The Place
copyright 2012 Faeriemage
(Insert Witty Statement Here)

---

It looked so out of place sitting there between two sky scrappers that I simply had to stop and look. As a conscientious driver, I pulled over to the side of the road before I stopped, of course, but that didn’t prevent the other drivers in the road from honking at me.

I waved at them with a cheery smile on my face, knowing that it only took a moment of my time to be courteous. They made their choices, and I made my own. There are so many saying that support what I did, but my favorite has always been ‘you attract more flies with honey than vinegar.’

The thing is, why do you want to attract flies, but it is the concept that counts, even if sweet is usually used when trying to kill flies, like with fly paper. Of course, have you ever considered how inhumane flypaper actually is? It doesn’t really kill flies, it just traps them there…

Anyway, that isn’t a part of the story, at least not the way that you’d think it was.

Across the road, in the midst of three tall skyscrapers was a small plot of land with a building, no more than two or three stories tall in the center of it. At first, I thought it was a two-story building, and it really seemed to be one, but every once in a while, for no apparent reason, a third story would peak out from under the roof as if it were a shy little three year old consumed with curiosity and looking back in my direction.

As the story progresses, I continue to refer to the building as if it were alive, and to a certain degree I think she is. Most people are more comfortable thinking of their buildings as being inanimate objects. That’s fine. Whatever helps them cope, but to a greater or lesser degree, all buildings are aware.

It’s what gives them a haunted feeling over a long period of time. You see the more evil that is done in a house the less that the house likes him, or her, self. Houses develop complexes just like their residents do.

This is something that you will have to just get used to. I flit from idea to idea, which I think was the only reason that the house and I first met. I couldn’t ever focus on one thing long enough to stay distracted away from the house.

Being the conscientious person I am, I walked to the intersection before crossing the street. The fact that there was New York rush hour traffic in between myself and the house was only a passing concern.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking, but you’d be wrong. I’ve never4 backed down from a challenge, but walking across the center of the road, beyond being illegal, is simply rude. All those people trying to get where they’re going coming to a stop to avoid killing you is something I’d prefer not to be the cause of.

So, I went to the corner, crossed the road, and then walked the half block or so back up to the house. Other than the obvious neglect that had been shown to the garden surrounding the little building, I thought that it held potential, a lot of potential. The door was solid, and all of the glass panes were intact. Looking in through the windows, I saw that while there was a lot of dust inside, there were none of the other signs of decay I would expect from a vacant building in this, or any other, part of the city.

I walked around the house one more time and then called my broker. Well, to be accurate he was just a Real Estate Agent, but I like calling him my broker. Makes me sound important.

“Steve, I’d like you to look into a property for me. I think I would be absolutely perfect.”

“Where are you?”

“Just outside of downtown, actually.”

“You found an office space then?”

“Not exactly. I found a house.”

“Um…a house. In down town. What are you smoking, and can I get some.”

“Shut up, Steve, and just come over here.” I gave him the address, which he made me repeat because his GPS device didn’t like the address.

I find GPSs to be woefully unreliable people. They think that they know more than you about streets and addresses. That is why I regularly test them to make sure they know as much as everyone seems to believe they do. I really think my current one is getting a little too smug and I’ll need to trade her out for a newer model. For some reason every route I plot recently takes me past Grand Central Station.

So, I stood and waited for Steve to arrive, and may I say that it was one of the more interesting experiences that I’d had waiting for someone. He parked right in front of the house, got out, and started walking down the block. I laughed at that, and he seemed to hear, and turn around. He passed by me not more than ten feet away, but never saw me. Every time he turned to look in my direction, it seemed that his gaze glazed over and he just continued looking past to the next building in line.

“I’m right here, Steve,” I said after walking right up next to him, but not onto the sidewalk.

“What the…? Jules?” And that’s about the time his eyes got real big and all 6’5” of him collapsed to the sidewalk.

I dragged and rolled him off the sidewalk onto the un kempt grass that sided it and began to watch the people as they walked by. Most of them, I’d say about 99%, just kept walking by. One in one hundred looked my way, so I waved. They seemed to be stunned by my surroundings for a moment before, like the others, they’d glaze over and then continue walking.

