“Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, yard by yard; I girded it of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you? I am the Ghost of Christmas Past. Long Past? No. Your past. I see a vacant seat in the poor chimney corner, and a crutch without an owner carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, the child will die.”
“Spectre. tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?”

Bah, Humbug!

    Nothing despatched me under the cinema seat, nor the bedcovers, nor the sofa cushions as often as Charles Dicken’s alleged kid’s story A Christmas Carol. Every Christmas they trotted it out in some form or other, and familiarity failed utterly to terrify me any less. How could they imagine something so downright scary be suitable to children? I had to scream not only from fear but to cover the rattle of those bloody chains.s.