“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside awakes.” — Carl Gustav Jung

© 2011 Evelyn Klebert

Cafe Cornerstone

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” — Marcel Proust

His eyes snapped open. He could still feel it, the energy he’d tapped into. And then his awareness spread through the house. She was trying to leave.

Alice seemed like a sweet person. She was only sixteen. She and her mother worked for Mr. Burke, living in a set of rooms near the kitchen. Her elderly mother was the cook and Alice more of a housekeeper. She told Julia that they had been in Mr. Burke’s employ only a month. Alice was a chatty girl and more than willing to give out information. But when she’d asked why Alice wore such a strange outfit she’d laughed indulgently asking why it was strange. Julia gleaned from their conversation that Mr. Burke had intimated that his guest was ill, perhaps ill in the head and might say strange things. After Julia had managed to eat a bit of soup, the young girl had helped her take what amounted to a cat bath. She’d then guided Julia back into her bed, lightly patting her hand with comfort and whispering that she would remember things right before too long.
And then she’d left, turning out the lamp, and leaving the room in semi-darkness. But Julia did not sleep. She laid in the alien bed in the alien room with her mind finally lucid. She’d been kidnapped – an odd imprisonment to say the least. But it was clear now. And what was also clear was that not only her mental distress was a factor here, but also her physical deterioration. She was a diabetic. It hadn’t seemed like as much as an issue while she was ill. But now that she was eating again,no matter how little, her blood sugar would be escalating. She needed insulin in order to live.
She sat up in the bed. From what Intel she’d gathered from Alice, there didn’t seem to be guards about here. She could just walk out a door, wherever that might be and escape from this bizarre place where people liked to play dress-up. Escape get help and go home – simple enough.  She’d seen people running about more scantily clad than in the long nightgown she wore.  In fact her current garb would be considered conservative.
Quietly she flung back the covers and put her bare feet on the cool wooden floor. She tiptoed to the door, and slowly opened it peeking out. There was a soft light in the hallway. Her eyes caught sight of a sort of hurricane lamp mounted to the wall, but no one around. Julia took a deep breath and headed out, taking her first steps to potential freedom.
She quietly but quickly traveled down a long hallway, sparsely decorated until she reached the top of a curving staircase. She peeked down, but still there seemed to be stillness, no one about. Softly her bare feet hit the thin wooden steps on the half spiral stairway, but gratefully she made no noise. It stopped on the threshold of several connected rooms, lined with chairs and small tables. She glanced around furtively spotting a short hallway on the far end of the second one. Her heart began to race. Silently she scampered across the room as she reached a heavy white wooden door with several large bolts connected to it.  Her hands quickly hit the cold metal as she turned the bolt of the first and then the second. With exultation she began to pull the heavy door open when startlingly a hand caught it just above her and slammed it shut. He bent over her head and in a heavy whisper said, “I wouldn’t advise that.”
With fury she spun around confronted by the face of what she inferred was Mr. Burke dangerously close to hers. “You can’t keep me prisoner here,” she rasped.
“You must be feeling better,” he commented a little too calmly. She could feel his warm breath on her and it unnerved her greatly.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “If you keep me here I’ll die. I need. . .”
He nodded, “I know, insulin. I have it. I was just waiting for you. . .”
She cringed against the door, aghast at the thoroughness at which he’d prepared well whatever he’d prepared. “What? What the hell is this? What can you possibly want from me?”
He let his hand drop and he backed away a bit. “I would have thought you’d figured that out by now Julia. I want the Dubourg crystal.”
Her eyes widened in shock. She hadn’t even considered that this was about that. In fact she hadn’t had time to consider much of anything except that she had to get out.  “What did you say?” she whispered.
“The elemental, it’s clear you’re the key.”
“Who are you?” she asked in a voice that was fading in the tumult of emotion inside her.
He felt it. She could see the concern cross his face. This kidnapper, this inexplicable costumed insane person was worried about her.  He moved a bit closer holding out his hand to her. “Come with me, come sit down and I’ll do my best to explain things to you.”
She shook her head, again reaching for the lock on the door. “No, you can’t keep me here. I’m leaving.” And in a split second the hand he’d held out to her moments before was now on top of hers, clasping it, stilling it from motion.
His face was so close to hers that he whispered into her completely disheveled hair, “You don’t understand Julia. Where you are, what will happen if you walk out that door. Chances are you’ll be arrested for indecent exposure, thrown into some asylum, or accosted by some traveling brigand.”
Again she spun around to face him directly. “What are you talking about?” she rasped.  “They don’t do that to people these days.”
He pulled his face back away from hers so that she was looking right into his dark brown eyes. It struck her again; a memory, a feeling from long ago ephemeral and then gone just as quickly as though it was a phantom. “No, they don’t where you came from.”
“What does that mean?”
He pulled back completely removing his hands from any contact with her  and stared at her with an unflinching determination that she found more than a bit unsettling. “There’s no easy way to tell you this. My name is Nicholas Burke and I have brought you here, to the year 1910.”
She stood there, riveted to the spot, staring at him in that silent moment trying to digest his proclamation. And then she replied in the only way that she could. “You must be insane.”

For Julia Moreau life seems complicated. Emerging from a failed marriage and managing a lifetime of diabetes, she lives alone in her childhood home where she communicates with the spirit of her Great Aunt Lilia.

But Julia doesn’t have a clue what complicated is until she is thrust into being the key chess piece in a match between two powerful men of extraordinary abilities on the wild hunt for a mystical creature hidden in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Will Julia lose her soul to the karma of a devastating past life or her heart to the love of a man driven by dark forces? What is clear is that whichever way she turns she is Treading on Borrowed Time.

Now available at Cornerstone Book Publisher’s, Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble and all other major on-line retailers.

E. Klebert

Treading on Borrowed Time Page

For Julia Moreau life seems complicated. Emerging from a failed marriage and managing a lifetime of diabetes, she lives alone in her childhood home where she communicates with the spirit of her Great Aunt Lilia. But Julia doesn’t have a clue what complicated is until she is thrust into being the key chess piece in a match between two powerful men of extraordinary abilities on the wild hunt for a mystical creature hidden in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Will Julia lose her soul to the karma of a devastating past life or her heart to the love of a man driven by dark forces? What is clear is that whichever way she turns she is Treading on Borrowed Time.

© 2011 Evelyn Klebert