The Christmas Spirits

by Whitley Strieber

Genres: Fantasy

Synopsis

George Moore is a modern day Scrooge, a futures trader who drives his staff hard, and won't let his assistant go home to look after her autistic son on Christmas Eve.Like Scrooge he is mean with money, but he is also mean with his sympathies and his time. He has to swerve to avoid putting money in a charity box and also crosses the road to avoid a family he thinks are probably gypsies on his way to dinner at a cheap cafeteria. An old man sitting nearby looks as if he might be looking for the warmth of some human contact. George refuses to meet his eye and hurries home.Various slightly odd, even disconcerting things happen. He encounters a nun who looks like an elderly child. He sees a Santa in the window of a department store, who seems to emerge from his Grotto, look confused, and is then surrounded by small elf-like figures who drag him back behind the curtains. Finally, when he arrives back in his apartment the old man from the cafeteria suddenly appears and reveals himself as George's old mentor in trading and in greed. Bill Hill reveals that he is dead and that he has come to give George a warning. He warns George he will have three visitors that night, and then in a flash he disappears.So it comes about that, as Bill Hill said, George receives three visitors that Christmas Eve, just as Scrooge was visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. But these are not the ghosties and sprites that frightened Dickens's readers. George's visitors are more ambiguous, more frightening to a modern sensibility. They are visitors that will give even today's reader goose bumps.They take George on an emotional journey that like Scrooge's journey - and the journey in another Christmas story, It's a Wonderful Life - teaches him the true value of Christmas, the true meaning of life and finally ... how to love. This new classic is both very scary and very Christmassy.

Release date: November 21, 2011

Publisher: Coronet

Print pages: 240

Sample

Chapter One

A faint music of bells from the great carillon at St. Mary Magdalene, the old church two blocks away, drifted into George Moore’s office. Megan came in, stopped and listened.

‘So beautiful,’ she said. ‘Don’t you just love Christmas?’

‘Money is spent, that’s for sure.’

‘I mean the feeling of the season, the celebration of life.’

‘I don’t get it, frankly. All those presents. What’s the point?’

She laughed. ‘George Moore, at least nobody could call you sentimental. Presents are an important part of it. I love to sit and think about Charlie and Michael and what they’d enjoy.’

George hardly heard her. He was working, analyzing the market action in sugar futures.

‘Why not try getting out into the streets? Enjoy the spirit of it! Or hop over to the Mag and leave a few gifts for the poor kiddies. Or the bus depot on Charles, it’s closer, and they’re collecting there, too.’

‘Sentimental rubbish.’

‘You’re muttering.’

He got up and went to the door of his office. The trading floor was three-quarters empty. ‘Great,’ he said to himself. ‘All I need.’

George had forbidden early departure. You didn’t leave before your markets closed, not ever. There was always money to be made, every day, even in these slow, stifled days before Christmas.

His memo had been very clear: We are open when the markets are open and employees are expected at their desks at eight.

As far as the futures trading business was concerned, Christmas just got in the way.

When he’d started out, he’d traded for the legendary Bill Hill, whose philosophy was simple: you worked until you lost consciousness. There had been a sign in the office which read, ‘If you don’t come in on Sunday, don’t come in on Monday.’ In Bill’s operation, it was not a joke. He kept records.

The carillon stopped at last, only to be replaced by the racket from the Salvation Army guy’s boom box on the sidewalk just below.

He worked on, blocking the distractions as best he could

By four, the snow was hissing against the windows and muffling the traffic noises from the street below – but not, unfortunately, the tinny carols emanating from the boom box. They used to have bands, those people, fools with blaring horns and tambourines. But at least it didn’t go on and on and on. People have to stop and rest; boom boxes do not.

Megan appeared again. The glance he fired at her should have been enough to communicate his annoyance, but she kept coming. Her lips drew back into that simpering smile of hers. Yet again, he reflected that he needed a new assistant. But Megan was wonderfully cheap.

‘Mr. Moore,’ she said, the smile spreading into an astonishing fissure, ‘Mr. Moore, I need to leave a little early today—’

‘Please don’t.’

‘Michael isn’t able to pick up Charlie—’

She’d often defeated him with that damned little boy. ‘What’s the problem with Charlie now?’

‘He’s coughing and his father can’t get away.’

‘You might not realize it, but this is a work day here, too.’

‘Of course, I understand that, but – well, they’ve all left.’

‘Not me.’ He gestured toward the desk outside where his secretary sat. ‘Not Miss Jefferson.’

‘She—’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Behind him, one of his array of monitors bleated a signal of the kind he liked to hear. Wheeling around in his chair, he saw that the position he’d set up in sugar futures that had looked so dismal all week had moved nicely into the money. He could take the profit off the table right now or wait for more the day after Christmas. He checked the technical indicators on the market. There were buyers still coming in. Should he wait, or take home a nice Christmas bonus right now? The price kept ticking up.

Then the monitor flickered. The lights flickered. The system crashed and began its reboot sequence.

There was nothing to do but wait, and he could be losing money. Damn the power company, they must surely have noticed by now that it snows in Chicago, so why weren’t they prepared?

‘Mr. Moore?’

He turned on her. ‘Yes, Megan!’

