Disclaimer: Susan Pevensie and all the characters and situations in the Chronicles of Narnia belong to C. S. Lewis and not to me. I believe Dickens' A Christmas Carol is public domain now, but if not, that's not mine either. I'm just stealing freely from it. Any really strange punctuation you notice is likely copied from the original.

A NARNIAN CHRISTMAS CAROL

STAVE ONE: THE PROFESSOR'S GHOST

The Professor was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The train had taken the bend coming into the station far too fast, and the Professor had been killed. Along with Aunt Polly, Cousin Eustace and his friend Jill, Mum and Dad, and Lucy and Peter and Edmund, the Professor had been killed when it crashed. Afterward, they were all identified, neatly labeled and taken away to be buried.

Susan knew he was dead? Of course she did. How could it be otherwise? She had seen him in his coffin, one of the nine. Stiff and white. Cold. Like an odd waxwork of himself made by someone who had never seen him when he was alive. Yes, there was no doubt that the Professor was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

But Susan, young and lovely Susan, queenly and gentle Susan, had before that fatal day already begun to change. She had convinced herself that being grownup meant forgetting the truth, that it meant leaving behind all she had known and been and learned in favor of lipstick and invitations. She had convinced herself that Peter was being childish, no, more than that, foolish and even harmful, in believing still in a silly game and encouraging Lucy and Edmund at it. She told herself Edmund was deluded, perhaps even blasphemous, when he claimed to have found their make-believe Lion just round the corner in their parish church. And she was certain that Lucy, sweet, courageous and so-sheltered Lucy, would have her marriage prospects ruined if she didn't start acting her age.

Oh! But Susan herself was not one to be sheltered or pushed to the side. That season, the season following the tragedy, no party was a party if the divine Miss Pevensie was not present. Her clothes were the dernier cri, the latest fashion, and she wore them with style and grace. Her friends were society's best, the crème de la crème, and she walked among them in perfect ease, filling nights and days with a whirl of people and places and events so that what sleep she got was dark and dreamless and the past, for the most part, left her to herself.

Now there were some who remembered Susan, neighbors who had known her family and had watched her grow up, boys, now men, who had once looked longingly upon her from the back row of a classroom, girls from that same classroom, now women, who had once flocked to her kindness and vivacity, but they hardly knew her any longer. Not that she was unkind or snobbish, not that she would have refused to speak had she met any one of them in the street, but these days she had no time for such people and the memories that clung to them.

Once upon a time– of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve seven years after that fateful train crash, Susan was coming home from a party. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal. She huddled in her fur coat, feeling strangely as if she should remember another time in another coat and another winter, waiting for her date to open the front door.

"Do hurry, Granger. It's beastly cold out."

"Give a chap a chance, eh? There it is."

The key clicked coldly in the lock and the door swung open. Susan hurried into the warmth of the foyer, and Granger bustled in behind her. She turned at once and held her hand out for her key.

"Thank you, and good night."

"Aww, but I thought maybe when you said you were tired you just meant you were tired of everyone else." He cupped her face in both hands, bringing his lips close to hers. "I thought perhaps tonight . . . "

He looked at her expectantly, and she shrugged away from him.

"When I said I was tired, Granger, that's exactly what I meant."

"But, Susie, it's Christmas Eve. Surely, in the sprit of the season–"

"Christmas." Her lovely mouth was marred with a sneer. "Christmas is for children and for those who refuse to grow up. I know– have known too many people like that, and it never got them anywhere."

"But, Susie, you can't mean that."

"I've asked you before, Granger, to please not call me Susie. Now thank you for bringing me home. If you hurry, you can get back before the party breaks up."

"Good idea," he said, and there was a flash of anger in his dark eyes. "I imagine Olivia Brownlee won't have left yet. She's certainly not one to turn a fellow out into the cold."

"You'll be a perfect match." Susan turned him towards the door. "Have fun."

She practically shoved him outside and then locked the door behind him and slipped the key into the pocket of her fur coat. Oh, she was tired. And, oh, she was cold, the dull, dreary sort of cold that made her shrink into herself. Not the rushing exciting cold that used to make her dance when she walked, the sparkling cold that reminded her of reindeer and sleigh bells. It seemed she was always cold. Always winter and never Christmas.

