Things Will Never Be the Same Page 25

  After this reading, Dickens had two more in the provinces, then back to St. James Hall in London for the holiday series. He would read not only The Christmas Garland there, but also both The Chimes and The Haunted Man, his last Christmas book from back in 1848.

  In London he would also oversee the Christmas supplement of Household Words, his weekly magazine. This year, on a theme superintended by Dickens, and including one short story by him, was the conceit of Christmas at Mugby Junction, a station where five railway lines converged. Leaning over the junction would be the bright blue towers of the H.M.P.S., from which the trains drew their force. Indeed, Wilkie Collins’s contribution was the story of a boy, back in London, who proudly wore the crisp blue and red uniform, imagining, as he sat on duty with his headset strapped on, Mugby Junction and the great rail lines that he powered, on one of which was coming to London, and to whom he would be introduced on his fortnight off duty, his brother-in-law’s cousin, a girl. Dickens had, of course, made Collins rewrite all the precious parts, and bring Father Christmas in for a scratch behind the ears—“else it might as well take place during August Bank Holiday!” said Dickens in a terse note to Collins when the manuscript had caught up with him at his hotel in Aberdeen yesterday.

  Just now, the letter-opener in his hand had become the cane of old Mr. Jayhew as he walked toward the Cratchitts’ door.

  Such a smell, like a bakery and a laundry and a pub all rolled together! The very air was thick with Christmas, so much so that Eben Mizer wondered how he detected the smells, unseen and unheard as he was, as the sputtering blue and purple Spirit stood beside him.

  “Where’s your father?” asked Mrs. Cratchitt.

  “He’s just gone to fetch Giant Timmy,” said the youngest daughter.

  “Your brother’s name is Tim,” said Mrs. Cratchitt. “It’s just the neighbors call him that,” she added with a smile.

  The door came open without a knock, and there stood Katy, their eldest, laden with baskets and a case, come all the way from Cambridge, where she worked as a nanny.

  “Mother!” she said. “Oh, the changes on the trains! I thought I should never reach here!”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Cratchitt, hugging her, “you’re here, that’s what matters. Now it will be a very merry Christmas!”

  “I must have waited in ten stations,” said Katy, taking off her shawl, then hugging her sisters and giving them small presents. “Every line its own train, every one with its own motive-car. Absolutely nothing works right on Christmas Eve.” She looked around. “Where’s Father? Where’s Tim?”

  “Your father’s off fetching him . . . and his pay,” said Mrs. Cratchitt.

  “When can I go to work, mumsy?” asked Bobby, pulling at his pinafore.

  “Not for a long time yet,” said Mrs. Cratchitt. “Perhaps you’ll be the first one in the family goes to University.”

  “Don’t tease him so,” said Katy.

  “Well, it’s possible,” said his mother.

  “Not with what Mr. Mizer pays Father, and what I can send when I can, nor even with Tim’s pay,” said Katy. “And unless I am mistaken, his rates have gone down.”

  “All of them are down,” said Mrs. Cratchitt, “what with the Irish and the potato blight. The streets here are full of red hair and beards, all looking for work.”

  There was a sound outside in the street, and the door came open, Mr. Cratchitt’s back appearing as he turned. “This way. No, no, this way.” He tugged twice, and then was followed.

  Behind Mr. Cratchitt came Tim. He weighed fifteen stone though he was but twelve years old. He wore a white shapeless smock, with the name Wilborn Mot. Ser. written in smudged ink across the left chest, and white pants. His skin was translucent, as if made of waxed parchment, and his head had taken on a slight pearlike appearance, not helped by the short bowl shape into which his hair had been cut. There were two round notches in the bowl cut, just above the temples, and small bruised and slightly burnt circles covered the exposed skin there.

  But it was the eyes Mizer noticed most—the eyes, once blue-green like his father’s had faded to whitish gray; they seemed both staring from their sockets in amazement, and to be taking in absolutely nothing, as if they were white china doorknobs stuck below his brows.

