THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter One - Part Three

The heat alone wasn’t enough to tell Clare that something was very not right within the environs of her property. Maybe if she’d seen the digital thermometer climb past thirty and keep going and hadn’t continued to discount it as faulty wiring... The movement in the bushes and trees was odd, certainly, but not overtly mystical (the wind could do things like that if it wanted to) but it did add another chunk of evidence. It was what happened after the rabbits started acting up that tipped her over from lifelong scepticism to true believer; and what happened after that.

The rabbits acted strangely at the best of times. In a moment of impulsive weakness, she and her husband had purchased two boys and a girl and despite being brothers, the boys had instantly taken on a war footing to win the love of the only long eared animal out there that didn’t have a little rabbit willy. If kept together they fought. Snowy’s ear had a rip in it shaped like the letter C and Jester’s fur had covered the garden in brown and white clumps until they’d been separated: one boy and a girl running loose, the odd man out left caged in a five foot run connected at one end to a two-storey hutch.

Snowy and his black and white girlfriend were loose on the lawn when the bushes started shaking. They immediately sprang into motion, sprinting in tighter and tighter circles, off the lawn, onto the patio then back up onto the lawn again: round and round, up and down. In the run, Jester ran from one corner diagonally to the other before reversing the journey at top speed, over and over.

Clare put one hand on her hip, staring curiously out at them, standing up a little on tiptoe to see more of the garden. Then between her and them the window quivered, making her jump and rock back onto her heels. There were numerous ornaments on the wide window ledge: miniature houses made from hand-painted pottery; more than a dozen in various scales. As if an invisible arm rested on the ledge against the glass pane and swiped against them all simultaneously, they moved – only four or five inches, but they moved. It wasn’t quite far enough for them to drop off the window ledge but a couple were close. Then the invisible force gave just two of them a further nudge and they dropped off the ledge onto the black work surface and cracked.

Clare yelped aloud and staggered back what might have been half a dozen steps if she hadn’t come up hard against the cupboards to the right of the sink. There was nothing visible; nothing at all; but something had just moved those ornaments.

Her first thought was earthquake. But there was no tremor. And she hadn’t felt an earthquake in all her thirty seven years anywhere in England. Her second thought linked it in to the heat. If anything it was even hotter now (forty five on the thermometer’s digital window). The heat was like a simmering shudder in the air; an encompassing thickness to the oxygen on her exposed arms and upper chest, on her face and inside her throat as she breathed.

Ralph was up on his paws, a growl rolling out of his jaws at a pitch Clare had never heard before. She had never heard anything but benevolence coming from his mouth but hearing this sudden shift chilled her more sharply than what she was seeing.

Then the kettle moved, on the opposite worktop. Beside it the toaster slid a few centimetres and stopped. On the table the salt cellar dropped onto its side and a ruffle formed in the table cloth as though a hand had pushed it up into a fold. Against the wall beside the bins was a decorative shelf unit with a fancy carved lip at the top. It rocked back then bonked forward and shifted, scraping audibly as its right corner swung out maybe five degrees from its original position.

It was like a drunk was stumbling from one part of the room to another, tipping against this, knocking over that, righting himself then shambling on. Clare’s hand went to her mouth as she stared after the unseen visitor.

Ralph walked backwards into the entrance of the kitchen, backing up level with the fridge freezer, looking upward slightly, as if he could see something specific, some intangible cloud or spectral haunt. His growl notched up its pitch as he took another step back then he yelped and cowered low as whatever it was that he could see that Clare couldn’t passed right over or through him.

For several seconds nothing happened. Clare stayed feet planted but leaned forward with her neck. Ralph took several steps down the hall in the direction of the front door. It seemed that even he couldn’t see anything anymore. Then just at the kink in the corridor where the stairs came down, the oil painting that Clare had inherited from her mother rocked clockwise down. Ralph dropped onto his forepaws and gave out a deep bark. Still Clare couldn’t see a thing.

Then Ralph sprang up to full standing and backed rapidly toward her, barking savagely as the invisible force; whatever it was; started coming back towards them.