JACOB MA Ebenezer. Tonight you will be visited by three spirits.

NARRATOR Jacob Ma was dead. He had been dead for seven years, to the very night, and there was no doubt about it whatsoever. Ebenezer Szeto had signed the papers himself. He had chosen the cheapest coffin on the list, and he had gone back to work the same afternoon.

NARRATOR And yet the old sign above the shop still read Szeto and Ma Properties. Szeto had never taken his partner's name down. A new sign would cost money, and Ebenezer Szeto did not like to spend money. Not on signs, not on lunch, and certainly not on other people.

NARRATOR The two of them had built the business together over fifteen years. They had bought old buildings cheaply and rented them out dearly, and they had never once given a tenant a second chance. When Jacob died, people in Mong Kok said that Szeto had lost the only friend he had. Szeto himself said only that the office was quieter now, and the electricity bill was lower.

NARRATOR The agency was a narrow shop on a side street in Mong Kok, its window covered in cards: flats for sale, flats for rent, flats so small that the photographs had been taken from the doorway, because there was nowhere else to stand. Outside, the street glowed. Every shopping centre on Nathan Road had dressed itself in lights, and a cold wind from the north pushed the crowds of shoppers along like leaves.

NARRATOR Inside, it was almost as cold as the street. The heater stood in the corner, unplugged. Szeto sat at the big desk at the back, counting. He was a thin, grey man of about forty five who looked twenty years older, and he wore the same dark suit he had worn for a decade. People said the temperature dropped when he walked into a room. People said a great many things about Ebenezer Szeto, and most of them were true.

NARRATOR At the small desk by the door sat his clerk, Bob Choi, with his scarf wrapped twice around his neck and his fingers stiff on the keyboard. It was half past seven in the evening. Bob had been there since eight that morning.

BOB CHOI Mr Szeto, the listings for next week are done. Shall I send them now?

EBENEZER SZETO Send them. Then check the Tai Kok Tsui contracts again. I found a mistake in them yesterday.

BOB CHOI It was a missing full stop, Mr Szeto.

EBENEZER SZETO A mistake is a mistake.

NARRATOR Bob glanced at his phone. There was a message from his wife: a photo of their son, Tim, asleep on the sofa, with a hospital appointment card on the table beside him. Tim had been waiting for his treatment since the summer, and the date on the card was still a long way off. Bob turned the phone face down and went back to the contracts.

NARRATOR Bob's family rented one small room on the other side of the harbour, and the journey home took more than an hour by bus and train. Most nights he got back after Tim had gone to sleep. Most mornings he left before Tim woke up. He told himself it would not be like this forever.

NARRATOR Then the door swung open, and the wind blew in a young man with a red face and a bright smile.

FRED Merry Christmas, Uncle Ebenezer!

EBENEZER SZETO What's merry about it? You're letting the cold in.

FRED It's colder in here than it is out there! Come on, Uncle. Come to dinner tomorrow. Mei is cooking, the whole family will be there, and there's a seat with your name on it.

EBENEZER SZETO Christmas! What a load of rubbish. A day when people spend money they haven't got on things they don't need, and then expect me to wait for the rent.

FRED You don't mean that, Uncle.

EBENEZER SZETO I do. What right have you got to be merry? You're poor enough.

FRED And what right have you got to be miserable? You're rich enough!

FRED It's a day when people remember each other. My mother loved Christmas. You know she did.

NARRATOR For a moment, something moved in Szeto's face. Fred's mother had been his little sister, and she had been gone for many years. Then the moment passed.

EBENEZER SZETO Your mother was too kind for her own good. Good night, Fred.

FRED I'm not angry with you, Uncle. I'll ask you again next year, and the year after that. Merry Christmas, Bob!

BOB CHOI Merry Christmas, Fred.

EBENEZER SZETO One more word from you, Bob, and you can spend Christmas looking for a new job.

NARRATOR Fred had hardly gone when the door opened again, more slowly this time. An old woman stepped in, small and bent, pulling a metal trolley piled high with flattened cardboard boxes. She left it carefully outside, so that it would not block the way.

NARRATOR This was Mrs Lam. For eleven years she had rented a room in one of Szeto's buildings in Sham Shui Po, in a flat that had once been one home and was now divided into five. Her room had a bed, a hot plate, and a window that looked straight at a wall.

MRS LAM Mr Szeto, I'm sorry to come so late. I got your letter. About the rent.

EBENEZER SZETO Then you know what it says. Seven hundred more a month, from January.

