THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Five - Part Seven

“You’re telling me you both had a seizure,” said Clare.

“Yeah,” replied Mike. “Isn’t that freaky as shit?”

“It’s not freaky Mike. It’s wrong. There’s something going on here.”

“Like what did you have in mind?”

Clare paused, checking round to see who might be listening. Joey was still standing beside her. Rosalie, Mike’s daughter, was gazing wistfully at the box of toys in the corner of the waiting room. Again, the rapport between them was a marvel as, without even looking down – remaining very much in the conversation with Clare – he somehow knew what she wanted and gently patted her on the back of the shoulder and said, You can go play if you want honey.”

Joey went and sat back down.

“When did you get your seizure?” asked Clare.

“I don’t know. An hour ago? It was after dark.”

“So it was after ours.”

“Both of you. You both had the same thing.” Even though it had happened to him to and he had been the one to bring it up, Mike was openly sceptical.

“Not just us,” said Clare. “He denies it but Henry, another lodger of mine... I think the same thing happened to him.”

“Three of you? And us.”

Clare nodded. “All one after another as close as I can tell.”

“And what caused it? A virus?”

“I don’t think so.” She stepped closer. “Before it happened... did anything... weird happen?”

Mike grinned making a crinkle of skin from his nose to his chin on one side of his mouth. “Like weird in what way?”

Clare looked at him straight on and said a single word. The reaction on his face told her everything she needed to know. “Heat.”

The realisation and acceptance that something very very strange had happened that evening touched every part of his face in turn and shifted his entire posture. He didn’t say anything. Neither of them had to; the old sub-vocal communication rattling this colossal shift in their perspective better than noise and flapping lips, incredulity or reasoning. It was a comfort, having someone else understand what she was realising herself until she reminded herself who this was and what he had done to her. The realisation of that must have effected a similar change in her own body language because Mike frowned and said, “What?”

She ignored the question. Despite any decade-and-a-half old differences of opinion, what had happened to them required attention in a way that Henry and Joey blatantly couldn’t provide. “What else? Did you sense anything else that was off?”

“Like what?”

Clare had a scientific mind; a throwback from her childhood science reading; she had good instincts for building a logical picture of reasonable and undisputable evidence. She didn’t want to put words in his mouth by telling him what had happened to her first. “Anything. Tell me the sequence of events.”

Mike scratched the crease between his eyebrows with his little finger, crinkling his forehead as he threw his mind back into his memory: yet another mannerism that hadn’t changed, as though the past between them had been yesterday. Or now. “We were driving.”

“Where?”

“Bourne Avenue. From Bournemouth Square up along the gardens?”

“I know it.”

“It was dark. I was thinking about some stuff. Er... Rosalie was in the passenger seat. It got hot. She was shaking suddenly.”

“While you were driving along?” He nodded. “God.”

“I was trying to see if she was okay and then it happened to me; almost passed out behind the wheel.”

“I did pass out,” said Clare.

“Me too. But I managed to hit the brakes first.” He looked hard across at his daughter. “Saved her little ass I guess. And mine.” He watched her playing for a moment. When he turned back he had clearly lost the flow, his mind away elsewhere. It took him a moment to click back on. “What about you?”

Clare rubbed the backs of her arms. “You wouldn’t believe me.” She’d lost the flow herself for a minute, coming back to the harboured resentment she’d forgotten was still hiding away inside her memory, making her unwilling to trust again. Truth was, it scared her how quickly the flow of ideas had come back, the rapport that had kept them up talking until five or six in the morning night after night in their earlier years.

She stared at him levelly, considering how deep she wanted to go with this. “I think it may have been a ghost. Or something like it. A spirit.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“A ghost?”

“Yeah.”

Tumblers falling into place: Mike measuring her expression, making the same judgment of her that she had been making of him. “Okay. Tell me why you think that.”

