A Christmas Carol… If It Had Gone Horribly Wrong Within The First Few Minutes

Marley was dead to begin with. Remember that, because it’s important later in the story. He had gained a well-deserved reputation as the most ruthless and predatory moneylender in all of London, and foreclosing on widows was a particular specialty of his. He regretted that he could not foreclose on orphans as well, since they owned no property, so he settled for kicking them surreptitiously whenever he got the chance. My point is, he was a real son of a bitch.

And so, when Jacob Elizabeth Marley died of syphilis on Christmas Eve 1836, his only mourner was his equally unscrupulous and mean-spirited business partner, Ebeneezer Scrooge. If anything, Scrooge was even more of a skidmark than Marley, and Scrooge was weirdly proud of the misery and suffering that they had created together. He vowed to continue their work. Even after Marley’s death, the office they shared near the London Stock Exchange still bore a sign over the door that read Scrooge & Marley.

“It’s a branding thing,” Scrooge would tell people who asked. Few did.

In the ensuing seven years, Ebeneezer Scrooge became even meaner and greedier than ever, foreclosing on widows at a furious pace and somehow making that a profitable business for himself. On a good day, he could foreclose on seven or eight widows, kick a dozen orphans, and still have time to berate and humiliate his poverty-stricken clerk, Bob Cratchit, who was financially dependent on the terrible job Scrooge had given him. He had a sick kid at home or something. Once, just for fun, Scrooge made Cratchit eat an entire lump of coal.

Christmas Eve 1843 was a fairly good day for Scrooge, at least by his twisted standards. He’d only gotten to foreclose on three widows and hadn’t kicked a single orphan, but he did get to reject a dinner invitation from his nephew Fred in a particularly brutal way and he made absolute mincemeat out of two charity chumps who foolishly came into the office, scrounging for donations. Needless to say, no donations were made that afternoon. The only low point was when Scrooge realized he had to give Bob Cratchit the next day off because it was Christmas or some other hippie bullshit like that. And so, to cheer himself up, Scrooge threw lumps of coal at Cratchit’s head all day. One left quite a mark.

After work, Scrooge had his customary supper of gruel and lamb fat at a nearby restaurant. It was the cheapest thing on the menu, and even this he got for free because he claimed he found a Band-Aid in his gruel. He always kept some old Band-Aids in his vest pocket for just such an occasion, and it worked about 60% of the time. Thus, with his wallet full of money and his belly full of gruel, Scrooge went home to spend Christmas Eve by himself, the only company he could ever tolerate for long. Fun fact: he lived in Jacob Marley’s old chambers, which is a totally real thing from the original story that people usually overlook.

Arriving home, Scrooge was briefly disconcerted when he thought he saw the face of Jacob Marley materialize on the front door knocker. But he chalked it up to slight indigestion, plus the peyote he’d done earlier in the day, and went inside. He climbed the rickety stairs and changed into those hilarious old-timey pajamas people wore in the 1800s. You know the ones that are basically a dress and a pointy Smurf hat? That’s what he was wearing as he crawled into bed and began to think about what he’d do the next day. There’d be no widows to foreclose on, of course, but he could throw lumps of coal out his bedroom window and hit passersby, including a few orphans, the good Lord willing. A couple were bound to hobble by at some point in the day.

But it was not to be! Ebeneezer Scrooge had only been asleep for a few minutes when something truly strange and terrifying happened. The late Jacob Marley, seven years in his grave, materialized as a translucent ghost in Scrooge’s bed chamber. A particularly gruesome ghost he was, too — withered and desiccated, with an eerie bluish pallor. Death had obviously not been kind to him. Plus, he was dragging these thick, heavy chains behind him and made a loud “CLANK CLANK!” sound wherever he went.

The unattractive ghost of Marley hovered at the foot of his ex-partner’s bed and yelled, “EBENEEZER SCROOGE!!!” in his loudest and spookiest voice, the kind you’d use if you were running a haunted house for the Jaycees. Now, one thing I have neglected to tell you so far is that Scrooge was getting up there in years. He was nearly 40, which in those days was like a million. Plus, he lived on a diet of gruel and lamb fat, so he was not exactly in top physical condition. Therefore, when he saw the hideously decayed visage of his dead business partner, he sat bolt upright in bed, clutched his chest, gasped in agony, and collapsed as the life force abruptly left him. The room fell silent.

After a moment, Marley ventured to speak, this time in a much softer voice: “Ebeneezer? Buddy? You okay?” This garnered no response whatsoever.

Marley began to panic. He’d only meant to scare Scrooge and now he’d apparently killed him. He became flustered and started staring around the room, as he did not know what to do next.  Flashing back to a first aid course he’d  taken at the YMCA, he tried performing chest compressions on his one-time partner, but Marley’s  vapor-ish see-through ghost hands just passed through Scrooge’s upper chest with no consequence. An attempt at CPR likewise proved futile, as Marley’s ghost breath had no effect on the lifeless miser at all.  It was no use; Scrooge was dead.

