Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories

The Marley Case by Linda Haldeman

We do Christmas right at our house — the holly and the ivy and the manger and the tree. Stockings all hung and an ever full wassail bowl for thirsty carollers. I use the pronoun “we” editorially, for all this holiday jollity comes your way with the compliments of Joyce and the kids. I’m not much of a celebrator myself, and even in my youth avoided when possible all those cherished tribal rituals.

Some people don’t. Joyce, for instance. For years I didn’t understand. I thought it was just for the children, all the decking of halls and jingling of bells and harking of herald angels. But as the children grew up, the merry mayhem diminished not at all, and I still find myself in my middle years surrounded by a trio of oversized moppets bandaging boxes in miles of red satin ribbon and spreading tinsel all over everything.

A week before this Christmas just past, I was force fed a certain minimal dose of spirit when I was carted to the church youth club’s annual dramatization of A Christmas Carol. This, I must admit, is one of the less objectionable parts of the customary Saturnalia. It’s not the Royal Shakespeare Company, to be sure, but it certainly is an improvement on the pageants of my childhood, where at least one angel fainted every year and the wise men always forgot their lines. As in everything else seasonal, the family had a considerable stake in this production. Stephanie, in a billowy gauze gown that reminded me painfully of a Sunday School angel’s robe, was the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“Long past?” the boy who played Scrooge asked warily.

“No, your past,” Steffy replied in a thin, æthereal voice that actually made me, her father, shiver. I have at times envisioned Steffy as a basketball coach or a carnival barker, but certainly not as an actress, and not with that voice. Remarkable.

Mark played, of course, Tiny Tim. He’s small for his age and is able to project a deceptive air of cherubic innocence.

“God bless us every one,” he intoned with the falsetto intensity of a child evangelist. It was a performance that melted poor sentimental old Scrooge’s heart. It hardened mine, not just because I could not fully separate Mark smiling sweetly onstage from Mark raising hell at the dinner table, but because I always suspect virtuous children.

We stopped at Mister Donut on the way home. Steffy, no longer ghostly, had a double chocolate doughnut and a cup of hot chocolate. I could almost see the acne pop out. Mark, choosing, it seems, to remain for a while in character, selected something gooey called “angel filled.”

“It’s remarkable,” said Joyce, “how a great piece like that doesn’t date. But then the Christmas spirit doesn’t date, either.”

“Bah!” I said. “Humbug!”

“Oh, Daddy,” Steffy sighed as only an adolescent daughter can.

“You know,” I went on, “I’ve often wondered about one thing. Just as it says: ‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’” (I was proud to quote with such perfect accuracy, for the kids were obviously impressed. And how often can a man of my age and shortcomings impress his kids?) “Okay. Marley was dead. But what did he die of?”

“I don’t know, probably a stroke or a heart attack,” said Joyce. “After all, he was a classic type A personality.”

“Have you considered the possibility of foul play?”

There. I had caught their attention, dropped a curdling dollop of vinegar into their emotional eggnog of peace and goodwill. What fun.

“Oh, I get it,” Mark exclaimed in an astounding show of insight, for him. “He could have been murdered.”

“Now who would do that?” Joyce laughed.

“Look for a motive.”

“Scrooge himself would be a prime suspect,” said Steffy. She’s quick-witted for a ghost and a sophomore, and she shares my love of detective fiction. “He had a motive. Money, He inherited Marley’s half of the business, right?”

“Too obvious,” I said. “The obvious suspect is never the real culprit.”

“Anyhow,” Mark chimed in, “if Scrooge had done him in, why would Marley have come back from the dead to save him? I bet it was good old Tiny Tim, bashed the old skinflint’s brains out with his crutch for not paying his father a decent wage.”

“Impossible,” Steffy snickered. “How old do you think Tiny Tim was, midget? He probably wasn’t even born when Marley died. ‘Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,’ Scrooge says. Bob Cratchit might not even have worked for Scrooge and Marley then. Faced you, hosehead!”

Occasionally, not often, mind you, but every now and then, your children make you proud.

We celebrate Christmas early now that the children are older, one tradition that I like, for it gets the worst of it out of the way and permits the household to settle back more quickly into the blessed monotony of the midwinter doldrums. It all starts on Christmas Eve, with an extensive carolling tour of the neighborhood, ending up at St. Nicholas (no less) Parish Church in time for Midnight Mass. I don’t attend, especially at Christmas, for of all tinsel, liturgical tinsel is the most incongruous.

