The Hours Between

A Short Story in the Time Slip Genre

Part I: The Dreamer

Oliver- Present Day, October 2024

The first time she came, Oliver Whyborne thought he was dying.

He woke in the grey hour before dawn to find a woman lying beside him in his narrow bed, her dark hair spread across the pillow he'd bought for no one but himself. The cottage bedroom, with its low beams and mullioned windows, felt suddenly too small to contain this impossibility. She was turned away from him, her breathing shallow and quick, and for a moment he wondered if his heart had finally given out in his sleep—if this was what dying felt like, this strange peace overlaid with wonder.

The woman wore a dress he didn't recognise, something that seemed to shimmer even in the half-light. Not silk, not cotton, but something that caught the darkness and held it. When she stirred, he held his breath, afraid that the slightest movement would shatter whatever delicate spell had brought her here.

She turned then, and her eyes—grey as the Suffolk sky before a storm—met his own. They looked at each other for what felt like hours, though it could only have been seconds. There was recognition in her gaze, a terrible, wonderful familiarity that made his chest tight.

"Oliver," she whispered, and his name on her lips sounded like a prayer, like a secret she'd been keeping.

He tried to speak, to ask the thousand questions crowding his throat, but she placed a finger against his lips. Her touch was real—warm, slightly trembling. Not the gauzy stuff of dreams.

"Not yet," she said. "Please. Not yet."

So he lay there in the growing light, memorising the curve of her cheek, the way her hair caught the amber of sunrise. When he finally let himself drift back to sleep, he woke hours later to discover she was gone, leaving only the faintest impression on the pillow and the lingering scent of something like bergamot, but not quite.

Oliver Whyborne was a practical man. At forty-three, he'd learned to trust what his hands could build, what his eyes could see, what his mind could understand. He restored old books for the university library, spent his days with vellum and gilt, with stories already told and safely bound. His cottage in the village of Bramley End was Tudor at its bones, bought with his divorce settlement and furnished with the careful precision of a man who'd learned to live alone.

He told himself it was a dream. Stress, perhaps, or too much wine with dinner. The mind, he knew from his work with ancient texts, was a palimpsest—old impressions showing through new writing, memory and imagination bleeding into each other like ink on wet paper.

But when Mrs. Harkness from the post office mentioned seeing a light in his bedroom window at half past four that morning, he began to doubt.

The second time, he was ready.

Oliver lay awake in the darkness, listening to the church bells chime midnight, then one, then two. At twenty minutes past two, the air in his bedroom grew thick, almost viscous, like the moment before a thunderstorm. The temperature dropped, and he could see his breath in small puffs.

She arrived not with sound or flash, but with a gradual solidification, as if she were being painted into existence by an invisible brush. First, the suggestion of a form, then the weight settling into his mattress, then the full reality of her presence.

This time she faced him from the start. In the moonlight streaming through the casement windows, he could see her more clearly. She was perhaps thirty, with the kind of beauty that spoke of good bones rather than cosmetics. Her dress—or was it a gown?—seemed to shift colour in the changing light, pewter to midnight blue to deep green.

"You're awake," she observed, her voice carrying an accent he couldn't place. Educated, certainly. Southern, but with something else underneath, something almost archaic in its vowel sounds.

"Are you real?" The words tumbled out before he could stop them.

She smiled then, a expression both sad and radiant. "What's real, Oliver? This moment? Your dreams? The morning when you wake and wonder if I was here at all?"

"I need to know."

"Do you?" She reached out and touched his hand where it lay on the coverlet. Her fingers were cold, but they warmed under his. "Or do you need to believe?"

They talked until dawn crept across the floorboards. She told him nothing concrete—not her name, not where she came from, not how she found herself in his bed in the small hours of October mornings. But she listened as he spoke of his work, his quiet life, the way the village changed with the seasons. She knew things she shouldn't know—that he took his tea without milk, that he'd planted rosemary by his kitchen door last spring, that he sometimes woke with the taste of salt on his lips though the sea was thirty miles away.

When the first church bell rang six o'clock, she began to fade.

"Will you come back?" he asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.

"Would you like me to?"

The question hung between them like morning mist. By the time he'd found his voice to answer, she was gone.

The third time, Oliver had prepared. He'd moved the electric clock from his bedside table, finding its red digital display somehow profane. In its place sat an oil lamp, unlit but ready. He'd aired the room during the day, changed the sheets, even—feeling foolish but unable to help himself—left a cup of tea cooling on the windowsill.

She came at ten minutes past three, materialising as she had before. This time, though, there was something different in her manner. An urgency that hadn't been there previously.

"Light the lamp," she said before he could speak.

Oliver fumbled for the matches, struck one, adjusted the wick. Golden light bloomed in the room, pushing back shadows and making everything seem more solid, more present.

In the lamplight, he could see her clearly for the first time. She was beautiful, yes, but there was something fragile about her beauty, like old porcelain that had been cracked and carefully mended. Her dress, he could see now, was indeed extraordinary—the fabric seemed to contain depths, as if it were woven from twilight.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Claudia." The admission seemed to cost her something. "Claudia Ashford."

"When are you from, Claudia?"

She looked away, toward the window where dawn was still hours away. "Does it matter? I'm here now, with you."

But it did matter, Oliver found. Over the following weeks, as Claudia’s visits became regular—always in the deep night, always departing before dawn—he began to piece together fragments of her story. She spoke of places he knew but in ways that suggested they'd changed. The university library where he worked, she said, had become something called a "memory archive." The village pub had been replaced by something she termed a "gathering space."

Most tellingly, she spoke of the cottage itself in the past tense.

"It was beautiful," she said one night in November, running her fingers along the exposed beam above his bed. "The preservation society did their best, but you can never really capture what a place felt like when it was lived in."

The realisation came slowly, like the way light gradually revealed a room at dawn. Claudia wasn't just from the future—she was from his future, from a time when his cottage was a museum, when his quiet life had become history.

"How far?" he asked one night as they lay listening to the rain against the windows.

"Far enough," she said. "Far enough that your books are curiosities, that your work restoring them is remembered as quaint and noble."

"And us? This? What becomes of this?"

She turned to face him fully then, and in the lamplight he could see tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. "That's why I came back, Oliver. To find out."