Carol for Another Christmas (19 page)

“Oh, brother!” Monica said. “Don't tell me I forget all of what happens here tonight to the extent that I don't fire that snake . . . Or is it too late?”

The spirit who looked so much like her shrugged her own shrug. It was contemptuous.

“Well, at least I made these people happy.”

“By failing to recognize their ability, alienating them, and driving them off into other enterprises, which, given their talents and intelligence, paid them more handsomely than you were doing. That's quite an accomplishment,” the spirit said acerbically.

“I think we'd better leave now.”

“Just a moment.”

“Where's Wayne?” asked Curtis Lu, who joined the group of his former colleagues.

“Oh, you know. I invited him,” said another man—John, John Beardesley, that was it. He was a debug ger or something. “But he's heavy into telecommuting for everything since his mom died. I don't think he'd stay long at any party that had Johansen at it, either. Wayne's not even a
fiscal
Republican. You know that.”

“Mrs. Reilly died? Oh, dear. Spirit, we have to go see Wayne. He adored his mother—not that he was a mama's boy, or anything like that, but she was a nice lady. Please, let's get out of here and go see him.”

“Very well,” the spirit said. “It's on our way.”

Monica wondered what her guide meant by that.

This night was wet and cold, and yet there was no fire in Wayne's fireplace, though he sat at his computer in the den as he had before. Instead of books and papers littering the floor, an avalanche of wad ded Kleenex overflowed the wastebasket and desk to all but bury a red-nosed, bleary-eyed Wayne. He was much grayer than when she had seen him last and his beard, which was several days old, had far too much white in it. He still wore pajamas and a robe, and Monica wondered when the last time was that he'd worn anything else.

He sneezed, blew his nose, and typed a few words into the computer. Then he sneezed and blew his nose again, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Poor guy,” Monica said. “Guess this Christmas isn't going to be any fun at all for him.”

“What's the difference?” the spirit said harshly, sounding so much like Monica herself that the heiress cringed. “He's always been a bit of a sob sister anyway. Now he's got something to cry about.”

“Didn't you hear what they said at the party? He's just lost his mother. And he's all alone.”

“He doesn't have to be. Surely with his millions he could buy love.”

Monica lingered near him and put her hand on his shoulder, but she knew he couldn't feel it. The spirit stood nearby, tapping her toe.

Finally, Monica turned and asked with a sigh, “Are we going to go back to visit the people Wayne corresponds with? Is that why we're here?”

The spirit shook her head. “That is all in what is now the past. There is something else here you ought to see.”

“How much time has passed? When will this happen?”

The spirit sniffed. “I'm not at liberty to divulge that information. We like to keep the element of surprise on our side in order to ensure that the subject keeps his or her affairs and files current and up-to-date at all times. Mr. Reilly is setting a good example. He is now making an entry in his electronic journal. You will notice that he uses an off-line machine and stores all information on a removable disk for security reasons. He did this after having pieces of his diary copied and presented as evidence in the legal actions against Databanks and Monica Banks, CEO, Databanks.”

It was Monica's turn to sniff. “I wouldn't think you'd approve of that. Privacy, I mean.”

“You're the one who sounds disapproving, which is odd, since your company was the one that created the software to invade Mr. Reilly's machine.”

“I don't want to invade Wayne's privacy,” she said, feeling the heat rise in her face as she thought of one particular message he'd been sending on her previous visit. “It might be . . . private.”

The spirit ignored her and drew her into Wayne's machine.

Monica immediately looked for the dates on the entries, and the spirit, with a smirk, stabbed her finger in the air and produced little bars of color over that portion of the screen above each entry.

Monica glared at her, and the spirit's smirk deepened. Monica made a silent vow never to smirk at anyone ever again unless she deeply, passionately loathed and despised that person.

The first entry appeared as a mural, spreading out before her.

“Missed Christmas with Ma. The airport was socked in, and there was no way to get out. Monica turned me down again, too. Oh, well, there's always another Christmas, I guess.”

The next entry was a forwarded file from an online tabloid. “Government Forecloses on Databanks—Money Left With Only One Mansion to Her Name.”

“That's not fair,” Monica said. “I only have one mansion, and that's the one Doug built by the lake. It's much too big for me, and the whole thing is computer operated. I can hardly open a cabinet because I haven't figured out the controls. Up until I inherited it, I couldn't even afford a home of my own. These people forget that I
worked
for my money.”

“Too bad for you, but I don't think they forgot a thing,” the spirit said nastily, and pointed to an issue of
People
magazine with a picture of Monica on the cover. “Monica—Money—Banks, What Next for the Diabolic Dimpled Dumpling of Databanks?” The index promised articles titled, “ ‘I Remember Monica—the Year the IRS Took My Farm' and Other Atrocity Stories by Those the Former Tax Termagent Ruined.” The spirit clicked to a picture of seventy-four-year-old former farmer Homer Pewterbottom, who was quoted as saying, “When I saw that that nasty tax woman what took my farm had inherited millions, I said to Obesella—that's my pig, ‘Obesella'—I said, ‘That there is just another case of good things happenin' to bad people.' But I reckon she's got her comeuppance now and I say good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“I'm surprised the government doesn't step in and sue for libel,” Monica said hotly. “I was only doing my job. These people weren't paying taxes they legally owed.”

“Did you try to work with them? Did you cooperate with them in any way possible to ascertain your figures were correct? Did you even listen to them?”

“No, but that wasn't my . . . I suppose I might have been a little harder than I should have been with some people who were honest and deserved more consideration. But you meet so many deadbeats, you get tired of worrying about who's trying to trick you. There are guidelines, you know.”

