A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Part 2.
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CHAPTER TWO | Marley’s Ghost
Scrooge walked home to the rooms where he lived. Years ago his partner Marley lived there. They were very old and dark and silent. The knocker on the door was large but it was like hundreds of other door knockers. Scrooge never looked at it. And he wasn’t thinking about Marley when he put his key in the door. So how did he see Marley’s face in the knocker? Yes, Marley’s face! There was a strange light around it. It looked at Scrooge with its glasses up in its hair, like Marley when he was alive. The hair was moving slowly, the eyes were wide open, and the face was very white. Scrooge looked at it for a moment, and then it was a knocker again. He was surprised, but he went in and lit his candle. Then he looked at the knocker again.
‘It’s nothing!’ he said, and closed the door.
The sound echoed around the house, but Scrooge wasn’t frightened of echoes and he went slowly up the dark stairs. He liked darkness; it was cheap. He looked around his room: nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa, nobody under the bed, nobody in the cupboards. He locked the door and put on his dressing-gown, slippers and nightcap. Then he sat in front of an old fireplace with a very small fire in it. For a moment he thought he saw Marley’s face in the fire.
‘Humbug!’ he said.
Then he looked at the old bell above him on the wall. He was very surprised when this bell began to move. At first it moved slowly and quietly, but soon it made a very loud sound and all the bells in the house began to ring too. Suddenly they stopped. Scrooge heard a strange noise far away in the house – a noise of metal, like chains. It was coming up the stairs. Something was coming towards his door.
‘It’s humbug!’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it.’
But the thing came into the room and stopped in front of him.
He couldn’t believe his eyes! The same face: Marley’s face! Scrooge recognised his dead partner’s clothes and boots, and he saw a long chain round his transparent body. The chain had heavy cash-boxes, keys, locks, and account books on it. Marley was looking at him with cold, dead eyes. There was a handkerchief round his head and chin.
‘Well?’ Scrooge said. ‘What do you want with me?’
‘Much!’ It was certainly Marley’s voice.
‘Who are you?’
‘Ask me who I was?’
‘Who were you then?’
‘In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.’
‘Sit down – if you can.’
The Ghost sat in a chair on the other side of the fireplace.
‘You don’t believe in me, do you?’ it said.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because perhaps I ate a piece of meat or cheese and my stomach didn’t digest it, so you are only the consequence of a bad stomach.’
Scrooge said this because he didn’t want to show his terror. But the Ghost’s cold eyes frightened him very much.
‘If I eat this candle,’ Scrooge continued, ‘I’ll see hundreds of ghosts like you, but they’ll only be in my head.’
Then the Spirit gave a terrible cry, and it shook its chain with a tremendous noise. Scrooge trembled. And then he fell out of his chair with horror when the Ghost took off the handkerchief and its chin dropped on its chest.
‘Help!’ he cried with his hands on his face. ‘Oh, why are you here, terrible Spirit?’