A Christmas Carol II--Contagion Read online

  Quiet descended between them once more as the cart rattled away down a dingy side street, and holding Felicity to him, and absorbing the shaking of her sobs into his breast and the wetness of her tears into his silk neck-tie, despite the horror they had just endured, Scrooge found himself light-headed at his closeness to the young girl. Casting around for a cheerful distraction from their present plight, he settled on a topic that he thought would surely lighten the situation.

  ‘Mr Cratchit,’ he said. ‘Tiny Tim. How is he, sir?’

  Cratchit turned a grime-smeared face to his and regarded the blithely smiling Scrooge for many long seconds, his head trembling under the agency of some scarcely controlled emotion. Then he spoke in a whisper.

  ‘Twice in one day, would you? I’ve got a gun,’ he said, holding it up barrel foremost, for Scrooge’s inspection. ‘It’s loaded. So don’t ask me that. Don’t do it, Scrooge!’ And he turned away the better to get a control of himself.

  Quite at a loss to understand this outburst (his memory being not what it once had been), Scrooge also looked the other way, and was about to start whistling a merry tune of his own composition, which might have proved a fatal sally to Cratchit’s exasperated patience, when the cart very suddenly checked itself, throwing all of its contents human and otherwise up into the air and rearranging them in an interesting new composition, back on its surface. Picking themselves up again, and checking their guns weren’t about to go off, the human inhabitants stared out into the road ahead to see what had caused them to stop.

  Tacker had the reins in one hand and with his other was aiming his revolver at a tall shadowy figure who stood in the middle of the road. No creature of the undead was this: he stood still, his eyes hidden beneath a dark wide-brimmed hat, his form concealed in long black cloak, and a large physician’s bag stood on the road by his side. He had one hand raised with the clear intention of stopping the cart, and having succeeded in this application, he retained his pose, which made the horses snort and clatter restlessly.

  ‘Pardon my French,’ drawled Tacker, ‘but who the f— are you?’

  The hat’s brim lifted slowly revealing a wiry, alert visage with two bright black eyes that shone with knowledge, and a small twisted mouth.

  ‘I am one who can lead you to a safe place,’ he said, his voice betraying an accent, as though he had been removed many years from the country of his birth, and also a pedagogic exactness of articulation, that suggested a gentleman of learning, or a madman, or both.

  ‘I suggest that you let me aboard.’

  Tacker was not impressed enough for his aim to deviate from the centre of the stranger’s forehead. ‘We have company enough, stranger. I’ve got a cart here that’s good and full up. Suggest you get out of the way and let us proceed to Hampstead, and you carry on your way too.’

  The man lowered his hand, but still looked at Tacker and his gun. ‘You will not make it that far north. There are far too many of them there. I have a place nearby. Drive me there, and you can all be safe until morning.’

  Scrooge was deeply impressed that this man had survived alone on the street among the creatures – the only such survivor they had yet seen.

  ‘How have you managed to stay alive?’ enquired Scrooge.

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Scrooge, he’s a creep,’ muttered the American.

  The man became impatient. ‘I am a man of science. I have investigated every kind of apparition, ghoul and monster on the earth. It is my life’s work. But these creatures – they are something new to me, and I have been out gathering specimens. Come, we are all fools to stand here like this!’ He looked around irritably and hitched his bag up to his chest.

  ‘Allow me to importune you for a lift and I shall explain. If the explanation does not satisfy, you may throw me off!’

  ‘Mr Tacker, he speaks sense,’ urged Scrooge. ‘Let’s make our minds up as we go. Get aboard, sir!’

  Tacker lowered his gun slowly, allowed the man to climb up next to him and, in order to express his feelings about the arrangement, set the horses off as fast as they would go, throwing the stranger uncomfortably hard into the wooden seat before he had had a chance to set himself down.

  When their guest had gained a little composure, he looked them all over quite coolly, and unconsciously placed his hand on his leather bag.

  ‘Sir?’ asked Scrooge.

