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.