THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Two - Part Four

Henry’s heart rate fell as soon as he was out of sight at the top of the stairs. Clare was still moving around down there somewhere but he was safe for now.

The upstairs of the house was slightly split level. The stairs came up in the centre of the building next to a large frosted glass window. Straight ahead, at the back of the house over the kitchen, were Clare’s room and the shared bathroom (Henry still found it difficult having to compete for space in there). The other bedrooms were at the front of the house: The first room belonged to Joey, the boy with the perpetual hood on his head who did nothing but waste his time in front of his video games. To the right was an empty double room, not yet let, that also housed the washing machine.

Between them was the sanctuary: Henry’s room, the biggest bedroom in the house. He’d been first in and was willing to pay what, in his younger days, would have been sufficient weekly cash to rent the whole house, so that he could get it. He needed the size for all his belongings. Going from a full detached home crammed to the brim with mementos and keepsakes down to a single room had been a struggle comprised of the heart-raking chore of disposing of three quarters of his life’s gatherings. Even then there was no surface left in the room free of clutter, every piece as good as priceless to him but probably no better than refuse to anyone else.

The death of his wife, Lillian, had left him in a comfortable but very lonely existence: wandering into empty rooms to find that he didn’t know why he was in there; staring mindlessly at the grey blankness of the deactivated television screen, shovelling spoonfuls of food into his slowly chewing mouth not to savour the taste but because he would shrivel into nothing if he didn’t. He had quickly realised that he needed company if he wasn’t going to die; company that was alive instead of the deathly company he already had.

Hence the sale of the house, the disposal of the lifelong clutter and the moving in here.

It was better not to think of the other reason he had to leave that house; probably the principle reason if he gave it any thought.

He went into his room, noting that Joey next door was silent for a change but not thinking much past that, certainly not coming to the point where he might knock to see if the young man was okay. He closed his door and stood the other side of it, palm on the wood, eyes closed; resting.

All three blackout blinds were fully down in the bay window, casting the entire room into shadow, the way Henry liked it. His PC monitor was switched off, screen locked behind the seventeen character alphanumeric password that he privately felt was unbreakable. The covers on his bed were ruffled. It had never been neatly made. He hadn’t climbed into a made bed since Lillian’s death.

He walked over to his desk to the right of the bay window. Next to it was a black LaserJet printer. On top of that was his shredder. Henry switched it on, took a final lingering look at the picture on the sheet of paper he’d taken down with him to the toilet and then fed it in the grinding letterbox slot in the top of the device, watching until it was gone.

He sat on the corner of his bed and propped his forehead on the heel of each palm. This was the last time he was going to do that. The very last time. It was far too dangerous. He’d almost been caught. If Clare had caught sight of the picture, anything could have happened. She would have jumped to conclusions and it didn’t matter that he’d never taken action, she would have condemned him just for fantasising about it. His life could have been destroyed.

But he went back over to the computer all the same and typed in his password. He opened Internet Explorer, went to Google Images (where he’d found the picture in the first place) and typed in the same search criteria. The picture was on the fourth page of results. Clicking the link took him straight through to the larger image.

He sat staring at it for several minutes, and though it wasn’t long at all since he’d ejaculated he found his fingers teasing the end of his slugworm through the fabric of his chords.

The picture on the screen wasn’t black and white like the printout had been; it was full colour. There was nothing wrong with it – no blatant reason why looking at it should make him feel ashamed. But it did.

It was a picture of a little girl, no older than seven, with a pretty blue dress on, smiling into the camera as she held a yellow balloon in her chubby little hand.

THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Two - Part Three

Henry looked very much caught on the hop when he appeared in the toilet doorway. He had always been a friendly old man but now, for the first time, he looked irritable and flushed. He was perspiring and the outer rims of his eyes were drawn in red.

“Oh thank God you’re alright,” said Clare.

“Yes. I’m fine,” replied Henry, trying his best to smile.

“Are you certain? You don’t look fine. You look a bit tense; even breathless.

“Of course.” He fixed the smile more convincingly to his lips. “Never been better.”

“Did you...” She didn’t finish the sentence right away – wasn’t sure how to – but the glow in Henry’s cheeks increased and a vein in his neck thickened pushing the skin out. “Did you feel anything... strange a few minutes ago?”