I was beginning to wonder if I might not be the crazy one when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Are you lost, Miss?”

I looked up at the soft voiced stranger who had interrupted my people-watching. “Not lost. I think this house wants to be found.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because she keeps looking at me in curiosity.”

The other person laughed. He was dressed in a nice three-piece suit that fit him like…well like a suit is supposed to fit a man. If you’ve never met the…guy…then I can’t really describe it more than that. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that you’ve seen one tailored suit, then you’ve seen them all.

Let me tell you that this isn’t the case. Imagine seeing a really good tailored suit for the first time, you know, one that was just finished a couple of hours ago so that the creases are still in it, and no permanent wrinkles have begun to form. You know, the ones that make every guy want a tailored suit and ever woman want to be with the guy in the suit.

The type of tailored suit that makes you look at the guy next to him and assume that his six-thousand dollar suit is an off the rack model. Don’t ask, but I’m embarrassed to say this actually did happen. My dad hasn’t spoken to me in five years because of it.

Anyway, assume that there is a third man in a suit that is as much better than the second suit as the second is better than the first and the first is better than an off the rack. Basically, this third man is wearing a third-degree fitted suit.

The person standing in front of me was wearing at least an eleventh-degree fitted suit. That is the best that I can describe it to you. It looked like the proto-suit, the suit that every other suit in history has ever been patterned after. I immediately distrusted him, because if anyone could possibly achieve that suit without some sort of supernatural assistance then I was the queen of Sheba.

“This is my house, miss, so if you wouldn’t mind…”

The house growled at him. Not to say that it sounded like a wolf or dog or lion or something. No, it growled like a house. It was sort of a metal-fatigue wood-on-wood fingernails-on-chalkboard sort of thing.

Now, normal houses, of which this one certainly wasn’t numbered, do this sort of thing quietly. Most people call it settling. You ever know a happy house to ‘settle?’

I didn’t think so.

So, this house let out almost a bellow of a growl that even startled the…smarmy bastard…in front of me.

“Ok, so the house isn’t mine, but I have access to the proper deed and title…”

The house growled again, and I was beginning to get the picture of what was going on. He was trying to make me a deal I couldn’t refuse for a house he didn’t own. Basically he was a used car salesman, or at least the proto-used-car-salesman.

“I think it is time you left.”

“You can’t talk to me that way. Do you know who I am? I’ve brought kingdoms to their knees. I’ve toppled…”

“Yes, you have an impressive resume, but you have outstayed your welcome. Neither the house nor I want you here. As a man I admire a lot once said: get thee hence.”

He left, but not without a lot of cursing and bemoaning of his fate. There even might have been a tear or two.

“Who was that?”

“Welcome back, Steve.”

“Sorry, but it felt like the entire world broke open in front of me for a minute, and there you were standing in a mythical garden in the middle of New York City.”

Seeing the look on my face, his joking smile disappeared. He cautiously looked around and his eyes opened wide.

“Where in the world are we?”

“Right where I told you. Se, there’s your car parked in front of us.”

“This is insane, when I was on the sidewalk, all I saw was tall buildings. Nothing like this was anywhere to be seen.”

“Take it as it comes, Steve. Just figure out who owns this property, and if I can buy it.”

Steve left after a little bit of walking over the property with me, and I stayed there just relaxing in this little oasis of color in the midst of downtown gray.

Don’t get me wrong; I like the city. No, if I’m being honest, I love the city. It is the reason I was out that morning looking for properties. I’d recently achieved a degree and was looking for a place to set out my shingle, as it were. I figured if I were in the middle of the city somewhere then people would be able to take a break from their daily grind and visit me at all hours of the day.

It is not what you’re thinking either. Why would someone need a degree for that after all. Neither was I a massage therapist, or specifically a therapist of any kind. I am a psychiatrist.

About this point in the story some of you are ready to go looking for something that makes a little more sense. You’re probably thinking that I’m too insane to be a psychiatrist. Here is where you’d be wrong. At the most I would be considered delusional. There is a difference between delusional and insane. I should know, after all: I’m the mental health professional.

The thing is a little delusion in your life is perfectly healthy. If we were all a hundred percent truthful with ourselves, and others, we would be living in a lot bleaker world with a lot less of the technologies that we know and love.

