Short Story: A Place Out Of Time

I have a story I need to tell, you may find it hard to believe but I can assure you it’s the truth. Before I begin though, I should say a little about my life up to this point, so you may better understand my circumstances.
I’ve lived now over half a century, been married once, and have had a couple other serious relationships, but none that amounted to anything. It’s not that the women I’ve been involved with had anything wrong with them, quite the contrary, they were all fine ladies, it’s just that I was never all that passionate about them.
Only weeks before this story begins I found myself again going through the process of packing and moving. I had bought a great building in a very old section of town, the minute I laid eyes on it I knew I was going to buy it. It had actually been a general store at one time. At the turn of the century, there were several small towns in this area, and as the population grew, the towns grew together and are now part of a very large urban area. The section where I am now was the main street of one of those towns. The area had fallen into disrepair over time with many of the stores and shops abandoned or closed when, about five years ago, there was a move to restore and revitalize the area. The old bank building is now an art gallery, the former jail is an upscale and trendy bar, and many of the old shops are now restaurants and side-walk cafes. My place, the old general store, contains my Photographic Studio below, with living quarters above. The upstairs had once held two apartments, but has now been enlarged into one. The walls are the same red brick from when it was built, and much of the wood trim is still original as well, and now that several layers of old paint have been removed and the wood refinished I would imagine that it looks quite like it did when first built. The only all new part of the whole building are the wood floors, which have been redone to look like the originals. It is in this building where my story takes place.
I’ll start when I began the move into my living quarters. I had pretty well set up the studio a week or so previous, but the upstairs was still undergoing work and I had been staying in a motel. One morning I walked upstairs with an arm load of possessions and there she was, an attractive, but somewhat oddly dressed woman was standing in my kitchen. When my eyes first met hers I had the distinct feeling I knew her, but couldn’t remember from where. I decided she must have modeled for me sometime in the past. How she got upstairs without my seeing her I can’t imagine, but there she was. “Hi,” I said, “I don’t know how you got up here, but this is my living quarters, the studio is below.” She just smiled and continued to watch me. “I’m really not open yet, still moving in as you can see.” Would you like to leave a way for me to contact you when I’m ready to start shooting?” Still no response from her, just the hint of a smile on her lips. I walked over to her and reached out to take her hand, as a hint it was time to leave. When I touched her, I felt a slight chill but no substance. She got a surprised look on her face and disappeared. I mean she really disappeared. I wish I had the words to describe how I felt, and what went on in my mind when this happened, but it defies description. How long I stood there looking around and second guessing my self I can’t say. I was sure what I had seen was real, but that simply was not possible. The next couple days passed quickly and somewhat uneasily but I was finally settled into my living quarters. I had been thinking of the lady I saw continuously, still far from sure that things had really happened as I thought. Then on the third day I walked upstairs and there she was again. She was standing in the same place as before, dressed as she had been before, and smiling at me. “Your back,” I said. She shook her head, “I’ve been here the while,” she replied. After a bit of uneasy silence on both our parts we finally began talking. I asked her about the other day when I had first seen her, and how she had vanished. A surprised look came over her and she replied, “When you touched my hand your hand was like nothing, it passed right through mine and felt cold. Then you disappeared.”
That conversation took place over twelve months ago. Since that time she has been my constant companion. We have tried, several times, to touch hands but always the same thing happens. Each of us sees the other disappear, and then it can be anywhere from several hours to a day or more before we’re back together.
She has told me a little of her life. Her name is Kate and she was born about 1850, she doesn’t know for sure when. She grew up in an isolated area with no other families within miles of hers, and she was not well treated. When she was about 17 years old the abuse and neglect got to be too much and she left. She had walked for days, barefoot and hungry, when she came to this town. When she tells of coming into town that first day you should see the look on her face. The first person to see her came to help, spoke kindly to her, actually picked her up and carried her to the doctor’s office a couple hundred yards down the street. All along the way as she was being carried, people came to look and offer help. She was carried past the general store, where the commotion of her passing caught the attention of the proprietor, who later was to offer one of his upstairs apartments for her to recover in. She smiles when she thinks of him. He gave, from his store, clothing and other necessities that she had no money to pay for. He gave the room she recovered in, and later gave her employment in his store so she could repay him. This building means a great deal to her. It’s the only place in which she ever felt happy and contented, and she says she will never leave.
