Christmas Carol

by Speer, Flora

  Commander Drum’s eyebrows went up, but at first he showed no other sign of surprise at her action. Then he looked right into Carol’s eyes and she watched the slow light of recognition dawn in him.

  Carol understood at last why the two of them had been fated to meet in this particular time … and knew that Commander Drum understood it, too.

  “So,” Drum said softly, almost tenderly. “My nemesis. I know you of old. But you will not haunt me any longer.”

  “Car!”

  Carol heard Nik’s desperate warning shout. She saw the long, slow flame erupt from Commander Drum’s weapon and make its leisurely way toward her. And in Drum’s cold eyes she saw her own death, watching her.

  From behind Commander Drum, Bas struggled to a half-sitting position and fired his stunner. Drum went down, sinking to the pavement in a peculiarly graceful paralysis. Bas collapsed again, his eyes on Carol.

  There was a hot, grinding pain in Carol’s chest. She could not breathe, and the ground came up to meet her with such a jolting shock it tore a cry of anguish from her lips.

  With the sound of her own scream, the slow motion stopped. Normal speed resumed, and suddenly everything was happening much too fast. Nik turned her over, holding her. When Carol’s head fell back across his arm, she saw the still-paralyzed Pen weeping silent tears… and a circle of poorly clad people— Nik’s friends joined with allies from other rebel groups—all standing shoulder to shoulder facing outward toward the civil guards, defending this little space where she lay in Nik’s arms …. She could hear shouts and screams in the background, and the continuing sound of weapons fire.

  “Car.” Nik’s face was wet, though it was not raining. “Car, why did you do it? I’d far rather it was me. How can I live without you?”

  Still she could not get her breath, and the pain in her chest would not go away. There was a hot, sticky fluid pouring down her left side, but she was unable to stretch out her hand to reach beneath her raincoat to discover what it was.

  “Nik.” It was so difficult to speak. Nik’s face was growing blurry, in a way she had seen once before … long ago.

  “Car—Car, my love.” Nik’s voice sounded so broken and desperate that she wanted to put her arms around him and tell him everything was going to be all right. But she could not move. “Car, don’t leave me!”

  “I love you.” She wasn’t sure he heard her. There was a roaring noise that blotted out mere voices, and there was a sickening darkness enveloping her.

  Carol felt as though she were being dragged away to another place, but she had not heard Nik shout an order for her to be moved. And the pain … never had she experienced such fiery, lancing pain.

  She could bear the pain. It would not last for long, and Nik and Pen were still alive. That was what really mattered, not her own temporary discomfort. Her lungs ached for the air she could no longer draw into them. Carol struggled to breathe and found she still could not.

  The encroaching blackness grew closer and heavier, pressing down on her, driving the life out of her pain-wracked body. The last thing she heard was Nik’s howl of agonized loss as his dream of love with Carol turned into a reality more devastating than any nightmare could ever be.

  “Car! Noooo!”

  Part V.

  Noel.

  London, 1993.

  Chapter 17

  “Be careful,” warned Lady Augusta, “or you will trip and fall.”

  “Where? … what?” Carol stared into thick fog. There were pale halos around the street lamps, and the lights on the Christmas tree sent forth a ghostly, multicolored glow. “I’m still in the square. But it’s so quiet. What has happened to the weapons fire? And where are the others?”

  “Your former companions remain in their own time.” The words came out of the darkness. Carol could just barely see Lady Augusta as a slightly more distinct shape than the formless, shifting fog.

  “Nik,” Carol cried. “Pen. The others. What happened to them?” She was beginning to understand that she was not dead. Though she had willingly given up her life, . she had been returned to the world in which she belonged. The change had been so abrupt that now she could not stop thinking about those whom she had left behind. Or was it left ahead? She was too confused to reason through the answer to that question, and Lady Augusta’s response only added to Carol’s distress.

  “Do you mean, what will happen to them?” asked Lady Augusta. “Are you certain you want to know?”

  “Of course I want to know! I love them! Stop playing tricks on me and tell me the truth for once.”