  “Tim!” yelled Katy. She ran to him and hugged him as best she could. He slowly lifted one of his arms to wrap around her shoulders.

  “Oh! You’re hurting!” she said, and pulled away.

  “Here, sit here,” said Bob Cratchitt, making motions toward the largest chair. It groaned as the boy sat down.

  “There is a small bonus for Christmas.” said Mr. Cratchitt. “Not much.” He patted the corner of the pay envelope in his pocket. “Not enough to equal even the old pay rates, but something. They’ve been working especially hard. The paymaster at Wilborn’s was telling me they’ve been hired as motive power for six new factories in the last month alone.”

  “Oh, Tim,” said Katy. “It’s so good to see you and have you home for Christmas, even for just the day.”

  He looked at her for a long time, then went back to watching the fireplace.

  Then there was the steaming sound of a goose coming out of the oven, hissing in its own gravy, and of a pudding going in, and Mr. Cratchitt leapt up and started the gin-and-apple punch, with its pieces of pineapple, and oranges, and a full stick of cinnamon bark.

  Halfway through the meal, when healths were going round, and Mr. Mizer’s name mentioned, and the Queen’s, Giant Timmy sat forward suddenly in the big chair that had been pulled up to the table, and said, “God Bless . . . us all each . . . every . . .” Then he went quiet again, staring at his glass.

  “That’s right, that’s exactly right, Tim,” said Bob Cratchitt. “God Bless Us All, Each and Every One!”

  Then the Spirit and Eben Mizer were outside in the snow, looking in at the window.

  “I have nothing to do with this,” said Eben. “I pay Cratchitt as good as he could get, and I have nothing to do, whatsoever, with the policies of the companies for whom I do the accounts.” He looked at the Spirit of Christmases Current, who said nothing, and in a thrice, he was back in his bedchamber, and the blue-purple glow was fading from the air. Exhausted as if he had swum ten miles off Blackpool, he dropped to unconsciousness against his soft pillow.

  Dickens grew rapidly tired as he read, but he dared not now let down either himself or his audience.

  In many ways that younger self who had written the story had been a dreamer, but he had been also a very practical man in business and social matters. That night in Manchester as he waited for Mr. Disraeli to wind down, and as the idea for The Christmas Garland ran through his head, he thought he had seen a glimpse of a simple social need, and with all the assurance and arrogance of youth, what needed to be done. If he could strike the hammer blow with a Christmas tale, so much the better.

  So he had.

  The Spirit of Christmases Yet to Come was a small implike person, jumping here and there. It wore no mica or copper, only a tight garment and a small cloth skullcap from which stood up only a single wire, slightly glowing at the tip. First the Spirit was behind the chair, then in front, then above the bureau, then at one corner of the bed.

  Despite its somewhat comic manner, the Spirit frightened Eben Mizer as the others had not. He drew back, afraid, for the face below the cap was an upturned grin, whether from mirth or in a rictus of pain he did not know. The imp said nothing but held out a gutta-percha covered wand for Mizer to grasp, as if it knew the very touch of its nervous hand would cause instant death, of the kind Mizer had feared from the Sprite before. Mizer. took the end of the wand; instantly they were on the ceiling, then out in the hall, back near the chair, then inside something dark, then out into the night.

  “I know you are to show me the Christmas Yet to Come, as Ma
rley said. But is it Christmas as it Will Be, or only Christmas Yet to Come if I keep on this way?”

  The imp was silent. They were in the air near the Serpentine, then somewhere off Margate, then back at the confluence of the Thames and Isis, then somewhere over the river near the docks. As Eben Mizer looked down, a slow barge transformed into a sleek boat going an unimaginable speed across the water. As he watched, it went in a long fast circle and crashed into a wharf, spewing bodies like toy soldiers from a bumped table.