I have been doing very well in my business. I have made further investments in equipment, gained new clients, and, best of all, the quality of my work has improved. I to am beginning to feel happy and contented for the first time in my life. Leaving this place, and her, are the furthest things from my mind.
She knows nothing of my world, but believes what I tell her. When we stand side by side and look out our upstairs window I see automobiles, people sitting in the side walk cafes and a UPS driver making a delivery. She, right next to me, sees a street muddy from a recent rain and a horse drawn wagon passing by. When either of us leaves our home we are in our own worlds, we never meet anywhere but up stairs where we live. To her down stairs is still the general store where she works. To me it’s a photographic studio. I feel her presence, know she’s near, right there next to me when I’m working, I just can’t see her.
It’s kind of funny that to me there is one apartment upstairs and to her there are two. She sees me walk through a wall and disappear when I go into either my office or the back bedroom, and she can only get into what is now our living room from the hall, which to me does not exist.
However there are some things we both can see and use. For instance, when she builds a fire in the fireplace we both see it and feel its warmth. Most things however, are not seen by us both. The kitchen, for example, is in approximately the same place to both, but where I just had some new cabinets and a counter top built is where her wood burning stove sits. One night I was working in the kitchen and she was seated in the living room and we were talking of the days events, when I seated myself on the counter top. The look on her face! What she saw was me seated on the top of a very hot stove. That has now become our own little joke. If ever I want to make her laugh, all I need do is hop on my counter/her stove, or even just look at it, and she can’t help but smile.
The weeks and months passed, and our feelings for each other continued to grow. We were both happy in each others company despite the obvious draw back of not being able to touch. We learned almost everything there was to know about the other and in fact became almost as one. Then one day I was in my studio and was having some problems with a balky light. As I walked from the camera across the floor to the light I passed her. We passed as we would in a narrow isle, she walking with a piece of merchandise in her hand, and looking up into my eyes as we passed. I saw the surprised look on her face and knew she had seen me also. The excitement I felt was unbelievable. I made excuses to my model and headed upstairs as fast as I could. Within minutes she was there also. We stood and looked at each other a long time without speaking, and in fact she was the first to regain her voice. “ What can this mean,” she asked. I could give no answer. I reached out my hand to her, something we hadn’t tried in several weeks. She took it in hers. I felt the substance, the warmth of her flesh, and she did not disappear. We stepped together, embraced, held each other tightly. I bent down to her, raised her chin gently with my hand, and kissed her a soft lingering kiss, our lips barely touching, then again, this time firmer and with passion. We held each other a long time, our tears mixing together and leaving damp spots on our clothing.
We both had to get back to our work and parted reluctantly. When I got down stairs I found my model amusing herself with a magazine and a Diet Coke. Luckily I had worked with her in the past and she was forgiving of my rather abrupt departure, and total inability to accomplish anything of value in the rest of the shoot. I could think of nothing but seeing Kate that night. I got upstairs early, the minutes, even the seconds, dragged by. Five O’clock came, two more minutes and she’d be here. She always walked in at exactly two minutes after five. She never came. She didn’t appear the next day or night either. I was disappointed but not yet worried, we had gone through this before when we used to touch hands and she always would reappear after a few hours, a day at most. When a week had past I could no longer just sit and wait. I was worried that something bad might have happened to her, shot in a robbery or who knows what. I remembered there was a Historical Society down the street that had a lot of old photos and news papers, and I had the idea of looking back in the old papers for news of her. I knew that in her time it was about a week past the 4th of July, 1881 when I had seen her last, so I began with the paper published on July 6th and went forward. At that time the local paper was only published once a week and was one folded page, by 1890 it had gone to a bi-weekly and each edition had tripled in size. I was amazed that all copies were available on micro film, with no missing issues. I started first with the obituaries, and to my great relief hadn’t found her name even after going through every paper for the next ten years. Later that evening as I was sitting at home on an old couch that we had both been able to share, and hoping she might yet reappear, I had the idea of reading every paper in its entirety looking for news of her. When the proprietor had died, his family no longer had interest in the store and left Kate to manage it, I knew she had hopes of purchasing it one day, and at any rate I knew her determination never to leave, certainly there would be some mention of her.
