitten than she had in the preceding twenty minutes’ horrors. The little old lady looked rapturously up at Tacker’s receding form as the creatures set upon her. What followed was gruesome indeed.

  BLOOD BURST OUT OF BITTEN-OPEN VEINS AND ARTERIES, EYES WERE PULLED OUT, LOOSE THINGS SUCH AS LIMBS TORN AWAY

  The creatures were dead, yet they had strength, and they pulled the women apart like the carcases of cooked chickens after a Sunday lunch. Blood burst out of bitten-open veins and arteries, eyes were pulled out, loose things such as limbs torn away as more moving dead joined the throng, and the voices of the women were very quickly lost as the cart dodged left and right through the crowd that had gathered, Scrooge and Tacker firing from each side to clear the way. Once they had broken free, both looked back to see only a feeding frenzy upon the road behind.