I was feeling particularly Scroogish about the whole business this year, so I took my dinner, a slapdash hoagie on an undersized bun (fast before feast, I suppose), sought refuge in the den, and did not show my face until the merry revellers were ready to leave. Then I sent them off with a resounding, “Bah! Humbug!” which was greeted with much untoward merriment.

“Oh, Daddy,” said Stephanie.

“Don’t get into the brandy,” Joyce warned.

I waved to them from the doorway, then went back inside the house and watched them from the living room window until they had turned a corner and could no longer see the house. Then I turned off the string of colored lights that outlined our front porch, pulled the plug on the Christmas tree, and got into the brandy. Not terribly, for brandy gives a vicious hangover, just enough to make me mellow. Once I was sufficiently mellow, I turned out all the other lights and went to bed.

That was a mistake. Sometimes brandy works, and sometimes it backfires. I don’t know that it really was the brandy’s fault. The house was so empty, so silent. For the last month I had longed and prayed for silence and solitude, but now that I had it in abundance I found it a hollow and empty state.

And then there was the moon, which had the bad taste to be full on a cloudless cold night. It was a silver-white moon, shining down unshaded on a silver-white earth. Too much, much too much, as if the entire universe had been hung with tinsel. And the light wouldn’t stay outside where it belonged; the damned washed-out white light slithered in around gaps in the lined drapes and crawled across the bed to sit glaring on my eyelids and murder sleep. I lay under that light brooding, I don’t know why, on the fate of one Jacob Marley, dead nearly a century and a half.

Finally giving up the struggle, I crept out from under the electric blanket, shrugged on my slippers and went downstairs. The moonlight followed me, illuminating the stairs and the wide entrance hall. The living room curtains were sheer and generously invited all the moonlight in the vicinity inside, as to a silver-white open house. The Christmas tree stood before the large bay window looking tacky as only an unlighted Christmas tree can. The trees outside, undecorated even by their own natural foliage, silhouetted by the overpowering moonlight, appeared like black spectres, skeletal, ominous. I turned quickly about, went into my study across the hall, closed the door, drew the drapes, and turned on the comfortably warm yellow reading lamp.

The third shelf of the bookcase that lined one wall held a handsome leather bound set of the complete works of Dickens, an inheritance from my grandfather that I had not bothered for years. I took out the volume titled Christmas Stories and settled back in my recliner, opened it, and read aloud softly into the moonlight.

“‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’”

“Amen say I to that,” declared a voice deep as the Pit, yet thin as a breath. I jumped up with a cry, dropping the book. In front of me stood the ghost of Jacob Marley, exactly as Dickens had described it, a tall stocky man in waistcoat and boots dragging along with him a large wrought iron chain to which ledgers, keys, padlocks, purses, and the like were attached every few links, like charms on a bracelet. He was so transparent that I could read through him the titles of my grandfather’s set of Dickens on the bookshelf behind him.

“What the hell?” I cried, realizing as the words left my mouth how absurdly unDickensian they sounded. The apparition did not crack a smile, prevented perhaps by a strip of white cloth bound around its head from jaw to balding crown.

“Marley, sir,” he said. “Jacob Marley.”

He offered his transparent hand, and I automatically held my own out to shake, then drew back.

“With all due respect, Mr. Marley,” I said, my voice admittedly a little tremulous, “this is very absurd. What do you want with me, anyway? God knows, I keep Christmas. Look at that damned tree out there. It must have a pound of tinsel on it. Do you know that I actually sing along at the elementary Christmas program sing-along? That’s keeping Christmas with a vengeance.”

“Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine,” the Ghost said illogically.

“By scaring the living daylights out of innocent people in the middle of the night?”

The Ghost sighed. “I am doomed to wander through the world trying to do the good I failed to do in life.”

“What possible good could you do me?”

“I would lay you,” replied the Ghost.

