The Macabre Megapack by Duane Parsons

Author:Duane Parsons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gothic, macabre, ghost stories, horror, short stories
ISBN: 9781434446695
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE, by Nathaniel Parker Willis

(1843)

The death of a lady, in a foreign land, leaves me at liberty to narrate the circumstances which follow.

A few words of previous explanation, however.

I am inclined to believe, from conversations on the subject with many sensible persons, that there are few men who have not had, at different intervals in their lives, sudden emotions, currents of thought, affections of mind and body, which not only were wholly disconnected with the course of life thus interrupted, but seemed to belong to a wholly different being.

Perhaps I shall somewhere touch the reader’s experience by describing rather minutely, and in the first person, some sensations of this kind not unusual to myself.

Walking in a crowded street, for example, in perfect health, with every faculty gaily alive, I suddenly lose the sense of neighborhood. I see—I hear—but I feel as if I had become invisible where I stand, and was at the same time present and visible elsewhere. I know everything that passes around me, but I seem disconnected, and (magnetically speaking) unlinked from the human beings near. If spoken to at such a moment, I answer with difficulty. The person who speaks seems to be addressing me from a world to which I no longer belong. At the same time, I have an irresistible inner consciousness of being present in another scene of everyday life—where there are streets and houses and people—where I am looked on without surprise as a familiar object—where I have cares, fears, objects to attain—a different scene altogether, and a different life, from the scene and life of which I was a moment before conscious. I have a dull ache at the back of my eye for the minute or two that this trance lasts, and then, slowly and reluctantly, my absent soul seems creeping back, the magnetic links of conscious neighborhood, one by one, re-attach, and I resume my ordinary life, but with an irrepressible feeling of sadness.

It is in vain that I try to fix these shadows as they recede. I have struggled a thousand times in vain to particularize and note down what I saw in the strange city to which I was translated. The memory glides from my grasp with preternatural evasiveness.

In a book called “The Man of Two Lives,” similar sensations to these are made the basis of the story. Indeed, till I saw that book, the fear of having my sanity suspected, sealed my lips on the subject.

I have still a reserve in my confession. I have been conscious, since boyhood, of a mental peculiarity which I fear to name while I doubt that it is possessed by others than myself—which I should not allude to now, but that it forms a strange link of identity between me and another being to be mentioned in this story.

I may say, also, without attaching any importance to it, except as it bears upon this same identity, that, of those things which I had no occasion

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