Humbug Holiday

  “It’s not convenient!” snapped Scrooge.

  Bob quaked. “Christmas comes but once a year, sir.”

  “A poor excuse for picking my pocket every twenty-fifth of December,” said Scrooge. “Still, I suppose you must have the whole day off. But be here all the earlier the next morning.”

  “Oh, I shall be!”

  “You had better,” growled Scrooge. “Or it’ll be your last day in this office!” With that, he pulled on a coat so long and black it made him look like a bear, glared at Frankie and me, then stomped off into the street and vanished into the yellow fog.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Frankie. “Is he the meanest guy in the universe, or just the whole world?”

  “Yeah, he’s one cheery guy,” I added. “Oh, sorry, I mean—not!”

  Bob Cratchit, however, was an actual cheery guy. In fact, he looked like he would just pop with excitement.

  “Christmas Eve!” he chirped. “Oh! I can’t wait!”

  He tossed a thin scarf around his neck, plopped his hat on, and rushed for the door. Then he stopped.

  “But, oh! Dear me! What about you two?”

  I shrugged. “Hey, we’re fine. We’ve got to go look for something anyway.”

  “No, no, it’s cold tonight, and you two, well, I’m not sure where you live, but you’re certainly not dressed for such a night as this.”

  “We’ll be okay,” said Frankie. “Really, we’ve got the book—”

  “Here,” he said. He pulled his own scarf off and wound it around Frankie’s neck. Then he took an extra one off the coatrack and gave it to me.

  “But, now you don’t have one,” said Frankie.

  “Oh, but I have my family waiting for me. That will keep me quite warm. Wait. I suddenly have a better idea. Why don’t you two come home for dinner with me?”

  Frankie gave me a look. A glance at the page told us the story didn’t follow him. It followed Scrooge.

  “Sorry, Mr. Bob,” I said. “Maybe we’ll hook up later.”

  “I do hope so! Well, until then—Merry Christmas!”

  “Merry Christmas!” I said. It felt good saying it.

  Bob shut up the office, then ran off down the street, sliding down the slippery walk with a bunch of boys at least twenty times before shooting off around the corner for home.

  “Even if he isn’t the richest guy on earth, Bob sure seems happy,” said Frankie. “Lots of Christmas spirit.”

  “Sure, once he gets out of the office,” I said. “He reminds me of me—on a Friday afternoon at bus time.”

  We had a chuckle over that. But even as we did, the fog and darkness got thicker, and the temperature went down even further, and we remembered what we were supposed to be doing.

  Following Ebenezer Scrooge. Mr. Nice Guy. Not.

  Wrapping Bob Cratchit’s thin scarves around us, we passed out of the court where Scrooge and Marley’s offices were, when I suddenly got a whiff of something familiar.

  “Frankie, I smell cookies—”

  “Chocolate cookies!” she said.

  We zipped around the corner to see a row of shops, all bright on the inside, full of people, and blazing from the lamps hanging in the frosted windows.

  The first was a bakery. The door opened, and a woman and her little girl left with a white bag bulging with warm baked goods and bringing the smell with them into the cold street.

  I sniffed it all in, then sighed. “False alarm. Not mom’s cookies. But it sure does smell good.”

  “Too bad we have no money,” said Frankie, her face orange in the glow from the shop windows. “I am getting a bit hungry.”

  At that moment, a gentleman came along and flipped something shiny at us. It clanked on the street at our feet. Frankie picked it up. It was a coin.

  “Hey, old-fashioned money,” I said. “They think we’re poor.”

  “Well, look at you. Ratty jeans, T-shirt, stringy hair.”

  I made a face. “Where I come from, it’s called style.”

  But I knew what she meant. There we were, standing in front of food shops, hungry, shivering because we weren’t dressed for the weather, and looking like we didn’t belong.

  “I’ll keep the coin,” said Frankie, popping it into her pocket. “It’ll make a cool souvenir of our time in this book.”

  “If we ever get out of it,” I said. “We already lost Scrooge. Keep the book close and let’s find him.”