The nip that question gave to his expression told her that he had but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it. “Nothing serious,” he said. “I’m perhaps a little under the weather.” He paused. “What did you hear exactly?”

“I’m not sure. An... odd noise... coming from inside.”

There was a crinkling down by his thigh and Clare noticed the paper he was holding for the first time. His hand quivered as she looked at it as though he didn’t want her to see. He needn’t have worried; only the blank side was visible and then only barely. “I think I might go and lie down,” he said.

“Oh. Okay.” Clare stepped back to let him pass but she took his arm as came level. “God, you’ve caught the sun. Have you been out in the garden?”

“What?”

“You look like you’ve been sunbathing; maybe even lying under a sunlamp.”

He gave another quick smile but this wasn’t even close to looking real. “I’ve been in all day.” She’d never seen him act this way but if what happened to her had happened to him then he had every right to; more if anything, considering his frailty. There was no indication why he didn’t want to talk about it but she had to respect that. “You look like you’ve caught the sun too.”

“I do?”

“Yes.” He pulled away from her gently and moved off down the hall toward the foot of the stairs, bringing his piece of crumpled paper round in front of him and out of her field of vision. It promptly dropped from her conscious thought as though it had never been there.

Clare put her hand to her cheek. It felt warm to the touch, like it have might after a day at the beach. She turned her back on Henry’s ascent of the stairs and his careful positioning of the paper in his hand to keep his body between her and an unobstructed view of it. He’d left the toilet door open, and the light on (surprise surprise); the towel crumpled on the floor underneath the sink where the loose fitting always caused a puddle to form if she didn’t keep on top of it.

The sink hung in the corner, twin mirrors either side of it, one on each wall, giving an oddly displaced but otherwise accurate image of her face without the normal reversing effect. The Clare in the mirror had caught the sun pretty heavily. She wasn’t sunburned but it also wasn’t far off. Her skin had a ruddy healthy-looking glow to it that might or might not turn into a light tan... if it didn’t peel.

It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense and it wasn’t possible in any way she had ever heard of, but she also knew that their invisible visitor had caused this somehow. The heat it had given off... and the fact that even though she had been outside earlier, it had been cloudy all day.... It must have been generating ultraviolet rays, and God knew what else.

Clare almost called up to Henry to question him further but something stopped her: the look on his face probably. Maybe later she’d take him aside; she if she could wheedle something out of him about what he saw when it happened.

She gave the toilet a quick tidy then closed the door.

It occurred to her suddenly that there might really be something wrong with her. Maybe she should drive down to casualty, her and Henry. She flicked the kettle on then sat at the kitchen table and checked her pulse. She didn’t feel off at all anymore. There was nothing wrong with her as far as she could tell beyond a creakiness in her limbs and a slight bump to the head. It was probably worth running upstairs to check on Henry in a few minutes to check he was okay but beyond that there seemed little point in panicking.

Unless it was something wrong with her that had caused the seizure or whatever it was; something wrong with her brain... Something that had made her imagine this powerful invisible force breaking into her house and terrorising her and her dog.

But it couldn’t be that, precisely because of the dog. Ralph had reacted. He had sensed whatever it was. He had known it was real. It had been real.

All she had to do now was work out what it was.

THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Two - Part Two

Ninety seconds earlier, Henry Court opened his eyes inside the brightly lit toilet-come-shower room feeling everything that Clare had felt on waking except a lot worse. He was eighty two, and though at thirty seven Clare was starting to worry about how old she was getting, she was still little more than a girl in the scheme of things. Let her wait until she’d had two heart attacks and a pacemaker fitted; maybe a new hip; and she’d start to get a feeling for true age.

He was still sitting on the toilet, head tilted back onto the cistern, trousers pooled without dignity around his ankles. He got tired nowadays like he’d never in his younger life imagined he could, but this was something far far beyond that. It was like the visits he’d had to make to the chiropractor (Lillian, his late wife’s, orders) when his back started to play up enough that he moaned almost constantly about it. The beautiful but surely underskilled students who had been let loose on him had had zero restraint when it came to twisting his limbs and torso into unnatural and painful positions. All his body felt pummelled and his mind did too. It was difficult to bring his thoughts back into order but he did finally begin to; managed to lift his head and reassess his current location.

