The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge (3 page)

On his otherwise barren chimneypiece, Scrooge kept a decanter of brandy and a pair of snifters (a long-ago Christmas gift from his nephew) for just such occasions. Only when his late partner was fully settled in the chair opposite did Scrooge rise and pour one glass nearly full, then dribble a few drops into the other. The full glass he passed to Marley; the other he kept for himself—not drinking, but periodically breathing the rich vapours that circulated in its depths. Marley had
politely taken his usual chair, a ragged and decrepit affair that would be no worse for the fresh brandy stains Scrooge would find there next morning—for it might truly be said of Marley that he could not hold his liquor.

It occurred to Scrooge that he might remark on this defect in his friend's character, for he was much in the habit of making merry, but Marley's fixed, glazed eyes and the hot vapours that swirled his ghostly hair told Scrooge there was more import to this visit than desire for a friend's society and wit. Marley was often wont to sit with Scrooge when the living member of this peculiar pair suffered a sleepless night due to an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of an underdone potato, but tonight Marley downed his brandy and, as the stain spread slowly across the cushion, raised his face to the ceiling and let out a cry of such lament that Scrooge, in spite of himself, felt chilled to his marrow.

“What troubles you, good friend?” asked Scrooge, in as calm a voice as he could (for though he was quite content to chat with Marley for hours, he never forgot that his friend was a ghost, and he knew that mystery and terror might lurk around any corner of the conversation).

“I'm sorry to frighten you,” said the ghost, not for a moment fooled by Scrooge's false composure, “but I begin to despair
of ever breaking these chains.” At this Marley rose and rattled the chains so that the sound echoed throughout the house, down the stairwell, across the yard below, and down the street, where gaslights flickered and neighbours abed shuddered in their sleep.

Scrooge waited until the echoes had died in the heavy evening air and the spectre had fallen back into his brandy-soaked chair. “You are not so fettered as when you first came to these rooms,” he said. “Surely all your works in the past score of years have shortened the chains you bear. Surely you must be close on to earning your rest.”

“These chains!” cried Marley, holding his arms aloft so that the chains dragged across the floor with a dull growl. “Since the night I enlisted the help of three spirits to turn you from a man of impervious selfishness to one who embraces all his fellow men with Christian love, I have been relieved of but five links.”

“Five links!” said Scrooge, jumping to his feet and striding to the window, where the thick summer air slid into the room. “Five links! But you have laboured these twenty years to help me be a better man, to keep me on the track you so wisely set me upon that Christmas Eve that seems another life ago. How can all those years of devotion have lessened your burden only five links?” And this Scrooge shouted into the night, as if
those who imprisoned his friend might be lurking outside his window and find themselves moved by his passionate testimony.

“Five links,” said Marley dully, not moving from his chair. “It is the paradox of my curse that in order to shorten my chains I must do good for those who still live, yet I have forever lost the power to interfere in human affairs. Few of my fellow spectres have lost as many links as five, and most despair of ever lightening their loads.”

Marley tilted his head back once again and opened his ghostly mouth, and more to stanch the wail that would curdle his blood than because he knew of any way to free Marley from his torment, Scrooge said, “What if there were a way?”

Marley froze, his mouth so wide that his face appeared nearly overwhelmed by its cavernous blackness. Then, slowly, silently, he lowered his gaze to the empty fireplace, pressed his thin lips together, and sat for several minutes, not wailing or howling or rattling his chains—sat for so long, in fact, that Scrooge began to wonder if ghosts could fall asleep. He was going over in his mind all of Marley's previous visits, trying to recall if such a thing had ever occurred, when the ghost parted his lips just enough to murmur, in a tone so low as to be nearly inaudible, “A way?”

Scrooge turned from the window to find Marley's gaze locked on him, and he almost thought he detected a spark of
hope in the spirit's empty, passionless eyes. “Let us consider the problem as a business proposition,” said Scrooge, encouraged by the bemused expression that seemed to wash over Marley's face. “You arranged for one man—that is, myself—to see the error of his ways and to waken his latent power for good on a single day, Christmas Day. For that your load was lightened by five links.”

