When Scrooge wakes up, it is still dark, as if no time has passed. Marley then disappears, and Scrooge falls into a deep sleep. Marley tells Scrooge that he will be visited by three spirits on the next three nights. He warns that Scrooge is headed for the same fate, an even worse one considering his horrible spirit. Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge that he has been wandering the earth trying to undo the wrongs that he neglected in his lifetime. But he is visited again, this time by the full-length spirit of Marley, bound in a huge, clanking chain. Scrooge refuses to believe his senses and hurries upstairs. First, his door knocker turns into Jacob Marley’s face. When Scrooge arrives home, he is greeted by a series of spooky apparitions. The next visit is from two gentlemen collecting for the poor, but Scrooge believes in keeping the poor in the workhouses and sends them away. Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, makes a visit, but his incessant seasonal merriness aggravates Scrooge, and he says “Humbug!” to Fred’s idea that he spend Christmas dinner at Fred's house. Scrooge is in his counting house, keeping a cruel monopoly on the coal supply and keeping his clerk Bob Cratchit in the cold. It is Christmas Eve, seven years since the death of Jacob Marley, the business partner and only friend of Ebenezer Scrooge.
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