The toilet bowl beneath him was absent of both urine and faeces. Henry still had what Lillian had called his hairy slugworm in his gnarly fingers. He didn’t have the faintest hint of a clue about what had happened to him unless it was a stroke or some other worse new trick that God had decided to play on his ageing body, but somewhere in the middle of it his spasming arm had completed the work he’s been building to within his bolted little private chamber. The spermy slug trails were glistening on the front of his shirt, on top of his skinny thighs and pooled around the base of the slugworm itself where his hand continued to grip it.

When Henry saw this the shame flushed his cheeks as it always did. Ordinarily he would have snatched at the toilet paper roll on the wall and swiped it away as soon as the embers inside his body died down but though he tried to do so, the aches in his muscles failed him and his sticky hand slumped back down next to the slugworm as it curled back up to sleep.

He lay against the cistern. Better to stay there for a while longer until he could get his strength up again. Just rest. There was no hurry to move.

A hammering came on the door. “Henry! Are you alright in there?”

Henry came awake in a flash the way he used to as a younger man when he’d pressed the snooze button twice too many times and was now going to be late for work. He came awake so fast it pained him in his chest and in his neck.

“Henry! Can you hear me?”

It was that damn woman! Not the wife – not this time – the pretty blond who ran this den of urban racket: always smiling and helpful but in the same condescending way they all had if they were under fifty five; like it could never happen to them. She was nice enough, nicer than most, but why couldn’t she just be quiet now and let him sleep?

“Henry, are you okay? I heard you call out?”

He didn’t remember doing that. He didn’t remember much of anything.

“Open the door Henry. Can you speak to me?”

No, he did remember. He cocked forward, head dropping between his legs then he flipped back up, recalling what he’d done. Again. The printout he’d made from the internet was still in his hand. Seeing the picture again, thinking about his spunkworm and the shame of it: his face coloured even more. He clenched his hand, crumpling the centre of the A4 sheet.

“I’m alright,” he said. “There’s no need to worry. I’m fine.”

He was terrified that she’d use some special landlady trick to open the door, bolt or no. She’d see him there with his trousers down and the slug trails all over everywhere and she’d know exactly what he’d been doing.

And what he’d been looking at while he’d been doing it.

“I’m fine,” he repeated. “Really. Thank you Clare. I’m perfectly alright.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I heard—”

“I’m fine.”

He reached for his trousers and pulled them up as best he could with the internet picture still in his hand, not caring for now that there were still slug trails on his pasty over-thin legs. His trousers would mop them up and he could wash them himself when Clare was out so that she didn’t catch him. He was a careful man and it was possible to keep things private as long as you were always careful.

She didn’t say anything else; must have gone away. He washed the silvery trails off his hands and wet a tissue to pad at those on his shirt. It looked like he’d had an accident of incontinence now more than it looked like evidence of his shame. She’d find that easier to believe than anything else anyway. All the young ones looked down on the people of his generation now. They couldn’t help it. And hadn’t he been just the same – so sure that he would be immune to the curse of time; that he would escape it somehow while everyone around him succumbed... including his wife?

His body still ached as he unlocked the door but it had subsided enough to move freely, if stiffly. He held the printout behind his back in case Clare was still close. If she were going to be behind him as he made his way back upstairs then he’d simply switch it to the front.

When he opened the door she was standing right outside; right there in front of him, her arms folded, and he felt the veins in his forehead and cheeks flood with extra blood as he realised that he was not going to be able to keep the paper hidden. She obviously knew his secret already. 

 

THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Two - Part One

THE PICTURE

Clare came-to to the sound of sloshing liquid and the body-wide sensation of overstretched muscles. She didn’t open her eyes right away. A unique feeling loitered in her brain that felt like nothing if not a pulsing swell constrained by the limits of her skull. When she did open her eyes, there were light blobs floating in her vision as though she’d just been shot in the eyes with a camera flash in a dark room. She was chest-down on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor, head turned to the right so that her line of sight went into the dusty shadows beneath the cupboards.

