A Christmas Carol II--Contagion Read online

  ‘Well then,’ said Scrooge, holding a chair for Felicity first, before sitting down himself and looking around somewhat doubtfully as one does when casting about with difficulty for something to compliment. ‘Well,’ he said again, and coughed into his hand, and repeated his examination of the chamber, somewhat at a loss. ‘Good acoustics,’ he said at last, and then started when someone in the shadows at the other end of the room seemed to make the exact same remark.

  Tacker and Cratchit were ignoring Scrooge’s attempt to make light conversation, and having unravelled a leather cloth, they set about cleaning and oiling their guns, the one eagerly attending to a lesson in the procedure from the other. Peace of a sort descended upon the gathering, insofar as peace may descend in such circumstances (that is to say, when one’s life is in certain danger, and the skull of a Triceratops is staring down from the wall a few feet away). Zaltzwick passed the time making notes on more of the scattered pages of his research. Cratchit watched Tacker intensely, unconsciously replicating his every gesture, including when he picked his nose and placed the resulting gruel into his mouth. Scrooge and Felicity drank their refreshments and whispered heartening remarks to one another about their chances of survival, and each tried to genuinely believe what the other said, for the other’s sake. Each time he spoke to the pretty girl now, Scrooge felt that hardening of spirit, that return to the wicked and unyielding determination of his former years – that is, he felt that way towards all other things that were not her, and anything that would hurt this innocent creature. Each time this devil, this former character of his, made another appearance in his heart, he inwardly protested a little less, for he was starting to believe that without this necessary evil, none of them would live out the night.

  These were some of the reflections into which he was abstracted, once their conversation had ebbed, and the girl dozed on his arm. And by degrees, lulled by the wine and comforted by Felicity’s proximity, he passed once more into a state of dreaming.

  THE SECOND APPARITION

  Scrooge came awake in his bed to the sound of the clock striking one, and finding himself alert and not wishing to be surprised by any apparition that might appear, but rather to take initiative and to surprise the Ghost itself, he threw off his bedclothes, pulled the bed curtains back, and found himself surprised nonetheless, to be but in his unadorned room of old, with no ghost or any other person in it.

  For a few moments he stood unsure of himself, and by looking around, checking under the bed, and in his closet, and up the chimney, he eventually became aware of a light emanating from beneath the door in the next room.

  ‘Of course!’ he muttered to himself. ‘I had forgotten he did not appear in this room. Still, he was a jolly enough fellow, and I shall make him welcome.’ Had he been awake, this hopefulness may have had some degree of self-deception, considering the general circumstances in which Scrooge found himself, and indeed the contents of the foregoing vision, but hopefulness being ever an admirable quality that thrives in the heart of all true men, it was with stoutness of heart that Scrooge pushed open the door to reacquaint himself with this spiritual acquaintance of old.

  Nor was he disappointed, because he found the room as he had upon that Christmas Eve many years before. It was festooned with greenery and hanging red berries so that it resembled an Arcadian bower, and upon the floor stuffed geese, and pigs, and turkeys and game birds of every type wrapped in rashers of bacon, all garlanded with coils of sausages. Upon a throne in their midst sat his former friend, dressed as before in a green cloak and a wreath upon his head: the Ghost of Christmas Present.

  Scrooge rushed forward to take the man’s hand, his progress impeded by the proliferation of good things over which he had to step, taking care not to trip. The jolly giant’s face broadened in a happy smile, and his arms were thrown wide in welcome, and he opened his mouth to make a festive greeting. Scrooge persevered onwards although he had to wade towards his old acquaintance, so keen was he to thank him for his past services (and also, in part, hoping to be praised for how he had changed) it amounted almost to desperation. His progress was too slow, and he seemed not to be able to reach the Ghost, yet it didn’t matter, because suddenly they were in the room no more, but in the street.

  A chorus of carol singers gathered around a door, on a quiet city lane.

  ‘Why it’s my nephew’s house!’ said Scrooge. ‘Such a fine lad. They are sure to be well rewarded here. Yet he doesn’t open, and he must be in!’ The hideous wailing let out by the small singers was not immediately distinguishable from the noise made by the average carolling group, and it was only as he passed them and saw over the top of the songsheets they held up, the horrible drawn faces and lidless eyes, that he understood the true reason why his nephew had not opened to them. And he passed inside with the Ghost’s power, and saw his nephew and pregnant niece-in-law, both terrified out of their wits, crying and leaning against the door, begging for it to stop.

  Before he could ask anything or beg advice as to what he could do to help his nephew, Scrooge was whisked away again to the front of a theatre, ushering its patrons into the night still aglow with the evening’s entertainment, smiling, asking each other about what they had seen, and repeating their favourite lines, and looking for a cab to take them home in time for midnight mass. For a moment the panic caused by the previous vision abated and Scrooge found peace in this sight, but then he noticed a few people scattered about in the crowd, blundering slowly, with dead eyes and grey skin, and he had hardly time to draw breath to try to warn the crowd (who would not have been able to hear him anyway) before the screaming started. And once it had started, the stampede followed in what felt like a few seconds. As it descended the crowd parted and Scrooge caught a sudden glimpse which tore at his heart, of a woman who he hadn’t seen in the flesh for as many decades: his former sweetheart, now grown to late middle-age, pearls about her neck and every sign of a happy and fruitful life that had been lived without him. Until, that is, he saw the dead body of a nurse bearing down upon her, and ripping into her throat with its teeth, and (lingering longer than should have been correct according to Ghostly protocol) the violent spray of blood into the ghoul’s eye as it tore into the artery, so that Scrooge had to look away.

  When he opened his eyes he was back in the slums, where he had been with the first Ghost. He was inside one of the little rooms he had seen before, and now, on Christmas Day once again, he saw a whole family sitting down to its festive repast. Laid along their rough table was an elderly member of the family who the others had contrived to weigh down at the neck and waist with timbers, and into its midriff they were all tucking with mighty appetite, head-butting each other out of the way to gnaw at the ribs, sucking the fluid from a stretch of colonic tubing as though it was a sherbet sweet, and once they had got through to the bottom of the meal, chewing greedily on the marrow-rich chunks of vertebrae. Throughout, the head that belonged to the body snapped its jaws and groaned terribly, its eyes thrown open in an ecstasy of anger aimed at them not out of pain or outrage at its own bodily desecration, Scrooge now realized, but out of jealousy, for the taste of its own insides.

  ‘Enough! Please!’ begged Scrooge. ‘Take me back!’

  And to his surprise he found that the Ghost obliged him with his wish. He was back within the room, in front of the Ghost upon its throne of meat and pastries and sweetmeats, as jolly as ever. Except now he saw a hesitation come over its face. He had not yet uttered one word, and as he seemed about to speak the happy grin became fixed, and the generous expression of the eyes became strangely hollow, more like a careless rendering that fails to catch its true likeness than the things themselves. The happy rustling of leaves around him and gay flickering of candles hushed, and what it was in the room that had been so welcoming, became most uneasy.

  Scrooge stopped, nearly falling over a brace of partridge covered in a snowfall of oranges. A painful groaning came from the Ghost, and his arms seemed outstretched now not to embrace,
but out of pain. The Ghost began to shake, and became a pale green giant, and then a white one. A great wriggling motion at his feet, Scrooge saw, was not from the action of his toes but because some of the plucked fowls and other animals were moving, and their heads were bobbing up and down, as though they were suckling upon them.

  Still Scrooge did not understand, and continued to watch even as he felt danger cloak itself about him. The Ghost shook slightly and his green mantle fell loose, disclosing that his chest was half eaten away from behind and with acute horror Scrooge saw the face of an animal behind the ribcage, its jaws guzzling away at the soft tissue of lung and heart. Now he saw a whole deer – or, being slaughtered and skinned, a whole carcass of venison – had reared up behind the Ghost, and with its blind eyes wide open, was chewing angrily at his neck with cracked teeth. Blood sprang up the Ghost’s legs from which the skin and tendon were being torn, and it began to shake as a change came upon it. Its skin began to darken once more towards a deadly grey, and the expression darkened too, became bleak and haggard.

  It was almost too late when Scrooge felt the dead creatures swarming about his feet. The animals were turning upon each other with their mouths, frantically biting and writhing, and where between them had formerly been dates and figs and mince pies, were now maggots and rats. It came as a horror of the kind no man should endure, to be suddenly engulfed and trapped by the animals he most fears, in the murderous throes of madness.

  HIS GREEN MANTLE FELL LOOSE, DISCLOSING THAT HIS CHEST WAS HALF EATEN AWAY

  He stumbled and fell, and ran for the door kicking with his feet and shrieking every prayer and incantation that he knew, which came rushing out in an incomprehensible jumble of words and syllables that could have moved no higher being to his aid, had there been one within praying distance of that dark place, for the time it would have taken to untangle the sense of the prayer.

  With a last glance back he saw his friend the Ghost, who was without doubt now reduced to one of those dreaded creatures, marauding on hands and feet through the throng, clawing and gnashing at the dead creatures as they did so at him. Scrooge propelled himself through the door, and slamming it safely shut behind him, found himself in welcome darkness again, and, his consciousness throbbing from the effort and the shock, he swooned quite away.

  VERSE VIII

  Nor did waking provide much relief to the old man. His oldest colleague and friend was sitting nearby, it is true, and next to him was an American gentleman of great stature and strength and a most admirable directness of purpose. Beside those two men was a scientist whose life’s work it had been to understand the kind of predicament they were in, and in whose admirably fortified house (which was but the kissing-cousin of a castle) gave them protection. Then there was the beautiful girl who rested on his arm, still quite asleep even though he had started awake with a shock, whose beauty was such that it bestowed grace upon any who looked at it, by the mere connection of sight.

  ‘If we’re gonna die tonight, Scrooge, you’d better tap that fine piece of a—,’ said Tacker in the background, but Scrooge having no notion of what this sporting slang might mean, it made no dent upon his thoughts.

  No, despite all these things, there was no respite from the sense of doom that lowered over Scrooge, and briefly encouraged his worse self to a new dominance which he weakly struggled to repel. The reason for this was the groan. Having come awake suddenly, he realized that the others had not noticed the sound coming from far away outside that penetrated even into this deep chamber. It was a distant chorus that produced a sudden chill in him no change of temperature could induce.

  ‘Don’t you hear it?’ he asked. The other men looked up from their lessons – Tacker was now teaching Zaltzwick how to clean, oil and load a hefty-looking pistol while Cratchit tutted scornfully over the doctor’s mistakes, which he himself had been making scarcely half an hour ago. All three looked at him with irritation for a moment, before understanding came into their eyes. Felicity had gently roused herself too, and all now found themselves looking to the fireplace, wherefrom the noise was issuing.

  ‘How many of them can there be?’ asked Cratchit.

  ‘I thought only a few hundred at first,’ said Zaltzwick with an air of resignation. ‘That was a few days ago, when I noticed the outbreak before the authorities had become aware of it. Hatstands. This evening, I thought four or five thousand. But that sound …’

  That sound was a low howling, like that of a high wind heard through a thick door. Quiet and innocuous at first, and unnoticed for many minutes, it had built around them as might the fumes from an unnoticed fire, until it was too threatening to be ignored.

  ‘It sounds like a million people.’ Felicity articulated what they were all thinking: that they had never heard from a ‘zombie’ any noise louder than a low groaning, and therefore that it could not be magnified into such a sound without a huge concentration of numbers.

  They had hardly been here an hour or more, but it seemed as though in that time the walking dead had clogged the streets and that, quite possibly, a huge proportion of the remaining local population had failed to escape, and been infected. Whether either of these things were true, or some innocent trick of meteorology caused the howling wind, it chilled the blood of its listeners near enough to freezing to make them temporarily unable to move.

