Neezer Skroob Chapter 6 - The Ritual of Becoming

The Carol of Bells Unblessed

The bells that rang for joy now toll

For one who sold his very soul.

His flesh undone, his name erased,

A shadow rose to take his place.

The black book no longer whispered. It commanded. Pages pulsed with words written in no hand, searing into sight. Where once there had been questioning, now only obedience remained.

The final rite was laid bare upon the page: The Rite of Unbinding.

Read thrice, breath short, skin clammy. The rite demanded sacrifice, not of coin, not of name, but of the last thread that tied a man to himself. Burn the remnants of mortal mercy. Carve the sigil into living flesh. Speak the name that was not yet owned but would be.

For nights, hesitation. The city sang carols; church bells rang. Laughter drifted through shuttered windows, a reminder of what had been lost. Then came other thoughts: the Spirits, smug, shimmering, untouched by hunger or ruin. Bob Cratchit, fattened on stolen fortune, parading in silks. The jeering boys. Fred's awkward smile. Doors closed. Always closed.

The world had no place for Ebenezer Scrooge.

But perhaps it had place for something else.

Christmas Eve, 1850. Two years since his ruin. One year since he had found the book.

Preparation in secret, beneath the crumbling nave of St. Dunstan's-in-the-East, that half-abandoned church near the Tower where the congregation had dwindled to nothing and the verger no longer troubled to lock the doors. Fire had gutted the east end a decade past, and the parish had never found funds to repair it. The altar stood cracked beneath a roof open to the sky. Stones slick with rain and rot. Air cold as a tomb. Fitting. A dying church for a dying man.

The sigil drawn on the stone floor in soot and blood. Not ink, not chalk: the book forbade such weakness. A shard of stained glass sliced shallow lines into palm, blood dripping in careful arcs until the broken circle with three strokes lay complete. Pain sharp, clarifying. Welcome.

Candles flickered to life though no hand had lit them. The air thickened, pressing chest until every breath came ragged and thin.

From the coat, the last relic of mercy: a small carved toy horse, whittled for Tiny Tim one Christmas long ago. Kept hidden even through the fall, impossible to part with. Trembling fingers set it in the center of the sigil.

The book's words burned across the page: Burn what love remains. Speak the name that is yours no longer.

A voice cracked. "Forgive me, Tim." Flint struck. The toy caught flame, smoke rising not gray but black, curling into tendrils that twisted like fingers reaching down from some vast and terrible hand.

And then the transformation began.

The smoke did not dissipate. It clung, seeping through clothes, hair, skin, burrowing like something alive. Burning and freezing all at once, fire and ice braided together. A mouth opened to scream but the sound that emerged belonged to no man.

The hands changed first. Skin stretched taut across knuckles, flesh thinning until bone showed through like pale branches beneath winter ice. Fingers began to lengthen. Small wet snaps. Cartilage separating. Joints popping loose and reforming longer, sharper. Nails darkened, thickened, curving into black talons that gleamed in the candlelight like claws dredged from deep water.

Knees struck stone. Claws gouged ancient rock.

The pain spread upward. Arms twisted, muscles knotting and reshaping beneath skin that cracked like old parchment left too long in the sun. Through the fissures, something darker showed: not blood, but shadow, as though night itself had taken residence beneath the flesh.

The spine arched. It crackled, vertebra by vertebra, each one grinding against the next as the back hunched and twisted. Ribs shifted, pressing outward. For a terrible moment, no breath would come. When air finally arrived, it tasted of ash and iron and something older, something without a name.

The face was last.

Jaw unhinged, stretched, resettled into something longer, sharper. Teeth loosened in their sockets, and a tongue that ran across them found they were no longer the teeth of a man. Cheeks hollowed, skin sinking into the skull beneath until the face was more bone than flesh, a death mask worn by something still breathing.

And the eyes.

They burned. Not with heat but with cold, a cold so absolute it seared. Squeezing them shut did nothing; the fire was behind them, inside them. When they opened again, the world had changed. Colors bled away. Shadows sharpened into blades. Heat rose visible from the stones. Rats trembled fleeing through the walls. The pulse of the city beyond the ruined church throbbed like a wound, every heartbeat a drumbeat, every breath a whisper.

The beard had grown wild during the transformation, tangled and frost-white, streaked with ash and something darker. Hair, once thin and patchy, now hung in matted coils past the shoulders, pale as bone.

The scream that finally escaped was layered, voices upon voices, as though a choir sang through a single throat. The sound cracked the remaining windows of the ruined church. Pigeons burst from the rafters. Somewhere in the city, dogs began to howl.

The candles guttered out. Yet the room glowed with a sickly phosphorescence, cold and green, rising from the sigil itself.

Silence fell.

What had been Scrooge staggered to the broken altar. In a shard of stained glass, a reflection. A recoil. Then, slowly, a leaning closer.

The eyes that stared back were pits of white fire, cold and endless, like stars seen through a grave. Skin hung in ridges and folds, gray as ash, stretched across a skull too sharp, too long to be human. Hands ended in terrible claws, each finger a weapon. The frame was hunched, twisted, wrapped in remnants of clothes that hung like shrouds.

Something that had crawled from a crypt. Something that had never been alive at all.

"Scrooge," came a rasp, testing the name. But it dissolved in the air, meaningless, a word for a man who no longer existed.

The book fluttered open of its own will, its pages scrawling new words in letters that smoked and curled:

You are no longer Scrooge. You are Skroob. Neezer Skroob. The Unbound. The Unblessed. The One Who Was Shown Mercy and Learned Its Price.

The name whispered itself. It fit the mouth as though always borne, as though every year of life had been leading to this syllable. The sound of it rattled the rafters. Shadows on the walls bent toward it, attentive, waiting.

The sigil's glow faded, but its mark remained, etched into the stone as though carved by centuries of patient hands.

Standing now. Taller than remembered, or perhaps the world had simply grown smaller. Movements strange, jerking, as though the body had not yet learned its new shape. But with each step, easier. With each breath, the cold inside settled into something almost like peace.

One clawed hand lifted. The smoke that still lingered in the ruined nave coiled around it like a servant greeting its master.

For the first time since the ruin, no hunger. No cold. No weakness.

Only power. Vast and dark and patient.

A turn toward the broken door of the church, where the London night waited, thick with fog and the distant sound of carolers who did not know what walked among them now.

"Now," whispered the voice that was the creak of coffin lids, the scratch of quills on ledgers of the damned, "let them come to me."

The fog rolled in through the shattered doorway, and with it, the first echo of the new name rippled outward into the dark:

Skroob.

Skroob has risen. Now he collects. Parts 7-9 await.