Book Description

Charles Dickens, struggling writer, is haunted by the ghost of his lost daughter, and in his darkest Christmastime she comes to him in visions to inspire his writing … and sparks the idea for one of the greatest Christmas stories of all time.

This remarkable holiday story by #1 international bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson is accompanied by the original Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol.

The Ghost of Christmas Always

includes the original Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol

Kevin J. Anderson

Charles Dickens

The Ghost of Christmas Always

Copyright © 2021, WordFire, Inc., Introduction © 2021 WordFire, Inc.

A Christmas Carol, first published 1843.

This work is in the public domain.

“The Ghost of Christmas Always,” first published in Pulphouse,

December 31, 1991

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share the ebook with another, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

WordFire Press has chosen to reissue selected out-of-print novels, in hopes of creating a new readership. Because these works were written in a different time, some attitudes and phrasing may seem outdated to a modern audience. After careful consideration, rather than revising the author’s work, we have chosen to preserve the original wording and intent.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-272-8

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-271-1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-273-5

Case Bind ISBN: 978-1-68057-274-2

Cover design by Janet MacDonald. Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock

Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

Published by WordFire Press, LLC, PO Box 1840, Monument CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press eBook Edition 2021

WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2021

WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2021

Join our WordFire Press Readers Group for sneak previews, updates, new projects, and giveaways. Sign up at wordfirepress.com

Contents

Introduction

Kevin J. Anderson

The Ghost of Christmas Always

Kevin J. Anderson

Stave One

Stave Two

Stave Three

Stave Four

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

Preface

Characters

Stave One

Stave Two

Stave Three

Stave Four

Stave Five

About the Authors

About the Illustrator

If You Liked …

Other WordFire Press Titles By Kevin J. Anderson

Introduction

Kevin J. Anderson

Early in my career as a writer, my annual tradition was to spend the holidays with a group of writer friends, most of whom were clustered around Eugene, Oregon. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area where I worked as a technical writer for a large research laboratory—in other words, I had a “real job”—but I very much wanted to be a full-time writer and worked at my stories and novels, gradually seeing some success.

Each year I would make the drive up Interstate 5 along the spine of California to Oregon, and in questionable mid-December weather, but I didn’t want to miss my holiday gathering. One year I even took my fiancée Rebecca Moesta with me (and she and I just celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary).

One of the Eugene locals would act as the host, and we’d get together the day before Christmas for conversation and cooking. Some people baked cookies or other desserts; I always made my famous lasagna, a masterpiece of a recipe that has been in my family for five generations. (Yes, turkey or ham might be more traditional, but we were a group who broke with traditions—we were writers, after all—and formed our own.)

After the late afternoon feast, we passed out gifts. In keeping with being starving writers, no gift could cost more than a dollar, which forced us to do some imaginative shopping.

After the gift giving, we sat around for the highlight of the evening—the real sharing of gifts among writers, usually by a fireplace, usually with mulled cider. We would take out printed manuscripts, stories that we each had written specially for the occasion, which had never been read before. We went around in a circle, reading aloud one story after another. Some were heartwarming, some were scary, some magical, some imaginative, some haunting. Each of us had our own particular spin on the holiday season.

We were all new writers, learning our craft and learning the business. We poured our hearts and our energies into these stories.

In the years since, members of our group have become international bestselling authors, New York Times bestselling authors, winners or nominees of almost every award in numerous genres, from the Writers of the Future Award to the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, Bram Stoker, Shamus, Edgar, Pushcart, Endeavor, Sidewise, Scribe, Locus, Mythopoeic Society, Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards (and probably many others). Some have become publishers themselves, or movie producers, record producers, game designers.

Maybe there was magic in those Christmas Eves after all.

This was a novelette I wrote for that gathering, one of my most heartfelt stories that goes beyond the Christmas spirit to the core of what it means to be a writer.

The Ghost of Christmas Always

Kevin J. Anderson

“After she died I dreamed of her every night for many months, sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a living creature, never with any of the bitterness of my real sorrow, but always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back … And so it did.”