  He looked out toward the city. London towered up and up and up, till the highest buildings were level with his place in the middle of the air. And above the highest buildings stood giant towers of every kind and shape, humming and glowing blue in the air. Between the tall stone and iron buildings ran aerial railways, level after crossing level of them, and on every one some kind of train; some sleek, some boxlike, moving along their spans. The city was a blaze of light; every corner on every street glowed, all the buildings were lit. Far to the horizon the lights stretched, past all comprehension; lights in a million houses, more lights than all the candles and lamps and new motility lights in Eben Mizer’s world could make if all lit at once. There was no end to the glow the whole river valley was one blue sheen that hurt his eyes.

  Here and there, though, the blue flickered. As he watched, some trains gathered speed on their rails three hundred feet above the ground, and on others higher or lower they stopped completely. Then he and the imp were closer to one of the trains that bad come to a halt. The passengers were pressed to the windows of one of the carriages, which had no engines or motive cars attached, and then in a flash around a building came a spotted snake of light that was another train, and there was a great grinding roar as the two became one. The trains were a wilted salad of metal and wheels, and people fled by like hornet larvae from a nest hit by a shotgun blast. They tumbled without sound down the crevasses between the buildings, and cracked windows and masonry followed them as rails snapped like stretched string.

  Something was wrong with the sky, for the blue light flickered on and off, as did the lights of the city, and the top of one of the towers began to glow faint red, as if it were a mulling poker.

  Then he and the imp were on the ground, near a churchyard, and as they watched, with a grinding clang that died instantly, a train car from above went through the belfry of the church. Bodies, whose screams grew higher and louder, thudded into the sacred ground, snapping off tombstones, giving statues a clothing of true human skin.

  The imp of Christmases Yet to Come drew nearer a wooden cross in the pauper’s section, pointing. Eben Mizer stood transfixed, watching the towers of buildings, stone attached to iron, and the twisting cords of the railways above come loose and dangle before breaking off and falling.

  With a deafening roar a ground-level railway train came ploughing through the churchyard wall, tearing a great gouge in the earth and, shedding passengers like an otter shakes water, burst-through the opposite wall, ending its career farther out of sight. It left a huge furrow through the cemetery, and at the cemetery’s exact center a quiet, intact railway car in which nothing moved. Here and there in the torn earth a coffin stood on end, or lay cut in two, exactly half an anatomy lesson.

  Eben Mizer saw that one of the great towers nearby had its side punched open, as neat a cut as with a knife through a hoop of cheese. From this opening shambled an army, if ever army such as this could be. . . .

  They were huge, and their heads too were huge, and the sides of their heads smoked; the hair of some was smouldering, which they did not notice, until some quite burst afire and then those slowly sank back to the ground. Others walked in place, only thinking their thin legs were moving them forward. A higher part of the tower fell on twenty or thirty of them with no effect on the others who were walking before or behind them.

  Great fires were bursting out in the buildings overhead. A jagged bolt lanced into the Thames, turning it to steam; a return bolt blew the top from a tower, which fell away from the river, taking two giant buildings with it.

  A train shot out of the city a thousand feet up. As it left, the entire valley winked out into a darkness lit only by dim blazes from fires. Mizer heard the train hit in Southwark in the pitch blackness before his night vision came back.

  All around there was moaning; the small moaning of people, larger ones of twisted cooling metal great ones of buildings before they snapped and fell.

  He began to make out shapes in the churchyard slowly, here and there. There were fires on bodies of people, on the wooden seats of train benches. A burning chesterfield fell onto the railway car, showering sparks.

  The staggering figures came closer; they were dressed in loose clothing. By the light of fires he saw their bulbous shapes. One drew near, and turned toward him.

  Its eyes, all their eyes, were like pale doorknobs. They moved toward him. The closest, its lips trying to say words, lifted its arms. Others joined it, and they came on slowly, their shoulders moving ineffectually back and forth; they shuffled from one foot to the other, getting closer and closer. They lifted their white soft grub-worm fingers toward him—

  WHAP!! Dickens brought his palm down hard on the wooden block. The whole audience jumped. Men and women both yelped. Then nervous laughter ran through the hall.