  ‘You have been fortunate to make it so far,’ said the stranger, nodding several times to himself. ‘Yes indeed.’ (‘A—hole,’ muttered Tacker again, whipping the horses.)

  As he looked them all over, the stranger’s eyes fell on the open crate of firearms, whereupon he rose in his seat, leaned over and admired them closely, making clucking and cooing sounds and running his spindly fingers over the shiny and impressive-looking weaponry.

  ‘Not so lucky!’ he said. ‘I take it back. You are well prepared.’

  ‘That’s my stuff,’ said Tacker, ‘but it’s not for sale. Not to you.’

  ‘Either way, American man, I need it not,’ said the foreigner loftily. ‘For I wield a cutlass!’ Making a rather unnecessary show of his swordsmanship, he now drew the blade which had been hidden in a scabbard beneath his cloak and flourished it above Tacker’s head, causing that man to duck and accidentally direct the horses hard into a side street. An inn was on that corner, and a heavy wooden sign, bearing the encouraging legend ‘The Jolly Butchers’ and depending from a strut beside the upper window, did the inhabitants of the cart great service in attaching itself to the raised sword as they passed beneath, plucking it out of the curious gentleman’s hand and placing it out of harm’s reach.

  It took Dwight Tacker a few seconds’ struggle to get control of the horses once again and when he had done so, with his spare hand he took the stranger by the scruff of the neck and deposited him into the cartbed behind with a violent flourish and a complete lack of ceremony or warning. The doctor’s leather bag followed, hitting its owner in the chest and robbing him for a few moments of his breath.

  ‘What do you keep in there, anyway?’ asked Cratchit.

  At this question the scientist recovered at once from his injuries and the loss of his precious cutlass, and unstrapping the top of the bag, foraged around inside, meanwhile delivering this explanation:

  ‘Now, you see, to examine these creatures I needed specimens. I am nothing unless I have evidence to study, so when this outbreak began, at first I watched what was happening in the streets, and then when I saw it was some kind of illness, some, how you say, contagion, I knew I must study it. I was lucky. Nearby in the street I discovered a whole leg …’

  Without giving them the slightest pause to take in this information he pulled out an adult’s naked leg from inside the bag and dumped it on Cratchit’s chest. One toe caught on the buckle as it came out so that as it landed the thing was wobbling as though alive.

  ‘Turn right here, driver! We are not far!’ called the scientist sternly, before returning to his captive audience. As his enthusiasm took hold and his speech quickened, his grasp of English loosened to an equal degree. ‘And then I zought I must travel further and find better specimens, because perhups zees ees not an unfection of skin und muscle und bone, but might have origins in ze bladder, or ze colon; ze lungs, kidneys, or – most like of all – pancreas!’

  As he announced each of these organs he produced them from jars within the bag and dropped them one by one into Cratchit’s lap with a plop, giving him too little time to react after each delivery before making the next one, so that at the end of his speech the little man was furiously juggling wet sacs and bulges of red-raw flesh, in a desperate confusion of wanting to get them off him, but not feeling able to throw them away in case they really were important scientific specimens. Felicity, who had been startled from her grief into paying the doctor close attention, threw herself back onto Scrooge’s chest with a further series of convulsions for which Scrooge could only be guiltily approving.

  ‘And ZEN!’ shouted the stran
ger, standing and raising his finger to the sky with disregard for low-hanging pub signs (and clutching his hat to his head with his other hand), ‘I thought about their behaviour, and saw that zees was clearly a problem of ze BRAIN!’

  With this triumphant conclusion, he upturned the bag and out of it bobbled the six or seven brains he had hacked free from the bodies of the no-longer-walking dead, depositing themselves with a sequence of splats upon the other bodily organs in Cratchit’s lap.