I said, “Good God,” and sat down quickly. My chair of its own will flew back into the reclining position, pitching me back with a jarring thump. I closed my eyes and tried to bring order to my gyrating thoughts. It was possible, of course, that all this time I was safe and asleep under the warmth of the electric blanket and the influence of a slight overdose of brandy, dreaming. Or my subconscious had finally won the battle for my mind, and I was hallucinating in the den, enthroned like some mad king on my recliner, where I couldn’t do anyone much harm. But, being a rational person, even in the worst extremity, I expect my hallucinations to be consistent and make sense.

“I think you have that wrong, Jacob,” I said very quietly, wondering if it might be wiser to attempt to wake myself rather than waste intellectual energy reasoning with a trick of the right brain. On the other hand, I was a little afraid I would find that I was not asleep at all. “As you are the ghost, I ought to be laying you.”

“If you could, I should be most grateful,” Marley’s Ghost said courteously. “For you see, though you are in the flesh and I in the spirit, we share a common affliction. We do not find rest in the night.”

“Well, if someone would turn the moon down, I might be able to get some sleep.”

“You walk the night only when the moon is full?” the Ghost asked. “I do not think so.”

“Well, a little darkness might help. I don’t know why the hell I can’t sleep. If the story runs true, you can’t rest because you were a miserable, stingy bastard in life, and now you have to go around scaring other miserable, stingy bastards into playing Santa Claus. If that’s what you’re after here, you certainly picked the wrong house.”

“I came here because you thought of me,” said Marley’s Ghost. “It is the thought of me that keeps you awake. You have asked a question that has never been asked before, not even by he who created me. To lay you is an easy matter; we must simply find the answer to your question.”

I looked at the shade in astonishment. “Surely you know what you died of?”

He shook his head. “I exist only to the degree in which I have been thought about. He who created me did not think about the manner of my death; therefore the manner of my death did not exist, at least not until you inquired into it.”

“I wasn’t all that interested,” I grumbled. “I was just making conversation.”

“If you were just making conversation, how is it that you do not sleep?”

“Damned if I know.”

The Ghost shuddered, causing his chain to roll thuddingly along the carpeting. “My dear sir, I beseech you. Avoid that expression. As it stands you have aroused my curiosity, and since for whatever reason we have both been deprived of our repose this Christmas Eve, we might amusingly and perhaps profitably pass the time exploring the mystery, eh?”

I shrugged. “Why don’t you go on without me? I think I’m going to mosey on back to bed.”

I got up and started to move past him, but his transparent hand caught my forearm in a remarkably strong grip.

“Come now, my dear fellow, don’t be hasty. I cannot travel alone, incorporeal as I am, and a very minor ghost at that. I must justify any journey that I make like some otherworldly civil servant, and you could be my justification. Besides I was a man of business and had not the imagination to solve mysteries. You could be much assistance.”

“And what do I get out of it?”

“Unless I am much mistaken, my dear sir,” said Marley’s Ghost, “you are not the sort of fellow who sleeps well on an empty belly or an unanswered question. What I offer you is a rare opportunity to travel through time, to observe the world as it was and will never be again. You have in your secret heart longed to be a detective and solve some great mystery; here is your chance, perhaps your only chance, to fulfill that wish. Corporeal life, believe me, is woefully short. There is much time on this side to regret lost opportunities.”

I walked slowly back to the recliner and sat down.

“You probably died of a heart attack or a stroke or... or food poisoning.”

“You do not see it that way,” said Marley’s Ghost, “so that is not the way it will be.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, my dear sir, that you are the author.”

He picked up the tooled leather volume from the floor where I had dropped it and handed it to me. I pushed the chair into the reclining position and began to read aloud. The Ghost, leaning on the back of the chair, looked over my shoulder at his own likeness in a reproduction of the original engraving.

“‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it, and Scrooge’s name was good...’”

A reclining chair is not the best place for reading; it is too comfortable. I have often dropped into a doze even while reading some remarkable thriller, so it is not so awfully strange that I did so now. I was startled into wakefulness by the resonant striking of the hour, twelve. That did not seem so awfully strange either, until it occurred to me that we do not have a clock that strikes the hour.

I sat up quickly, jerking the chair upright. The moonlight, it appeared, had taken over my den, touching everything in it with a silver glow of tinsel. And directly in front of me, in the place where old Marley had first appeared, stood my daughter Stephanie, in the billowy Christmas angel gown, her light brown hair caught in a circlet of holly, a mysterious half smile on her lips. The tinsel moonlight reflected off her in such a way that she appeared to glow.

