The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Read Online Free Page A

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 ofhope 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.”
    â€œTrue,” said Marley, still not moving.
    â€œOne 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.”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œBut nonetheless,” said Scrooge, “that goodwill is but a fraction of what I now envision.”
    â€œBut you know it is not within my power to help the living,” said Marley with a sigh, and he sank back into hischair and dropped his head onto his ghostly chest so that the two seemed almost to merge.
    â€œNot 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.
    â€œFirst,” said Scrooge, without the slightest hesitation, “I shall require threespirits.”

 
STAVE II

The First of the Three Spirits
    M any a person in Scrooge’s excited state (and I daresay you are one of them) would have