Beyond This Time: A Time-Travel Suspense Novel by Charlotte Banchi, Agb Photographics

his listeners discover the parallels between his rhetoric and their situation. She hoped some form of enlightenment would eventually show its face.
    “Without speaking,” Rayson continued, “the ghost placed a record on her old Victrola and cranked the handle. A beautiful waltz filled the room. He extended his hand, inviting her to dance. Mattie De Carlo initially withdrew from this apparition, fearful of any contact. But the Dancing Ghost, not easily discouraged, stepped closer. With an engaging smile and a gentle tug, he pulled her out of the chair.”
    “She touched him?” Kat asked, thrilled by the first inkling of a connection between this story and her own experience. She remembered how the man on Park Street had passed through her Honda as though he was without substance. If she’d rolled down the window, reached her hand out toward him, would she have touched a flesh and blood man?
    “Oh yes indeed. Miss De Carlo mentioned being surprised by his warmth. Well, to get on with it, her reluctance dissolved and she soon waltzed gracefully around the room. Suddenly, without warning, she found herself back in the chair, book in her lap. A soft chiming sound echoed in the room, she glanced to the mantle clock. It read seven o’clock. The hour hadn’t budged more than couple of seconds. The clock was still chiming off the same hour as when the ghost had first appeared.”
    “Mitch and I noticed the same thing. It’s like we got stuck in time when our ghost man first appeared outside the car. And it happened again in the shower, when I was transported to Birmingham. Maybe that’s the explanation for why the coffee didn’t finished dripping even though I must have been gone long enough. At least long enough for the hot water to run out.”
    Rayson nodded. “Some folks say time has no meaning in the afterlife.”
    “Sort of a time continuum?”
    “If you’re meaning everything grinds to a stop, then I reckon so.”
    Kat laughed and patted his chubby ebony cheek. “Pop, you gotta get out more; go to a few sci-fi movies. Even watch a couple of episodes of Star Trek , they’re very entertaining.”
    “Kathleen, the good book is plenty entertaining.”
    “So are Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Kat muttered like a grumpy little girl.
    Rayson cleared his throat, the prelude to resuming his oration. “Now, Boyd Turley’s tale is an entirely different matter. For some years his family lived apart, divided. One side claimed the other stole a whole peck of money their late daddy intended to be equally divided between his two boys. Boyd assured everyone he never found the money and if he did, he most surely would give his brother an equal share.”
    “This is real helpful,” Kat complained.
    “You might be surprised how helpful, if you hushed up and listened,” Rayson responded.
    At this point Kat surrendered. Pop had no intention of speeding up the process. He’d get around to addressing her questions in the ‘by and by’. She sighed and snuggled against his chest, comforted by his familiar aroma of Old Spice and Ivory soap. Listening to the steady rhythm of his heart, for the first time in days she felt safe.
    “Strange things began happening to him around Easter. The first things he heard were the noises. Not the banging or clanking you’d expect from any self respecting ghost, more like rubbing. Sometimes from the front room, other times the bedroom. This went on close to two weeks. One morning, just before he crawled out of bed, the whole room switched around on him. The furniture, bedspread and curtains took on different colors. Suddenly the walls were painted, not wallpapered. It looked like his folk’s old bedroom all over again. He said this image only lasted a few seconds, and later on he figured he went back to sleep and dreamed it all up.”
    “I can surely understand his thinking,” Kat said. “I keep asking myself the same thing, could I have been asleep and dreamed it all? Especially now