“True,” said Marley, still not moving.

“One man, one day, five links,” said Scrooge, who, now that he had begun to think in terms of numbers, was in familiar territory. He could see the solution to Marley's torment like a row of figures in a ledger laid out before him—a simple matter of arithmetic. “What if I told you,” he said, “that I knew of a way to help hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and not just on one day, but on every day of the year? If one times one equals five links, three hundred and sixty-five times a thousand would free you of your chains a hundredfold.”

“You were never as skilled with numbers as I, Ebenezer,” said Marley. “I have changed you for more than a single day and you have been of aid to many others.”

“But nonetheless,” said Scrooge, “that goodwill is but a fraction of what I now envision.”

“But you know it is not within my power to help the living,” said Marley with a sigh, and he sank back into his
chair and dropped his head onto his ghostly chest so that the two seemed almost to merge.

“Not possible for you, perhaps,” said Scrooge, now trembling with the excitement of the vision unfolding before him, “but what if it were possible for me? What if I could help a thousand people or a hundred thousand, but I couldn't do it without you? Wouldn't that count for something?”

Without realising how it happened, for he never saw Marley budge from his chair, Scrooge found himself enveloped in a cold so chilling he could not move. It was a feeling that would have struck terror in the hearts of most men, but Scrooge knew it to be Marley's embrace. Cold though it was, he could feel the joy in his friend's spirit and the hope in his dormant, ghostly heart. And for the first time in all the years he had known Marley, thirty-two years in life and twenty years in death, he felt something else. A single icy tear dropped from Marley's eye onto Scrooge's cheek.

A moment later, Marley stepped back and looked his friend in the eyes. “What do you need from me?” he asked.

“First,” said Scrooge, without the slightest hesitation, “I shall require three
spirits.”

 

M
any a person in Scrooge's excited state (and I daresay you are one of them) would have shunned sleep, knowing as he did that his night would be haunted by not one but three spectres beyond that which had already paid him a visit. Not so for Scrooge, though. He climbed into bed, pulled the curtains shut around him, and was soon as sound asleep as you or I would be on a cold winter's night when a fire burned in the grate, the covers were piled high atop us, and we had nothing more to worry our minds than to wonder if the snow would stop falling by daybreak.

Scrooge awoke in blackness so complete that he knew it must be near the hour of the first ghost's coming—for only at such an hour, deep in the night, would total darkness reign in midsummer. The air sat stiller than still around him and
no sounds drifted up from the street to his open window. He was endeavouring to pierce the gloom with his sparkling eyes (which somehow continued to glitter despite the dearth of light) when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters. Holding his breath with excitement, he listened for the hour. One. No more. The hour had come!

Before Scrooge could leap from his bed to greet the visitor he knew must even then be arriving in his rooms, the curtains of his bed, at his feet, were drawn aside by a hand. In an instant Scrooge was sitting at the foot of the bed, his warm feet dangling above the floor, his face inches from the smooth and youthful visage of his unearthly visitor. How well he remembered that supernatural figure that hovered before him—though they had met only once, a score of years ago. The flowing hair of ancient white so incongruous with the tender bloom of rose on the unsullied cheeks, the muscular arms and legs bare to the warm air, the tunic of purest white, the sprig of holly, and above all the clear winter light that sprung from his head. Scrooge felt as if he were meeting an old friend, and he could not have been more delighted if the dearest companion of his youth had materialised in his rooms.

“Welcome, gentle Spirit!” cried Scrooge. “I thank you for coming to my aid on a night when you should, by all rights, be at rest.”

The Ghost of Christmas Past—for that, of course, is who stood before Mr. Scrooge—tossed back his head, shook his white locks, and let forth a long, musical sigh. “It is indeed many a year since I have ventured abroad in this sultry season, but I carry my winter with me.” Scrooge observed that the spirit's sigh had frosted the windows and raised gooseflesh on his own arms. “What business brings me here?”

“The welfare of my dear friend Jacob Marley, and of a thousand others who suffer in this city tonight.”