You see, it all starts out with fiction. Think about it. Fiction is another word for lie. We’ve just elevated it in our minds to the level where it stands on it’s own plinth supported pedestal. We don’t normally think about fiction as being a lie, and those of you who are authors of fictional works are secure in the fact that you are storytellers.

In point of fact, you are all just professional liars. I don’t hold it against you. Your stories are what keep me going most of the time. I love a good romance novel every once in a while, and if ever there was a pack of lies for general consumption…

But again I digress. Delusions are the little lies we tell ourselves to make it through the day: He really loves me; I look good in these jeans; It’s not the size that matters, but how you use it; and any number of other little lies you need to believe.

And to the guy looking smug over there in the front row, it can be too big. Any woman will tell you that she wants it to be just right, our definitions of that very widely however.

These are all delusions, but they help us through the day, so like I said, delusion can be healthy. My little delusions about houses being sentient are nothing more or less than this, unless they are actually true.

I sat down on a marble bench to the south side of the house, and looked around me as the light slowly changed. It was a truly beautiful spot, and would be even more so with a little love. How had this beauty been missed by everyone for so long?

There was definitely something to the ‘camouflage circuit’ or whatever was tied into the house and kept it out of people’s conscious minds. Or maybe it was simply the fact that no one currently lived in the house, and that was what made it invisible?

I didn’t know, and it was something that didn’t really matter at the moment. I went out to the sidewalk and walked down to the corner and then back to my car after again crossing the street.

I spent the rest of the day moving from one errant to the next as most people do. I was, at that time, unemployed. It’s not that I didn’t have job opportunities, but that I didn’t want the opportunities that I had. I didn’t just want to be another pill-slinger without concern for the fates of my patients.

I’d become a psychiatrist because I wanted the capability to prescribe them the proper medicines, should that be necessary. I felt then, and continue to feel now, that it is all part of the package. Some mental conditions are caused by a biological imbalance of one sort or another. Other individuals are plagued by a changing mental/emotional landscape instigated by themselves or others. A last group of them are the result of mental conditions hard wired in place.

Which is to say that: some things require medicine, some require therapy, and some simply require understanding and the ability to avoid triggers.

If it wasn’t apparent, I really like my job. I mean really like it. Before medical school, I thought that I wanted to be a surgeon, either that or a sociopath. I really enjoyed cutting things up. Unlike some of the other girls in my biology classes, I excelled at the dissections.

So, it went, and in medical school I was so excited to get into the cadavers. I still enjoy the idea of surgery, but losing my roommate to suicide was a wakeup call. The signs had been there, but I missed them, or just over-looked them. She was the top of our class before she removed herself from the running.

I was sort of anti-suicide from that point on. I don’t personally think it solve any problems for either the person or their loved ones. I know, I know, some of you out there don’t ascribe to an afterlife.

It doesn’t much bother me on way or the other, really, whether you agree with me on this one or not. I do believe in a life after death. Even if a person who commits suicide doesn’t go directly to hell, they will remain in a hell of their own creation.

Let me explain: Once you are dead, there are no repeats. You’re already dead. So, if you hated everything about this world so much that you removed yourself from it, only to wake up and realize that this world wasn’t the end, that there was another world waiting for you…well you should begin to get the picture.

The person you are when you die is the person you remain.

In my opinion, which isn’t back by any religion that I am aware of, hell is having to live with the consequences of your actions forever.

Let me explain: suppose you are an alcoholic. You died from a terminal bout with Sir Osis. So, you wake up on the other side and what is the first thing you do? Reach for another drink. Only without a body, you no longer get the benefits from it, even if you could drink it.

That is just an obvious one, but there are others, and not all of them physical. Anger can be just as addicting, but what happens when anger no longer gives you that rush of adrenaline?

Addictions aren’t the only things that could make another life hell. Imagine the guilt that would eat at you hour after hour, day after day. Imagine never being able, or needing, to sleep. Never being able to escape, even for a few hours, from yourself.

Now, imagine if that guilt was caused by killing yourself.

Like I say, suicide is never an answer.

So, I made it my mission in life to help people solve their problems, and that was why I was looking for a place when I saw the house.

See how everything ties in together?

It was later the next day when Steve finally had the decency to give me a call back.

