To Be Taken With A Pinch Of Salt

London. The month of October almost over, and Mr Headstone is sitting in his room in front of a glowing coal fire, an open book upon his lap, and a glass of Old Tom at his elbow. Outside it is bitterly cold and there is as much murk and gloom in the streets as if the ancient shades of creation’s first night had not yet withdrawn from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a crook-backed homunculus shuffling down the Strand. Dogs howl at the moon, which peers down through drifting tattered clouds. A black cat jumps onto a graveyard wall, arches its back and stares with wide green eyes at something moving between the tombs. Horses whinny and shy at the least provocation, their hooves striking sparks on the wet cobbles. Foot passengers, wrapped up in coats and scarves, gliding through the streets, their footfalls muffled by the clammy atmosphere, come and go like the spirits of the departed. It is weather for neither man nor beast, and so Mr Headstone is making himself comfortable by the fireside with the intention of whiling away the evening in the perusal of three ghost stories by Mr Dickens, these short works being the most appropriate form of entertainment for the season. Shadows everywhere. Shadows creeping over the domes and spires of the city; shadows settling on the rooftops of the great houses between Portland Place and Bryanstone Square; shadows, blacker than a judge’s cap, filling up the courts of Gray’s Inn; shadows engulfing the humbler dwellings of Camden Town and Staggs’s Garden; shadows finding every nook and every cranny of every crooked alleyway, and seeping even into the cracks of the newly laid paving stones. Shadows in the very room where Mr Headstone sits alone, looking nervously over his shoulder as he puts down his book, imagining he sees something crouching in the corner, which - on closer investigation - turns out to be nothing more menacing than the coal scuttle. Hark! Is that a scratching at the window? Is that a rustling under the chair? Is that a footfall on the stair? Do the pedagogue’s eyes deceive him, or is the doorknob slowly turning as if someone – or something – wanted to come in? The door creaks slowly open on its hinges, but what apparition stands there? Is it a pale sheeted ghost risen up from the grave come to haunt the trembling pedagogue? No, it is Mrs Raddle delivering the weekly supply of freshly laundered linen, and come to remind Mr Headstone that his rent his due on Saturday.