The Memoirs of a Ghost by G. W. Stonier

Author:G. W. Stonier [Stonier, G. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Ghosts, Historical Fiction
Publisher: Grey Walls Press Limited
Published: 1947-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

wandering about the area in question. The reason why I rose early, with the first glimmer of dawn, was that I was terrified of losing any moment of daylight. Three-quarters of the day in any case had to be wasted over a menial job. My room had, of course, no electricity, and I could not afford candles and matches.

There were, in this map or reconstruction, deserts, gaps, question-marks, many names and appearances I knew to be wrong or assumed, but these I hoped with time to correct. The names of streets involved a curious though simple displacement. There are, for example, many streets that bear evidence to a previous activity or country origin, and these words evoked for me not the brick and stone I knew to be there, but the thing — river, hill, or market — named. Osier Place: I saw osiers growing. Passing Rose Lane — during the frequent walks that accompanied these reconstructions — I could smell roses even in winter, whereas I had little doubt that the actual congeries of smells, could I have detected it,

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would have been unpleasant. If necessary, no doubt, I could thoroughly establish Rose Lane, so that to all outward appearance my presence and perceptions there would be no different from the next man’s. But I can’t take anything for granted: that much at least I have learnt. I am like the blind man who knows to say cheerfully: “What a fine day; look at the sunshine on those roofs!” or “The leaves are beginning to turn — see”; and it’s the companion who sees, who takes in sunlight and leaves, and can reject what to the blind man is life itself.

Automatically, after a time, I “constructed” wherever I went. My mistakes — ah, they were endless, humiliating. Often people must have thought me extraordinarily imperceptive, even deranged, but that (dreadful though it once appeared to me) could by no means be helped; I had to make this unceasing trial and error, or accept the alternative: a state of mind so painful, a universe so shadowy and unstable, as not to be borne. Even as it was, my elaborate reconstructions of the daytime unravelled, crumbled away at night in terrors that reduced everything to a rubble of crushed identities, chaotic fragments, which in the morning it might take hours to reinstate. The struggle between chaos and order — all chaos, any order — was unremitting. It was my battle that must be fought, if need be, ignominiously and vainly. To oppose the forces that would dismember, unskeleton and unworld me — it was a point of honour as much as of instinct with me to resist. What was to be gained? I did not know. Life of a sort; if you prefer it, death. But to a man with my hungers and regrets even that may be valuable. I couldn’t let go. I lived by inches.

Up to a point — in my constructions — I seemed to be

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succeeding. Every day brought

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