Part 1

Marla Entwistle had died a few years ago and her partner Muriel Groosce had almost forgotten her. They had been good friends during the course of their business life but sentiment and business make very unsatisfactory bed-fellows. Muriel lived for the present.

The Spartan finishing school they had both founded and run was prospering as never before. The girl pupils came from a wide variety of backgrounds. The one thing they all had in common was their parents' determination that the evils of the modern world with its consumerism and materialism should not pollute their offspring.

This was Christmas Eve and the girls had all been sent early to bed. Muriel walked up to the dormitory and commanded the young but physically mature pupils to stand by their beds so that she might inspect them. The room was cold and the beds hard, covered only by a threadbare blanket. No linen sheets touched the soft skin of these poor young people! They might be from rich families but they led lives of poverty and pain. They stood in line, naked as the day they had been born.

"Henrietta! Your bed is untidy! Bend over!"

"Gloria! Take this whippy cane from my hand and use it on the rear of that wicked child!"

Gloria did as she had been told. She swished the cane for a few minutes, experimenting with its potential for causing pain and brought it down upon the soft and shapely rear of her dearest friend.

"Ouch!" said Henrietta.

"No speaking" said the stern Muriel Groosce. "Hit her again and hit her six times! I will brook no disobedience."

She walked up and down the room a few more times and found more faults with the shivering terrified girls. Many a shapely and delicate posterior, in the luscious bloom of youth, had its ripe and rounded firmness covered with red lines before the evil Muriel's work was done that Christmas Eve! Finally she strode off to her own room to sleep the sleep of the just and righteous.

As she was about to undress, the telephone rang.

"The Groosce Finishing Academy for Young Ladies! How may I help?"

"Merry Christmas, Auntie!" There was drunken laughter from the young man at the other end of the line and Muriel heard the sounds of ribald and highly inebriated merriment in the background. Disgusting! Her nephew, Arthur again! Drat the stupid man! Married to a stupid flighty miss with painted toe nails who had never been better than she should be and the father of two undisciplined brats. If only she had those juvenile fiends under her care! She'd make the little bitches jump!

"Get lost, Arthur. Don't you know phone calls cost you money and me valuable time?"

"Coming round tomorrow Auntie? There's always a spare place for good old Dad's sister! God rest his soul!"

"He was another damned fool. Just like his idiot son! Goodbye and don't phone me again or I'll inform the police!"

She put down the phone and the doorbell rang. Fucking Hell's Bells! She cursed under her breath as she went to answer the door.

"God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. Let Nothing you dismay!"

Muriel had never been a devotee of choral music, especially when produced by a bevy of tonally challenged people with some terrible kind of throat disorder! Maybe they had suffered from cancer of the vocal chords and had these appendages removed!

"Fuck off!" shouted the furious Muriel. "I don't pay my rates and taxes to be subjected to this mental torture every bloody year at this time!"

"It's for a good cause, Madam! Helping to pay for the children of single mothers to have a free holiday in Benidorm!"

"Get off my doorstep or I'll have the law on you! Arseholes!"

Muriel stomped upstairs to bed. Was she ever in a wicked mood by this time! She prepared to go to bed and there was Marla Entwistle standing by the unlit fire and looking sadly at her former partner. (I use the word 'partner' in its archaic sense as meaning one with whom one is in business - not screwing on a regular basis!)

"What the fuck are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be dead? Piss off, I'm tired. Never could stand you, to be honest!"

"Muriel Groosce! You are a wicked and lost woman! You torment nubile and naked young beauties night after night. You deny joy to those around you. You have the chance to repent. I repented but too late! I am doomed, Muriel, but you may yet be saved. You will be visited by three Spirits and if you listen to what they have to say, you won't get much of a night's sleep!"

"You sound like one of those American television evangelists! I don't know who you've been hanging around with since you died and left me in the lurch, but I suggest you find more intelligent company."

"Repent Muriel! Repent!" and Marla backed away and out of the window, where the astounded Muriel saw a host of doomed spirits wailing in the night sky. She shut the window and went to bed. Something to do with global warming, she thought.

Muriel got into bed and the clock struck one o'clock. Odd, really. She didn't have a chiming clock. Noisy horrible things!

Part 2

Muriel was not sleeping well lately. And tonight was worse than ever. She tossed and turned and finally sat bolt upright in bed. Somehow, the room looked different. And someone was standing on her carpet, looking merrily at her. Pissed out of his mind, obviously!

"I am the Spirit of Christmas Past!" announced this tipsy apparition. "Come with me and see how you were in the old days, you dirty old devil!"

Suddenly Muriel found herself on the edge of a stretch of water. A buxom lady wearing not a stitch of clothing, ran out of a makeshift hut and scampered to the water's edge, plunging in with a squeal of mock agony. Behind her was a young lissom female whom Muriel recognised as her younger self.