by Stuart Le Grice

Created on: February 29, 2008

"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!" as his Nephew bid him a Merry Christmas, and those two words encompass the feelings of the truly miserly and miserable Ebenezer Scrooge. A man of such unimaginable bad will that he only lets his long suffering employee Bob Cratchit use one piece of coal in the fire at a time. A man that sees Christmas day as little more than a poor excuse for picking a mans pocket every twenty-fifth of December, and warns the aforementioned Cratchit that he had better be at work all the earlier come Boxing Day if he is to have the whole of Christmas Day away from work. Yes, it's fair to say that Scrooge kept Christmas in very much his own way by simply ignoring and berating it completely, he ignored his Nephews repeated requests for him to join him and his wife for a Christmas dinner, preferring his own melancholy company. Of course this sort of attitude could not be left to fester a moment longer, and so it was that this Christmas Eve as Scrooge sat in his dark and cold chambers that a deep and mournful rattling of chains emitted from the basement and grew in strength as something someone seemed to be walking deliberately towards old Scrooges room, toward and then straight through old Scrooges door.

"Scrooges color changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know him; Marley's Ghost!" and fell again."

There, standing before Scrooge was the Ghost of his seven years dead partner Jacob Marley! Dressed as he always was along with a chain of keys, padlocks, cash boxes and ledgers clasped desperately in his dead hands. "This is no light part of my penance" said Marley's Ghost, "I am here tonight to warn you, you will be haunted by three spirits". Despite Scrooges utterance that he'd rather not, Marley's Ghost insisted that without them Scrooge faced an eternal path of torment similar to his own. The spirits would come in the form of Christmas` past, Christmas present and Christmas` still to come and Scrooge was to receive the first of the three visits this very night at one o'clock in the morning. And true to Marley's words the spirits visited Scrooge and took him on a series of terrifying journeys looking at missed opportunities in Scrooges past, of love from others spurned, of friends brushed aside and ultimately of a miserable, lonely and despised man. The question was could Scrooge do anything about the way

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