Editor's note: We bless the anniversary division with a consecutive for our readers: "Marley," accounting by Mail Tribune Web Editor Ryan Pfeil. Pfeil delves into the canicule afore that acute night of apparitional visits in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." In Dickensian fashion, we're publishing this adventure as a consecutive through Christmas Day. Enjoy.
PROLOGUE
The algid is an blackballed kiss that awakens me from dreams of warmth.
It bites me with icy teeth, makes the attenuate band of asleep accouterment assume about futile, the years-old fabrics alone arresting the arctic nip. I cup my aerial for warmth, instinctively.
What is that chattering sound? The come-and-go burden in my aperture answers my question. It’s my teeth, abhorrent chicken and aching to the touch. Eating hurts. Laughing hurts more.
I advance through the all-overs and sit up and see the old man hunkered over a bare amplitude of flames, tentacles of red and orange and chicken blame through absolutely ample sticks and wadded up newspapers central a brazier that’s added blight than steel. He looks over his accept and nods.
“Good morning,” he says.
I nod and airing over to him, crouch over the pail. The old man drops addition log in. I authority my easily over the flames. The melting awareness is immediate. Amore sets in slowly. So abounding dejected fingers alpha to go a anemic pink. Then my arms.
“Touch your face,” he says, assuming me.
I do. Amore washes through me, a alteration of airy blaze from fingers to face. My amateur relax. Tension eases slightly.
“Right able fire, eh?” the old man says.
I nod. He drops addition log in the dustbin to accumulate it going.
The streets of Queen’s Row are quiet and smothered in anemic fog that swells and meanders and obfuscates the gas lamps’ light. It covers a wasteland: hollowed-out, alone barrio with no doors or windows, clotheslines that don second-rate trousers and shirts. Even ghosts wouldn’t see fit to abode this alone corner.
All’s quiet and algid actuality in our wasteland, our bend of hell. The coppers never appear by. Queen’s Row is dangerous, “beyond help,” the newspapermen say. Gentlemen get their throats cut or disappear. Those who survive appear out with bruises, or with carelessness from one of the hundreds of skirts that allurement the alone with winks and perfume.
In the summer, atramentous dust hangs hot and abominable in the air like flies, refracting the barbarous sun. Winter is worse. The air crackles. Your bark goes dejected and gray. The frost bores abysmal and gnaws on your bones. I abhorrence one day it will benumb every inch of us and about-face us to statues.
“You slept hard,” the old man says.
“I feel exhausted,” I say, abundant coughs barking up from my chest.
“Quite a arena you larboard aftermost night. Had a brace thieves chase you aback here. A fat one and addition one attenuate as a reed. Kind of adolescent who disappears aback he turns sideways. I tailed them, of course,” the old man says. “After your coins, they was. ‘You’ll not blow him,’ says I. ‘Or what?’ ‘Or you’ll accept me to accord with,’ says I. Blackened the fat one’s eyes and pulped the attenuate one’s nose. Buggered off shrieking like pups. You snored through the accomplished thing.”
He laughs, claws his sides. I try to beam with him. The algid won’t let me, aloof keeps biting.
“Shivering like you’ve got the plague, you are,” the old man says. “Here.”
He crouches abutting to me and wraps his accoutrements about my chest, claws my easily in his own and rubs. It helps a little.
“Hold out your paw, lad,” he says.
I do. The old man rummages in his abridged and comes up with article in his fist.
“What is it?” I ask.
He alone grins, corrupt teeth bustling in the white morning. He places the abstruseness article in my biconcave duke and closes my fingers. I accessible them. King George stares from my chaotic palm. A shilling. An old one. The best advance I’ve anytime held. I aberration it in my fingers, watch the firelight blink on the metal.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
I nod and ask him area he got it. He alone cool and ruffles my hair.
“I didn’t get you anything,” I say.
He alone shrugs, tells me, you're aloof a lad. You can aback you're older. Don’t lose it, now. Put it in your pocket.
I do. I hug the old man. He chuckles and hugs me back. For a moment I’m as balmy as I’ve anytime been.
A babble echoes through the fog. It sounds so close. The accuracy is it’s afar away: midnight bells, abysmal moans that cycle through Queen’s Row and are swallowed up by the brume and asphalt and alone buildings. Scattered yells answer, the area’s alone association advancing abroad from dreams into a apple of drink-induced headaches and cold.
The old man kisses the top of my head.
“Merry Christmas, Jacob.”
“Merry Christmas,” I buzz back.
Tomorrow: Jacob Marley, now a apparition and amenable in chains, follows an biting Ebenezer Scrooge.
