The Rotted Tooth

Angrier, I have never been. My nose was assaulted by the pungent stench of my partner, Jacob Marley. Our cramped counting office left no room to spare and the odor from this contemptible man hung heavy in the air accosting me throughout the day like an irksome ill-fated child whose body smells of a rotted corpse. Like the rotted meat of the butcher, or the sewage in the river.

In the summer it was more bearable for we could open a window and the breeze passed through and carried it along. Where it took it, I have not the faintest idea, but it only briefly lingered and its tendrils affected me little. But in winter, as the windows were shut to preserve the heat from the stove that cost far too much in the first place, there was nowhere for the stench to escape and thus it loitered in the office and made misery of my day. 

When I was at my wit's end, I spoke to Marley about the odor and he at first denied any culpability and had the audacity to blame me or that of my faulty senses. He put forth that I may have imagined it. Then he blamed sewer gas, or a faulty wash-closet, saying that if I would spare the expense for an inspector to inspect it and a handyman to fix it, we would be rid of that noxious haunting odor. 

His lies worked not on me as I opposed them with logical recourse. On the days he was not in the office, taking off several due to gout or other illnesses, the odor was absent as well.

"Poppycock!" he admonished. 

"Poppycock, indeed, sir!" I yelled back. I found myself in that instant gripping my cane most violently at the ready as he snarled accused before me. 

I encouraged him to bathe, as the smell became so bothersome that I could bear it no longer. I could not fire the man from his employment as we were partners and there was a binding obligation and a payout I would have to provide should our mutual proprietorship no longer be possible for some sort of cause due to diminishing capacity or senility, as it had been specified in the language of our contract. 

I had no proof to justify accusing him of theft or any gross malfeasance that would force him out empty-handed. As horrid as he smelled, he was faultless and good in the duties of his occupation. And had I paid him out, encouraged his retirement for he was five years my senior, it is likely I would lose clients that Marley himself had procured and I would find myself in the relative poor house. So my greed made me bear the stench until I could no more. 

I was left in fits and I slept not a wink many nights for the horrendous stench followed me like a ghost home and haunted me in my dreams. It attached to my clothes, my hair, and skin so that I thought the only way to rid myself of it was to burn them. To burn everything and all, myself included. I couldn't escape it. I couldn't bear it any longer. Not another Christmas season followed by the long winter months when I would be closed in with that ungodly stench like we were buried in a shared coffin. Breathing it. Tasting it. Corpses in the morgue, fish in the rotted waste barrels of the market, smell better than old Jacob Marley. 

I tried hanging things about and lighting scented candles and using fragrances and expensive perfumes to mask the odor, but it was all futile. I bought Marley the finest of French colognes, but it was of no use. In fact, the sweet smell of anything made the odor smell even worse and seemed to augment it as though the contrast, the war between the two scents, brought the worst out of it like a prodded and enraged skunk. 

The only way to end it lurked most abhorrent in my thoughts, let alone in articulation and carried out in grim reality. I knew I must rid myself of this ghastly odor by ridding myself of the man. The source of it all. I couldn't part with money. I couldn't buy him out and send him on his way or convince him of his senility much to my favor. He wasn't at all mad. It was I who had gone mad—mad by the scent of that which reaked from him. That horrible effluvium of his body. I realized then that I must kill Jacob Marley if ever I was to know any sort of peace. 

I, Ebenezer Scrooge, had never committed a foul or contemptible deed in my good life. I was guilty of no purposeful offense greater than crossing the street improperly or not paying a tax I might have owed out of the burden of business necessity. Oh, and there was that time or two I skimmed on charitable donations and enforced rents and contracts, perhaps, a little harshly. And I took two pence from the collection plate during communion in younger years when I knew not the beauty of the faith from which I stole. But murder? Murder? Murder!

How could I murder this man who was like a brother to me? A mentor. A fine and upstanding man who was guilty only of something he clearly could not himself control. Something he was not aware of and couldn't not smell himself. Yet, something he denied vociferously and repugnantly! I must confront him. I must tell him that the odor was driving me mad so that he could remedy the problem before I dared another thought of this most severe crime of which I was not sure I could bear to administer. 

"Marley," I implored in my deplorable state. "You are stricken with an odor most foul that I have bore two years long without speaking a word of—that I have only recently called to your attention to no avail. To only your most rude and reviled rebuke. Please, good man, remedy the most foul and wretched fetor of decay so that I can be at ease in our shared space as I was before it begun."

Marley's face drew up like a contemptible prune. That of a feral animal agrieved. That of a rodent most foul. A trespassing rabid rat in the pantry, his cheeks full of my cheese. His whiskers wiry and unkempt. His wild gray eyebrows furrowed into a frown, and his lips that were pale as a dead fish mouthed in such defiance a retort I will not soon forget, and one that incensed me to the point that murder was but an appropriate reaction—and, in fact, my only recourse.

"Scrooge, my boy," he began. Those dead fish lips covered in the bile of his belly slobber. "It is not I who reeks most foul. It is you, man! The funk is not mine, and I bear no responsibility in the matter. I have tolerated you for these years because my sense of smell has dulled from age. Yet, I can discern the source. And emphatically, the miasma is your own!"

Oh, what choice did I have then, I ask of you. I drew my cane at once in a fit of afflicted rage and struck him with a foreceful blow that stung my very hands. Every word he offered was an inch more he stabbed my pride. How dare he have the audacity to blame me for the offense! 

He fell against the wall as the force of the blow from the silver wolf-handle of my cane cracked his contemptible skull wide-open. Blood trickled down his eggshell forehead reminiscent of hair he once bore. The curly lock of a single crimson rivulet that flowed down his crooked nose. His eyes, two watery orbs, looked at me with horror and such indignation that I struck him again, my nose filled with that terrible stench which would not go away and seemed to get worse suddenly as an accosted skunk struck by such a blow would in exhausting its last defense. 