“You know, if I hadn’t thought to write the address down originally for that Place, I’d probably have forgotten to even look for it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The address for the Place. Unless I’m reading it off a piece of paper I can’t ever seem to remember it.”

“Ok…”

“Sorry, it’s just that apparently we’re the only two people in this city aware of it’s existence. And I’m only aware of it about half the time. I’ll be going along, stick my hand in my pocket, and realize I have a piece of paper in there.

“I think, ‘oh, that’s odd,’ and pull it out. It’s only after I read it, in my own handwriting, that I even remember that there is a Place in the city you are looking for.”

“So, then if no one owns it…”

“Not exactly the same thing as no one knowing it exists. No, I finally found a lot registry in a back room of the city office. All three of the buildings surrounding the lot are sure that they own it. They started contesting the land almost forty years ago when the first buildings on those lots went up.

“Thing is, that people just stopped filing paper work on the suit and it sort of went away.”

“Come on, Steve. Spit it out already. Who owns the land?”

“You do.”

“You bought it for me? That’s…”

“No, you already owned the land. Apparently, there was a deed written out to Tara Distaff in 1893 by the previous owner. The deed states that it would be yours until at least 2012 when you would be able to take possession in person.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I found out about it in the suit from 40 years ago. Apparently they stated that it was impossible for anyone to know whether a person would be able to take possession of a property a hundred and twenty years in the future.”

The two of us agreed to meet at the county assessor’s office the next day so that I could take possession of the house, or as Steve continued to insist on calling it, the Place.

“Hello, I’m Tara Distaff and I’m here…”

“Really? Another one? Well, just put your thumb print here and we’ll check it out.”

“My thumb print? Right or left?”

“Not sure. How ‘bout you give us both. No chance you’re going to match the print from over a hundred years ago anyway.”

The overweight woman behind the counter looked bored, and altogether dissatisfied with her job. “I’m sorry to bother you, then. I’ll give you my print and then be on my way.”

I pressed both of my thumbs into the pad, and then put the marks were she asked me to. She smiled halfheartedly to me and then walked into the other room, I assume to check it against a thumb print on a document.

Steve and I talked quietly while we waited.

“So, have you reconsidered?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“Things change…”

“But not enough. I like you, Steve, but the last time we went out on a date the restaurant caught fire; someone stole your pants, while you were wearing them; and a meteor demolished your car. That’s about the point that you assume that the universe frowns on something.”

“It could have happened to anyone…”

“A meteor destroying your car could happen to anyone?”

“That too, but I mean having your pants stolen.”

“Try me again in another two years.”

I liked Steve well enough, but he could be as persistent as a dog with a bone. It made him a great salesman, but a less great potential mate.

A wide-eyed woman returned to the front desk.

“Is something the matter?”

“Nothing…just…nothing.”

“So, my prints didn’t match?”

“Just need you to wait here for a moment.”

We waited more than a moment. Every five minutes or so I would ask the woman what we were waiting for, and she would just ask me to be patient. Between Steve casting googly eyes as me, which are better than sheep eyes any day of the week, and the woman behind the counter staring at me, I felt like the center of attention.

In fact it almost felt like I might be the heroine of a web serial or something. It was disconcerting to say the least.

It was almost an hour before a man walked in with a big plastic case and came to a stop in front of me.

I say ‘a man’ when I mean The Man. Not as in the government or big business or something. No I meant in a ‘You Tarzan, Me Jane’ sort of way.

It was only after he repeated himself that I even realized he was talking. The movement of his lips was entirely too captivating.

“Can you hold out your hands for me?”

Blushing I complied. He cleaned off my thumbs with an alcohol swab, and proceeded to finger print me again, after checking the pads of my thumbs, for what I couldn’t tell you.

He then took the new prints to the counter, where he compared them to something on an old looking piece of paper.

“Yep, it’s legit. Either she is the proof that finger prints aren’t unique, or this is her print on the document.”

The two of them talked for a moment, and then I watched the most perfect man in existence walk out the door and did nothing to stop him.

On a side note, I signed a few pieces of papers and became the legal owner of the Place.

Now the only thing that concerned me was how to get clients to find the Place, since apparently it did its best to stay hidden.