“I have a dog. A Doberman. It was him as much as the other thing, but the dog saw it. Or smelled it, I don’t know. And things moved in my kitchen, as though the invisible man was doing it: shifting the table, knocking things over. And then there was the heat of course. The whole kitchen was like a furnace.”

“This was after it happened?”

“Before. Henry, the old man who lives upstairs, was in the downstairs toilet. It got him first. Then it got me; knocked me out.”

“An invisible spirit that the dog could see.”

“Yeah. It did Henry and then me and then Joey afterwards I guess; knocked all three of us out for a few minutes. Then when we woke up it was like we’d been out in the sun too long.” She showed him her arm: not burned as such but close to it. “You have the same thing.”

“I do?”

“You and Rosalie.”

Mike looked back across at his daughter then checked out the backs of his hands. Then he looked steadily round the room before returning his gaze to Clare. “We’re the only ones here with skin like this.” Clare verified it with a look of her own. “If this was happening all over town then there’d be hundreds of sun-kissed people in here wanting answers.”

“You’re right.”

“Shit I’m not convinced a doctor’s going to be able to tell us anything! I feel perfectly fine! Do you?”

“Yeah.”

Mike took a seat a little way from the closest person and Clare joined him. Joey was engrossed in a comic book. Rosalie was playing with a Barbie motor home.

They both mulled it over. It came again to Clare how she shouldn’t be sitting this close to Mike; how she shouldn’t be talking to him; but it was a brief and weak resistance.

They were both thinking about the same thing. “The link,” said Mike.

“Why everyone in my house.”

“And why me and Rosalie.”

Clare gazed off for a moment then started rooting through her bag.

“What is it?”

She took out her mobile phone, unlocked the touch screen, highlighted a name on her contacts list and hit the green button.

“Who are you calling?”

She held up her hand for quiet.

“Who are you ringing.”

She pressed the red button to cancel the call and put the phone away. 

“What?” asked Mike.

“Selina,” replied Clare. She cut in after Mike opened his mouth to ask a question but before the sound came out. “She’s my other tenant. I was just thinking... It’s crazy.”

“You were wondering if she’d been got too.”

She nodded. “But she didn’t answer. I guess I’ll check with her later at home.” She looked at Mike and she saw that he was holding onto something in his mind that he was reluctant to give up. “What is it?”

“The link,” he said, “between me and Rosalie and you and your tenants...”

“What is it?”

He cleared his throat. “There’s been a lot of shit going on in my life lately. A lot of bad stuff. I got kicked out of my place this morning.”

Clare bit back on the urge to say something catty but she sure as hell thought it. She didn’t know how she’d managed to kid herself that he might have changed. It was all the same crap as it had always been.

“And now I have Rosalie to look after.” Pinch in his face again as though there was something he wasn’t telling her. “And so I started looking up old friends to see if there was somewhere I could stay. If it had been just me I would have slept in my van until I could have sorted something out. But I saw you on Facebook.”

“You were spying on me?”

“No! I just... I saw that you were running a boarding house now... and though I didn’t want to...”

“Oh my God. You decided to come and ask me if I could put you up.”

He nodded.

“When? When exactly?”

“Seconds,” he said. “I mean seconds before Rosalie went into her seizure.”

Another silent moment of understanding; quiet eyes meeting one another.

Then Clare picked out a noise outside that wasn’t entirely incongruous with their surroundings but louder than she would have expected and she started to notice that there was an increase in the amount of bustle going on in the rooms at the back where the doctors were: raised voices and movement. The noise outside was getting louder and louder and Clare realised it was because there was more than one of them, maybe more than two.

People were standing up and going to the windows and the door, trying to look out to see what all the racket was about and Clare found herself doing the same, with Mike beside her, turning aside only long enough to lift Rosalie back up into his arms.

Then the first one pulled up at the front; the first ambulance. Doctors and nurses were outside, shouting, pointing, racing to open the doors. And a second ambulance was coming in behind. And there, in the distance, signs of more flashing lights as a third and maybe a fourth tore down the road toward the hospital.