‘Can I?’

What was she about now? ‘Can you what?’

‘Go? For Charlie?’

He just couldn’t stand it. His staff might be a gaggle of disloyal pricks, but he was working, couldn’t she see that? ‘No!’

‘They can’t wait with him, they don’t do that.’

‘Please make other arrangements. Thank you.’

‘Mr. Moore—’

‘Thank you, Megan.’

As she turned and hurried out, his system came back up. A moment later, he could hear her murmuring into her phone, her voice urgent, but he couldn’t care less. The system could go out again at any moment. He transmitted the orders that would take his profits, and none too soon. The close was less than a minute away.

He sat back, waiting for his fills. Outside, Megan was still jabbering away on the phone. He punched the intercom. ‘Keep personal calls to a minimum, please. You know the rules.’

She started to respond, but he clicked her off.

That little boy, autistic – whatever that actually meant – or not, would no longer be allowed as an excuse. This was a workplace and she needed to respect that.

Which reminded him that she’d been late this morning for the fourth time this week, and he’d devised a little surprise for her. Now was the perfect time to spring it. He said into the intercom, ‘Megan, how are you doing on those trading reports?’ Annual evaluations of his traders were done every December. They told him who he had to bonus, who he could terrorize into taking a lower draw, and who needed to be sacked.

She appeared in the doorway. Her face was gleaming with tears. Fighting down his disgust, he looked up at her in silent question.

‘That’ll take through Christmas.’

‘You haven’t started them yet?’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘I did. At eight sharp. Over the intercom.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a constricted voice, ‘I was a little late coming in. I didn’t hear.’

‘And I didn’t know you weren’t there. So please get started. I’ll expect them as soon as possible.’

‘Right after Christmas.’

‘Christmas is fine.’

‘You don’t mean Christmas day?’

‘I’ll be here at eight sharp.’

Megan flounced out. He listened to her heels clicking away across the tile floor of the outer office. He would make certain that her replacement, when she was found, would be childless.

Pressing the intercom button again, he said to Linda, ‘Miss Jefferson, I’m leaving early today. I’ll be going straight home, reachable on my cell if anything important comes in.’

‘Yes, sir. Sir? Mr. Moore?’

‘What?’

‘I just want to let you know that I’ve accepted a position at Goldman Sachs.’

He took a deep breath. He was tempted to tell her to get out right now, but he couldn’t afford to be without her. ‘When?’

‘January 2. Right after the holidays.’ Her voice was flatly indifferent. She’d given him the absolute minimum amount of notice required by her employment contract.

‘Nice,’ he said. He clicked off the intercom.

His fills were back. He had made a hundred and twenty thousand dollars on the trade. A fair profit for the days he’d endured sweating it out. Fair enough.

The hell it was. If he’d stayed in he would have managed a half million by the middle of next week, maybe more. He was a damn coward, was what he was.

Well, the hell with it. Day before yesterday the position had been three hundred grand in the red, so who knew what would happen next week? No looking back, anyway, was there? Nobody evaluated the boss.

He shuffled on his overcoat, which was just beginning to fray but was still perfectly wearable. Then he tied his wool muffler snugly around his neck. He jammed on the winter hat he’d been wearing for ten years.

As he picked his way through the jammed desks of his traders, he had a shock. There was a huge food basket on Megan’s desk. He saw canned duck terrine, a bottle of Pol Roger, luscious strawberries, dark, gleaming chocolates, foi gras, fat, juicy looking dates and figs – the variety was extraordinary.

‘What’s this?’

She looked up at him, a frown of confusion crossing her face. ‘We all got them. From you.’

‘Not from me!’

‘But – look.’ She held out a card. On it was typed, ‘Joy of the Season, George.’

‘This is absolutely ridiculous. You say everybody got them?’

‘Even Tuffy.’

‘This is three hundred dollars’ worth of food! Who gives a gift like that to a janitor? Let alone a roomful of hostile ingrates like my excuses for traders.’

‘You do.’

He turned. Miss Jefferson stood beside her desk. ‘I did it on your behalf. And they cost $349.50 each.’

‘WHAT?’

‘You have got to be the nastiest, meanest, most ungenerous man I’ve ever known, Mr. Moore.’

‘How dare you do this to me! This is thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts! You’re a damn thief, is what you are, and I’m gonna wreck you over at Goldman.’

‘You can’t. Nobody cares what you say. You’re the Scrooge of the commodities business, Mr. Moore. Everybody knows about you. Do you understand that? How despised you are?’

He didn’t have to listen to this drivel. He’d make a few calls and put this bitch out on the street for the rest of her life. ‘You’re done here, Miss Jefferson. Gather up your personals and get out.’

‘I’m done? I don’t have to work out the notice weeks?’

‘Get out of my office!’

She grinned from ear to ear. ‘Well, merry Christmas to you, too, you old miser. Deck the halls with boughs of holly, I am outta here!’

Leaving her to box up her belongings, he strode across the trading floor and out to the elevator bank.

‘Goodnight, Mr. Moore,’ Megan said behind him, her voice dull. ‘Merry Christmas.’

He kept going. But then he stopped. ‘Happy Saturnalia,’ he said back t. . .