The Chains of Jacob Marley

Few men suffered the interminable misery that was Jacob Marley’s lot. Golden chains and silver shackles bound him between life and death, his leaden heart cursing him with its heavy stillness. Time slithered past, the shell of others’ realities guarding its slimy, green expanse. If only he could force a boot free of its bond, a glove free of its shackle, silver though they were. But reality belonged to the living; breath, to those truly alive. Though Marley surged against his gold and silver bonds for what seemed uncounted eons, his struggle proved as futile as had his life’s constant striving. The spectre that had been Jacob Marley, existing as he did between life and eternity, felt the chill of London’s approaching winter further crystallize his already frozen countenance; the fog wafting off the Thames further deadening his already insensate heart. Once a year, wasn't it? Or perhaps once each second, minute, hour, day, week, fortnight, month, decade, century, millennium. Only the Living could tell. A stray thought crossed Marley's mind. Winter ... yuletide ... Christmas. A spasm jarred his stiff, hoary countenance. Those warm beings, the Living, would soon begin celebrating the Savior’s Advent. "Savior"... from what? The Living knew nothing of agony, enjoying blissful ignorance of what awaits them on the Other Side. "Savior" indeed. During his life, or what had passed for it, Jacob had ridiculed any who acknowledged man's fallen state and his need for a Savior. "Foolishness! Humbug!" had been his response. A wistful pang thrilled his hollow breast at this Fatal Irony. If only I'd known. He, and his business partner Ebenezer Scrooge, had ignored the Blessed Season, but for the profitable opportunities it presented. Together, they had blasphemed the Holy Savior by selling their wares dearly to those who could afford to celebrate Christmas in high style. A moan began in Marley’s cursed spirit, arose and amplified through his protruding ribs, and gushed from his lifeless lips. His arms shook violently under the effort of raising his infernal golden chains toward the heavens. But even as his dead soul cried out, his mind knew the entreaty was too late. Eternally too late. Scrooge’s image came into Marley’s mind and he realized they had been friends of sorts, as much as two lustful men could be. He regarded Scrooge, not with jealousy over his partner’s lingering life, and not with contempt for his surviving to spend their fortune, for either of them would sooner endure torture than waste a penny. Yes, they had been two-of-a-kind in life, but now he wondered if they were both doomed to share the same torment in death. And for the first time, Marley considered Scrooge’s impending anguish with compassion. With all that remained of his being, Marley longed to warn him. A spot of light broke into Marley’s darkness. It brightened and neared, as if a steam locomotive bore down upon him through a tunnel’s blackness. And not only the train’s light, but its hissing, clattering, and constant roaring. Marley winced, at once hoping his torment was over, and dreading what might follow, but the light halted, fully engulfing his face. After a moment’s visual confusion, he beheld a human face staring back at him. Was he daft as well as dead? The face appeared to belong to Ebenezer Scrooge. And before Marley’s stunned mind could recover, the face was gone. ~~~ “Jacob Marley.” Voices were not uncommon in Marley’s nether world, but they seldom spoke coherently. So at the first call, he assumed his imagination--what little he possessed--had tricked him. “Jacob Marley.” With his attention already peaked, Marley realized this was not a voice to be ignored. “Speak, good sir. I hear you.” The voice emanated from everywhere, or was it from nowhere? “You will enter the world of the living for a short time, and warn Ebenezer Scrooge where his path will surely take him.” Marley searched the blackness for some visual hint of the speaker. There was nothing. “Who are you, sir? What is your name?” “I AM THAT I AM.” The Voice saturated Marley’s phantom being, vibrated his chains with Truth, and made him cower though he had no life to lose. “Fear not, Jacob Marley, for your compassion has gained you a task, the successful completion of which will break your bonds.” “Will I finally live, or die? For I long to do either.” “Your obedience to your mission will tell.” “Good sir, only tell me what I shall do.” “The man whose face you saw must turn into a path now dark to him. Three spirits shall I summon to rend the scales and break the chains so willful wrought. He must expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one; the second on the next night at the same hour; the third will appear the following night, after the twelfth stroke.” “Lord, when may I embark on this mission?” “Pull the bell-cord and go to him.” “But, Sir, what if I fail?” ~~~ A dim light – bright to one whose existence was darkness – became visible, and a stench invaded Marley’s phantom-body, a stench as of putrefying flesh. Shocked to see a natural-appearing light, he shook off his revulsion to the odor and began moving toward the light’s source, a gable windowpane, shedding foggy light from a street far below. Though he pulled his yards of golden chain across the bare, wooden floor, he heard no noise, felt no drag. And upon looking down, he wheezed what, in life, would have been a gasp. The gold chain had become black iron, the silver shackles, bronze, and Marley found himself shaking uncontrollably; not a bit of grief moved his emotions, but only joy unspeakable, and full of glory. Gold was incorruptible, but iron would one day rust and fall apart. Marley recovered his composure, then turned, and amid boxes draped with dusty cloths, he spied a plaited cord of the kind that might summon servants. He recalled the Master’s command as if it were yet resonating within his ears, and forgetting the stench, moved toward the bell-cord. Both shackled hands reached out and closed upon it, but felt only the mildest sensation as it passed clean through his flesh, or his flesh passed through it. At first, curiosity waved his hands back and forth through the cord, causing it to move as if from a slight breeze. But alarm seized the phantom Marley when he realized his inability to pull the cord; then ... desperation. Again, and again he grasped at the cord, and would have wept if his tears hadn’t dried up long before his death. But at long last his pulling began to move the cord downward, and the quietest bell sounded in the distance. Encouraged, he kept up his pulling until bells began sounding from throughout the house, and he laughed until he could no longer move or see. Silence replaced the bells’ pealing, a different window appeared to him high up in a wall, and he began moving toward it. Though he seemed to float above an invisible floor, his chains clattered over what lay below. He stopped, stared downward, and began to recognize wooden casks of the