  “If you wish, I will let you see for yourself what their future will be.”

  “Yes. Show me.” Carol placed a hand on her chest where the fatal wound had been. There was no wound now, and no flow of blood. Her raincoat was intact. Yet beneath her hand her heart beat at an alarming rate, and a terrible pain still lingered in the form of a rending sensation of loss.

  “Since you desire it so passionately,” said Lady Augusta, “I will vouchsafe one last vision to you. Prepare yourself, Carol.”

  There was a movement in the fog, and once more Carol was plunged into a dizzying, empty blackness. She was not completely alone. She sensed the presence of Lady Augusta, though she could not see her ghostly guide.

  “Where am I?” Carol asked.

  “Watch.” Lady Augusta’s disembodied voice came out of the void surrounding Carol. “Watch, and learn the final lesson.”

  In the darkness there slowly developed a circle of light. Carol could see into it as though she was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. While everything she saw appeared to be far away, she was able to make out a gray stone wall, three wooden poles in front of the wall, and a few men in brown civil guards uniforms. Commander Drum stood at their head, waiting in a gray and cold dawn.

  As Carol watched, more guards appeared, supporting three bundles of rags. The bundles moved in short, jerking steps, and Carol realized that the three objects were human beings—or what was left of humans after unspeakable tortures. She understood now the purpose of the three poles. The pitiable creatures being dragged forward were unable to stand alone and were going to be tied to those stakes.

  “Why are you showing me this?” Carol demanded of Lady Augusta.

  “You insisted upon seeing it. This is the final act, the last scene for you to observe,” came the doleful answer.

  With a rising sense of horror Carol comprehended the significance of the series of rusty-brown stains on the wall behind the stakes. When the prisoners were secured to the stakes, Commander Drum stepped toward them, cloth in hand.

  “No blindfold,” rasped the person tied to the center stake.

  “Nik!” Carol screamed. “No, this can’t be happening.”

  “No.” The figure at Nik’s left side also shook its head, like her brother refusing Commander Drum’s offer of a cloth to cover her eyes.

  “Pen! Lady Augusta, stop this! Make Drum stop.”

  “I cannot change it,” said Lady Augusta. “So long as the present and the future remain unaltered, this will be their fate. Only you can make the difference, Carol.”

  “I suppose you intend to be as foolishly brave as your companions and also stare death in the face?” said Commander Drum to the remains of a person on Nik’s right. This distorted shape could barely gasp out a single word.

  “N-n-no c-cloth.” So tortured was the sound that Carol was convinced his larynx had been broken. But like his friends, he struggled to stand as upright as he possibly could, given his terrible injuries.

  “Bas!” Carol cried, weeping for pity. Bas had tried to save her when Drum was determined to kill her, and she was sure Commander Drum had seen to it that Bas suffered accordingly for daring to shoot his stunner at the leader of the civil guards.

  “There is no need for last words,” snapped Commander Drum, moving away from the prisoners to stand with the other guards. “No one will hear what you say except me and my men, and we won’t care.�
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  Nik pulled himself a little straighter, fighting against the ropes that held him and lifting his head to glare proudly at his executioners. Despite Commander Drum’s cold-blooded declaration, Nik spoke with as much defiance as any man could be expected to muster under such dreadful circumstances.

  “We do not die,” Nik declared between labored breaths. “We love—we hope—we still dream—of a better world. We will live on.”

  “A charming theory,” sneered Commander Drum, “but faulty logic, I fear. When we kill you, that will be the end of you.”

  “No,” Nik choked. “Not—not the end.”

  “Oh, God!” Carol screamed. “Help them! Someone, help them!”

  “Guards, raise your weapons,” Commander Drum ordered with a bored calmness of manner that was utterly appalling to Carol. “Aim. Fire.”

  “No! Stop!” Carol’s desperate pleas had no effect on the scene before her. The grating buzz of the guards’ hand weapons filled her ears. The figures lashed to the poles each jerked once and then went perfectly still.

