A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART THREE

Marley was still dead. This needs to be understood, even though to mention it is to state the bleeding obvious. Very few beings have ever successfully returned from the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, and certainly not a wicked old miser buried in some forgotten churchyard in Victorian London.

He’d watched as old Ebenezer had happily lived to a ripe old age, shattering the various chains which he had accumulated for himself, and eventually dying, surrounded by his friends and family as a much-loved pillar of the community.

That was all very well and good, of course, but it didn’t change the fact that old Marley himself was still doomed to walk through eternity dragging his own wretched chain behind him, and, having suggested just one human life to be given an opportunity for redemption to seize at, it seemed, was not enough to change that. He might have lost a link or two by happening to thrust Ebenezer into the spirit’s spotlight, but his own burden remained much the same, if not slightly worse.

Because, with Ebenezer gone, he had finally lost his last link to the life that he once knew, and he was doomed to watch as, piece by piece, every aspect of the world he once knew was dismantled and replaced by the shiny and noisy new world which he was now meandering through. Occasionally he might come across a familiar fragment of the buildings and corners he once knew, but it had mostly been obliterated and replaced with glass and steel and plastic, some of which moved along the roads at a quite alarming rate, and some of which flew through the fetid air in almost miraculous ways.

Occasionally, as he walked his eternal walk, he would pull back on his pigtail and force his cold eyes to look upwards towards the skies and pause in his wanderings to stand and stare in amazement. Occasionally, as he stood there invisibly, someone would walk right through him and give a sudden shiver and perhaps remark to whomsoever might be listening to them that “someone just walked over their grave” before moving on.

This would bring old Marley right back down to Earth, because, whilst it was never the most pleasant of sensations, it did at least give him some contact with the world he’d lost.

But whilst he was fully aware that the world around him might have changed beyond all recognition, human beings remained much the same. They still worked their way through their days, accumulating and grasping for themselves and remaining almost oblivious to the misery and poverty all around them.

Other doomed spirits did occasionally try their best to intervene, as they too were lugging their own chains along behind them, to which there were attached devices that Marley never understood the function or the form of, but which he assumed were merely the current tools of the banking trade.

These young upstarts in their ghostly braces, striped shirts and spectacles, with those strange boxes clamped to their ears, whizzing around for all eternity in their wedge-shaped horseless carriages, didn’t seem to be as much concerned for their fellow man as he had become once he had passed across, but then the times had changed and some of these modern spectres seemed to act as if everything was the responsibility of the individual and almost gave the impression that they looked forward to seeing their friends and colleagues sharing their fate.

But then, perhaps sitting inside a vehicle for the rest of time, wasn’t quite as big a burden as trudging along dragging the chain behind you had once been, so maybe they didn’t quite feel the pain in the way that they were supposed to.

It is, after all, very difficult for those dishing out their eternal damnations to keep up with the times.

The better part of two centuries had since passed and he was still here, still doomed to walk the earth and merely watch as humanity sowed the seeds of its own destruction either individually or collectively.

Still pondering upon the injustice of this, he found that he had drifted into the city again. He was always drawn here, of course, because it was where he had spent the majority of his adult life. The shining glass towers had all been built upon the ruins of the world in which he had chosen to inhabit.

He noticed from the various fripperies adorning some of the streets and windows and lobbies that it was Christmastime again and it would soon be the anniversary of his lonely, wretched death, and he let out another of the mournful, ghostly wails which had once so alarmed his late, lamented friend and partner, but which now was completely lost amongst all the honks and shouts and squeals of this busy, noisy world.

Feeling rather more dejected than he usually did, he walked on, lost in his thoughts and keeping his eyes firmly upon the pavements slightly above his feet. He drifted aimlessly around the streets of the city as they darkened and those workers that could went on their way. He glanced at a clock. The clerks would never have got away with finishing this early back in his day, he found himself ungraciously thinking, immediately realising that, despite everything, he’d not really changed all that much.

He sighed.

It was a long, lonely, wretched sigh that came from the sure knowledge that he really was doomed to remain the way he was forever. He noticed that his wanderings had brought him to the base of yet another shining steel and glass tower and, judging by the gleaming signs above the entrances, this one had been built by a company known as “SnatchCon” which was the sort of name that implied that  they knew exactly what is was that they were doing, even if, in public they would no doubt deny it emphatically.

He looked around him. Apart from the security guards, it all seemed to be rather quiet now that everyone else had left for the day, although the lights burning on a level far above his head implied that something was still going on within.

Having nothing better to do with his time, he stood up and was just about to make his way upstairs when he heard the soft clicking of nervous footsteps approaching the tower from out of the darkness…