Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold. If the good St. Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol; but, at the first sound of, “God bless you, merry gentleman, May nothing you dismay!” quickly found himself in dismay. Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog, and even more congenial frost.
At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.
“You’ll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?” said Scrooge.
“If quite convenient, sir.”
“It’s not convenient,” said Scrooge, “and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself ill used, I’ll be bound?”
The clerk smiled faintly. Scrooge hated him a little for it. Tomorrow, Crachett’s day would be full of merry distractions, while Scrooge would count the bones of his former partner and the failures that went along with each one. With this in mind, Scrooge proceeded to take cold comfort in watching the good man squirm. After all it was, in part, the man’s fault.
“And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think me ill used when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”
The clerk observed that it was only once a year. Truly, Cratchit seemed to have assigned no significance of the day and how it related to his employment.
“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. He paused to observe the clerk fidget uncomfortably. With a self-satisfied sigh, he continued, “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”
The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas-eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s buff.
Scrooge fumbled around in his pocket as he watched the clerk go, and upon grasping the metal, pulled the key into the light and inspected it. The key, being primarily iron and ornamented with scrolled silver, fit the lock of the store room around back of the counting house. It was to here that Scrooge retired, shoving the key into the equally ornamented lock and turning it home. He did not light a lamp immediately but stood much like a ghoul himself in the gloom of the store room.
There in the shadows lay the real tools of Scrooge and Marley’s trade. Iron implements inlaid with silver runes, lanterns attached to mirrors designed to cast the brightest possible light, black powders that could ignite in an instant, herbs and salts to smudge and disperse the spirits. And darker still, vials of blood to draw the energies in and trap the worst of the ghouls that walked the earth.
With a sigh of a man who had done the same for years gone by, Scrooge moved a few ancient logs from a dusty woodpile and onto the small hearth. He threw a handful of black powder on the pyre and struck it alight with a practiced swipe at the flint stone. The flames lit the room with a bright, hot heat and then died down to a small flicker as the mummified logs struggled to catch. Scrooge knew he could have easily struck the logs alight without the powder, but the resulting smell of burning sulfur suited his melancholy mood.
Pulling a small flask from his deep pockets, Scrooge set about his task. As he had done every year on the anniversary of Marley’s death, Scrooge inspected the store room. With a practiced hand, he examined the protection wards on the doors and windows, feeling for weaknesses and looking for signs of molestation. Satisfied that the room was undisturbed, he drew up a hard stool, much like it’s twin in the counting house, and taking another long swig from his flask, proceeded to pull every weapon, tool and instrument of his defunct craft to his lap where he inspected, polished and cared for each one in turn. Not for the first time, Scrooge wondered about his old trade, ghoul hunting, and how the counting house had started as a front for this passion. With the passage of time and one death too many, the two professions had switched roles with the counting house taking prominence and ghoul hunting being regulated to a hobby mostly forgotten. Scrooge hadn’t taken a case since Marley’s demise.
Once Scrooge had satisfied himself as to the quality of the tools of his former trade, with the flames guttering in the hearth, he pulled out an old fob watch of his former partner. “For you, you sorry bastard,” Scrooge toasted before tilting back his flask and finding nothing but air, as he had drank the contents during the dischargement of his annual duties. He shrugged and stood, having to check his balance against the dusty doorjamb and leaving the final flickers of fire to burn themselves out, locked up the store room and stumbled out into the cold and foggy night.
Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having finished a few more cups, and silently toasted his former partner in equally vile terms, went home to bed. He lived in chambers, which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices. The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.
Now, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the City of London, even including--which is a bold word--the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge, while plenty in his cups, had not been prone to flights of fancy or tricks of the mind. He had toasted and cursed Marley’s memory in turns all evening, but it was an utter surprise when Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change--not a knocker, but Marley’s face.
Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath of hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face, and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.
As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.
To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.
He did pause, with a moment’s irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he
said, “Pooh, pooh!” and closed it with a bang.
The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every cask in the wine merchant’s cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and shambled across the hall, and up the stairs: slowly, too: trimming his candle as he went.
You may talk vaguely about driving a coach and six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall, and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge’s dip.
Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is comforting to dark souls, and Scrooge owned the lowliest. But, before he shut his heavy door, he shuffled through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face through the haze of drink to desire to do that.
Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they should be. No spectre under the table, no gholam under the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (to counter Scrooge’s inevitable morning head) upon the hob. No ghouls under the bed; no goblins in the closet; no phantoms in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall and he hit it unsteadily with a cane for good measure. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a fire iron scrolled with silver runes, the only tool of his former trade that he kept in the residence.
Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; adding a ward against spectral intrusion, which was not his custom. Upon turning from the protections, the room spun too quickly to his mind. Momentarily lost for balance and in correcting himself, Scrooge unwittingly disrupted his own magical works; scuffing his foot through the ward and thus feeling falsely secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.
It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. In his drunken state, having magiked himself in (to his mind) to the room, the fuel required for a larger fire was too far from reach being downstairs. He was obliged to sit close to the fire, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fire-place was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters, Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, and laid over all, in neat lines of silver, lay the runes he and Marley had laid together decades prior. Staring at those figures the face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley’s head on every one.
“Humbug!” said Scrooge; and walked across the room.
After several turns he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated, for some purpose now forgotten, with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that, as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased, as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant’s cellar. Scrooge usually thought of those casks with lust, but now that sound filled him with dread.
The cellar door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.
“It’s coming for me,” said Scrooge. “It’s past time!”
His colour changed, though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed the tampered wards and into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, “I know him! Marley’s Ghost!” and fell again.
The same face: the very same. Marley in his thick trousers, and knee-high boots, his vest pulling at the buttons where time had expanded his waist; the very pocket watch Scrooge had held in the storeroom now decorated Marley’s vest; his beard, as always was unkempt and his pigtail wig sat slightly skewed on his head. It had been Scrooge’s idea, all those years ago to pose as men of business, Marley had never quite got the hang of it.
The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of stones, keys, padlocks, rune inscribed tools, and even heavy tombstones wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.
Scrooge had often said that Marley had more guts than brains, but now he had no bowels at all.
No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.
“How now!” said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. “How did you come to this, old friend? Or are you not my friend at all, but some other pest wearing his guise?”
Marley’s voice chortled, no doubt about it. His eyes danced with a cold mirth at his old acquaintance’s expense. The dry, dusty laugh ran chills through Scrooge as it sounded so familiar and yet so inexplicably wrong.
“Who are you?”
“Ask me who I was.”
“Who were you, then?” said Scrooge, raising his voice. “You’re particular, for a shade.” He was going to say “to a shade,” but substituted this, as more appropriate.
“In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”
“Can you--can you sit down?” asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.
“I can.”
“Do it, then.”
Scrooge asked the question, because he didn’t know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that, in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the Ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fire-place, as if he were quite used to it.
“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your own senses?”
“Evidence that you were Marley, for one. It’s not often that men in our occupation come back to haunt the living. Not by choice, anyhow,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
The shade looked askance at Scrooge, “Or a bit of drink, old friend?”
Scr
ooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he appreciate this phantom throwing his shortcomings back in his face. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.
To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of his own. The phantom seemed to shimmer, as if a great heat stood between them, casting up waves to warp the air. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.
“You see this fire iron?” said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision’s stony gaze from himself.
“I do,” replied the Ghost.
“You are not looking at it,” said Scrooge.
“But I see it,” said the Ghost, “notwithstanding.”
“Well!” returned Scrooge, “Marley would know the implement and where it came from. Prove yourself or taste oblivion.” In truth the threat was a bluff. The fire iron was the only weapon in the house enchanted with the power to disperse the shade, but it could not send it to oblivion. The shade looked at Scrooge sly, and gave a wink with a tap of his nose. It knew, as surely as Scrooge did, and the shade thought it a good laugh.
“The fire iron came with the house,” Marley chuckled, “the silver from hard work at a counting house neither of us cared for. The runes from a silversmith who thought the order vain and spat sideways for the coin. And the first chance you had to use it, you skewered a goblin and spent the next fortnight cleaning its guts from the channels and crevices the silver wrought.”
Ebenezer Scrooge Page 2