I struggled to regain my equilibrium.

“Back from Mass already, hon?”

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” she said in that voice of wind-rattled icicles that made me shudder.

“My past?” I decided to play along.

“No. Long past. Come, my time is short.”

“As is your stature.”

I fully expected the usual, “Oh, Daddy,” but got instead an outstretched hand and a calm but firm order.

“Rise! and walk with me!”

“No thanks, hon...” I started to say, but then saw that the beckoning hand was transparent and slightly iridescent. I shrank back against the Naugahyde upholstery of the chair, my cold, but quite opaque, hands firmly gripping the armrests. “M-must I?”

The apparition, so like yet so unlike my daughter, shook its shining head solemnly, and little sparkles of tinsel floated in the air around it.

“You are under no compulsion and may decline, without retribution, to accompany me. Though it is strange that you would do so, as you are one of the fortunate ones who is spared the painful journey into your own past. What you are being offered is an opportunity offered to few, to visit a past that is not your own, simply for the satisfaction of your curiosity.”

“Really? No strings attached? No moral?”

The Spirit’s slight smile broadened just a trifle. “Few journeys are made in what you call the ‘real world’ without something being learned. You will be shown things; what you do with them is your business. The opportunity will not arise again. Come with me now, or close the book forever.”

I am a man incapable of passing an open door without peering into the room, so this challenge left me no choice but to accept it. I grasped the Spirit’s hand, surprised to find that it felt like solid flesh. Its grip was, indeed, very strong, pulling me up abruptly from my chair and leading me through the den and across the hall to the silver-bathed living room. I can well remember Steffy in the flesh dragging me from the comfort of the den with this same eagerness to see the decorated tree. I saw it now, shining in the moonlight, and it seemed larger, fuller, more brilliant and, goodness knows, gaudier, than it had before.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked as we hastened toward the bay window.

“London, December 24, 1836.” It spoke in the tone and manner of the narrative voice that so often opens cheaply made historical or science fiction films. The date, seven years prior to the publication of A Christmas Carol, reminded me all of a sudden of the purpose of my journey.

“Wait, where’s old Marley?”

“Right with you, my dear sir.”

And there he was indeed, peering over my left shoulder, bandage and all; apparently he had been there, unnoticed, the whole time. Now he grasped my left hand, and together the three of us passed through the bay window’s leaded panes. I felt the solid glass brush past me like the strips of a beaded curtain.

I had closed my eyes as I approached the window and did not open them at first when I felt the cold outside air. For one thing the air itself felt different, damp and chilly rather than sharp and crisp. And all about me was a confusion of noise and smells. So many smells: coal fires smoking, gas fumes, old fish, beer, sewage, sweat, and then rising above all this the sweet, pungent odor of mince pie. I stood for a moment in wonder, my head raised like that of a hound downwind of a herd of deer, just sniffing. Then I had the strange, vaguely unpleasant, sensation of someone passing through me, as if I were a beaded curtain, and I opened my eyes.

I knew at once where I was, for I had been there before, in the City of London late on a winter afternoon, at a busy intersection just east of those three brooding stone edifices that form the hub around which the ancient city spins: the Bank of England, the Mansion House, and the Royal Exchange. I marvelled at how similar the scene was to the one I had enjoyed in my student days, watching schools of office workers crowding down the old streets through the early twilight into underground and railway stations. And yet, as I recovered from the shock of finding myself in that well remembered spot, I saw it all as very familiar yet marvelously strange.

Leadenhall, that was the name of the street, between two churches, St. Michael Cornhill to the west, its stolid, rectangular, pinnacled tower standing out above everything, and to the east St. Andrew Undershaft, the site, it is said, in older times of a gigantic maypole. It is the churches, the ubiquitous churches, that give the City of London its illusion of timelessness. The London I now stood in was older, dirtier, noisier, and even more charming than the one I had known.

I am a city person, revelling in the urban rush and clutter and racket. But this was almost too much city for even me, noisy beyond belief, with the clatter of donkey carts and hackneys and great lumbering omnibuses over the stone paving, the shouts of peddlers urging their wares on the passerby, and the intermittent clanging of bells. I counted the chimes of the hour coming from St. Michael’s tower with some surprise. It was only three o’clock, yet it was dark enough for the gas lamps to be lighted. The air was thick with an oppressive dark green smog that penetrated everywhere but softened the roughness of the street life as if wrapping it in gray-green chiffon.

