Fetching wpdb data from a php file seems to break?

Initial thoughts are that it depends where your load_marque.php file is located. I assume within a theme or plugin.

If so, what happens when the file is called directly. If there are some errors, these will be shown on the page.

Based on the on here https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/wpdb your query your query may need to be changed slightly. An example from the codex shows it more like this:

global $wpdb;
$results = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}options WHERE option_id = 1", OBJECT ); 

The differences seem to center around not requiring the ID number to be wrapped in single quote marks.