“Yes, and they are interpreted differently from agent to agent. You had another nickname in your office, didn't you, Monica? Because you were the most rigid and punitive of all the people there. What was it, Monica? It wasn't Money, was it?”

“No, it—”

“Rhymed with Banks, didn't it?”

“Yes—”

“Something large and hard and unrelenting . . .”

“Tank,” Monica said. “They called me ‘Tank Banks.' Thank God the press never got hold of that.”

“Oh, but they did. See here on page forty-seven?”

Monica groaned.

“Ah—look at this. ‘
60 Minutes
on Get a Life' it says here by this little picture of—what would you say that is, Ms. Banks?”

“It's a film clip,” Monica said tiredly.

“Let's see.”

“This is Donald Sortoff for
60 Minutes
,” the earnest man on the clip said. “Earlier this year, Databanks Corporation not only released a new type of network communications management, but made sure each and every computer in their affiliated hardware companies came off the assembly line equipped with this tool. The product claimed to be a revolutionary way to tend to every phase of your business and personal life via telecommunication. Soon, people who used this began to notice that their affairs were not only public; they were being monitored in a 1984-esque fashion by government computers trained to pick up certain words and phrases and act, in effect, as a sort of KGB here in the U.S. We go now to talk to—”

The film went fuzzy for a moment and then Sortoff and his microphone appeared outside Doug's mansion. “Databanks, as we learned earlier this week, has claimed bankruptcy after most of its assets had been seized by the IRS, an ironic twist of fate, since the controversial CEO of the company, Monica ‘Money' Banks, was herself once an IRS auditor. This home, estimated to be worth upwards of twelve million dollars, is still in the possession of Monica Banks as it is her domicile and cannot, under law, be seized. We knocked on her door earlier, but no one answered. It is believed that Banks is inside, secluded from the press, but we were unable to find anyone to talk to. There are no servants. The eccentric Banks heiress prefers it that way. Former employees say she has an exaggerated sense of privacy, almost a paranoia—”

Monica shivered. “How can they say that when they really are all against me? Spirit, none of this has to happen, does it? I don't have to produce Get a Life—”

“You have a contract. You have obligations. You have a deadline.”

“You have a discouraging way of putting things.”

“Yes, I do, don't you?” the spirit said with another nasty smirk. “Shall we see what Wayne's up to now?”

They emerged from within the computer again to find Wayne writing another message on his online computer. “I know she doesn't want to see me anymore or anybody else, but I've asked her to Christmas dinner every year since we were kids, and I'm not going to stop now. Flu or no flu, I'll ask her. All she can do is say no like she always does, and I'm used to that.”

“Way to go, Paddy,” the person on the other end replied. “Go for it. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Wayne typed, and clicked back out to compose another letter. “Dear Moni,” it began, but Monica read no more as she and the spirit were swooshed once more through the lines connecting the machines and she found herself and her other self arriving in a cold, dark room from the dark, cold monitor of a seemingly dead computer.

Fortunately for them both, the spectral Monica shone with her own eldritch light by which they could see their surroundings. “You know this place?” the spirit asked.

“Of course I do. This is Doug's house. Well, my house really. I've been intending to block this room off.”

“But the computer is here,” the ghost said.

“There's a computer in every room of this house, sometimes more than one. I feel like I have no privacy. That's why I fired the servants. I can wash my own underwear, thank you, though I admit I've had trouble locating the washer and dryer. To tell you the truth, I haven't spent much time here. I find it . . . large. It was Doug's dream house, not mine.”

“Hmph,” said the ghost. “Why are there no windows?”

“A lot of it is underground. Doug said it saves energy.” She crossed her arms and hugged herself. Though she couldn't actually feel the cold with her skin, she felt it just the same. “I just think it's dark and gloomy unless you put in a lot of that full spectrum light, which is expensive.”

“He was a multibillionaire.”

“No excuse to be a spendthrift,” Monica said. As the spirit drifted to one of the frost-rimed walls and pointed out the icicles that had formed from condensation on the chandelier, Monica added, “Of course, one can always take thrift too far. Looks like I overdid it here.”

The spirit nodded, but just then there came a heavy thumping and bumping, and the beams from two flashlights flooded the room as the door caved in under attack from without. The spirit increased her candlepower so that beyond the flashlight beams, Monica saw two rough-looking people in stocking caps and tattered jackets burst into the room. One methodically began filling garbage sacks with the room's portable contents while the other one unplugged the computer and its parts and loaded them onto a shopping cart.

“Thieves,” Monica said. “Help! Police! Call 911.”

“With what?” the ghost asked. “There's no power here—or why would the room be so cold and dark? And even if there were, no one would hear you.”

When the thieves finished looting the place, laughing and making fun of the things they stuck into their bags, they began smashing things, and a third person, someone Monica had seen under different circumstances only recently, appeared with a spray can. “Hey, Money Banks!” He hollered, pounding on the wall, a pounding that was enthusiastically joined by the others, who shouted threats and ugly names through the door with crude, frightening laughter until the first figure waved them quiet. “We could use jobs! How about you hire us as your new decorators, huh?” he asked, and as they all laughed and capered to the partnership of their own hugely exaggerated shadows, he scrawled an obscenity across the wall with great loops of paint.

“Let's get out of here,” Monica said.

“We can't go the way we came,” the spirit pointed out. “We'll have to go out through the house, or until we find a computer still intact, if we're to take the Ethernet.”

But the rooms they went through were worse: the kitchen sink frozen and fouled, filthy water all over the floor, and at some point, a fire had flared to burn itself out on the fireproof exteriors. The bathrooms were unspeakable, and over every surface were the angry graffiti. In the next two rooms, an assortment of people camped out in the damage and she saw her clothes, bedclothes, and draperies used as bedding and her furniture as firewood for fires built on the floors.