I was finding it difficult to see, a problem the natural inhabitants of the place seemed to have overcome, and blundered into a young woman who materialized suddenly out of the fog, hurrying along the street, a dark knit shawl wrapped around her striped silk gown, a wide-brimmed bonnet shielding her face. I got a look at it, though, a pretty, childlike, bright-eyed face set with a grimness that seemed contrary to its nature. I attempted to excuse myself, but realized, when the stack of petticoats rustled right through my astonished leg, that apologies were not just unnecessary, they were downright useless.

I fell in step beside her, curious about where she might be going and why she was so nervous. Invisibility, by the way, is a very useful attribute to have in a crowded city street, especially when trying to keep up with someone who is in a great hurry and doesn’t even know you’re there. I was enjoying myself thoroughly, drinking in the wonderful grimy aliveness of the city, feeling the rush and the gaiety, observing with delight the sideshow of strange and colorful characters free in their anonymity. I took pleasure now and then as I hurried through (literally) the crowds in playing childish “invisible man” games, swinging unseen from a lamppost and passing right through the polished brass “can” of a baked potato vendor stationed on the pavement in the shelter of Whittington Avenue as it leads into the old Leadenhall Market. I must have caused a bit of a breeze, for the coals in the iron firepot suspended beneath the large, showy receptacle shot up in a sudden surge of orange flame and died down. Then I remembered Marley and the superstition that flames rise in the presence of ghosts.

“Sorry about that,” I said over my shoulder but saw only the Ghost of Christmas Past helping the hot potato man get the conflagration under control before his primitive steam table blew up. Marley had hurried on ahead through the confusion of the great poultry market.

“Where are you going?” I shouted over the racket of hundreds of chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, and, for all I know, dodos and emus, bewailing their fate in the overcrowded condemned cells of the market, a Dickensian slum for poultry if ever there was one. A group of three or four very dirty, ragged boys hoarsely chanting some tuneless carol passed through me, surrounding the potato vendor in an effort to take advantage of the generosity of his clients and the warmth of his fire.

“My chambers,” Marley panted, pointing vaguely toward the street ahead of us. “I lived there, and still do, in a way of speaking, in the wine cellars.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” I murmured.

I followed the Ghost down a narrow byway along the back wall of a great stone house, relieved to be free of the feathered bedlam of the poultry market. We came out on a street of large, impressive buildings only slightly less congested than the thoroughfare, and Marley’s Ghost, apparently oblivious to the chill drizzle of sleet that was beginning to fall from the gunmetal gray sky, and the black city mud splashed up from the street by passing hooves and bare metal wheels, jaywalked joyously across toward a narrow courtyard almost hidden between two buildings. I hesitated a moment before following him into that nineteenth century rush hour, for I still did not quite trust my bodiless condition.

A light touch on my arm caused me to turn. The Ghost of Christmas Past, disguised as my daughter Stephanie, pointed northward along the side of the great stone house.

“East India House. Torn down in 1862. You ought to have a look at the front portico facing Leadenhall Street. You will have seen something no person living has seen.”

That sort of exclusiveness holds little appeal for me. I was much more interested in exploring Marley’s wine cellars, but something else facing Leadenhall Street did catch my interest. A nervous young woman in a striped silk dress and a dark shawl and bonnet had just crossed the thoroughfare and was turning north by the soot-stained gothic church of St. Andrew Undershaft.

“Hey, Marley! Up this way!” I shouted. “I want to see where that girl’s going.”

He followed me with an obedience I have yet to inspire in the living.

“May I presume to ask why we are stalking this particular person?” he asked when he had caught up.

“I don’t know, really. It’s just a hunch. Good detectives always follow hunches.”

Crossing Leadenhall at that hour was dangerous and indeed all but impossible for ordinary mortals, but we floated easily through hansom cabs and hackney coaches, piemen and holly decorated donkey carts. We followed the girl northward past aging mansions and half timbered Elizabethan relics into an area of small shops with living quarters above them.

“Where are we?” I asked Marley.