“Well, shit,” said Marley.

The ghost of Marley floated over Scrooge’s bed for a few minutes when he was suddenly tapped on the shoulder. He turned around to see the ghost of Ebeneezer Scrooge staring angrily back at him. Scrooge now looked much like Marley, which is to say, not good. Marley did his best to smile at his old partner.

“Ebeneezer!” he said in his cheeriest voice. “Good to see you, man! It’s been a long time!”

“Indeed, Jacob,” replied an impatient Scrooge. “I’d say about … oh, seven years?”

“Uh, yes,” said Marley, now trying to avoid eye contact. He pretended to clear a little phlegm from his ghost throat.

“So, Jacob,” said a seething Scrooge, “what was it you wanted to tell me?”

“Oh, uh, it was nothing,” replied Marley, sheepishly.

“Nothing? I’m dead, Jacob!” Scrooge’s anger was unmistakable. “You materialized as a super-scary ghost in my bedroom on Christmas Eve, and now I’m dead because of you! So whatever you wanted to tell me must have been pretty goddamned important. What was it, Jacob? What did you want to tell me? I’m literally dying to hear it!”

“Well, uh,” began Jacob, “it pretty much boils down to… be nicer.”

“Be nicer?”

“Uh, yeah. You know, to, like, widows and orphans and stuff. Oh, and to Bob Cratchit, too. His kid is sick or something. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, exactly. I’m not a doctor.”

“Yeah, obviously,” said the ghost of Scrooge.  “Anything else, Jacob?”

“Uh, let me think. Be less greedy?”

“Less greedy. Mm hmm. I see. Is that it?”

“Pretty much,” said Marley. “Oh, uh, you know your nephew Fred?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you should have said yes to his dinner invitation.”

Scrooge took a moment to compose himself before replying.

“So let me get this straight, Jacob,” he said at last. “You wanted me to be nicer, be less greedy, and accept my nephew’s dinner invitation?”

“Yes.”

“And you thought the best way to convey this message was to LITERALLY SCARE ME TO FUCKING DEATH?”

“Well, uh, the plan didn’t go exactly the way I’d hoped.”

“A fat lot of good that does me, Jacob! And I just now noticed, I’m dragging around these heavy-ass chains! Care to explain THAT?”

“Those are the chains you kinda, sorta… forged in life,” Marley replied shyly.

“The chains I forged in life?!”

“Yeah, um… how do I explain this? See, each link represents something bad you did in life. And you did a bunch of bad things, so… yeah. I’ve got ’em, too.” Marley illustrated his point by jangling his chains and making the “CLANK CLANK” sound.

“Any chance I can get rid of them?”

“Well, no. See, the plan was for me to scare you into changing your ways so that you could redeem yourself while you were still alive. Obviously, that did not happen tonight.”

“And my soul is now…?”

“Damned for all eternity, yes.”

Scrooge let out a deep sigh of frustration. It was at that moment the two ghosts were joined by a third. This one was an ageless, genderless, angelic, glowing figure with shoulder-length golden hair and a flowing white tunic. It spoke in a soft soothing voice but was obviously a bit irritated.

“Excuse me! Are you guys even going to need me tonight?” said the third spirit. “Because I have other places I could be right now.”

“Oh, hey, Ghost of Christmas Past!” said Marley.

“You know this… this thing?” remarked Scrooge, astonished.

“Yeah,” said Marley to Scrooge. “We sort of work together. It’s complicated.”

“You have some weird friends now, Jacob,” said Scrooge.

Marley did not respond to this. Instead he turned to the third spirit and said, “No, Ghost of Christmas Past, we won’t need you to take Mr. Scrooge back to the places he’d known in his youth and young adulthood and show him where he went wrong at various critical moments in his life.”

“You were gonna do that?” said an astonished Scrooge.

“Uh, yeah,” said Marley to Scrooge. “That was the original plan.”

“Can you still do it?” asked Scrooge, this time directing his question to the third ghost.

“Sorry, amigo. No can do,” replied the Ghost of Christmas Past. “It only works for people who are still, you know, alive.”

“Oh,” said a disappointed Scrooge.

“So if you don’t need me,” said the third ghost, “I’m gonna hit up a party that the Ghost of Christmas Future is having. That guy seems like a total downer, but I swear, he throws the sickest parties. Fully catered. DJ. Bouncy house. The works.”

“Am I invited?” asked an optimistic Marley.

“No,” replied the third ghost flatly before disappearing.

The ghosts of Marley and Scrooge were once again left alone in the solemn silence of Scrooge’s bed chamber. They just sort of hovered there for a long moment, neither one knowing what to say next. It was Scrooge who finally spoke.

“So, Jacob, as long as we’re both ghosts, you wanna go haunt some orphans?”

“I’d like that, Ebeneezer. I’d like that a lot.”

And so, with a renewed sense of purpose, the two reunited partners went off into the night. It was going to be a merry Christmas after all.

THE END