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William Gerhardie - Resurrection

It was nearly five o'clock when I turned out my light in my bedroom and fell asleep. When I felt myself waking I was alarmed at not being able to move a muscle, always associated in my mind with the danger of being buried alive. But I remembered Lord Herbert's injunction to keep calm, to
dissociate myself from my benumbed body, held stiff in catalepsy, and to welcome my other freedom as I had experienced it the previous day with all its adventurous possibilities. And my wish came true.

I did not this time suprise myself floating- above my bed and then being placed on my feet. I was only conscious of whirling blindly-it was something between swimming and flying- through rny rooms.

My consciousness was so dim that it did no occur to me that anything singular was happening to me. Even though, as the contours of my rooms came into focus, when I stretched out a hand to soften the impact of my body with the wall or, taking no heed, passed lhrough them,-I still felt too dim to realize what was happening. Only when my own face looked back at me in dull but recognizable reflection was I sufficiently startled to say to myself : But I am hanging on to the stained-glass fanlight over my dining-room door. And I doubt whether even that discovery would have caused the necessary astonishment to evoke my full consciousness had it not been for an associated thought.

I had never excelled in the school gymnasium at exercises involving pulling up the whole of-one's weight by-one's hands. As my body had never been heavy I could only attribute my failure to the weakness of rny arm muscles.

How was it then that now I managed to hold on by the finger-tips without any effort at all, and behold my reflection in the stained glass of the fanlight ?

The answer flashed across my mind : it was another ' astral ' projection. And the proof ? The proof was to see my body in bed.

No sooner thought than complied with. But how queer ! I saw myself in bed. My hair was differently ruffled from what I remembered of the previous occasion. My face was disconcertingly distinct. But how queer that the bed seemed to be in an unfamiliar corner. Was I dreaming, perhaps ?

And suddenly I awoke. I was standing by the door in my bedroom facing the large mirror reflecting the bed with my sleeping body. I turned away from the mirror and faced the bed : so it was.

I approached my sleeping self, bent over my breathing body, lowered my hand to touch the brow of
the sleeper. But an inch from it my hand halted. I could not touch that head. I cannot say what prevented me. Was there some real resistance ? It may have been the fear I had that at that touch something terrible, a kind of fuse, would blow causing my death. I turned away.

This time I said : ' Ah, I know I cannot open the door, but I will pass through it.' But the idea of opening the door was stronger than the thought that I could not open it (which contained nothing of serious doubt but merely a foregone conclusion) and as I held the handle the door opened. It was as if a door opened out of the door, and I passed through quickly, while it slowly closed itself.

I walked round the flat, looked into the dining-room and noted the time. The clock showed twenty-two minutes past nine. In some eight minutes my servants would be due. At ten o'clock my secretary would arrive. I went into my study, and sat still in the chair at my writing-table. Here I sat,
my own ghost, who could touch and feel his writing materials, but could not as much as lift a pencil. I felt like a schoolboy who had climbed into the empty classroom in the vacation and sat at his desk. Nothing to do.

The sound of the lift coming up and halting on my floor made me prick up my ears. This must be the maid, I thought. The prospect of testing whether she would notice my presence appealed to me. But I did not hear either the sound of the swinging doors of my vestibule or of the key in the latch, and I rightly concluded, there being four flats on each landing, that it was not my maid.

I was therefore startled when I suddenly saw Bonzo enter my room. ' But how did you corne in ? ' I exclaimed. ' I heard the lift, but whoever opened the door to you ? '

Bonzo smiled enigmatically as he stroked his little red beard. He seemed more frail and golden than before. ' I don't use lifts,' he said in that tone of mild irony as if there were something comic about using lifts.