“Simmery Axe.”

St. Mary Axe, I translated. English place names are marvelous and their pronunciation even more marvelous. I couldn’t say at first how I happened to know this particular pronunciation, but a song began to run through my head as I trotted up the pavement in pursuit of my hunch.

Gilbert and Sullivan, wasn’t it? I used to know all the words to most of the patter songs when I was younger and could sing after a fashion. The clatter of the horses and the rhythmic clanging of a muffin man’s bell formed an accompaniment, and I sang aloud, safe in the realization that no mortal ear could hear me. Marley, however, regarded me with some pain.

Good Lord. I stopped abruptly in front of one of the small shabby shops, for the girl in the bonnet had stopped and was looking uncertainly at it. The stone front was black, as was the door. The bowed windows — meant, I suppose, to display wares — were so soot begrimed as to appear black as well. The uncertain flicker of candles inside the shop only helped to obscure the view. I looked up. Over door and window in polished brass letters was the name of the shop, with the number 70 set like quotation marks at each end.

I started to laugh. The whole thing was so preposterous. I was not used to having such literary dreams. But this was stuff I knew about, and I couldn’t let a gaffe like that pass.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Christmas Past, who still floated on my right. “You just can’t do that.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the courteous Spirit.

“Anachronism. Blatant, baldfaced anachronism. Gilbert wrote The Sorcerer in 1877. This is supposed to be the London of 1836. Gilbert was born in 1836! Now, how do you explain that away?”

“Elementary,” said the Ghost. “It’s an old established family firm. The present proprietor is Gilbert’s sorcerer’s grandfather.”

“That’s ridiculous. How could the company exist before its author invented it? You can’t do that, even in fiction.”

“You can do anything in fiction as long as you’re consistent,” the Ghost explained with a great show of patience. “And once something, a place, a character, is conceived, it acquires an existence of its own — a past, a present, and a future.”

I laughed. “What a cop-out. Are you trying to tell me there’s no difference between flesh-and-blood historical reality and — and the figment of somebody’s imagination?”

“My dear sir,” the Spirit replied, “we are all figments of Somebody’s imagination.”

That’s what you get for arguing with a ghost.

I returned to my hunch.

The girl, after taking another quick, frightened look about her, entered the shop, activating a tinkly little bell. I followed, passing through the door after she had closed it, just for the thrill of doing it that way while I could. After all, I’m going to have to open doors for the rest of my life.

The inside of the shop was as dark as the outside, and the soot-saturated fog seemed to have passed through the closed door and filled every crevice. What little I could see through this miasma looked like a combination of old fashioned hardware store and the sort of cheap magic tricks emporium found on seaside boardwalks between the penny arcade and the bingo parlor. A small, round, bald man wearing a blue herringbone checked waistcoat over a pink shirt looked up from behind a low wooden counter where he sat playing solitaire with a set of ancient tarot cards by the light of a close-trimmed oil lamp. A meagre coal fire provided the only other light.

“And what may I do for you, madam?” he asked the girl in a carefully smoothed down cockney accent. His face was pink, his smile somewhat cherubic; his voice was oily and self-deprecating, a pudgy Uriah Heep.

The girl’s hand, when she removed it from her fur muff, was trembling, and her voice was thin and strained with tension.

“I... I’ve come for the — uh — the effigy.”

The proprietor raised his spectacles to the top of his head and looked carefully into her face for perhaps half a minute.

“Ah, yes,” he said slowly. “Mr. Scrooge.”

He spun around to face a cluttered shelf on the wall behind his desk, although I have no idea how he did it, since the chair did not swivel.

“Ah, here we are. Mr. Scrooge.”

He took down a cylindrical package wrapped in newspaper like an order of chips and handed it to her. She took it gingerly and stared at it a moment.

“Oh, dear. How dreadful. I don’t know how I could do this.”

J. W. Wells smiled slightly. “The first time is always the hardest.”

“Oh, dear,” the girl cried in agitation. “I certainly shan’t be doing this again. It’s not for me, you know. I never could do such a thing for my own gain. It’s for Fred, poor dear Fred. He hasn’t a farthing, and it’s so dreadfully unfair.”

“And if dear Fred ’asn’t a farthing, he can’t marry you, eh?”

The girl lowered her head. “He hasn’t asked me yet.”