She shook her head and huddled down into her furs. That was a strange thought to have. It was Christmas. And before too long, it wouldn't be winter. Still, she was cold, and she hurried to the fireplace, meaning to put more wood on, but she stopped short, her hand reaching towards the poker. She saw in the lion-headed andiron, the left one, mind you, without its undergoing any immediate process of change: not an andiron, but the Professor's face.

The Professor's face. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Susan as the Professor used to look, white-haired and shaggy bearded, bespectacled and bemused. As Susan looked on this phenomenon, it was an andiron again. To say that she was not startled would be untrue, but she picked up the poker she had been reaching for, stirred the fire with it and then turned towards the room. And there, with his usual mild smile, just to the right of her Louis XVI chair, stood the Professor himself.

The same face: the very same. He stood there in his burgundy smoking jacket with his pipe in his hand, and she could see the smoke curling out of it. His body was transparent: so that Susan, observing him, could see the back of his velvet collar and the box pleat in his jacket. Despite this, she was still incredulous, and fought against her senses.

"Professor," said Susan, cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"

"A great deal," said the Professor, mild as ever. "May I sit down?"

She shrugged. "If you like."

He sat down on the Louis XVI chair as if he were quite used to it and puffed for a moment on his pipe.

"You don't believe in me," he observed.

"I don't," said Susan. "I used to believe in fantasies, but I don't anymore. You're no more real than Centaurs and Gryphons and talking Lions."

"True," he observed. "Very true. And no less, my dear. No less."

She crossed her arms and tapped her slim foot. "Well? What is it you want with me?"

"If you don't believe in me, my dear, why do you ask?"

"Obviously, my subconscious has conjured you up because, A, I'm tired; B, I've been dwelling on the past far too much lately; and, C, I probably had a little too much champagne at the party. So I can only think you're here to help me work things out logically so I can get back to my real life."

The Professor raised his bushy eyebrows. "Your subconscious, eh? And how do you know that?"

"It's only logical." She sniffed. "I studied all about it when I was at university."

Shaking his head, the Professor took off his spectacles and began to polish them. "What do they teach in schools these days?" He looked up at her again. "Very well, then tell me about this 'real life' of yours. Are you happy?"

"Of course I am," she said hotly. "I have everything I could ask for."

"And do those things, Susan, make you happy? Truly?"

"Of course–"

"As happy as you were in Narnia?"

She caught a little gasping breath. "That was a game we played during the war. Just like this illusion right now, it was a coping mechanism, something we did so we wouldn't be too afraid being away from home. It was nothing else."

Again he raised his eyebrows. "Really?"

She pulled her coat more closely around her. Would this room never be warm?

"Really. My brothers and sister would never stop going on about it, but it's ridiculous to pretend it was all real. Kings and Queens of a magical land? Ridiculous."

"But then they did stop going on about it, eh?" His eyes were sympathetic and, as always, very kind. "And how have you liked it these seven years without them going on about it?"

"I tell you I have everything I want." Her blue eyes flashed. "I am happy."

"You are not yet as happy as you are meant to be," he said thoughtfully. "If you'd ever stop for a moment and really look about you, you'd see that."

"What is it you want with me?" she asked again, again with that impatient tapping of her foot, and the Professor sighed.

"I am sent to tell you that you will be visited by three spirits."

She turned rather paler than usual. "I– I think I'd rather not."

"Expect the first tomorrow when the bell tolls One," he said as if she had raised no objection. "Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate."

She lifted her chin, trying as best she could to look unafraid. "Couldn't I take all of them at once and have it over? I mean, since this is all a product of my imagination."

He stood up, shaking his head sadly. "Unless you learn to know the true from the false and to trust more than you see with your eyes, you will never see me again, my dear. But I pray you will remember . . . me and all that has passed before."

When he had said these words, the Professor walked backward from her, and at every step he took, he faded more and more from sight until he had utterly vanished. Susan only shook her head, pulling the coat closer around her. And being, from the emotion she had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or her glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Professor, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed without undressing or even removing her coat, and fell asleep upon the instant.

Coming up: STAVE TWO: THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS