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?”