the shadow without substance

One evening, at quarter-past nine, the usual hour for closing. Sharon was at work, she had spent several hours dealing with clients and she was making a elaborate station of her closing register. Suddenly she stood staring, and uttered two little quick gasps. She had just experienced something she had not so easily remembered in her waking life until now.

"What's the matter?" asked her co-worker closing shop along with her.

Brushing her hair, instantly the found voice attracted her gaze. She went towards her uncertainty, glancing back over her shoulder. "Did you hear that?" she uttered a little sobbering cry, as she clung to her sweater. Her mind went on a monotonous journey. Her gaze following it while her lips pouted sullenly. The snubbed, hurt feeling grew and grew, her heart beating violently. Terror, a lurking beast, had leapt out upon her from some ambush of the mind. Terror such as she had never felt before. When she told me, time seemed to have slowed down so that moments stretched themselves into minutes.

I will not tell anybody exactly what is in my small mind, I've developed cunning and began to fish for information. It is not easy, to be asked irrelevant questions. But on ghosts, witches, or various other manifestations of the supernatural, it is only fair to warn the unwary that this is unsatisfactory due to the lacking in that of completeness which, nowadays, is considered your time's worth. Such topics are strange to begin with but I do not consider it my buisness to fill up the spaces in between the lines for it is beyond my realm of understanding. The following is open to those who care to read.

I dreamed a dream. It was about this time, shortly after I began to have dreams, formless and incoherent to this waking memory. In them, or rather after them, I was conscious of loving something of feminine beauty and freshness of young girlhood, and of somebody loving me as I wanted to be loved.

I had met no girls who were grown-up or nearly grown-up. Perhaps, one might suggest, my busy little mind had materialized her out of some picture once seen and subsequently forgotten. Perhaps I had already created the ideal, of which, during my adolescence, I was to go vainly in search.

However that may be, I was conscious of a friendship, the incidents of which always just eluded my memory. I knew that sometimes I was drawn into a heaven of warm arms, and fresh girlish kisses covering my upturned face. Somehow, I could not remember her face--only just in glimpses which went out like sparks. And there was a fragrance about her, too--like a summer garden at night after a shower of rain.

It was all very puzzling to my small mind. I knew that I was not remembering somebody I had known when I was little, for these vague impressions had not started until I came to the Hillside. The experiences were recent and continuous; I knew that they would go on happening.

Having nobody in whom I felt that I could confide, I hugged these vague memories to myself. It was my secret, but, at the same time, a bit 'scary'. It made one go a bit chilly and caused one's eyes to water when one thought of it. For although I knew that I had nothing to fear, I was well aware that this friend did not belong to the same world as I.

I enjoy more than anybody else the venture of conventionality. I have my disappointments; at most, but to my unduly imaginative eyes I am in a world beautiful for its simplicity of architecture that is a palace with fairy stories. The Hillside is a place between two dilapitated buildings. In it remains the garden, the small ring park that grazed the estate, all as splendid as anything I had seen, even the seaside. It would be hard to say when I first began to associate this 'friend' within this place all the while. Something drew me there to play, and gradually I was not playing alone. This feeling was very nice at first, until I stopped playing and began to think about it. Then it seemed all wrong that there should be somebody there whom I couldn't see. At that I would take fright, like some little wild thing at the sound of a man's foot-step, and run panic-stricken through the thicket to the friendly cedar on the lawn, which was overlooked by the long row of windows at the back of the house. The cedar was always 'home' when I played one of her rare games like hide-and-seek. It was 'home', too, in this queer game--which was something more than a game--that I played by myself.

But this was not the only sort of experience with which I was provided. Sometimes I felt the presence of two people there--two people who were tremendously real except that I could not see not hear nor touch them. I was not more afraid on those occasions than on the other, although I always left more quickly. I knew, nobody wanted to hurt me. The sensation was the same that I experienced in the presence of grown-ups who wanted me to go so that they could talk in private. Being a sensitive little boy I was quick to detect when my father and mother wanted to talk privately and knew instinctively when they were going to tell me to run.

At five or six years old one learns things without realizing them. Instinct; they call it. It is there without much development of reasoning. Thus I discovered, without thinking it strange, that there was never any other presence there.

"Can you dream about what isn't really there?"

"Of course you can," said Sharon briefly.

I was sure she had not understood. "Sometimes," I explained, "I dream about you... but you're really there. Well, can you dream about anybody who isn't there at all?"

Of course you can," said Sharon. "Why, I dreamed of a big monkey the other night."

"But there are big monkeys."

"Nothing like the one I dreamed about," said Sharon definitely.

Sometimes I think, perhaps she isn't real, after all--only just a make believe, the lovely, pretty lady who brought love and warmth and colour and perfume into my dreams. But next morning I awake comforted, with more dim and rapidly-fading memories, and warm as if fresh from the embrace of her enfolding arms.