  Eben Mizer opened the shutter. The boy in the street had another snowball ready to throw when he noticed the man at the window. He turned to run.

  “Wait, boy!” Eben Mizer called. “Wait! What day is this?”

  “What? Why, sir, it’s Christmas Day.”

  “Bless me,” said Eben Mizer. “Of course. The Spirits have done it all in one night. Of course they have. There’s still time. Boy! You know that turkey in the shop down the street? . . .”

  His foot was paining him mightily. He shifted his weight to the other leg, his arms drawing the giant shape of the mansized turkey in the air. He was Eben Mizer, and he was the boy, and he was also the poulterer, running back with the turkey.

  And from that day on, he was a man with a mission, a most Christian one, and he took to his bosom his nephew’s family, and that of all mankind, but most especially that of Bob Cratchitt, and that most special case of Giant Timmy—who did not die and took to his heart those great words, “God Bless . . . us all each . . . every . . .”

  Charles Dickens closed his book and stood bathed in the selenium glow, and waited for the battering love that was applause.

  AFTERWORD

  In my time, I’ve killed some of the best.

  John W. Campbell sat in the editor’s chair at Astounding/Analog for 32 years, first changing the field radically and for the better, then becoming a curmudgeon. Nothing fazes him: he buys my first story. Bam! Seven months later, he’s dead.

  I’ve killed, in no particular order Galaxy, the original Crawdaddy!, Eternity SF, the anthology series New Dimensions (sorry, Bob! Sorry Marta!), Omni Online, Event Horizon, InfiniteMatrix.net (Eileen Gunn fixed it so there’d be no possible way I could be the last thing people ever read there: then she bought the last story she ever put up from Andy Hooper, and he asked me to write an afterword for it! Ha ha ha.)

  My pride and joy? I killed Amazing. TWICE!!

  It goes along for 68 years—the first SF magazine ever—through changes of ownership, good times and bad, Richard S. Shaver stories, the brilliant editorship of Cele Goldsmith, Harry Harrison, Malzberg etc., etc. In its entire history I’d had 1/2 a story there (“Men of Greywater Station” with George R.R.Martin) in the early 1970s. This is the background.

  I (and only I and the Royal Mail in Britain) noticed that 1993 is the 150th Anniversary of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”.

  It’s August already. It’s Hoddernell (as the name of a stove in a Tex Avery Droopy cartoon has it) in Austin and I’m in an unairconditioned house.

  I’m thinking about Dic
kens and I realize only one person (Kim Mohan of Amazing up in Wisconsin) could possibly get any story I wrote about Christmas out by Christmas—we’d talked at WisCon in Madison earlier in the year and he said he was only working three months ahead of cover-date (in the pub biz that’s called cutting it too close.)

  I called him. He told me that if I got it in before the end of the month and he took it, it would surely be out in the December issue.

  I sat down in the white heat and wrote at white heat between August 15 and 18, 1993 and typed it up and sent it off, and Kim called me on August 24, taking it. That’s what I call service.

  One of the joys of doing this one was that I got to read (hurriedly between my first phone call and the writing) Peter Ackroyd’s Charles Dickens, which is not only the best bio of the man—Victorian England comes reekingly alive—it’s also one of the best biographies of anyone, ever published.

  I’d read all the standard and definitive two- and three-volume bios on the writer that had come before, but nothing compared to this one.

  Time goes by; there was an Armadillocon in October where I read this then I got in my car and drove 1000 miles to arrive at dusk in Telluride CO, like some Columbus on October 12, 1993, where I was to try to teach writing to 7th and 12th graders as part of the Colorado Artists in the Schools Program.

  Don’t ask.

  I was there 2 months and the San Miguel River got smaller and smaller with ice on the edges and I kept fishing til it was useless. On Thanksgiving I walked the half-mile from where I was staying to Pamela Zoline’s place where we were all eating—it was -17° F. with a 40 mph wind and by the time I got there the 12 pounds of mashed potatoes I was bringing froze solid as a rock in the stockpot.