  “You have seen what you wanted to see.” Lady Augusta’s voice was a solemn whisper of sound in the deadly quiet following the executions. “Remember it well, Carol.”

  The circle of light in front of Carol’s eyes grew smaller and smaller until it vanished and all was blackness once more….

  And in Carol’s bosom, beneath the hand she still held over the spot where once a selflessly accepted wound had bled, her heart quietly shattered into an infinite number of tiny, excruciatingly sharp and painful splinters….

  Chapter 18

  Carol was alone. Lady Augusta had vanished, leaving her in the middle of the square. At first all was silence. Then, slowly, sound returned. The first noise Carol heard was a car horn, followed by the cries of a small child having a tantrum and the cajoling voice of the child’s mother.

  Bewildered, Carol stared at her surroundings. The fog was lifting and the street lamps were lit. The small bulbs on the Christmas tree shone with multicolored holiday brightness. On all sides of the square the old houses rose, whole and well cared for. Wreaths graced many of their doors and lights glowed in the windows. Directly ahead of her stood Marlowe House. All four stories of it and the roof were solid, complete, undamaged by warfare or time.

  Reaching out, Carol touched the Christmas tree, feeling with a new delight its prickly needles and the heat of an electric bulb.

  “You’re real,” she said to the tree, “not metal, and not something thought up by an uncaring Government. You mean something. Thank God for Christmas!”

  She did not enter Marlowe House by the servants’ entrance. She knew Nell would probably be in the kitchen with Mrs. Marks and Hettie, and she did not want to talk to anyone for a while. There would be time enough for conversation later, after she’d had a chance to assimilate everything that had happened to her.

  She found her house key in the purse that was still slung over her shoulder and, mounting the front steps, went in by the main door. She paused for a moment in the hall, looking at the clean black and white marble floor and the paneling that Nell did her best to keep well polished. There was no one in the hall. Crampton was probably in the kitchen with the women. Carol crossed to the drawing room entrance and opened one of the double doors.

  The room was unchanged and unused since Lady Augusta’s funeral. The walls were still pale yellow silk, the carved paneling accented with white and gilt paint.

  Her sense of time having been distorted by supernatural events, Carol was forced to count the days on her fingers in order to determine exactly how long it had been since she had stood in this same place during the reception after the funeral and rudely refused to make a donation to St. Fiacre’s Bountiful Board. It was three days ago. And only last night—no, one hundred seventy-five years in the future—she and Nik had danced in the small, partitioned section at the far end of this room before falling upon his bed to make intense, passionate love. And in the morning they had left his room and gone out to fight and die.

  Carol walked across Aubusson carpets, past gilded Regency chairs and tables, to the rear of the long, narrow drawing room. There she stopped, noting that the window which would one day be the single window of Nik’s small bedroom was not covered with layers of wood for security reasons, but instead was draped in heavy yellow silk and gold fringe.

  “Oh, Nik,” she whispered, her voice breaking. Gently she touched the windowsill, and then the wall where the head of his bed would one day be. “No. I can’t let it happen. The future has to be different. I will do anything I can to save him from that terrible end. And Pen and Bas, too. All of them.”

  “Good evening, Miss Simmons.” Crampton stood in the drawing room doorway. “I thought I heard you come in.”

  Carol did not respond. The lump in her throat prevented her from speaking.

  “Will you be wanting a late supper, miss?” asked Crampton.

  “Late?” Carol repeated. “What time is it?” An interesting question, she thought, and in a metaphysical sense, an unanswerable one.

  “It is just past nine o’clock, miss.”

  “Oh. I see. Well, I did eat a rather substantial tea at a late hour, so I think I will skip another meal tonight. I am going to bed now, so you may as well lock up the house.”

  “Yes, miss.” Crampton showed no sign of surprise at her claim to have eaten elsewhere when she took almost all of her meals in her own room, but then Crampton rarely showed any emotion at all.

