A/N: This story was written for the Writers Anonymous Holiday Challenge, and is for the computer game Vampyr, a new-to-me fandom which I've only just discovered in the last couple of months but which I love for its characters, the voice-acting, the atmosphere and its lore. It's also a fandom that's also virtually unknown on FFN judging by this story languishing in the Misc. Games category.
All comments and criticism are welcomed.
All the Ghosts of Christmases Past
The children were playing tricks again. Hiding, even though they knew very well that Aubrey's partner from the bank – whose name, oddly, Emelyne could not seem to recall – had arrived and was waiting to be introduced.
They were in Mary's room. She could hear Mary's stifled giggles, her hands pressed over her mouth in a vain attempt to stop herself from giving the game away too early, while Johnny teased her, trying to make his little sister burst into delighted laughter.
They'd grown so close since Johnny went away to school. Thick as thieves, the two of them. But Emelyne had never been close to her own brothers, and it filled her with a quiet happy pride to see how they doted on each other, Johnny so clever, and Mary so sweet-tempered and kind…
But there was something she'd forgotten, wasn't there? Mary wasn't always so sweet-tempered, not these days; these days she was often angry, and the thought of Mary angry was like a crushing weight of fear on Emelyne's chest, a fist around her throat, so tight she could not breathe.
And Johnny, always keeping secrets. She looked at him sometimes, her eldest child, and wondered how she ever could have given birth to a boy so strange and secretive.
She remembered the day he was born so clearly, even when all else was fog. The oncoming pain that swept in like the tide, her world shrinking to that room and the doctor's urging, the certain knowledge that she could not do what they asked of her, and how he seemed to tear his way free of her, her Jonathan, who was born in blood and seemed at times like a stranger.
They severed the cord and snatched him away before she could hold him, and she begged, holding out her arms until they brought him back, wiped clean and wrapped in a blanket, a squalling red-faced little creature, breath hitching with fury at having been so unceremoniously dumped into a world he had not asked for. His fist closed tight around her finger as Emelyne wept from joy and exhaustion, taking in every detail of his face, the shock of black hair slicked against his skull with gore. Her beautiful dead little boy.
The game had gone on quite long enough. She moved decisively, sweeping into the room, expecting to see them huddled by the side of the bed, Mary pink-cheeked and Johnny serious and shrewd, as if they'd only been waiting for her to find them.
No one there.
She faltered, looking around. Mary's laughter echoed in her memories, so clear and close Emelyne could almost feel her breath on her neck. Her gaze caught on her reflection in the mirror, and the face staring back at her was not her own. Her hand rose to her cheek, and the reflection aped the movement. This creature, with its greying hair and slack, crepey cheeks, surely this was not her?
The room was bitterly cold. No matter how many fires Avery lit, the house never seemed to get warm, but such was the burden of a house full of ghosts.
She stepped back out into the corridor and closed the door. She clung tight to the banister as she descended, because she wasn't quite as steady on her feet as she used to be, and she'd almost fallen more than once, her legs refusing to do as her brain instructed. Aubrey and his colleague from the bank lingered in the holly-and-ivy-strewn hall, both seeming oddly ill at ease.
"I'm dreadfully sorry," she told them. "I'm afraid I can't seem to find the children anywhere."
She'd said the wrong thing. Aubrey pressed his mouth in a tight line, while their guest regarded her with a look of sympathy. She liked him at once. Odd that she'd never seen him before, since she could have sworn she'd met all of Aubrey's partners from the bank. He was slight and slender, neat in both his dress and his manner, with a carefully trimmed moustache and spectacles. And he was pale, very nearly as pale as Aubrey.
Good Lord, was everyone in this house dead tonight aside from Emelyne and Avery?
"The children?" he said politely.
"Why, Jonathan and Mary. Goodness knows where they've got to. They really ought to know better."
Aubrey sighed and grasped her hand in his. He looked desperately weary. "I'm Jonathan, Mother."