MRS LAM Seven hundred Hong Kong dollars is a lot for me, Mr Szeto. I sell cardboard. On a good day, I make perhaps sixty. I have never been late with the rent. Not once in eleven years.

EBENEZER SZETO Then you'll find a way, Mrs Lam. Everybody else does.

MRS LAM I am seventy eight, Mr Szeto. My knees are not what they were. I cannot carry as much as I used to.

MRS LAM Please. Just this year. Wait until the summer.

EBENEZER SZETO The rent is the rent. Pay it, or leave by the end of January. There are ten people who want that room.

NARRATOR Mrs Lam looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, because there was nothing else to do, and went back out to her trolley. Bob watched her push it up the street into the wind. He said nothing. He could not afford to.

NARRATOR The third visitor of the evening was a woman in a bright red vest, with a clipboard in her hand.

MS HO Good evening. I'm from a food bank in Sham Shui Po. At Christmas we try to make sure every family in the neighbourhood has one good meal. A lot of them are elderly people living alone. Could your company help, sir? Even a small amount.

EBENEZER SZETO And what do the other businesses give?

MS HO Whatever they can. Some give a hundred. Some give an hour of their time.

EBENEZER SZETO Then let them. I pay my staff. I pay my bills. If people are hungry, let them work harder.

MS HO Some of them are eighty years old, sir.

EBENEZER SZETO Then they should have saved when they were young. Good night.

NARRATOR Ms Ho stood quietly for a second. Then she wrote something on her clipboard, thanked him politely, and left. Szeto felt rather pleased with himself, as if he had won something.

NARRATOR At eight o'clock, Szeto finally switched off his desk lamp. Bob stood up slowly and wound his scarf around his neck one more time.

BOB CHOI Mr Szeto. Tomorrow is Christmas Day. I'd like to take it off, if that's all right. I'd like to be with Tim.

EBENEZER SZETO You want a whole day's pay for no work.

BOB CHOI It's only one day a year, sir.

EBENEZER SZETO A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty fifth of December. Very well. Take it. But you'll be here at eight o'clock on the twenty sixth. Not one minute later.

BOB CHOI Thank you, Mr Szeto. Merry Christmas.

NARRATOR Szeto did not reply. He locked the door, pulled down the metal shutter with a crash, and walked off into the night.

NARRATOR Szeto walked home the long way, because the long way had no shops he wanted to go into. He passed shopping centres wrapped in giant ribbons, where a choir of schoolchildren was singing carols to a crowd holding up their phones. He passed a stall selling roast chestnuts, and a family sharing a single paper bag of them on a bench, laughing at something. He passed it all without looking, his collar turned up against the wind.

NARRATOR On a corner near Yau Ma Tei, a minibus pulled in, packed with tired workers going home. Under a street lamp, an old man was tying a tower of cardboard onto his trolley, his hands red with cold. Szeto stepped round him without a word, the way he would step round a puddle.

NARRATOR His own building stood on a quiet street in Yau Ma Tei. It was old, eighteen floors of grey concrete, and Szeto owned every flat in it. Two years ago it had been full of families. Now it was almost empty. He had not renewed a single lease, because a developer had offered him a great deal of money for the whole building, and empty buildings sell faster. Only one light still burned in it at night, and that was his own.

NARRATOR He reached the front gate and took out his key card. Above the card reader was the small screen of the video intercom. It was always dark. Tonight, it was not.

NARRATOR On the screen, looking straight out at him, was a face. A pale, tired face, with sad, hollow eyes. It did not move. It did not blink. It was the face of Jacob Ma.

NARRATOR Szeto stared. A chill ran down his back that had nothing to do with the wind. Then the screen flickered, and the face was gone. There was only his own reflection in the black glass.

EBENEZER SZETO Faulty wiring. I'll have it replaced. No. Repaired. Repairing is cheaper.

NARRATOR He went in, but he walked a little faster than usual, and in the lift, he did not look at the mirror.

NARRATOR Szeto's flat was on the top floor. It was the biggest flat in the building, and the emptiest. There was no tree, no lights, no cards on the shelves. There was a sofa, a table, one chair, and on the wall an old wooden clock. It had hung in his father's little shop in Sham Shui Po when Szeto was a boy. It was the only thing from those days that he had kept.

NARRATOR He checked every room. He looked behind the curtains, under the bed and inside the wardrobe, feeling foolish. Nobody was there. Of course nobody was there. He locked the door twice, heated a packet of instant noodles, and sat down to eat in his coat, because heating cost money.

NARRATOR It's nothing, he told himself. A tired man, a cold night and a cheap intercom. All his life he had heard stories about ghosts in old buildings, in Hong Kong as in every city in the world, and he had never believed a single one of them.