The ghost held out his hand. “I once guided you on a journey,” he said, “but now you have summoned me and shall be my guide. Whither would you?”

Scrooge laid his hand on that of the ghost and clasped him gently. “Before we journey to that past which is your domain, we must collect another passenger,” he said. But before he had uttered the name of that soul, who lay asleep and unsuspecting a few miles away, he and the ghost had passed through the wall. Scrooge was afforded no more than a glimpse of the lights of London before he found himself standing, with his spectral companion, at the foot of a bed not unlike his own, though the room in which it stood was cluttered with papers that seemed to cascade from every surface (of which there were many). Wild-eyed and afraid for his life, his hair jutting out from his head at unlikely angles, sat Scrooge's nephew,
bolt upright and clinging to the bedsheet, which he had pulled nearly over his head in fright.

“Merry Christmas, nephew!” bellowed Scrooge.

“U-u-u-uncle?” stuttered the disbelieving nephew.

“I'd like you to meet my nephew, Freddie,” said Scrooge, as casually as if he were introducing two acquaintances on a street corner. “Freddie, this is a dear friend of mine who once helped save my life and tonight will help save yours. May I present the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

If possible, Freddie's eyes opened even wider. From sheer force of habit, he managed to whisper, “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. . . .”

“You may call me Spirit,” said the ghost jovially.

“And what is your business here, Spirit?” asked Freddie, with a bureaucratic air that belied his continued unease.

“As I said, nephew, we come for your welfare.”

The nephew, now fully awake and of the belief that he might dispose of these unwelcome visitors in the same manner that he disposed of those members of the public who deigned to wander into his office in Whitehall, noted that a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end.

“Take heed!” cried the Spirit, rattling all authority out of poor Freddie, who now, if he had been wearing boots, would have been shaking in them.

“Rise and walk with us,” said Scrooge. “You must see the past ere we plot your future.” With this he laid one hand on his nephew and the other on the Spirit, and in a twinkling (though Freddie might have been more likely to describe it as a trembling) the trio found themselves in a cold stone room. The air was dank and stale, the only light a pale and hazy aura that seeped through an iron-barred window high overhead. The room was unfurnished (it was, in fact, so small it would have admitted little more than a single kitchen stool) and Freddie at first thought it empty. A low groan from behind him he took to be the voice of the ghost, until that spectre removed his cap and the room was flooded with the white light that flowed from his pate.

Freddie turned on his feet to take in the entire room, which he now saw to be no more than six feet square. When he saw the source of the groan he stopped in horror, his breath catching in his throat. Against his better judgment, he stared transfixed at the figure before him. The woman lay slumped against the rough stone wall, her hands and feet fastened to those same stones with chains as heavy as those that encumbered the ghost of Jacob Marley—a spirit which Freddie, prior to that night, had dismissed as his uncle's fancy. The woman's clothes were so ragged as to be nearly superfluous and her hair was matted far worse than the fur of the stray dogs on London's streets.

“What godforsaken prison is this?” choked Freddie.

“Not a prison,” said the ghost, to whom Freddie now paid rapt attention. “An asylum. St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics. This creature came here in hopes of a cure for her madness.”

“This cannot be,” gasped Freddie. “Such inhumanity is surely a thing of the past.”

“So it is,” said the ghost. “Perhaps you forget who I am. But this is a past you must see.”

“She was a governess,” said Scrooge, “working for a respectable family for seven years before she became ill. Now she has been chained to that wall for as many years, with no hope of salvation.”

The woman groaned again, a quiet and resigned sort of groan that seeped out of her like the last of the air out of a squeeze-box. She took no notice of either her visitors or the light they brought to her cell. Freddie reached out to touch her filthy shoulder but felt nothing but cold air.

“She is but the shadow of what has been,” said the ghost. “She has no consciousness of us.”

“What day is this?” asked Freddie, his eyes still on the wretched creature at his feet.

“Christmas Day,” answered the ghost. “A Christmas before you were brought into this world, though not before your uncle heard the first chorus of ‘Merry Christmas' strike his ears.”