It seemed so utterly ludicrous that she wanted to laugh at him. And then she stepped back, running her gaze over his face. A heavier brow, and taller too, his eyes a softer shade of blue. More sunken then they used to be, as though he hadn't slept in a long time, and his skin so pale... Not Aubrey at all, but her eldest child. Jonathan, who went away to the war and never quite came back again.
"Why, of course," she said, voice trembling. "Of course it's you, Johnny. You look so like your father."
He didn't exactly smile, but the hard line of his mouth eased a little. He squeezed her hand, his fingers cold and waxy. "Mother, may I introduce you to a very dear friend of mine, Dr Edgar Swansea. He's the administrator of the Pembroke Hospital in Whitechapel, and was the very man who offered me a position there on my return to London."
"Merry Christmas, Dr Swansea. "
His hand was as cold as Jonathan's, his eyes as sunken. "And to you, Mrs Reid, but please, do call me Edgar. You have a beautiful home."
"It's far too cold," she said, glancing up towards the stairs, certain she'd see Mary watching them, her lips painted an unnaturally bright scarlet. "Although I don't suppose you feel it, Dr Swansea–"
"Edgar, please."
"–Since you're dead, too."
A silence met her words. She looked back at them, and found Jonathan pinching the bridge of his nose and Dr Swansea staring very hard at the panelling as though he'd spotted the face of a saint hidden in the grain of the wood.
Well, of course. It must be unforgiveably rude to comment on whether a guest was alive or dead.
"Perhaps..." Her voice trembled again. "Perhaps a sherry in the parlour?"
"Mother," Jonathan began, a furrow of irritation between his brows, but Edgar jumped in.
"A sherry," he said, "would be delightful." Jonathan acquiesced, gesturing for Edgar to to precede him along the hallway. As she turned arway, she caught their reflections in the mirror, murky as if the mirror was foxed.
At the threshold of the parlour, she paused, remembering. "Oh Jonathan, do go and fetch your sister, would you? She's upstairs with her little one." To Edgar, she confided, "She's been staying here while her husband is away in France."
But of course. How could she have expected to see Mary as a child? Mary was a married woman now. A mother. And even though she'd adored bright colours as a child, she only ever wore black these days.
The tree stood in the parlour, lending the room a cosy familiar warmth, the firelight reflecting on the painted baubles. Jonathan was making no effort to find his sister, and his expression made her wonder uneasily if she'd said the wrong thing again. She rang for Avery, and called for sherry when he appeared. It startled her every time she saw the butler, the memory she held of him that of a much younger man. It was the same feeling she got whenever she saw her own reflection in the not-at-all-foxed mirrors. When on earth did they both get so old?
Edgar Swansea accepted the glass of sherry and sniffed at it. He tilted the glass, but only enough for the sherry to brush against his lips. He didn't take so much as a sip.
She'd been wondering for a while if the dead were able to eat or drink. They weren't insubstantial the way ghosts were supposed to be, unable to do much more than rattle their chains and carry their heads under their arms. An image popped unbidden into her head of this prim dapper little man with his head tucked under his arm and a giggle rose up out of her, the laughter of a girl unable to restrain herself. She pressed her hand to her mouth to catch it, and apologised.
"It's quite all right," Edgar Swansea said, smiling. "I'm merely delighted to be here. If not for Jonathan's invitation" – there was an strange stress to the way he said 'invitation' – "I'd have been spending my Christmas doing paperwork in a draughty hospital, so please, dear lady, laugh away."
"Have you family, Dr Swansea?"
"There's my mother, of course, but she lives in East Sussex. They may have lifted the quarantine in London now that the worst of the flu is over, but I couldn't risk travelling by train."
"And your father?"
"He passed away when I was a young man."
Another dead man. There were so many these days. France must be teeming with dead men. She wondered whether they'd ever be able to find their way home again or if they'd just wander into the first French farmhouse they stumbled across and make their new homes there. "I'm so sorry," she said. "Is he like you?"