  As we made our way through the streets, we saw a group of kids whose clothes really were ragged. They had dark eyes and dirty faces, but they were singing. “God bless you, merry gentleman! May nothing you dismay!”

  Then one of the singers, a boy who looked about our age, spotted a man coming up the street. Running to him, he called, “Please, sir, do you have any money to spare—”

  “Bah! Humbug!” the man shouted, raising his hand.

  I gasped. “It’s Scrooge! We found him.”

  While the singers fled into the nooks and crannies of the fog, Scrooge stomped off his own way.

  “Can you believe it,” said Frankie, staring at Scrooge. “I think I just heard him laugh!”

  “Poor kids, just trying to make a living,” I said. “Frankie, I’m really worried about this Dickens guy. If he’s so great, why did he make such a nasty guy the main character of a supposedly Christmas story?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I guess we better follow Scrooge anyway. He just turned a corner.”

  “We’ll follow,” I said. “But at a distance. He might still have his attack ruler with him.”

  The crooked old guy made his old crooked way through the crooked streets, his head always turned down, until he came upon a gloomy dead-end alley. It was a court of what looked like office buildings towering over one small depressed-looking house.

  “Pretty lonely digs,” I whispered.

  “I bet he likes it that way,” Frankie said. “It’s sad.”

  “And spooky,” I said. “It reminds me we’re in a ghost story. Just don’t show me any cold white hands poking out of the fog.”

  There weren’t any cold white hands.

  But there was something else.

  As Scrooge groped his way to the house, he stopped with a sudden jerk.

  On the door was a large door knocker. It had a big loop of brass on the front that you bang on the door with, so that people will answer the door.

  I thought it was odd that Scrooge should even have a knocker on his door. I couldn’t imagine he ever got visitors. But as odd as that was, it was nothing compared to what happened next.

  As Frankie and I—and Scrooge—stared at the knocker, it suddenly wasn’t a knocker anymore.

  It had turned into a face.

  Scrooge staggered back and gasped out a name.

  “Jacob Marley!”

  Chapter 6

  Scrooge stared at the face and said the name again.

  “Jacob Marley!”

  The face on the knocker—Marley’s face—was old and thin and sharp, like Scrooge’s, but had wire spectacles turned up on its pale forehead. The hair, what there was of it, was blown back as if by a breeze, and though the eyes were wide open, they were staring forward as if they saw nothing.

  “M-M-Marley?” I whispered. “But isn’t he … dead?”

  Frankie turned to me. “If he weren’t, it would be really hard to get his face into the knocker, wouldn’t it?”

  “You mean—”

  “Ghosts,” she said. “Just like the story says—”

  Then even as we stared at it, the face faded into nothing, and the knocker was just a knocker again.

  “Hum—humbug!” said Scrooge. Then, turning to see us again, he scowled. “Why are you two following me?”

  “Um … we’re looking for something,” I said.

  “You won’t get my money!”

  “We don’t want your money,” said Frankie.

  “Humph!” he snorted. Then he inserted his key into the lock, pushed the doo
r open, and stepped inside. Since the guy liked to slam doors so much, I expected him to slam this one in our faces, which would have made it tough for us to follow him through the story.

  But he didn’t. Maybe seeing Marley’s face on the knocker had spooked him. Maybe he didn’t want to be alone just then. Whatever it was, Scrooge seemed to hold the door open just long enough for us to slip inside. Then he closed the door with his usual harshness.

  Boom-oom-oom! The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above and every room below seemed to have a separate echo of its own.

  “I don’t know about anybody else, but I don’t like spooky echoes,” I mumbled. “Especially in the dark. And by the way, Mr. Scrooge, you seem to have a lot of darkness around here.”

  “Bah!” said Scrooge. He lit a tiny candle that had been sitting on a nearby table, and headed for a wide set of stairs.

  “That little candle doesn’t do much,” said Frankie. “What you need is some real light in this place. A couple of ceiling lamps, a string of Christmas lights, some lava lamps, maybe a tree with spotlights in the corner. Something that would brighten the house right up. I have catalogs at home that would make this place glow—”

  “Humph!” snarled Scrooge, starting up the stairs. “I don’t care a button for that. Darkness is cheap. I like it!”

  Scrooge reached the top of the stairs and opened a door off the landing. Inside was a small, firelit sitting room. Beyond that was a bedroom, and off to the side, a room filled with logs for the fireplace.

  Scrooge peered in the doorway, but didn’t go in. I was sure he was remembering Marley’s face again. He turned to us. “As long as you’re here, go look around!”

  I turned to Frankie. She nodded.

  So together we searched.

  “There’s nothing under the table, nothing under the sofa,” said Frankie.

  “Nothing under the bed or in the closet, either,” I said. “No backpack anywhere.”

  “And no ghosts!” said Scrooge. “Ha! What did I tell you? No such thing as ghosts!” He disappeared into the bedroom and returned in a long thick nightgown with a funny stocking cap dangling off his head.

  “What? Are you two still here?” he said, plopping down into a chair next to the fireplace.

  Both Frankie and I knew that the story followed Scrooge, and that we’d have to stay pretty close to the meanie if we were ever going to get to the end.

  Frankie gulped. “Um … do you think… since you have all this room … and because we’re kids … and not from around here … and it’s cold outside …”

  “Enough!” Scrooge snapped. “I’m not such a chatty person! Look, I get warm by the fire, then I go to sleep in my bed. I don’t much care where you sleep, but I expect you gone by tomorrow morning!”

  “Thank you, thank you!” I said, jumping up and down. “I’ll be really quiet, and I never snore—”

  “And if he does,” said Frankie, “I’ll poke him with a ruler. Besides, Bob Cratchit invited us to spend Christmas Day with him, anyway.”

  “Bob Cratchit?” Scrooge snarled. “He couldn’t feed a family of mice! And Christmas? It’s nothing but a—hum—hum—hum—!”

  He didn’t get a chance to say the rest. But even if he had, we probably wouldn’t have been able to hear him.

  For at that second, though the house was empty except for us, there came a huge clanking, clanging noise from deep down below, as if somebody were dragging heavy chains around in the cellar. It thundered through the whole house.

  Clank! Clong! Krreeek! Boom!

  Scrooge leaped from his chair. “Ghosts!” he cried. “Ghosts! I’ve heard that ghosts in haunted houses are always dragging chains!”

  “Ghosts!” I yelped. “Oh, no! So it’s true!”

  From deep down below us came a sudden, swift crashing sound, which sent Scrooge wailing, “That was the cellar door! Oh!”

  But the sound didn’t stop in the cellar. It was coming up the cellar stairs one by one—boom-boom-boom!

  Then the terrible noise dragged across a lower floor. It was definitely chains and the clanking and clanging of iron boxes.

  “That’s really going to wreck the floors!” said Frankie.

  It was getting louder and louder.

  Then it came up the stairs we had just been on.

  Then straight toward the sitting-room door.

  “Devin!” Frankie cried out, jumping over to me.

  “It’s humbug, still!” said Scrooge defiantly. “Humbug, I say! I won’t believe it!”

  “You better believe it,” I said. “Because, whatever it is—it’s coming right here!”

  The clanking, clanging noise—and the thing that was making the noise—reached the landing outside the room and, without stopping, came right on through the heavy door and passed into the room before us.

  Scrooge made a sort of choking sound in his throat and spat out two words that confirmed to me that this wasn’t the nice jolly snowman and sparkly presents and red-nosed reindeer kind of Christmas story.

  “Marley’s—ghost!” Scrooge said.

  Clutching Frankie’s arm, I screamed out at the top of my lungs.

  “Frankie—I see dead people!”

  Chapter 7

  Marley’s ghost.

  There was no denying it. The thing had the same face as the door knocker, only it was attached to a body.

  Well, a sort of body.

  “Devin, he’s—see-through!” Frankie hissed.

  It was true. From Marley’s front you could see the buttons on the back of his coat. Not only that, his hair was being blown about by that same invisible breeze that the knocker’s hair did.