The next day found me back in the Historical Society Building, looking through each paper in turn, this time reading every printed word, every ad in its entirety. In the third paper I found an item of great interest. It read, “Today, Kate Sellers, manager of O’Brien’s Mercantile on Main Street reported the loss of a valued piece of jewelry. A ring that Miss Sellers was in the habit of keeping in a secret place was discovered to be missing this morning when she went to retrieve it. She is giving her account here rather than to the Constable because she says there was only one other person who knew of her hiding place. That person does not reside in town at this time, but she is sure they will read this paper and she wants them to know that if the ring will be valued as much by them as it is by her, she wants them to keep it.”
I must have reread that item half a dozen times. Kate had made a point of showing me her secret hiding place, between the cushions on “our” sofa, down in the crack where crumbs and sometimes change collects. She had also told me I was the only other person who knew that she used it as a hiding place. That ring was very special to her, she did not wear it when cleaning or when doing anything that might damage or dirty it. It was all she had taken with her when she left home, and I believe it had belonged to a grandmother.
Minutes later I was home, with my hand feeling about between the cushions of our sofa. There were a few crumbs and one quarter, but no ring. In the next three weeks I read and reread every word in every paper from July 6th 1881 to July 1921. There was an article about Kate when a wind storm had done some damage to the store, and mention of her in the ads a few times. Then in May of 1882 began a series of articles about her disappearance. According to the newspaper articles she had closed the store one Wednesday night, was seen by several people locking up, then going through the door leading to her upstairs apartment. Lights were seen in her windows later and she was in fact seen through the window by at least one credible witness. When the store didn’t open the next morning at the usual time, and knocks on her door went unanswered, the Constable broke through the lock and went up stairs. Every thing was in order. There were no signs of a struggle or foul play. Yet she never returned. There were three more articles over the next six months about her disappearance, but no facts ever came to light, nor was she ever heard from again.
I had of course been checking in the sofa every day, sometimes five or ten times, and had not found the ring. Yet I never gave up, and every time I came in the door one of the first things I did was check the sofa. I had faith that it would be there sooner or later, that article that Kate put in the paper had to be intended for me, there could be no other explanation, and if she put the ring there for me, and it disappeared, then sooner or later I must have it. That is just what happened. I came home one day, tired and a bit discouraged from work, perhaps feeling a little sorry for myself but most of all missing her. I slumped down on our sofa and automatically began feeling down between the cushions. The first thing I felt was the ring. Suddenly a dreary, lackluster day became the best day of my life. It was her ring, no doubt about it and it hadn’t been there before. She knew we both had the “use” of that couch, and I remembered that she had always said if you wanted things bad enough, eventually you would get them. She had just proven that loud and clear.
Over the next few days I gave myself countless headaches trying to figure out a time line between her and myself. It was about three weeks in her time between us seeing each other for the last time and when she put the ad in the paper about her missing ring. However for me it was almost two months before I found the ring, that’s counting the week between her disappearance from me and my finding the article in the paper. I wondered if her disappearance in May of 1882 might not mean she came back to me, and her never returning meant she was able to stay. That’s why I was so interested in a time line between us, although it seemed that three weeks to her was closer to six or seven to me.
The days passed into weeks, then months. I still missed her as much as ever but I was determined to think positively that she would return. I tried buying an antique locket and chain that was in a similar style to her ring and that had been made about 1840, I put that in our sofa hoping it would be found by her, but it never was. I also found an old, original copy of the local paper and put that between the cushions of our sofa. It was never found either.
Then one day I had been working in the studio on the computer and decided to go upstairs for lunch, something I was not in the habit of doing. On the way up the stairs I smelled her perfume. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I stood there for a moment and said a silent prayer, then continued slowly up the remaining few steps. She was standing in the living room; the uneasy expression on her face soon replaced by a smile. “Your back,” I was barley able to get out. She shook her head, “I’ve been here the while,” she said through tears. “It’s a Thursday morning in May isn’t it,” I asked. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and nodded, then slowly, smiling, said “you read the papers?”
“Forty years and a few days worth, every word of them,” I replied. To her questioning glance I said, “You never returned.” “I read the accounts of your disappearance in the papers, what else can you tell me?” She replied, “I had closed up the store last night and came up stairs. I was feeling bad, wondering if I’d ever see you again. I sat down on the couch and I guess I cried myself to sleep; this is what I woke up to. I must say I was glad when you came up. I’ve looked out the window once, but have been afraid to again.”
Another year has passed and we’re still together. She has adapted quite well. It took a couple days to work up the courage to walk outside, but it seems she is here for good.
So ends this story to you, my reader, but Kate’s and mine I hope will continue on for years to come.