NARRATOR The clock ticked. The wind whistled at the window. And then, far below him, a sound began.

NARRATOR It was the bell of the lift, one soft note at the ground floor. Then another, at the first floor. Then the second. Floor by floor, the lift was rising through the empty building, and nobody had called it.

NARRATOR Szeto put down his chopsticks. He told himself it was children playing, though no children had lived in the building for a year. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.

NARRATOR The lift doors opened onto the corridor outside his flat. And then he heard it: a heavy, dragging, clanking sound, like iron being pulled across a stone floor. It came slowly down the corridor, towards his door.

NARRATOR The door did not open. It did not need to. Jacob Ma came straight through it, as if the wood were water.

NARRATOR He looked as he had always looked, in the same old suit and the same worn shoes. But around his body, wound over and over, was a long and heavy chain. And the chain was not made of ordinary iron. It was made of keys. Thousands of keys, to thousands of doors. Between them hung padlocks and rent books and tenancy agreements, signed and stamped, rattling as he moved.

EBENEZER SZETO Who are you? What do you want with me?

JACOB MA Ask me who I was.

EBENEZER SZETO Who were you, then?

JACOB MA In life, I was your partner. Jacob Ma.

EBENEZER SZETO You're not real. You're a bit of bad food. A trick of the light. You're nothing more than a bad dream.

NARRATOR Jacob raised his head and let out a terrible cry, and shook his chain so hard that the whole room rang with it. Szeto gripped the edge of the table with both hands.

EBENEZER SZETO All right! All right. I believe you. Jacob, why do you wear that chain?

JACOB MA I wear the chain I made in life. I made it link by link, Ebenezer, and key by key. Every door I locked against someone who needed help. Every rent I raised on someone who could not pay. Every time I said no, when I could have said yes. I made it myself, and I chose to wear it.

JACOB MA And do you know how long your own chain is? It was as long as this one seven years ago. You have worked hard on it since then.

JACOB MA In life, I never looked further than the walls of our office. I never looked up from the counting. Why did I walk through crowds of people every day with my eyes on the ground? At this time of year, Ebenezer, I suffer most of all.

NARRATOR Szeto looked down at the floor around his feet, half expecting to see keys there. There was nothing. But he felt the weight of something all the same.

EBENEZER SZETO Jacob. Old friend. Tell me something to comfort me.

JACOB MA I have no comfort to give. I cannot rest, and I cannot stay. I have walked for seven years without stopping, and I will walk for many more. I came tonight to warn you. You still have a chance to escape my fate, Ebenezer. A chance that I arranged for you.

EBENEZER SZETO You were always a good friend to me, Jacob.

JACOB MA Tonight you will be visited by three spirits.

EBENEZER SZETO Is that the chance? I think I'd rather not.

JACOB MA Without them, you will walk the road I walk. Expect the first when the clock strikes one. Look for me no more. And for your own sake, remember what has passed between us.

NARRATOR Jacob moved backwards towards the window, and with every step he took, the window opened a little wider, until it stood wide open to the cold night air. He raised his hand, as if to say, come and see. Szeto, trembling, went to the window and looked out.

NARRATOR The air above Nathan Road was full of figures. Pale, drifting shapes, moving slowly through the lights, and every one of them wore a chain. Some were chained to their own office safes. Some dragged the weight of whole buildings behind them. One old man, heavy with gold, hung weeping above a woman and her child in a doorway far below. He wanted to help them, and he could not. He had lost the power to help, forever.

NARRATOR Then the shapes faded into the mist, and the night was only a night again. When Szeto turned round, the room was empty. Jacob was gone.

NARRATOR Szeto shut the window. He checked the door. It was still locked twice, just as he had left it. He opened his mouth to say what he always said.

EBENEZER SZETO What a load of...

NARRATOR But he stopped. He did not finish. Perhaps he was tired. Perhaps it was the strange evening, or the late hour, or the cold. Perhaps it was something else. He went straight to bed without even taking off his coat, and he fell asleep at once.

NARRATOR Outside, the city went on shining. Far below, on Nathan Road, the last shoppers were heading home with their bags, and somewhere a choir was singing one more carol before midnight.

NARRATOR On the wall of the dark, empty flat, his father's old clock ticked on, towards one.

NARRATOR Next time on A Hong Kong Christmas Carol, the clock strikes one, and the first of the three spirits takes Ebenezer back to a small shop in 1990s Hong Kong, and to the boy he used to be.

NARRATOR Want more listening practice? You can try our free tasters at cadenceenglish.com.