“But how can doctors treat a poor woman like this?” asked Freddie.

“Coercion for the outward man, and rabid physicking for the inward man, were then the specifics for lunacy,” replied the ghost. “Chains, straw, filthy solitude, darkness, and starvation; spinning in whirligigs, corporal punishment, gagging, continued intoxication; nothing was too wildly extravagant, nothing too monstrously cruel to be prescribed by mad-doctors.”

“And what is to happen to this soul?” asked Freddie, tears gathering in his eyes as he felt unfamiliar emotions coursing through him.

But the ghost only replied, “Remember this Christmas and what you saw here.”

At this Freddie finally tore his eyes away from the woman and turned on his uncle. “Why did you bring me here, Uncle Ebenezer?” he cried, tears of despair and anger now streaming down his face. “Why do you show me this sight and tell me there is nothing I can do?”

“There is much you can do,” replied Scrooge calmly, exchanging a knowing smile with the ghost. “But it is time we moved on.”

As the room dissolved around them, and the figure of the poor woman faded into the shadow that it was, and then into nothingness, Freddie heard an upwelling of cries, as if a
thousand other inmates of that ghastly place let out their miseries at once. As the sound seemed just about to overwhelm them, it suddenly stopped, and Freddie found himself standing in a narrow street that curved downhill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where pedestrians might become passengers of the craft that plied the waters of the Thames. At the top of those stairs, where Freddie and his companions now found themselves, was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, which must have abutted on the water when the tide was in, but now abutted only mud. The sun hung low in the sky and there was a winter chill in the air.

“I know this place,” said Scrooge excitedly, pointing to the sign that hung upon the waterside warehouse.
MURDSTONE AND GRINBY'S
, it proclaimed. Though Freddie was still adjusting to the fact that it was no longer either nighttime or summer and that he was no longer in either St. Luke's or his own lodgings, Scrooge grinned with delight at his realisation: Not only did the grim and grimy warehouse inhabit the end of a street in Blackfriars; it also inhabited the pages of the novel that currently rested atop Scrooge's bedside table a few miles and some decades hence.

The travellers ventured inside the warehouse, inured as they were to the horrors of what they would see by the fact
that they visited only shadows of what had been. Within they discovered panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years. The floors and staircases were decaying and from the cellars they could hear the squeaking and scuffling of old grey rats. The dirt and rottenness of the place was worse than Freddie had imagined even from its dour exterior.

A large room on the ground floor of the warehouse rang with stern voices, clanking of machinery, splashing of water, and a score of other noises, making conversation amongst the visitors impossible, but the Spirit led Scrooge and Freddie to a dim and quieter corner, where an especially noxious odour hung in the air. Bent over a small table was a gaunt boy who could not have been more than twelve. His face was drawn and without expression, and his vacant eyes seemed to focus on something far beyond the work of his hands. His clothes were worn and ragged and his face and hands so dirty as to make his racial origins a matter of some uncertainty. The acrid smell in his corner of the warehouse rose from a pot of glue, into which he repeatedly dipped a brush. With this smoking concoction inches from his nose, he brushed the back of a paper label, which he then transferred to an empty bottle. This process he repeated some dozens of times in the few moments that Scrooge and Freddie observed him. His hands
were cracked and burned from the glue and his eyes red from the fumes. As he placed each freshly labelled bottle to the side he let out a rattling cough.

“His father is in debtors' prison at the Marshalsea,” said the Spirit. “Strange that if a man has twenty pounds a year for his income, and spends nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he is happy, but if he spends twenty pounds one he is miserable, as are his children.”

“A talented boy he was,” added Scrooge. “Such promise.”

Without pausing to ask how Scrooge knew the young lad, Freddie asked, “How long must he work like this?”

“Sixteen hours a day,” replied the Spirit, “with a half hour for tea.” Though Freddie had meant to ask for how many days or weeks or, God forbid, months longer the boy would be employed in this dreadful work, he reeled at the thought that for even a single day a child should be forced to work such hours in such conditions.