“He ’asn’t? Bless my soul.” The little shopkeeper chuckled, catching the girl’s hand in a quick, gentle, but firm movement. “Come now, let’s see what we ’ave here.” He took the package from her hand and spread the palm out under the lamp, raising the wick just a trifle. “Now this is very nice, don’t you see? Such a lovely long life line. I see marriage, but not so soon. No matter, it’s a very fine hand: happiness, many children, prosperity in due time. Be patient, say the Stars, your time will come.”

He released her hand and placed the package back into it.

“A Christmas gift for poor, dear Fred. That’ll come to five quid, madam, and a bob for the reading. For you. Regular clients I charge ’arf a crown.”

“Oh.” She fumbled in her muff and pulled out a small purse from which she carefully counted out coins.

“You’re sure this is Mr. Scrooge?” she asked, staring at the little package. “Do you know Mr. Scrooge?”

The chuckle was less cherubic, more malevolent. “Know Mr. Scrooge? My dear lady, there’s not a chap within the sound of Bow bells that don’t know Mr. Scrooge, more’s the pity. His chambers being just over the way, I’m privileged betimes to share the street with ’im. ‘Mr. Scrooge?’ says I and tips me hat. ‘Umph,’ says he, if he says anything at all. Not a kindly man, our Mr. Scrooge.” He leaned over the counter familiarly. “It’s a favor we’re doing this old town, you and me.”

The girl shuddered and drew back. “For Fred,” she whispered. “Just for Fred. What do I do with it?”

“Set it in the fire, madam, saying these words...” He drew her face close to his and whispered a series of phrases in her ear which I, though I leaned close, could not make out. “You’ve got that now? Good. Wouldn’t you care to have a look at it? It’s a marvelous likeness, I must say.”

“Oh no. I couldn’t bear it. I’d rather not know what he looked — looks like.”

She secreted the package in her muff and ran from the shop, the bell on the door tinkling in her wake.

“Thank you very much, and a Merry Christmas to you,” the shopkeeper called. “And a Merry Christmas to Fred, the lucky fellow.”

I passed through the closed door just as the great bell of St. Andrew Undershaft boomed the hour of four. The sky was dark, what sky could be seen, but the street was bright with torches and gaslights. Marley materialized beside me.

“Who is this Fred?” he asked.

“Scrooge’s nephew.”

“Oh yes, that dreadfully jolly young fellow who came around to the counting house every Christmas Eve, spreading cheer, like marzipan, all over everything. Scrooge assumed he was after his money. But I don’t recognize her. Who is she, and what’s she up to?”

“She’s Scrooge’s niece-in-law to be, I think. And, if I’m not mistaken, she’s attempting to melt a rich uncle in wax, so to speak. Come on.”

I pushed through the crowd, for I was losing my hunch. Suddenly there was a diversion on the southwest corner of Leadenhall Street, in front of the brashly neoclassic facade of East India House. Two slightly drunken porters had collided and were now settling the question of right-of-way with bare fists. The nearby market emptied into the street to join the melee. I passed through the center of the mob, having caught sight of a dark bonnet disappearing down Whittington Avenue. Then I saw her standing in front of the brass baked potato can temporarily left untended. She looked around, white-faced, then quickly threw her package onto the glowing coals of the firepot and fled westward.

By the time I reached the vessel the paper had burst into yellow flame and shrivelled to a blackened crust, and the wax effigy itself was starting to melt. It was a rather horrid sight, as recognizable human features began to run together. Recognizable indeed, for it was a good likeness, a perfect likeness of Jacob Marley.

“Hey!” I called to the girl’s rapidly retreating back, forgetting my ghostly state. “You hexed the wrong man!”

The effigy was beginning to melt rapidly, and I put my hand into the pot, attempting to retrieve it. A firm, transparent grip on my wrist prevented me.

“You are free to observe only,” said the Ghost of Christmas Past, “not to intervene. The past cannot be altered, even in fiction.”

So we stood, three ill-matched spectres in the sooty darkness as snow began to fall lightly over the scene, watching the effigy slowly dissolve and run in rivulets of molten wax around and between the hot coals.

“I don’t understand,” said Marley’s Ghost.

“It’s a form of black magic,” I explained. “A wax image of the victim is slowly melted with appropriate curses or whatever.”

