Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories
- Автор: Аллингем (Аллингхэм) Марджери (Марджори), Бучер Энтони
- Год: 1990
- Язык: английский
- Год: Signet
- ISBN: 978-0-451-16909-9
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
The third shelf of the bookcase that lined one wall held a handsome leather bound set of the complete works of Dickens, an inheritance from my grandfather that I had not bothered for years. I took out the volume titled Christmas Stories and settled back in my recliner, opened it, and read aloud softly into the moonlight.
“‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’”
“Amen say I to that,” declared a voice deep as the Pit, yet thin as a breath. I jumped up with a cry, dropping the book. In front of me stood the ghost of Jacob Marley, exactly as Dickens had described it, a tall stocky man in waistcoat and boots dragging along with him a large wrought iron chain to which ledgers, keys, padlocks, purses, and the like were attached every few links, like charms on a bracelet. He was so transparent that I could read through him the titles of my grandfather’s set of Dickens on the bookshelf behind him.
“What the hell?” I cried, realizing as the words left my mouth how absurdly unDickensian they sounded. The apparition did not crack a smile, prevented perhaps by a strip of white cloth bound around its head from jaw to balding crown.
“Marley, sir,” he said. “Jacob Marley.”
He offered his transparent hand, and I automatically held my own out to shake, then drew back.
“With all due respect, Mr. Marley,” I said, my voice admittedly a little tremulous, “this is very absurd. What do you want with me, anyway? God knows, I keep Christmas. Look at that damned tree out there. It must have a pound of tinsel on it. Do you know that I actually sing along at the elementary Christmas program sing-along? That’s keeping Christmas with a vengeance.”
“Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine,” the Ghost said illogically.
“By scaring the living daylights out of innocent people in the middle of the night?”
The Ghost sighed. “I am doomed to wander through the world trying to do the good I failed to do in life.”
“What possible good could you do me?”
“I would lay you,” replied the Ghost.
I said, “Good God,” and sat down quickly. My chair of its own will flew back into the reclining position, pitching me back with a jarring thump. I closed my eyes and tried to bring order to my gyrating thoughts. It was possible, of course, that all this time I was safe and asleep under the warmth of the electric blanket and the influence of a slight overdose of brandy, dreaming. Or my subconscious had finally won the battle for my mind, and I was hallucinating in the den, enthroned like some mad king on my recliner, where I couldn’t do anyone much harm. But, being a rational person, even in the worst extremity, I expect my hallucinations to be consistent and make sense.
“I think you have that wrong, Jacob,” I said very quietly, wondering if it might be wiser to attempt to wake myself rather than waste intellectual energy reasoning with a trick of the right brain. On the other hand, I was a little afraid I would find that I was not asleep at all. “As you are the ghost, I ought to be laying you.”
“If you could, I should be most grateful,” Marley’s Ghost said courteously. “For you see, though you are in the flesh and I in the spirit, we share a common affliction. We do not find rest in the night.”
“Well, if someone would turn the moon down, I might be able to get some sleep.”
“You walk the night only when the moon is full?” the Ghost asked. “I do not think so.”
“Well, a little darkness might help. I don’t know why the hell I can’t sleep. If the story runs true, you can’t rest because you were a miserable, stingy bastard in life, and now you have to go around scaring other miserable, stingy bastards into playing Santa Claus. If that’s what you’re after here, you certainly picked the wrong house.”
“I came here because you thought of me,” said Marley’s Ghost. “It is the thought of me that keeps you awake. You have asked a question that has never been asked before, not even by he who created me. To lay you is an easy matter; we must simply find the answer to your question.”
I looked at the shade in astonishment. “Surely you know what you died of?”
He shook his head. “I exist only to the degree in which I have been thought about. He who created me did not think about the manner of my death; therefore the manner of my death did not exist, at least not until you inquired into it.”
“I wasn’t all that interested,” I grumbled. “I was just making conversation.”
“If you were just making conversation, how is it that you do not sleep?”
“Damned if I know.”
The Ghost shuddered, causing his chain to roll thuddingly along the carpeting. “My dear sir, I beseech you. Avoid that expression. As it stands you have aroused my curiosity, and since for whatever reason we have both been deprived of our repose this Christmas Eve, we might amusingly and perhaps profitably pass the time exploring the mystery, eh?”
I shrugged. “Why don’t you go on without me? I think I’m going to mosey on back to bed.”
I got up and started to move past him, but his transparent hand caught my forearm in a remarkably strong grip.
“Come now, my dear fellow, don’t be hasty. I cannot travel alone, incorporeal as I am, and a very minor ghost at that. I must justify any journey that I make like some otherworldly civil servant, and you could be my justification. Besides I was a man of business and had not the imagination to solve mysteries. You could be much assistance.”
“And what do I get out of it?”
“Unless I am much mistaken, my dear sir,” said Marley’s Ghost, “you are not the sort of fellow who sleeps well on an empty belly or an unanswered question. What I offer you is a rare opportunity to travel through time, to observe the world as it was and will never be again. You have in your secret heart longed to be a detective and solve some great mystery; here is your chance, perhaps your only chance, to fulfill that wish. Corporeal life, believe me, is woefully short. There is much time on this side to regret lost opportunities.”
I walked slowly back to the recliner and sat down.
“You probably died of a heart attack or a stroke or... or food poisoning.”
“You do not see it that way,” said Marley’s Ghost, “so that is not the way it will be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, my dear sir, that you are the author.”
He picked up the tooled leather volume from the floor where I had dropped it and handed it to me. I pushed the chair into the reclining position and began to read aloud. The Ghost, leaning on the back of the chair, looked over my shoulder at his own likeness in a reproduction of the original engraving.
“‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it, and Scrooge’s name was good...’”
A reclining chair is not the best place for reading; it is too comfortable. I have often dropped into a doze even while reading some remarkable thriller, so it is not so awfully strange that I did so now. I was startled into wakefulness by the resonant striking of the hour, twelve. That did not seem so awfully strange either, until it occurred to me that we do not have a clock that strikes the hour.
I sat up quickly, jerking the chair upright. The moonlight, it appeared, had taken over my den, touching everything in it with a silver glow of tinsel. And directly in front of me, in the place where old Marley had first appeared, stood my daughter Stephanie, in the billowy Christmas angel gown, her light brown hair caught in a circlet of holly, a mysterious half smile on her lips. The tinsel moonlight reflected off her in such a way that she appeared to glow.