I'm Keith Morrison, and this is episode 2 of A Christmas Carol.

Old Ebenezer Scrooge has just had the fright of his life.

He's been visited by the ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley.

Marley tells Scrooge he's been roaming the earth since the very day of his death, haunted

by his own story of stinginess and greed.

He'd like to change it all, but it's too late now.

And he warn Scrooge that he too is destined for a tortured afterlife, if he doesn't mend his ways.

As if all that isn't enough, the ghost of Marley announces that Scrooge will be visited again

by three more ghosts, beginning when the clock strikes one.

We pick up our story as Ebenezer wakes from a fiddful sleep, confused, and, as Dickens writes,

with one eye on the clock.

When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark that, looking out of bed,

he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber.

He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferrid eyes

when chimes of a neighboring church struck the four quarters.

So he listened for the hour.

Do his greatest establishment, the heavy bell went on from six to seven and from seven to eight,

and regularly up to twelve, and then stopped.

Twelve, it was past two when he went to bed, the clock was wrong.

An icicle must have gotten into the works twelve.

Why, it isn't possible, said Scrooge, that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another night.

It isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at noon.

...