Christmas Carol (35 page)

“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.”

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….

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, drifting
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.”

“You are being unfair,” Carol said, feeling
more frustrated than ever. “One person alone cannot solve all of
the world’s problems.”

“You are not expected to do so. What you
are
expected to do is care about those whom you know you
could help. Begin with those around you and go on from there,
always doing the best you can. The slightest change can make a
bigger difference than you realize.”

“My best,” Carol repeated thoughtfully. “I
haven’t always done my best in the past, have I?”

“Do it now. It is never too late to begin.”
Lady Augusta rose, her garments floating around her. “Sleep now,
Carol. The pain of this second parting from your love will ease,
especially since you know that you have the means within yourself
to save him a second time. And to save the life of Car.”

“Are you telling me that there will be a
Car?” Carol stared at her. “A
real
Car?”

“I thought you were the real Car.” Head
tilted to one side, Lady Augusta regarded her with a piercing look.
“Didn’t Nik explain all of this to you when you first arrived in
that future time? Surely he mentioned the dreams he had,
foretelling your meeting?”

“Yes, he did.” Carol sighed, remembering. “I
listened to his beautiful words, but I didn’t really understand
them until this minute. Is it true, then? Nik and I will meet again
in the future, and we might both live beyond those days when I was
there? And Pen and the others, too?”

“Whether possibility becomes reality is up to
you, Carol.” Lady Augusta raised one hand and Carol began to grow
sleepy. It was all she could do to keep her eyes open. She yawned,
too weary to lift her own hand to cover her mouth.

“Sleep will mend your present grief,” Lady
Augusta said.

“Don’t go. Will I see you again? Didn’t you
say… ?” Carol was so sleepy that she could no longer remember what
Lady Augusta had said.

“I am heartened to learn that you now desire
my company where once you despised it.” There was amusement in Lady
Augusta’s fading voice, and a kindness and warmth Carol had not
heard from her before. “I will return once more. For the moment, my
presence is required Elsewhere. You have until Twelfth Night,
Carol. Do your very best, child. Remember, I am depending upon
you.”

The voice grew fainter and fainter, until
Carol could just barely hear the last words.

She sighed and turned over, snuggling down
beneath the bedcovers. Questions floated through her mind, but she
was too tired to ask them just yet. Tomorrow would be soon enough.
For the moment, her pillow was soft and the bed and her flannel
nightgown were warm.