lair was dead: to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  The register of his burial was signed by the commentator, the reporter, the party, and the chief mourner.  Brown signed it. Old Blair was as dead as a door-nail.

Brown knew he was dead?  Of course he did. How could it be otherwise?  Blair and he were partners for I don't know how many years.  Brown  was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee.  And even Brown was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

Brown never painted out Old Blair's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the door: Brown and Blair.  The firm was known as Brown and Blair.  Sometimes people new to the business called Brown Brown, and sometimes Blair, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Brown! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clunking, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his jutting chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, "My dear Brown, how are you?  When will you come to see me?"  No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Brown.  Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, "No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"

Brown took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's-book, went home to bed.  He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner.  They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Brown, the other rooms being all let out as offices. 

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large.  It is also a fact, that Brown had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Brown had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London. Now  let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Brown, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change -- not a knocker, but Blair’s face.

Blair's face.  It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it.  It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Brown as Blair used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead.  The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless.  That, and its livid colour, made it horrible.

As Brown looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again. After several turns, he sat down .  As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building.  It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing.  It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour.  The bells ceased as they had begun, together.  They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant's cellar.  Brown  then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains. The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

"It's humbug !" said Brown.  "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.  Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know him; Blair's Ghost!" and fell again.

 The same face: the very same.  Blair in his open neck shirt, tight jeans and cowboy boots. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle.  It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Brown observed it closely) of bombs, shells, bullets and padlocks  wrought in steel.

How now!" said Brown, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"

"Much!" – Blair’s voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

"Who were you then?"  said Brown, raising his voice. 

"In life I was your partner, Tony Blair. You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't." said Brown.

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Brown held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon.  But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast! Brown fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.

"Mercy!" he said.  "Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?"

"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or not?"

"I do," said Brown.  "I must.  But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?  You are fettered," said Brown, 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?"

Brown 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. It is a ponderous chain! It has the four billion links of the pounds you raised for the war, and 650,000 links for the deaths you caused.

Brown  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. "Tony," he said, imploringly.  "Old Tony Blair, tell me more.  Speak comfort to me, Tony!"

You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits." Without their visits," said the Ghost, "you cannot hope to shun the path I tread.  Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one."