  The men remained in their seats, wondering at the noise and its implications, while Felicity got smartly to her feet and approached the weapons laid out on the table. She had been dazed, and more or less passing in and out of a swoon since witnessing the destruction of her two relatives an hour earlier, but a few minutes’ rest on Scrooge’s arm had revived her spirits, and seemingly awoken her in another way, too. As she turned over a Colt revolver in her hands and stared down the barrel, Ebenezer thought he saw a new awareness of freedom in the young girl. After watching Tacker and Cratchit do the same, she sharply flipped open the barrel and began feeding bullets into it, a vivid look of what might even have been excitement in her eye. This sprightliness, and the determined set of her jawline, seemed to say: my old life might be dead, but it was scarcely alive anyway, and if a new one beckons, I shan’t meet it by sitting around and waiting to be attacked.

  She searched around her person and found that women’s attire was not nearly so suited to carrying firearms as men’s. The men, their pockets weighed down with guns, watched her with a new appreciation, which was not lessened when she discovered a final resting place for the pistol within the grip of her garter belt. She snapped the cold gun snugly to her skin without the smallest element of self-consciousness. She looked up to find the men all staring at her in a rather peculiar manner and, quite uninterested in what their reason for this might be, she demanded of them:

  ‘Where are we going next?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ said Zaltzwick with finality. ‘It is insane to leave. We are quite safe.’

  Mr Tacker betrayed not for the first time some discomfort at this idea. ‘Doctor, we are safe here until the morning. I agree. But you make it sound as if in the morning’s sun these creatures will vanish like so much fine mist. I can’t tell why you think this is so. Will we still be safe here in a week, or a year?’

  Tacker and Felicity exchanged glances that supported their mutual restlessness.

  Zaltzwick noticed and sighed, already aware he was going to lose his argument. ‘If we can survive Nodger’s cooking, we have a fortnight, perhaps.’

  ‘What is there, a million people in this city?’

  ‘Higher,’ said Cratchit. ‘More than two million, I think.’

  ‘What might just be ten thousand of those things tonight could be twenty or fifty by tomorrow, and double that the day after. Then we really are stuck here, waiting for death to come.’

  These were calculations it had never occurred to Scrooge to make himself, and he felt a sharp constriction of his chest, as though a band had been stretched around it and was being wound viciously tight. His reaction was not that of a helple
ss old man, however. He felt that cold determination stealing over him again. ‘Where shall we go?’ he demanded.

  ‘This is what I’ve been waiting to tell you. Scrooge and Cratchit is not the only European firm I was due to visit. Later I was due in Belgium, then afterwards Holland and a few other countries where we had already received orders for armaments. These supplies are on my boat, a freight ship of good size, and it’s moored in the Thames as we speak. There are many tonnes of weapons, ammunition and explosives on board. If we can get there we can defend ourselves for as long as we like, and escape.’

  Zaltzwick watched the growing eagerness of the group with sorrow. ‘I have observed these creatures this last week while you were eating dinner, and having business meetings, and paying not the slightest attention. Although they don’t die easily or quickly, they crave flesh very much, and move on to find new victims fast. The streets around the centre of the city are already overrun, the population has either escaped or is infected. Within a day or more, these animals will spread out into the suburbs. I am convinced of it. Some will remain, but most will flee, then it will be safe to make our escape.’

  It is sadly a remarkable feature of groups under great duress that they listen to the opinion that closest fits their own preconception, rather than making themselves open to persuasion from one who sees a more uncomfortable but more rational truth. Whether this was the case with the party of fugitives within the great vaulted laboratory that night, is hard to say, but it seemed this way to Dr Zaltzwick as he watched his words fail to impress those around him. Some lingering shred of guilt or awareness that he spoke good sense made them avoid his eye, and quite rudely refuse him a response, as they set about arming themselves to full capacity.