"You mean a physician?" He sniffed his sherry again. "No, my father was… well, I suppose he was a scientist of a kind, a modern-day Dr Dee."
"What my mother means is was he dead like you, Edgar," Jonathan said, his tone weary and amused and broken all at once. "As in did he come back?"
"Oh. I see." Edgar Swansea considered the question a moment, his eyes grave. "No, Mrs Reid..."
"Emelyne, please."
"Then you must call me Edgar. But no, to the best of my knowledge my father never came back. Although I'm certain he would have been delighted to have done so. That was his particular area of interest, you see. He made a study of..."
Very quietly Jonathan cleared his throat. Edgar stopped, his eyes flicking up, registering what Emelyne knew was a meaningful look from her son. It seemed that Edgar Swansea was just as devoted to keeping Jonathan's secrets as Mary had been.
She felt a flood of frustration and brought her glass to her mouth, drinking too fast so that it spilled over her slack clumsy lips, soaking her chin and the neckline of her dress and startling her. She brought the glass down on the table so hard it shattered, and there was a bright flash of pain in her hand. Edgar Swansea started to his feet.
In her mind she saw Mary, drawing the back of her hand across her mouth, smearing scarlet lipstick across her pallid cheek.
"Edgar," Jonathan said, his voice a low growl of warning.
Tears rose up in Emelyne's eyes, and she clasped her hand to her chest as Edgar Swansea moved towards her. "I'm so sorry," she said. "It's so clumsy of me."
"It's quite all right. Let me have a look." His touch was gentle as he turned her hand over. Jonathan stirred, his eyes darkening, seeming in the firelight to take on a scarlet cast. "The cut doesn't look too deep, Mrs Reid–"
"Emelyne," she murmured. This close she could see how red his eyes were, how they seemed coated with a thin wash of blood, as if every time he blinked he bathed them in the stuff.
"I shouldn't think it'll need stitches. A bandage ought to do nicely." He glanced up and pushed his spectacles up his nose with an embarrassed smile. "Perhaps you'd prefer to do the honours, Jonathan."
"Yes," Johnny said. "Yes, I think that might be best."
In the kitchen, her son bandaged her up. The air was rich with the aroma of simmering stock and the roasting capon – with their household so much reduced it made no sense to get a turkey – but Emelyne's appetite had deserted her. It hardly mattered. Aubrey could always be relied on to eat the leftovers. Not Jonathan though. Odd, how being dead seemed to affect her husband and her son so differently: Jonathan hardly seemed to eat at all, yet Aubrey never seemed to stop.
Her mind seemed filled with fog, her body leaden with exhaustion. After Johnny finished bandaging her hand she announced she was going to retire, leave them to their untouched sherries and their low murmured conversation. She suspected it came as something of a relief.
She meant to go to bed, but then she started to remember the walks she used to take with Aubrey before the children were born, the two of them wrapped up tight against the chill December air and calling merry greetings to their neighbours, and somehow, without quite knowing how it came to be, she was buttoning up her coat instead. Avery was busy in the kitchen and Johnny and Mary were merry in the parlour, and they'd spent so long apart while Johnny was in France that she was loath to disturb them. They used to be so very close as children.
She let herself out onto the street, closing the door quietly behind her.
The streets were dark and terribly changed. Many houses had been boarded up, dire warnings of the pestilence within scrawled across walls and doors in flaking paint. They'd changed the layout of the roads – she couldn't work out for the life of her why the authorities would keep doing that – and she couldn't remember her way home. For a while Aubrey was with her, and then he wasn't, melting off into the shadows. She walked until her back ached, her legs threatening to give way.
But the park she knew, a familiar island in an ocean of fog. They'd brought Johnny and Mary here as children, she remembered, as she sank down on a wrought iron bench to rest her aching legs.
"They were both such beautiful babies," she said to Aubrey, who sat beside her. He grunted in agreement and snuffled at her hand, tugging at the bandage. From the sound of his breathing, he had a cold sitting on his chest. His breathing was phlegmy. "You'd best see a doctor," she told him, suddenly concerned. "This awful flu that's been going around. Mary's boy was horribly sick with it, the poor little soul. We thought we'd lose him."