  Cratchit, trembling worse than ever and his face and arms smeared all over with unnameable substances, fixed the scientist with an unblinking stare and began to load his revolver without looking at it. Felicity’s bosom shook with sobs. The scientist laughed madly at his own breakthrough before checking himself and offering his hand to Scrooge while saying in a little voice, ‘But I must introduce myself, my name is Dr Konstantin Zaltzwick.’ He then looked up, bellowed, ‘DRIVER! STOP HERE!’ and as the cart bounced at full speed over an obstruction in the road, was thrown bodily off the back, landing in the road with a painful cry.

  The cart clattered to a halt twenty yards on and the companions looked back at the cloak-covered figure sprawled on the stones with every sign of having broken his neck. But he got up, slowly and painfully, and as he straightened his back they heard him mutter as though it was a personal mantra, ‘Hatstands, I love science. It’s so exciting!’

  It was all too much for Scrooge, upon whom the excitements of the day had taken their toll. Cratchit scrambled to stuff the contents of his lap back into the jars in the physician’s bag without damaging them, Felicity tried to recover herself by the application of a silk handkerchief to her eyes, and Tacker let off his gun into the sky several times in anger at not being allowed to shoot the insane scientist. At the same time Ebenezer Scrooge heard the bells of midnight being rung far away and slipped momentarily out of consciousness, and into a dream.

  THE FIRST APPARITION

  At first, everything seemed to him quite normal, and he was not afraid. He woke peacefully in his bed and saw the curtains at first dark, and then lit at the edges by a wholesome brightness. It made him sit up and draw them back without thinking before he fully recollected what happy memory the sight had stirred within him.

  There in the middle of the room was a shining spirit, who he knew to address as the Ghost of Christmas Past. Scrooge’s first thought was that he had taken his last breath, and that here was his spiritual guide for his passing to another place. Then he saw in that hovering sprite a look of urgency and sadness. Still his first idea did not leave him, that he was in the grip of his final judgement, and he saw that all his energies in the last few years had not proved strong enough to overthrow his former wickedness. A mortal chill spread through him, and he became fixed by an utter certain dread.

  He rose slowly and offered his hand to the ghost.

  ‘You know me,’ said the ghost. ‘We have travelled together before.’

  ‘You are the Ghost of Christmas Past,’ said Scrooge.

  ‘I am that spirit. And you know I have no power but to show you what has already happened. Your tears are premature.’

  Scrooge soberly dabbed the tears that had accumulated on his face with his nightshirt.

  ‘Come,’ said the gentle apparition, ‘take my hand. I have something to show you.’

  Scrooge trustingly took the Ghost’s hand and coming to the window they rose up and flew out of it across the rooftops. Clouds enclosed them, and as they erupted from the other side Scrooge could see they were in a time many decades past. He looked down on a slum of the most appalling degradation. Hungry and parasitical characters lounged watchfully at each corner while pitiful families starved, and babies cried against their helpless mothers’ shoulders. Scrooge saw street after street of these desolate faces, ignored by their neighbours who had barely enough to survive and nothing at all to spare, dying by degrees from starvation of body and spirit.

  Scrooge saw the attenuated misery of these drawn-out deaths, whole families unsure whether their bedridden relatives were yet breathing, and themselves too weak to call for bodies to be removed when it was known beyond doubt that they were not.

  Scrooge and the Ghost swooped into other streets and there they saw people who were so debased by hunger and desperation they were barely people any more, but were mere starving animals. Scrooge felt a tear land on his wrist from the Ghost’s gentle cheek as they watched the miserable creatures turn, in their ignorance, to eating their dead kin. They did so tentatively and with revulsion at first, but base hunger quickly took charge of their appetites and dispensed with all human concerns.