type that hold wine. Marley puzzled for only a moment, before a memory from his living past began taking shape. As he floated to the cellar floor and his chains rattled into a heap, he recognized the wine-merchant’s stock in the cellar of his own house – or the house he had owned in life. But again he smelled that familiar stench. Had something died in his old cellar? But no, the malodour was about himself, in the very atmosphere that clung to his ghastly body. Marley realized it was the smell to which he had become accustomed during his interminable confinement. Hatred for himself consumed him, for neglecting the eternal values his parents had taught him as a boy. The spectre of his life’s accumulations appeared before him, as if moldering in this dank place, accumulations for which he had traded his soul. And then he remembered Ebenezer Scrooge, the man whose salvation might bear upon his own. The apparition that was once Jacob Marley willed itself to move toward the cellar door, but the willing was not enough to move him. He took a step, and he began to feel a sensation from his distant life: weight, as if his body possessed mass. Another step, heavy on the wooden floor, and the chains scraped along behind him. A few more steps and he reached the stairway. More heavy steps carried him up the stairway to the landing at the top, his chains clattering along behind. His hand reached out, shackle, chain and all, and he started as, at his touch, the door flew open to crash against its stop. He kept walking over the anteroom rug to the broad staircase that led to his -- no, Scrooge’s -- rooms. Feet thudding and chains clanking on the steps announced his progress toward his goal. When at last he stood before what had been his chambers’ door, he stopped. Could his mission succeed? It must! Marley stepped toward the door, extended his shackled arms and pushed against the heavy, old wood, expecting it to swing away as had the cellar door. But it didn’t move. He pushed harder, the door felt as if it had yielded to his pressure, yet it had not moved. With the sharp sensation that might accompany immersing one’s tender hands in pure alcohol, first his hands disappeared into the wood, then his shackled wrists. After what had seemed an eternity of sensory deprivation, he relished even this pain, so he stepped into the wood as if its substance were real, but mattered little to his body. ~~~ Once Marley passed through the thick wood, a great light startled him witless. Within a brief moment, the light subsided and he saw his old business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge, seated in his hearth chair staring his way, incredulous. The old man summoned the nerve to challenge Marley, coldly, as though he belonged elsewhere, and asked him what he wanted. Jacob Marley stared back, unused to being addressed by mortal flesh. He tried to say, “Much,” but the word caught in his inert throat. Yet Scrooge seemed to hear as though he had audibly spoken. Scrooge jutted his chin as if challenging an intruder who had no rightful business there. “Who are you?” Once Marley realized trying to speak was as good as speaking, he said, “Ask me who I was.” So Scrooge did, raising his voice and reproaching him for being so particular. When Marley answered, “In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley,” the old man took a skeptical look upon his face. As if testing his visitor’s reality, Scrooge offered him the second chair, and he accepted. “You don’t believe in me.” “I don’t,” said Scrooge, dismissing Marley’s apparition to the delusional effects of poor digestion. The ghost only stared at him, aware once more of the stench of putrefying flesh. Though the hearth flame was small and the room closed, he felt a draft disturbing his hair and clothing. “You see this toothpick?” Scrooge demanded. “I do.” Marley’s frozen gaze never left the old man. “You are not looking at it.” “But I see it, notwithstanding.” When Scrooge suggested swallowing it would produce a more real haunting than he, Marley became distraught, and cried out in a most distressing discord of moans and unuttered words, shaking his chains in a clattering cacophony. To prove he was no product of undigested food, Marley unwrapped the bandage from round his head, and his jaw dropped loosely to his chest. Scrooge’s manner changed as he fell upon his knees, clasping his hands before his face as if in prayer. “Mercy!” Scrooge finally allowed his eyes and voice to show the terror in his heart. “Dreadful Apparition, why do you trouble me?” Without so much as a twitch of his dangling jaw, Marley said, “Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?” “I do.” Scrooge trembled through his words. “I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?” Marley confessed to failing his destiny, warned Scrooge that he was doing the same, and explained the broad consequences for that sin. “At this time of the rolling year,” Marley cried, “I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never rise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?” This speech dismayed Scrooge, and he began quaking, yearning to know how he might escape the ghost’s miserable fate. “I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer. “You will be haunted by Three Spirits.” Scrooge’s head dropped, all hope gone from his face. “I ... think I’d rather not.” “Without their visits you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one. “Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. “The third upon the next night when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to sound. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!” Marley’s gaze shifted to the bandage he had removed from his head. Resignation cloaked his face, but he reached down to take his bandage from the table and bound up his jaw as before, his teeth clacking when they closed. He gathered up his iron chain, rusting so rapidly it must not last long. With it wound over and about his arm, he moved backward, away from Scrooge and toward the window, which raised with his every step. Then he beckoned to Scrooge, who reluctantly moved forward. When the ghost motioned for him to stop, two paces from him, Scrooge acknowledged hearing a commotion of confused, incoherent lamentation and self-pitying, sorrowful wailing. Marley’s voice said, “Do not fail to listen to the Spirits, Ebenezer. Do not fail me,” and he cried out, his voice blending with the hopeless noise as he floated through the window, into the outer darkness. Scrooge’s image came to the window, but it, and he, receded into the foggy darkness. Marley was returned to the infernal company of disembodied voices crying pitifully. But he could have no pity, for they, as he, had earned the full measure of their torment. He knew there would be no more chance to obey the Savior his life had spurned, and though he had done his best to minister his experience to Scrooge, only God knew if the chains of Jacob Marley would one day drop free.