A Christmas Carol

Excerpt From: A Christmas Carol

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s-book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. That one piece of a far away life, of filled evenings and nights, Scrooge was but loath to relinquish.

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 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 would not concede to have bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven years’ dead partner that afternoon, not even to himself. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that 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.

Scrooge held in place, his heart near a standstill at the unbelievable image he had surely conjured with having spoken of his dead partner just that afternoon. Damn that sod for dredging up ghosts to haunt him.

And out of all of it, 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 in memory by breath or 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.

To its point, the horror seeped into Scrooge. His skin bore that chill to its depths; the icy grip of something to which he had long ago left to die as surely as his partner had those seven years ago. His nephew! His nephew had rambled nonsense of love and it had addled Scrooge’s brain, he was certain of it.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon of Marley’s face, 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. Fear and loss so keen seared his bones and hammered at his mind. 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. Hope sprang forth to war against fear in those seconds within Scrooge and gave discredit to the moment. But there it was. Scrooge had one fleeting weakness, one wish, to see taut shoulders and arse trapped under linen. To catch a glimpse of long, muscled legs beneath woollen pants.

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.