A Vampire Christmas Carol by Sarah Gray

interfered. Fan stopped up her ears then, and began to cry.
    “Please,” Scrooge begged of the spirit. “Do not make me see this.”
    But the ghost said nothing, and Scrooge felt himself gliding behind the boy and the father.
    Mr. Scrooge took his son to his room slowly and gravely—a delight in that formal show of doing justice, for surely his mind had been poisoned by Mrs. Grottweil’s lies. Then when they got there, suddenly he twisted the boy’s head under his arm.
    Scrooge stiffened in anticipation of what was to come.
    “Father! Sir!” the boy cried to him. “Don’t! Pray don’t beat me! I have tried to learn, sir, but I can’t learn while you and Mrs. Grottweil are watching me. I can’t indeed!”
    “Can’t you, indeed, Ebenezer?” he said. “We’ll try this, then.”
    He had his head as in a vise, but he twined round him somehow, and the boy stopped him for a moment, entreating him not to beat him. It was only for a moment that he stopped him, for he cut him heavily an instant afterward, and in the same instant the boy caught the hand with which Mr. Scrooge held his mouth, between his teeth, and bit it through.
    Mr. Scrooge beat Ebenezer then, as if he would have beaten him to death. Above all the noise they made, Scrooge heard Fan running up the stairs, and crying out. Then Mr. Scrooge was gone, at last, and the door was locked outside. At Scrooge’s feet lay his former self, fevered, and hot, and torn, and raging in a puny way, upon the floor.
    Tears glistened in Scrooge’s eyes as the child before him became quiet and an unnatural stillness seemed to reign through the whole house. How well he remembered, when his smart and passion began to cool, how wicked he began to feel! He hated them at that moment; his father, Mrs. Grottweil, even Fan. Even his long-lost mother. Damn them all!
    Scrooge watched as the boy sat listening for a long while, but there was not a sound. He then crawled up from the floor, and saw his own face in the glass, so swollen, red, and ugly that it almost frightened him. (It certainly frightened Scrooge now.) His stripes were sore and stiff, and made him cry afresh, when he moved, but they were nothing to the guilt he felt for damning his own sweet mother, who had given her life to give him his. The guilt lay heavier on his breast than if he had been a most terrible criminal, and the longer he thought of it, the greater the offense seemed.
    Scrooge watched as it began to grow dark, knowing there was no need to tell the ghost he had seen enough. Only the spirit could determine when enough was enough, and so he would be further tortured by these memories. The young boy shut the window (he had been lying, for the most part, with his head upon the sill, by turns crying, dozing, and looking listlessly out), when the key was turned, and Mrs. Grottweil came in with some bread and meat and milk.
    “Please tell me there is no blood in that milk,” Scrooge said in horror.
    If the ghost knew the answer, he did not provide one.
    Mrs. Grottweil put the nourishment down upon the table without a word, glaring at her charge all the while, and then retired, locking the door after her.
    It grew light again and Scrooge watched himself wake the next morning, being cheerful and fresh for the first moment, and then being weighed down by the stale and dismal oppression of remembrance. Mrs. Grottweil came again before he was out of bed, told him he was free to walk in the garden for half an hour and no longer, retired, leaving the door open, that he might avail him of that permission.
    The boy did so, and did so every morning of his imprisonment, which lasted five days. If he could have seen his sister alone, he would have gone down on his knees to her and besought her forgiveness for the way he had cursed at her and their dear mother. But he saw no one except Mrs. Grottweil during the whole time.
    The length of those five days Scrooge (as a boy or a man) could convey no idea of to anyone. They