Neil was fat, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The
scale groaned under the bulk, sighed 385 pounds, and gave up the ghost.
It was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there
is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined,
myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in
the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my
unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You
will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that  the scale was
as dead as a door-nail, and Neil was fat.

One evening,  Neil took his excessive dinner in his usual melancholy
diner; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the
evening arguing with trolls on rec.games.chess.politics, went to bed.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard a
clanging noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the
stairs; then coming straight towards his door. Neil recalled that that
ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

  'It's humbug!' said Neil. 'I won't believe it.'

  His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through
the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes.

'How now.' said Neil, caustic and cold as ever. 'What do you want with
me?'

  'Much.'-The voice was curiously like his own, Neil thought.

  'Who are you?'

  "Yourself." the apparition said. 'You don't believe in me,' observed
the Ghost.

  'I don't,' said Neil.

  'What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your
senses?'

  'I don't know,' said Neil.

  'Why do you doubt your senses?'

  'Because,' said Neil, 'a little thing affects them. A slight
disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit
of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an
underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you,
whatever you are!'

  Neil was unfortunately in the habit of cracking jokes, a trait he
picked up while writing silly parodies on newsgroups. The truth is,
that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention
from his very real problem. He had a Ghost in front of him, and what's
more,. a Ghost shackled with a chain, attached to which were fast food
wrappers, pizza boxes, chocolate bars, and other remains of meals past.

'You are fettered,' said Neil, trembling. 'Tell me why?'

  'I wear the chain I forged in life,' replied the Ghost. 'I made it
link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and
of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?'

 Neil trembled more and more.

  'Or would you know,' pursued the Ghost, 'the weight and length of
the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as
this. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!'

  Neil glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding
himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he
could see nothing but junk food wrappers. And this is scarcely
surprising, since he rarely could see the floor under his gut.

'I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of
escaping my fate. You will be haunted,' resumed the Ghost, 'by Two
Spirits. Without their visits,' said the Ghost, 'you cannot hope to
shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow, when the bell tolls
One.'

"Why Two Spirits? I thought there were supposed to be Three?"

"We are economizing this year."

 'Couldn't I take them all at once, and have it over?' hinted Neil.

 'Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. Look to see me
no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed
between us! Goodbye!" And the Ghost disappeared.

Neil closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had
entered. It was double-locked, as he had locked it with his own hands,
and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say 'Humbug!' but stopped
at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or
the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the
dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, or from
reading Victorian sentences with so many clauses, much in need of
repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon
the instant.

The hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow,
melancholy One. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant.

'Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?' asked Neil.

  'I am.'

  The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of
being so close beside him, it were at a distance.

  'Who, and what are you?' Neil demanded.

  'I am the Ghost of Life That Could Be.'  It put out its strong hand
as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the arm. 'Rise! and walk with
me!'

  It would have been in vain for Neil to plead that the weather and
the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes; that bed was warm,
and the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was clad but
lightly in his slippers, dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a
cold upon him at that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand,
was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit made
towards the window, clasped his robe in supplication.

  'I am mortal,' Neil remonstrated, 'and liable to fall. Big guys like
me aren't terribly aerodynamic.'

  'Bear but a touch of my hand there,' said the Spirit, laying it upon
his heart, 'and you shall be upheld in more than this!'

They flew swift as the wind over country and town. Soon they spotted a
crowd of people bicycling along a country road. They, silently,
unobserved, traveled among the bicylists. Then it was to a lake, in
which people were swimming, and on which people were boating, and
around which people were running and jogging. None of them groaned
under the bulk of excess weight. All were eating healthy food in
sensible amounts. All were enjoying themselves.

"Spirit, why drag me from my slumber to show me these scenes?" asked
Neil.

"This is what your life could be free from your excess poundage. Also,
we need to sneak the moral into the story at some point." And with
this, the Spirit disappeared, leaving Neil back in his bed-chamber,
wondering about blatant moralizing in allegory, and awaiting the second
Spirit.

The second Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came,
Neil bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this
Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.

  It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head,
its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one
outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach
its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which
it was surrounded.

  He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and
that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He knew no
more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.

  'I am in the presence of the Ghost of Life Yet To Come?' said Neil.

  The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.

  'You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not
happened, but will happen in the time before us,' Neil pursued. 'Is
that so, Spirit?'

  The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in
its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head. That was the only
answer he received.

He accompanied it until they reached an iron gate. He paused to look
round before entering.

  A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to
learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place. Walled in by
houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death,
not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite.
A worthy place!

  The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. The
grave was littered with pizza boxes and fast food wrappers. He advanced
towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he
dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.

  'Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,' said Neil,
'answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will
be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?'

  Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

  'Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered
in, they must lead,' said Neil. 'But if the courses be departed from,
the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!'

  The Spirit was immovable as ever.

 Neil crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the
finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name.

  'No, Spirit! Oh no, no!'

  The finger still was there.

  'Spirit!' he cried, tight clutching at its robe, 'hear me! I am not
the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this
intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?'

  For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

  'Good Spirit,' he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before
it: 'Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet
may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life? Oh,
tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!'

  In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself,
but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit,
stronger yet, repulsed him.

"I will lose weight! I will give up the lifestyle that will bring me to
this place! This I vow, oh Spirit!"

  Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he
saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk,
collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.

Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his
own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make
amends in!

  He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that
his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing
violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with
tears. I am here -- the shadows of the things that would have been, may
be dispelled. They will be. I know they will! I will live life free
from the shackles of obesity, in both the present and the future!

  His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them
inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them,
making them parties to every kind of extravagance. He had frisked into
the sitting-room, and was now standing there: perfectly winded.

'I don't know what to do!' cried Neil, laughing and crying in the same
breath. 'I am as light as a feather, despite my bulk; I am as happy as
an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man.
A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!
Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!"

And Neil was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more.
Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them
laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that
nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did
not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as
these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they
should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less
attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for
him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total
Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him,
that he knew how to live life to the fullest, if any man alive
possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!

The End

And to all my friends on ASD:

"God bless us, Every One!"