“That bright-eyed, dimpled, fresh-faced child involved in such dark deeds? I find that difficult to comprehend.”

“She was driven to it by necessity, I think.”

“Oh?” Marley’s Ghost was puzzled. “Not by me, surely.”

“No. By your partner. She wants to marry Fred, you see, as in time she will and make him very happy. And I suppose in time she will also secretly be glad that her attempt at witchcraft failed. It wasn’t her fault, of course, that it did, or the sorcerer’s either. Apparently he mistook you for Scrooge. I gather you sometimes answered to the name of Scrooge, as it is written of him: ‘Sometimes people... called Scrooge Scrooge and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.’”

Marley’s Ghost nodded solemnly, his jaws clacking together under the white bandage.

“We were like that, as it were one person in two bodies. It was also a device for keeping clients guessing. If an unwanted solicitor asked for Mr. Marley, he would be out for the day. I would be Mr. Scrooge. It was something of a game, I venture.”

“A game that cost you your life.”

Just at that moment Marley’s Ghost gave a gasp and backed into the baked potato can, pointing at something with a trembling finger. Following his gesture I saw Marley himself, in the flesh, a solid identical twin of my companion of the evening in all aspects except the bandage, stumbling eastward, somewhat unsteady on his feet, as though the curse had already begun to take effect. He tripped on a loose paving stone and fell through me, catching himself on the large round handle of the can. He leaned on it an instant to get his balance and inadvertently looked down into the glowing coals of the fire pot. The effigy had melted from the back of the head forward and the face now spread over the coals like a projected relief map. I tried to shield Marley from the sight, but of course he saw through me, as many do. With a cry the poor fellow staggered back, holding his chest, took three steps forward, and fell. We three stood there, helpless in our insubstantiality, and watched a crowd gather around the stricken man, make a corridor for a doctor to come through, and then close up again around him, and after a while six strong men, like premature pallbearers, carried the dying man down the street to his chambers. For though some of the bystanders weren’t certain whether this was Mr. Scrooge or Mr. Marley, all knew that he was one of those gentlemen and that his home was above the wine cellars and offices in the old dark house in the courtyard off Lime Street.

Chimes sounded again from the tower of St. Andrew’s Church. It must be six, I reasoned. The great bell tolled once and fell silent. I waited, straining in the sudden oppressive silence for the bell to go on. But it did not. All was darkness and stillness around me, and I was alone. Where was I now? In Scrooge’s dark chambers above the wine cellars and holiday vacant offices? He could not have been more alone than I was. I sat back, for wherever I was, I was sitting, and wished fervently for companionship, longed to hear the ominous clank of chains, to see some otherworldly luminosity break through the terrible blackness. Then I knew what was Scrooge’s curse, and Marley’s, to be alone and lonely on Christmas.

In the distance I heard voices, faint but growing stronger. The voices surely of an angel choir sent to redeem my hardened soul. I welcomed it as it drew near.

With a rush of comfort and joy I realized that I was in my recliner in the den and the angelic choir was Joyce and the kids coming home from Midnight Mass, strewing vocal tinsel through the dark world as they came.

I stumbled to my feet, groping for a light switch. I must turn the decorations on again before they got back. I had suddenly lost all desire to be mistaken for Scrooge. I felt along the wall, falling into bookcases and knocking over bric-a-brac. The singing was coming closer.

My hand was on the knob, and I pulled the door open. Light, brilliant, festive, many-colored, twinkling, clashing, gaudy Christmas light filled the living room and glowed from the porch. The lights had come on, how or why I did not know, but I thanked the Ghost of Christmas Present, who surely must have been.

The front door burst open, and there were my wife and children, bright and glowing in the light of the outdoor decorations. And I was glad to see them.

Standing like a young orator on the hall carpet, shaking off snow like tinsel, Mark spread out his arms and crowed.

“God bless us every one!”

“Amen say I to that,” I answered, turning back to the den just long enough to pick up and carefully close the book that lay on the floor still open to the picture of Marley’s Ghost, before I joined the family around the misplaced, overburdened tree in the living room.

“Shall I light the candles?” Joyce asked.

“No, no,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

“There’s light enough already, light enough.”

And I kissed her quickly, under the mistletoe.