A Vampire Christmas Carol Read Online Free PDF Page A

such insolence from a clerk, or witnessed such an oddity as the man’s translucent pinched face. “Sir?”
    “You heard me,” Disgut said. “Do not come here again, or those who plucked the lamplighter and his son from their ladder will be at your doorstep.” He lifted his upper lip, baring his teeth. They were certainly not fangs, but mostly definitely oddly shaped, as if they had been filed to points . . . or perhaps he consumed rocks and had broken them off.
    “Are you threatening us?” the more portly of the two gentlemen demanded.
    “I am making a promise,” Disgut replied with a sneer.
    Both gentlemen, frightened by the sight of the sharpened teeth and not entirely certain what to make of them, took a step back, giving little attention to the traffic in the street.
    “Go!” Disgut threatened. “Run, while you are still able.”
    The portly gentlemen did not run, for it probably would have been difficult, considering their portly states, but they most certainly did not take their time in crossing the street and disappearing into the relative safety of the darkness.

6
    B ack inside his office, Scrooge resumed his labors with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.
    Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterward, as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some laborers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered, warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowing sullenly congealed and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke, a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk in the streets, stirred up tomorrow’s pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.
    Despite their fear of the vampires that seemed to ooze from the darkness, the citizens of the town found a merriness on their tired faces and in their croaky voices. They were afraid to be certain; mothers kept their little ones by the hand, and husbands and wives walked arm in arm, but it was not enough to deter them from going about their business this Christmas Eve.
    As soon as full darkness fell, it became even foggier yet, and colder. It was a piercing, searching, biting cold. Was it the vampires that brought the unearthly chill? If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose.
    The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol, but at the first sound of “God bless you, merry gentleman. May nothing you dismay!” Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.
    Much to