  They flew swiftly over rooftops, years vanishing in seconds, and alighted on a scene even more gruesome, that made Scrooge feel mired by the filth of a shambles even to have witnessed it: the habitual eating of corpses among the very poorest, the deathly visage and mindlessness that had developed among the living who so frequently devoured them, so that they seemed perfectly imbecilic and like animated corpses themselves. At last they landed beside the body of a man who had been dining for years on the flesh of his brothers, and witnessed the quiet moment of his demise. Thrown down on the floor in the tiny barren chamber and long forgotten in the dust was a worthless scrap of paper which Scrooge at once recognised – a promissory note bearing his very own signature, the kind that in the old days would be brought to him on a daily basis to try and raise an increase upon the original loan, and which he would take great pleasure in turning away with carefully chosen words of such sympathy and encouragement as often reduced supplicants to tears, so that they had to be led away. Here was one such man, who had appealed to Scrooge as perhaps the last person on earth who might have helped him, and, that hope destroyed, now the same (or rather, a very different) Scrooge looked down upon him in his final moments.

  At the instant of death there was no light going out in the eyes, merely a spreading rigidity which bespoke the final collapse of the internal processes, long after the brain had ceased to function.

  Scrooge and the Ghost clutched hands tightly as they saw the lips quiver with a last breath, and then stay perfectly still. In his direst moment of speculation, Scrooge wondered whether here might be the first man (although aged perhaps only thirty he was quite old in appearance) who had eaten no other flesh but that of humans in his whole life. Scrooge and the Ghost clutched each other once again, as they saw that in death the spirit had fled, but the brain commanded the body still.

  They watched as the body jerked itself upright and bared its teeth at a child who had run into the room, and reached out its arms. The dead body understood one thing – its own irrational hunger – and nothing else. At this, the invisible pair spirited themselves away as fast as they could from the sight that was about to unfold, and flew over rooftops once more until they were beside Scrooge’s own window, and then at rest inside it.

  ‘Spirit,’ asked Scrooge tremblingly, ‘what does this mean, what you have showed me?’

  The Ghost shook his head, too sad to speak.

  ‘You have done good to me in the past,’ said the old man. ‘I changed my ways. I will do so again, if I can put this terrible sight to some good use.’

  ‘I cannot tell you,’ said the spirit. ‘I can only show what I must show. You must make of it what you can. Before the night is out, you will have two more visitations.’

  ‘Dear spirit, I thank you,’ said Scrooge. ‘I shall strive to be worthy of your attention, although this is all so wretched and confusing …’ Even as he said it, he felt the room turning around him, as though he was falling inescapably into slumber. His head swooned, and he slept – which is to say, he woke.

  VERSE VII

  Scrooge awoke from the dreadful apparition to find himself on the bed of the cart as before, with the others fussing around him to remove the trunk of weapons and Zaltzwick’s bag of specimens. In their busy-ness they appeared not to have noticed that he had been asleep, and choosing not to draw attention to it himself he clambered d
own after them. The road fore and aft was quiet and empty for the time being and, shaking the sleep from his old head, he looked up at the building in front of which they had came to rest. It was a tall and gaunt structure, something between a gothic church and a large public school but more forbidding than either. It stood in the corner of a small square protected from the nearby thoroughfares by rows of peaceful dwellings in whose window not even a single candle showed.

  ‘Come,’ said Zaltzwick from the doorway, and as he followed Scrooge looked up at a large stone arch, decorated with gargoyles and indeterminate statues, that might have formed the entrance to a small cathedral.

  Joining the party within, Scrooge saw they were all in a narrow hallway much smaller than the size of the building had suggested from outside. It was decked with the jaded trinkets of nobility: dim paintings, suits of rusting armour and cabinets packed with grubby stuffed birds and chipped ceramics, none of which matched each other, as though they had all been bought on a single day’s rushed perusal of a cheap antiques market. As they looked around, somewhat unimpressed (Zaltzwick’s eccentricity and nationality making Mr Scrooge doubt whether a good cup of tea might be produced as he dearly wished, and making Tacker worry that there would be no whisky to hand), Zaltzwick closed and locked the door behind them. He made no move towards any of the doors that led from the hallway on either side but instead put his key into a hole in the far wall, between a mounted moose’s head and a fake mahogany grandfather clock, and twisting it stood back to let them watch.