—Charles Dickens, in a letter to the mother of Mary Hogarth, 1842

Stave One

Mary was dead, to begin with. And yet each Christmas Eve her ghost came to haunt Charles Dickens. He waited the year round for the one night he could see her again, if only for a brief time.

Dickens gripped the arms of his chair, then let his eyes fall half closed. Across from him, aromatic smoke came from a fire in the sitting-room hearth. On the mantelpiece sat a scrolled ivory-and-gold clock with slim hands reaching toward midnight, when Mary would come. Wind rattled the window panes, pushing winter cold into the great house on Devonshire Terrace. The Dickenses had added mahogany doors, marble mantels, and carpets to their new home—such extravagance was expected from the author of Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, and of course the Pickwick Papers.

But on the silent night before Christmas, the house felt like a deserted stage in the theater, filled with props and costumes but no actors. Mary had never lived here with them. His young sister-in-law had died before the unparalleled success swept over Dickens’s life.

He stood up from the chair, brushed at his robe, and walked to the mantel. Dickens had urged the four children, his wife Kate, and the maid to retire early this night. None of them would suspect why he wanted them fast asleep. Beside the clock stood Mary’s portrait, painted by Phiz, the artist who illustrated so many of Dickens’s installments. After Mary’s death had devastated him, Dickens begged Phiz to do the portrait from memory, as a special favor. Now Dickens touched the lines of her face, the soft eyes gazing at something unseen but wondrous, the curves of her dark hair. Sweet Mary Hogarth, the delightful sister of his moody and shallow-minded wife. Kate would be snoring upstairs, grossly pregnant with their fifth child. She would carry out the same chores on Christmas day as she did every day. She had no broader imagination, doing only what she felt her wifely obligations demanded. Not like young Mary, who was always so bright, so fascinated.… “Can’t you gaze at that portrait any time, Charles Dickens? I have only a short while here with you.”

Dickens turned, smiling. He felt a rush of happiness. Mary Hogarth stood there, spectral and unchanged since her death six years before. She wore a shimmering white gown that reflected a light not from the fireplace and blew in a breeze that Dickens himself could not feel. “I was waiting for you,” he said.

“Just as I wait for this one night when I’m allowed to see you again.” She took a step forward but did not touch him. She made no sound as she moved. “This year I have a present for you, Charles, a gift I hope you will treasure as much as I treasure giving it to you.”

He could not think of what to say. He, Charles Dickens, who spoke in front of great audiences, who played in the theater, who read his own sketches aloud to crowds from the streets, found himself unable to utter a simple sentence to the wavering image of a sixteen-year-old girl. He finally said, “Merely seeing you again is enough to make me glad for the next twelve months.” Mary smiled and, keeping her gaze on his, reached forward to touch the clock. “But this is better. I give you Time.”

“Time?” he asked, not comprehending but feeling his heart filled with wonder. “I do need more of it, with all my commitments.”

“No,” she said with a lilt in her voice that reminded him of the times that they laughed, Charles and Kate and Mary, when they went on outings to the theater. “I give you your time, Charles. Your past, your present, and what is yet to come.”

Before he could say more, Mary turned the hour hand backward from midnight in a full circle until it reached eleven o’clock. As the hand touched the top of the dial, the chimes rang out. Mary extended her fingers to him. “Take my hand, Charles. Let me show you.”

Eagerly he wrapped his fingers around her cold flesh, insubstantial but as strong and insistent as the wind. Mary led him to the window and drew back the curtains. The distant lights of London sprawled out below, making him think of the crowded streets, tall buildings leaning out over alleys, small fires and candlelit windows.

“Step with me into the past,” she said.

Fighting back the tremors of fear in his voice, Dickens asked, “Long past?”

“No. Your past.” And she stepped partway through the window, through the sash as if it were no more than a bit of fog.

“Wait!” he cried, “I am mortal! I cannot pass through brick and stone and glass.”

“Bear but a touch of my hand, Charles.” As Mary said this, she gave a tug.