Anger drew my third and fourth blow. Hatred. Jealousy. Disgust. Every negative and hateful feeling I had ever harbored of him was exorcized like demons from within me. The anger of two long years of repressed disgust! The anger of being accused of that which sickened me. That which only I could smell when he was near and that which I knew came from this vile and disgusting man whose very soul was rotting from the inside. It was his soul, I knew—his very soul rotted within him. 

Death was already upon him, my cane had simply hastened his most natural demise. Surely, a medical examination would reveal that Jacob Marley had some sort of disease which made him reek of the putrid pong because death was imminent. I simply had delivered him to his eternal reward and forgave him of his suffering. 

There he lied against the wall like a drunkard, bleeding profusely. The single crimson banner that spiraled down his face became that of a mask so that the only part of him not affected was the eyes which were still open and staring at me in that accusatory way they had as he accosted me with his inflammatory words. His mouth was ajar as though to a room, a dark, dank room through which I've never trespassed, but in that I now wandered through with my curious eye. 

It was then that I could smell the most vile beast that was too strong and foul to be simply some part of a man in decay. But it was in that very room of his cracked head that I found the source of the smell. It was a tooth, rotted and black, therein, festering. I held a lantern to his head and there it was, staring back at me as though in indignation. A ring of puss seeped from its black vile root and now dripped from his dead fish lips in a putrid waterfall of listless drool. 

Marley was dead and there was nothing that I could do for him now. I didn't think of it as murder, nor did I feel as a murderer ought. I didn't feel guilt nor any sense of remorse for I was once again accosted by the odor of his mouth—that of the wretched rotted tooth. I was justified in my actions, any constable would discern. Surely, they would absolve me of any guilt if they too could smell it. 

I broke the murderous cane and tossed it into the fire. I cleaned the walls of the blood splatter and tossed the rags into the fire as well. The fire became my conspirator. Then I ran outside and yelled for help and two good men came straight away to ask me how they could assist. I trembled and pointed to the corpse of Jacob Marley who lied slumped against the wall, and their wandering eyes followed the length my long crooked finger. 

"Good Heavens!" one cried. The other came to his futile aid while the crying man went outside to flag down a constable. Upon the constable's inquiry as to the condition of Mr. Marley, I said only that he had stumbled into the office in such a state and I knew not what had occurred prior. He was, by chance, without his wallet, so robbery was suspected, and one of the good men who had responded to my pleas for help had inadvertently corroborated my lie by stating he saw an unsavory rube about with a cane in hand that could have struck the mortal blow. 

The prideful and portly constable fled to search for this man who was apprehended shortly thereafter. Blood was discovered upon his cane, somehow, which the poor wretch tried in vain to claim was that of a dog's. He was arrested, and later upon examination, admitted his false guilt surely burdened under the weight of the relentless accusation of the examiner. He was clearly a man without his faculties and had just been released from the lunatic asylum to find himself only briefly free before the fate of a murder befell him. For the murder or Mr. Marley he would be put to death and, thus, out of his misery—or so I told myself. 

The body was removed from my office and I was so overcome with joy that I felt it most difficult to feign grief for my partner of thirty years. I went to his funeral and wept not at all. He had no wife or children to grieve him. He had brothers and an extended family who were there out of custom only. Mr. Marley was a man alone, much like myself, and I pitied him in the casket. I could only smell faintly that rotted tooth which had condemned him. 

I quickly hired another associate to help me with the work of the office when I reopened. Bob, his name. Simple Bob. But after only a brief reprieve, the foul and unbearable stench returned! It returned like a lost spirit and hung in the air as though to mock me. As though Bob ferried it in and wore it like ripe socks or a dirty wool coat. 

I accused him of the crime and ordered him to open his mouth at once, which in fear he did as I gripped an iron paperweight and held it above my head as though to strike him. But inside his mouth there was not the culprit of a rotted tooth. He kept care of his teeth and all was in good order I could see. The smell did not come from Bob, I realized. It was that of Marley's ghost that had returned to torment me!

I sent Bob home and had it out with the devil that hung in the air. Once and for all, this devil would be returned rightly to Hell. This invisible miasma that I could not rid myself of any other way. I grabbed a torch and chased him about the room and accidentally set fire to the velvet drapes and my very own coat. I set the counting office afire in my madness. I laughed as the flames licked around me as though I were seated on the floor of Hell itself and left myself to die within those wicked walls. I slumped down before my desk where at last I would be rid of that stench, consumed myself in the forgiveness of fire. Perhaps, appropriately, in that I was guilty of two murders—of Marley and the poor rube I condemned, executed by hanging as his killer. 

But a man burst through the door and pulled me out to the snow where I lied and looked up hopelessly to large paper-white snowflakes drifting slowly down upon my face. It was Bob that had saved me. The miserable Bob Cratchit, who was no more a man than a mouse begging for crumbs of me. He, who probably would expect some sort of reward for his bravery that I never asked of him. For saving my miserable life and condemning me to suffer on Earth. He who dallys about and is incessantly late and who is, by his very nature, an untidy little nuisance of a man.

But that wouldn't do. The fire was put out, drenched by the goodwill of men who probably all will expect a reward from me. Or gratitude. The counting office, once charred, was restored. But soon after, during that miserable Christmas season, the malodour of the rotted tooth again returned and refused to relent. Marley, I realized, would always be with me. Forever tormenting me. In a stench that only I could smell as though his wicked soul was buried in my very nostrils. 

Goddamn you, Jacob Marley.