In response he tugged gently at the bandage again. His tongue slathered against the back of her wrist.
"Leech!" The bellow came from the depths of the park. A man's voice, with a harsh Cockney accent. A thundercrack that made Emelyne flinch and cry out in shock. Aubrey had gone, something that looked like a large dog vanishing in the bushes. Several down-at-heel men were approaching down the path. They were all armed.
One of them thrashed at the bushes with a sword and jerked his head towards her. "Check the old girl," he said, his accent Irish, "See how she is."
"You all right, love?" A man with the look of a boxer about him leaned over her, dressed in a grimy navy trenchcoat. Emelyne shrank back into her coat like a snail. "Did it bite you?"
She couldn't think what he meant.
"You get bitten?" His friendly demeanour was starting to slip. "Come on, missus, did it bite you or not? We ain't got all night."
"Ernie." The Irish man's voice snapped out like a whipcrack. "When did you ever know a leech to bandage up its victims after it's bit them?"
"The fella at the hospital might've, ain't that right, McCullum?" one of the others called out. He was grinning, but it faded quickly when the Irishman turned his dark-eyed stare on him.
"I want that monster found," he said, then as they dispersed, muttering, he knelt down in front of Emelyne, examining the bandage.
"Did it bite you?" he asked, his voice low.
"I don't think so," she said, although she couldn't remember. There was an empty blank space in her mind and her hand did hurt. "Was there a dog loose in the park?" Perhaps Aubrey chased it away.
"Something like a dog. A feral beast, anyway. It's not safe in these streets at night." He eased back the bandages carefully, checking the wound, then wrapped it back up again. "That's no bite, so I'd say you're fine. Where do you live?"
"I… I don't seem to remember," she said, then: "Oh!" She began to fumble in her bag. "Avery always makes sure to write down my address." She drew out a piece of paper and handed it to him. He glanced at it and nodded.
"Yeah, I know the street. I'll see you home safely." He held out his arm for her to take, as though escorting her to a dance.
"My father used to box," she told him. For a moment she felt as giddy as she had when she first met Aubrey, and he'd not been nearly so handsome as the man who now had her hand resting in the crook of his elbow.
"Did he now?"
His name, she learned, was Geoffrey McCullum, born in Dublin, and a man who'd fought a fair few prize fights himself once upon a time. Won them all too, which was more than could be said for her father. If she'd been thirty years younger, she would have been half in love with him by the time he got her home.
By then, they'd realised she was missing. The door jerked open at McCullum's knock, and Jonathan burst out. "Thank God! Mother, where on earth–" He broke off. His jaw clenched. "McCullum. What the hell are you doing with my mother?"
"Your m–" McCullum stared at Emelyne. "Your son is Jonathan Reid? Him?"
Jonathan stabbed his finger at McCullum's chest. "This is low, McCullum. Even for you."
"You should be thanking me, Reid. We found your mother wandering in the park, and she was damn lucky we did, since she almost got bitten."
Johnny flinched as if the other man had slapped him and stared at her. "Is that true?"
"I think there was a dog in the park," she said, uncertainly, glancing at McCullum for confirmation. "But Aubrey chased it away."
"My God." Johnny sagged against the door frame. "Mother, are you all right?"
"I'm fine, Johnny, really. Geoffrey saw me home."
"'Geoffrey?'"
"You're welcome, Reid."
"Are the two of you acquainted?" Emelyne asked.
"Oh, we've known each other a while, Dr Reid and I," McCullum said. "We're old friends."
"Well, in that case," Emelyne said to him, "you really must come in for a sherry. And I believe Avery's made some mince pies." McCullum's expression went still for a moment, then Jonathan gave a bark of humourless laughter and the Irishman grinned.
"Why the hell not? It is Christmas after all."