  He wore a vest, pants, and boots. But the strangest part of his outfit, and the noisiest, was the chain.

  It was thick and heavy and was locked around his waist, and wound about behind him like a tail. Clamped to it were boxes, safes, keys, padlocks, large books, and papers and other things, all made of heavy iron.

  “It’s all money stuff,” Frankie said, her voice quaking.

  Marley’s ghost dragged his heavy chain into the room with him and, though he wasn’t looking at him, stopped right before Scrooge.

  Scrooge himself, still glued to his chair, was shaking as bad as Frankie and me. I could hear his knees knocking and teeth chattering. “I don’t believe it!” he said.

  The ghost just stared ahead with death-cold eyes, his hair blown by a breeze none of us felt.

  “Well!” said Scrooge finally. “W-w-what do you want with m-m-me?”

  “Much!” said Marley.

  The ghost barely opened his mouth, but the sound that came out was big, and echoed throughout the house as if he were yelling in a tunnel.

  He stood there staring ahead while we melted into puddles on the floor. Frankie looked at me, then at Scrooge, then finally decided to speak to it.

  “So, like, who—or what—are you?” she asked.

  “Ask me who I was,” said the ghost.

  “All right, all right, who were you then?” Scrooge snapped.

  “In life, I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”

  That sent a whole new round of shivers through the room. To hear him say it, meant that it really was true—he was actually the ghost of a dead guy. My ears went hot, my skin went cold. I felt sick.

  The ghost just stood there.

  “Can you sit down?” I asked.

  “I can,” said the ghost. He plopped down on the opposite side of the fireplace from Scrooge. Turning his head to look first at us, then at Scrooge, he said, “You don’t believe in me.”

  “I don’t!” said Scrooge. “You may be a bad dream, or something I ate. Ha! You could be nothing more than an undigested bit of beef! Or a crumb of cheese! Ha! You might be a fragment of an underdone potato—”

  I almost laughed. “A potato ghost? So you’re saying there’s more gravy than grave about him!”

  “Devin, don’t make the dead guy mad,” said Frankie.

/>   Too late.

  The spirit made a horribly loud cry, shaking its chain with such a huge noise. “Do you believe in me or not?”

  “I do, I do. I must!” said Scrooge. “But why do spirits walk the earth? And why do you come to me?”

  “It is required that everyone’s spirit walk among its fellow creatures and share its goodness with them,” said the ghost. “If that spirit does not do so in life, it is condemned to do so after death!”

  “But what is all that you carry around, and why do you have it?” asked Scrooge. “It can’t be comfortable.”

  Again Marley howled and made a cry, and shook his chain and wrung his pale hands. “I wear the chain I made while I lived!” he boomed. “I made it of my own free will, and of my own free will—I wore it. Ebenezer Scrooge! Your chain was as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas Eves ago. You have worked on it since then. Oh, it is a long and terrible chain!”

  We all looked around Scrooge, but saw no chain.

  Then it hit me what the ghost meant. “Excuse me, Mr. Marley, are you saying that your chain is made up of all the bad things you did? And we all have chains, only we can’t see them while we’re alive?”

  “Ah! Yes!” said Marley sadly, as if he saw Scrooge’s chain growing longer by the second.

  “Mark me!” said the ghost. “My time here is short. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. Oh, seven long years, and yet I have such long weary journeys ahead of me!”

  “You’ve been traveling ever since you died?” I asked.

  “The whole time,” said Marley. “No rest, no peace!”

  “Do you travel fast?” asked Frankie.

  “On the wings of the wind,” replied the ghost.

  “You’ve probably covered a lot of ground in seven years—” I said.

  The ghost set up another cry and clanked its chain so loudly I thought I’d faint. But I was too scared to faint.

  “At this time of the year I suffer most!” Marley went on. “Oh, why did I walk through crowds with my eyes turned down? Why did I never raise them to the star which led the Wise Men to Bethlehem?”

  “You mean why didn’t you ever get into the Christmas mood?” I asked. “For me, it’s always my mom’s special chocolate-chip cookies that jump-start the Christmas season. But now they’re lost—”