She didn’t move; wasn’t ready to yet. Her arms were splayed forty five degrees or so out from her hips, legs ajar to the limit that her knee-length skirt would allow. Two chair legs tilted backwards close to her nose, the chair itself toppled back against the cupboards. The sloshing sound came from straight up as far as her body’s orientation went, somewhere out of her field of vision near the back door. She couldn’t yet place it, even though she’d heard the sound over a thousand times before. She was thinking now; her brain had rebooted itself; but she still wasn’t thinking in straight lines, and though she felt that she could move if she wanted to, she didn’t want to. She could imagine no reason powerful enough to lure her away from that position on the floor.

There was no recollection of what had put her there as yet, but no focused query in her thoughts either. She drifted there without moving until she started to notice how cold the tiles were. Cold. That circuited through to the memory; of the heat: the LED numbers on the wall thermometer ticking up, the sweat prickling in her lower back. And then in a flurry: the wind in the trees, the whining barking dog, the salt cellar falling onto its side, the kettle and the porcelain houses sliding by themselves.

Clare jerked, knocking the tilted chair legs far enough back that the chair rocked forward, its other two legs striking her shoulder. She lifted her head and twisted it toward the sloshing sound that had already stopped.

Ralph stood in front of the back door, poised in mid-drink above his water bowl. There hadn’t been any Lassie-like pawing at her unconscious body. He hadn’t licked her face, trying to wake her. He hadn’t even lain watching her unconscious form, eyes brimming with canine concern. To Ralph, Clare had just been asleep – in an odd position, yes – but asleep. To his credit, now that she was obviously awake he came over, wagging his knob of a tail and licked her face until she pushed him away like she always did when she got a whiff of his doggy breath.

“Good dog Ralph. Good dog. I’m alright.”

Clare got onto her knees then struggled up, using the chair like a walking stick, noting how far the table had been bodged out of place when she fell against it. It was coming back: the timeline of events from the invisible visitor’s first signs; but only patchily. There were still sections missing.

Her head was starting to feel better (no longer alternately swelling and contracting on the inside) but her limbs felt exhausted, like they had when, as a girl, she’d spent a weekend moving hay bales for a pittance in wages from the local farmer. Her stomach wasn’t as flat as it had been in her twenties but she wasn’t fat as such. Underneath the slight roundness, her underdeveloped muscles complained as much as they would have if she had spent the last ten minutes doing stomach crunches instead of lying flat out on the floor.

What had happened? What had she seen, really? What had it done to her? The first three questions that occurred had nothing in the way of answers.

The heat was gone, completely. It was chilly in there now if anything, perhaps just by contrast; Clare’s arms were pocked by goose pimples from wrist to shoulder. There was almost no sign that it had been there: the invisible intruder; but it had. The two porcelain houses that it had knocked off the window ledge were where they had fallen, broken into pieces. The kettle, bookcase and sauces were still out of place. However spaced out she felt now, that phenomenon had been real. But what it had been? She had no effing clue.

She stood there in the kitchen, waiting... for it to return; for some revelation to come. Nothing happened. It was just her kitchen. There was nothing untoward. Bored, Ralph wandered over to his basket near the entrance to the hall and curled into it.

Clare examined the salt cellar, looking closely. Apart from what could have been a vestigial lingering heat it was just a salt cellar. The kettle too was just a kettle. She put her palms together over her nose and mouth, her breathing a little ragged; more audible than usual, then laid both hands flat against her face and rubbed her eyes.

Nothing significant was different. Nothing had changed apart from the aches in her limbs. The world was still going round. The clouds were still scraping across the sky. The washing up still needed doing. A meal needed to be put on.

But it had happened. She was always going to believe that, even though it was getting hard to already in amongst this banality. It had happened. It had come and it had... wanted... something. And maybe it would be back.

There were no answers and before she could question herself further a memory suddenly came back to her.

“Oh my God!” Clare ran round to the downstairs toilet door. “Henry! Are you alright in there?” 

THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter One - Part Six

Joey Baylis, the twenty six year old lodger who lived in the room on the other side of the wall was too engrossed in his video game to notice the rising heat, and the cheap stereo headphones connected to his portable TV blocked out the barking of the dog and the scream Clare had made. He had been the second guest who had moved in when Clare opened the house to lodgers.