Emelyne pretended not to hear Jonathan hissing, "McCullum, you bastard," behind her as she swept into the parlour. It seemed Edgar Swansea knew the Irishman too, so it was very nearly a reunion of sorts.
"How exactly do you know Jonathan?" she asked McCullum. None of the men had sat down. McCullum and Jonathan appeared to be stalking each other around the furniture. "Do you work at the hospital?" She remembered the guns. "Are you policemen?"
"Something like that. We keep the streets clear of vermin. Isn't that right, Dr Reid?" He plucked a photograph of Mary from the mantlepiece, frowned and glanced at Jonathan.
"My sister, Mary," Johnny said. "She passed away recently."
They glared at each other, gazes locked. Edgar was staring mournfully down into his sherry.
"But it's all right," Emelyne interjected, keeping her voice as cheerful as she could. "She might be dead, but she often comes back to visit, just like Aubrey. And Jonathan too, of course, although he doesn't visit nearly so often."
"You shouldn't invite the dead into your house, Mrs Reid," McCullum said.
She smiled sadly at him. "It's different when it's family. Especially at Christmas. It always used to be my favourite time of the year. When Johnny and Mary were children, and we'd all sit around the fire and Aubrey would read from A Christmas Carol, and then we'd all play charades."
"Charades. Now there's a game I haven't played in a while." McCullum grinned at Johnny. "Perhaps we should play a few rounds. Will you be on my team, Mrs Reid? I know exactly what we should set them first."
"Allow me to take a stab in the dark," Johnny said. "You're going to suggest Dracula."
"Johnny," she scolded, "you're supposed to wait for the game to begin."
"You heard the lady, Reid. You can't guess before we've even started."
"Is it Dracula, McCullum?"
"Jonathan!" Emelyne said sharply, and he looked away, muttering something under his breath.
It was indeed Dracula. Edgar was a good sport, gamely attempting to stretch their turn out, at one point guessing The Lair of the White Worm while Jonathan snapped, "How is that a one-word title, Edgar?" And then Jonathan and Edgar took their turn, which proved to be very hard for Emelyne to guess despite McCullum's best efforts. It turned out to be the wholly unChristmassy choice of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, which didn't seem quite in the spirit of things to Emelyne, nor did any illumination dawn when Jonathan pointedly quoted the part about men who fight monsters while glaring hard at Geoffrey McCullum.
From that point on the evening rather descended into the three men glowering at each other across the parlour, but by then Emelyne had had enough sherry that she didn't much care, and on the whole it was one of the more enjoyable Christmases she'd had in a long time.
They were still glaring at each other when she went up to bed, taking some of the cold carved capon with her.
Aubrey crouched on the balcony of her bedroom, gnawing at something. He froze as she opened the door and stepped outside, his lips wrinkling back in a snarl of warning. She tossed him the meat she'd brought. While he devoured that, she quietly kicked the dead rat over the side of the balcony. Aubrey didn't notice, and when she reached out to caress his head he shifted closer, pressing his back up against her legs like an overexciteable springer spaniel she'd had as a child.
"It's so good to have Jonathan back," she said, "If only Mary could have come too."
He looked up at her, watery eyes glinting.
She nodded slowly. "I know, Aubrey. I may be an old fool, but I haven't entirely lost my marbles yet. Mary's gone, and not like you or Johnny or Johnny's doctor friend. She won't be coming back. Not this time." She leaned down and pressed her lips to his grimy forehead. "I do love you, my darling. You know you're always welcome here."
Downstairs, it sounded like the children were arguing. Always the same at this time of year. She'd been the same way with her brothers.
"Merry Christmas, Aubrey," she murmured. "And…?"
He drew a rattling breath, and tugged at her dress. She leaned down and he rose up into a crouch, meeting her halfway. His voice wheezed out of his phlegmy chest, so hoarse she might not have been able to understand him had she not known precisely what it was he was about to say, as though he were still alive, reading Dickens to his family by the warmth of the fire. "And 'God bless us," he rasped, "every one.'"