  For the first time in her almost six years at Marlowe House, Carol wondered what the butler really thought: about his late employer, about Marlowe House itself, and about the end of his career, for it seemed certain that he and Mrs. Marks would retire when the house was closed after Lady Augusta’s estate was settled. On her way out of the room she went past him with a curious look, but Crampton, who was pulling the double doors shut behind her, did not appear to notice her interest.

  On the upper floors of the house the corridors were lit only by single bulbs in wall sconces. The emptiness and the deep shadows did not bother Carol. After her recent experiences she was beyond fearing anything. Even death could not frighten her now. Opening the door of her own room, she reached out and pushed the light switch. Lamps sprang to life next to her bed and by the wing chair beside the fireplace, illuminating the familiar room that at the moment appeared entirely strange to her.

  A guest awaited her. Across the hearth from the wing chair Lady Augusta sat upon her invisible sofa.

  “Shut the door and take off your coat, Carol. We have much to discuss.”

  “I wondered when you would show up again.” Carol took her time undoing the buttons and the sash of her raincoat and hanging the coat in the closet. She needed those few minutes to collect her thoughts. She was not as calm or as unaffected by recent events as she pretended to be. She was very much afraid that Lady Augusta knew this and would take advantage of her weakness.

  “Do sit down, Carol. You are wasting time.”

  “I thought you had all eternity.”

  “Certainly not. I explained to you on my first visit that I have been given only until Twelfth Night to convince you to change your ways. I said, sit down!”

  Carol was planning to remain on her feet, but Lady Augusta gave her no choice. She felt herself being moved to the wing chair, felt her body bending and an invisible force pressing her downward until she sat as she was bidden. Once she was seated the force released her.

  “Very clever,” said Carol, glaring at her visitor. Then, intrigued, she looked more closely at the ghost. Lady Augusta’s gray hair was no longer hanging around her face in lank strands. Instead, it was piled into her usual neat chignon. She was still robed in the same gray and black she had been wearing during all her time in the future with Carol, but the robes had undergone a subtle transformation. They were not so heavy as they once were, and the long streamers of dark fabric no longer looked much like tattered rags, but now assumed a more elegant, drifti
ng appearance, like chiffon dyed to the color of dark smoke or of thick, swirling fog. These garments were never still. The skirt and the long, loose sleeves and the newly sheer cloak around her shoulders all lifted and blew gently in a nonexistent breeze, and then settled back around Lady Augusta’s figure, only to rise again a moment later. The effect was both ghostly and disorienting. Carol suspected Lady Augusta of wanting it that way.

  “How are you, Carol?”

  “How do you expect me to be? I’m not sure whether I’m dead or alive.” Lady Augusta did not respond to this deliberately provocative statement, but only sat watching her, and after a minute or two Carol added, “I want you to tell me what I can do to prevent the tragedy I just witnessed.”

  “As I recall it, you were a willing participant in those tragic events. You were willing to give your life to save those whom you loved.”

  “Love,” Carol corrected. “I love them still and will until I… but I’ve already done that, haven’t I? I have already died. Much good my sacrifice did them. You saw their final fate. That’s what I want to change, and you have to tell me how.”

  “You have learned the lessons I intended you to learn.” Lady Augusta moved, sending a flurry of sheer black and gray fabric into the air. To Carol’s eyes, the colors seemed to be fading into lighter shades even as she regarded her visitor with growing frustration. Nor did Lady Augusta’s next words shed more light on any possibility of changing the future. “The rest is up to you, Carol. You have only to look into your own heart. There you will discover all you need to know.”

  “I want Nik to live,” Carol cried. “And Pen— and Bas and Jo and Al and Lin. Luc, too. All of them, all of my friends in that time.”

  “Then you must take immediate action, for if you do not change the present, when time moves on to Nik’s day, he and all his friends will die in that failed uprising or will be executed after it is put down. Only you can change the future you saw this evening. If you wish it to be so, Nik and his friends will live under a democratic, representative government. No uprising will be necessary because there will be no repression. Nor will the cities of the world be in ruins or the weather patterns changed by the weapons used in terrible wars. And Christmas—along with all other holidays—will still be celebrated. The future depends upon you, Carol.”