He was replaying the original Play Station One game, Metal Gear Solid, for the fourth time completely through (he’d started but not finished two times on top of that but on this occasion he was determined to get all the way to the end). When complete, he was going to play the sequel and the sequel to that, and so on, until he got to the end of the story as told. What made it different this time was that he was playing each game on the original console it was released alongside. It was probably a bit cheesy and embarrassing in certain circles, but there was a hardcore group on a couple of internet forums he frequented who thought it was a great idea and his doctor was happy as long as he wasn’t hitting people.

He was doing the same thing simultaneously with the game Silent Hill while he was working nights as a watchman at the factory in Ferndown. Metal Gear Solid was fine in daylight, sneaking around like a spy on an island military base in the dead of winter but Silent Hill was scary as shit. It had to be played at night for maximum effect.

Joey had the smallest room in the house despite being almost a foot taller than anyone else: a box room with the same bunk bed in situ that had been left behind by the people who owned the place when Clare and her husband moved in. Joey didn’t mind the bunk even though it was too small for him; kind of liked it in a nostalgic sort of way; and although the room had garnered the nickname “the cell” because of its exact dimensional match to the size of the average prison accommodation, he didn’t mind it. He’d chosen it over the larger rooms he could have had, principally because of the cheaper rent but also because he preferred the confined space, the lack of floor area. And it wasn’t so bad; wasn’t so close to being a prison cell. There was no toilet at one end and no bars; just a door and a little window with a roller blind and a perfect place on the bottom bunk for him to jam his compact TV into place, pile up his pillows and kick back with a game for the bulk of the afternoon once he finally woke up post-night shift.

The bedroom reminded him actually of his room at the secure unit and it didn’t matter about how bad many of the memories were connected to that place, the room itself had been like a cocoon he could withdraw inside away from the racket in the rest of that dismal hell hole.

Joey was sitting in the corner of the lower bunk, walls on both sides of him, not facing the direction the invisible thing came from; looking down the mattress to where the TV was propped, but he had enough of the opposite wall within his field of vision that he would have been able to see the intruder coming through if he’d had the same powerful senses as the dog. As it was, hood up over his head, shoulders hunched, Joey saw nothing but he felt the ramped up heat like he was sliding into a bath that was almost too hot, coming up the length of his legs and torso and into his arms and face.

It made him lower the Play Station remote and look up, dazed curling lips, dim eyes, not really focused. “What the fuck?” There was no picture hanging from that opposite wall and nothing high enough on the floor for the intruder to knock so Joey had no real indication that something was there as Clare had done – he had no faithful hound to attempt, even unsuccessfully, to save him.

It went into his face – a great puff of air blowing out the sides of his hood – and into his chest, passing without impediment through the fabric of his top, his T-shirt and his skin. There wasn’t time for the instant of terror that Clare had felt, carried on the knowledge that something completely unnatural was about to happen to her. Joey had almost no hint that it was occurring at all.

His muscles went into spasm as Clare’s had done, his head smashing back against the vertical corner beam of the bunk bed. The Play Station controller stayed in his hand at first then he hurled it free. The wire caught its flight before it could crack against the opposite wall and it fell harmlessly to the carpet. But Joey was wearing his boots. He almost never took them off. They were steel toe-capped boots that had been yellow on the day of purchase three years earlier but now were mottled brown. He’d been obligated to buy them to protect his feet for an industrial temp job but now they stayed on twenty four seven if he could manage it, even slept in them.

His left boot shot out as his leg spasmed and buried itself in the screen of his television. The glass shattered and sparked but Joey didn’t react. He had no external senses anymore. Like Clare’s, his brain wasn’t turned off but it was overwhelmed with flash-images: memories, thoughts and feelings from his day, from the day before, from a month ago and ten years earlier; random splashes of his life that fell in no  chronological pattern: a birthday party, his mother laughing, crying in school, his hands closing around the neck of the first girl he tried to kiss, his father throwing a Frisbee on the afternoon he died, a kitchen table spread with a buffet of chicken legs, sandwiches and salad.

He locked tight, muscles straining; and fell still.

Time passed.

Nothing moved in the room beyond the slow curl of smoke that issued from the broken screen of the television. The presence lingered for a while longer then it drifted up through the ceiling into the attic bedroom that was also empty and out through the roof into the sky.