Dickens walked forward clad only in slippers and dressing-gown, blinking as he stepped through and out into a clear winter night. But he felt no cold, no wind, only astonishment, for he found himself many miles from his home on Devonshire Terrace.

Stave Two

Though it was dark, Dickens could make out the three-storey house before him, with glowing orange lights in several of the windows. By day he would be able to see the nearby Kentish countryside, Chatham, and the Medway Valley.

“Good Heaven!” Dickens cried, “I was a boy here! My father worked in the naval dockyard.”

Mary just smiled at him and raised her hand. Dickens found that they floated off the ground, rising along the terraces and shingles, to one of the upstairs windows where a single light still burned.

“That was my room!” Dickens said, keeping his voice to a whisper.

“And here is someone you’ll like to see, no doubt.”

They pressed their faces close to the window, and Dickens noted that, though the winter air must be very cold, neither his breath nor Mary’s left any frost upon the window.

Inside the room he saw a plump woman with grayish-brown hair tied neatly behind her head. She sat in a chair pulled near to a pair of beds in which lay a boy and a girl. Both children had eyes wide and mouths slack with rapt fascination and terror. The woman leaned forward to talk; her eyes squinted and her face contorted as she spoke, waving her hands.

“Why it’s old Mary Weller, our maid! Bless her heart—Mary Weller alive again!”

The maid lurched out in the middle of her story, splaying her fingers like claws.

Both children squirmed backward in their beds, defending themselves with nervous giggling.

Dickens, delighted, turned to the spirit beside him. “She used to tell us horrible stories about Captain Murderer! And how he’d indulge his taste in wives by killing them off and baking them into pies! Ugh—my sister Fanny and I used to lie awake shivering in terror every time she told us one of those stories. But I loved them. I used to make up my own.”

Mary patted him with her cold hand. “You’ve been a writer since the time you were a little boy. Come with me, around the corner.” They descended to the ground again, but when they turned the corner, Dickens found that they had reached an alley far distant from the old house. The light had changed to a gray wintry afternoon. People crowded the street, women wrapped in dark clothes tugging children alongside them on the frozen mud. Thawed patches of slush surrounded steaming piles of fresh horse manure. Dogs ran about, harrying burly men who carried packages and crates. Off to one side a man hauled a narrow pauper’s coffin on his back, passing unnoticed through the streets. Signboards protruded out over doors proclaiming lodging houses, barbers, poulterers, a tripe shop, a sausage-maker.

“This is the Strand!” Dickens said, nearly letting go of Mary’s hand in his excitement. “I got lost here one day when I was a boy.”

“In fact, there you are right now.” Mary indicated a small child gawking at the crowds, stumbling along with wonder-filled eyes. The boy looked as if he had been crying, but the tears dried to streaks in the cold air. “I had a shilling and fourpence in my pocket,” Dickens said. “My godfather gave it to me. I knew I would be rescued somehow. And I was very hungry.” They followed the boy, observing yet unseen by the pedestrians. Little Charles Dickens walked along, dressed in a warm jacket, bumping into unshaven men who ignored him. He stared from window to window in food shops, shuffling his feet, looking around. He kept walking. Finally he stopped in front of a pile of cooked sausages in a window. A paper sign in front read, “Small Germans, a Penny.” The boy stared at the sausages, shivering. He licked his lips. He took a deep breath, mustering courage, and strode in. The shopkeeper squinted at him with an amused grin, but the boy seemed confident now that he knew what to ask for.

“If you please, would you sell me one of those sausages?” His voice sounded tiny as Dickens listened. The boy reached into his pocket and took out a single penny. The shopkeeper used his fingers to pick up one of the sausages from the back of the pile and plucked the penny from the boy’s hand at the exact moment he surrendered the sausage. Charles Dickens felt his cheeks flushing with the delight of the memory. “The sausage wasn’t very warm,” he told Mary, “but it was one of the most delicious things ever to pass my lips. Of course part of it was that I had bought it myself.”

