A Veritable Scrooge

“A veritable Scrooge” – that was that they called him. Alastair could hardly blame them, for on the surface they were quite correct. But only on the surface.

If he had truly been like the miserly skinflint of literary fame, Alastair would have heeded the ghostly warnings he had received. He had not. Instead, he had laughed them off as feverish visions, by-blows of indigestion. He had regarded them entirely as gravy, not of grave, and had gone on living his life the way he always had – extravagantly.

Those had been the days, when coin had poured from his hands and bought him all the joys life could offer – food, wine, women, the appearance of friendship. It had bee Alastair’s delight to flaunt his wealth. If he could remind someone that he was their better through the judicious deployment of a guinea or two (or possibly, on occasion, even more), then he would do so. It was the basis of his social acumen, and so Alastair would use it to its utmost potential.

When his poor, deceased friend Francis Petherington had appeared to him to warn him of the hellish consequences a life of gluttony and mammon would surely earn him in the next life, Alastair had laughed in his translucent face. He could not believe it to be true. More to the point, he would not. Such a truth was too terrible to bear, so he did not.

“Very well,” his friend had sighed. “I’m very sorry for what follows, old chap, but you have only yourself to blame.”

With that, the spectre had vanished, and Alastair had enjoyed another chuckle at his absurd imagination.

The next day, Alastair had called in on a favourite restaurant to dine on a brace of fowl. The moment he signed the amount onto his tab, he was wracked with pains so terrible he could barely stand. Once the attack was passed, he had ordered a stiff brandy to calm his nerves. All the liquid did was turn brackish in his mouth and pass through his bowels swifter than a steam-train. This necessitated a new pair of breeches, which burned when he wore them.

So it went on. Whenever Alastair spent his money, nothing but pain, discomfort and embarrassment ensued. He took to his rooms as much as he could, ordering victuals in and groaning with the after-effects. In time he learned that the pains ebbed and flowed according to the level of extravagance – to buy something merely for sustenance, and minimal enjoyment, he could get away with a mild headache at worst. The pain grew incrementally with the amount he spent for anything beyond his basic needs.

Alastair could at least go out now, hobbling on a stick as he carried home his bread and cheese, wrapped in a threadbare cloak with boots that barely sufficed on the cobbles of London. His stomach griped him constantly, but he could bear that. So too could he bear the mockery of his one-time friends, if they had ever been so, and those he had mocked in turn in his time.

The one thing he could not bear was the memory of those fateful words: “You have only yourself to blame.”

Author’s Note

This story was part of my October 2021 Writing Challenge. The prompt was “Parsimonious”.

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