The boy wandered the streets again, in and out of yards and little squares, chased off by cooks he gawked at, bullied by a gang of young toughs who wanted the rest of the money in his pockets. The boy broke into a run, pushing through the crowds, splashing in the slush, until he lost the boys in a dark alley lined with dim counting houses where misers changed their gold.

The boy stood in the growing dark, looking unspeakably forlorn.

“Can we not help him?” Dickens said.

Mary shook her head. “No, Charles, we are here only to observe. You pity this boy now, but would you have traded that single day in your life for anything you can imagine?”

“No, never. It astonishes me even now to think of how much I used from that day in Oliver Twist, and in Nicholas Nickleby, and in half a dozen of my sketches for the periodicals.”

“And you will continue to find ways to use it. You’re a writer, Charles, heart and soul. Everything you experience is fodder for the tales that delight so many people.”

As Mary spoke, Dickens heard a loud cough and saw a middle-aged man come up to the wretched boy and ask what was wrong. The man’s clothes were drab and worn, but the brass buttons on his coat had been polished with care.

“That watchman took me home,” Dickens said in a whisper. “I remember his cough, how he wheezed all the way. I was afraid I was going to catch the plague from him.”

Mary strolled ahead, turning her back on the departing boy and the coughing watchman. “Why don’t you come around the corner with me? We’ll pass another decade.”

Still astounded, Dickens followed her as the scene once again changed. He found himself in a dark court, narrow but clean. Clouds the color of ice on a deep pond covered the sky. In front of a dark office, a young man strode by with a polished walking stick. He looked like a twenty-year-old dandy, with gleaming shoes, black waistcoat and vest. His gray felt trousers were new and unwrinkled, his green cravat impeccably tied. The brim of a brushed top hat shaded his face. The young man moved with a nervous manner as he stopped in front of the dark office—and then Dickens recognized the mail slot and the stencilled letters above it that read EDITOR’S BOX.

“This is Fleet Street! That’s me, posting my very first contribution for the Monthly Magazine.” The young man pulled out a long envelope and, trying to appear nonchalant, slipped it into the black hole of the mail slot before striding away. He rapped his walking stick on the cobblestones, swaggering but hurrying, as if afraid to be caught at what he had done.

“I paid half a crown for the next issue of that magazine, and there it was in print! One of my sketches, ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk,’ I think it was. I remember how it felt to see my words in print for the very first time.”

Mary’s voice took on a tone of chiding. “And you didn’t even receive payment for the piece.”

Dickens laughed. “What did it matter then? I was speaking to a whole world of readers! People were reading what I had written. I walked up and down Westminster Hall for half an hour. My eyes could hardly see, I was so excited!”

“Yet now you grow angry at anyone who prints even a bit of your correspondence without offering you royalties.”

Dickens stiffened. “They make enormous amounts of money off me just by placing my name on their masthead! Pirates have made me lose thousands of pounds by flaunting the copyright law.”

She had touched a sore spot, but he did not want to ruin their short time together by arguing. He softened his voice to change the subject. “These memories are delightful, Mary. Show me more!”

Her expression remained solemn. “Do not thank me until you have seen them all. Some of them may not be so precious, though they are as important.”

Dickens felt a chill from inside. “What do you mean?” His tone spoke plainly that he did not want to hear the answer.

“Our time grows short,” she said. “Quick! You must see one last memory of your past.”

As she led him down the street, the sky darkened into night, growing blacker with each step they took. Greenish-white glows from gas street lights made the scene shift with a harsh mixture of glares and shadows. As Mary hurried him along, Dickens saw the buildings again, recognizing the brick facade, the wrought-iron fence, the decorative lintels and arches of Mecklenburgh Square.

As they approached, Dickens saw a tall man open the wrought-iron gate in front of a three-storey brick home. He was accompanied by two women, one larger and hanging on the man’s arm, the other thin and delicate with dark hair pinned up under a bonnet. The man gestured for them both to precede him through the gate, then caught up with them under the rounded arch of the doorway. They all seemed to be laughing and enjoying themselves.