THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Five - Part Eight

No more than five hundred yards from the front door to Beltane Boarding House, the main road into Boscombe curved sharply to the left where once upon a time it had gone straight on (to become the now pedestrianised high street). It looped round the back of the shops before meeting the point where the high street ended, then went on toward Southbourne and Christchurch. Behind the shops the road ran straight for a while, overlooked by a multi-storey car park. It was here that James Western saw the walking man.

He was a walking man himself; taking what he called his “little escape” every night after dinner when the television got switched on by his wife and didn’t switch off again until she was sleeping with her head back on the sofa cushion, mouth open, spittle dribbling down her chin to make a damp circle stain on the bosom of her dress. Sometimes he wondered if the woman he’d married hadn’t been kidnapped and replaced by aliens. All this one did was stare at the goggle box. She would have had it on during dinner every night but he’d managed to put his foot down at least that far. If it wasn’t for his little escape he was sure he would have gone completely mental by now; literally; maybe even killed her for real.

She simply wasn’t the woman he married. At seventy six years old (one year ahead of him) she didn’t even look like his wife anymore. She was only now a bad copy that gaped into the flickering eye whenever she could and he could barely stand it.

Hence the walking. Every night he set off in a random direction and walked a meandering ribbon through the streets of Bournemouth, sometimes down and along the beach or cliff top, sometimes sticking to the suburbs. He generally walked ninety minutes each way and that was a lot of distance. After forty years he knew the town better than anybody.

Generally he stayed away from Boscombe. It had its nicer areas (some very nice indeed) but it could get seedy at times and at the end closest to Bournemouth, where the Crescent was, it got get downright nasty at times. But he got bored of the old routes so tonight, when he sauntered up through Southbourne, he decided to take the Boscombe route.

James was on the pavement opposite the multi-storey car park when he saw the walking man. Initially he went on walking himself but he was in no hurry and the strangeness of the man intrigued him so he stopped still and watched.

The man came round the bend from the direction of Bournemouth. Like the other witnesses, James noticed the man’s steady purposeful walk; his height and muscular build. He saw the thick curly hair and, in the bland wash of streetlight, his close-cropped beard. At first glance there was nothing overtly strange about the walking man but James still found his eyes lingering. What was it that drew his attention? He watched the man’s progress.

It was the intensity of his stride. Seldom had James seen someone walking with such calm purpose: not quickly but steadily... and directly. The man wasn’t following the pavement. He was following an invisible line that didn’t go through buildings but was otherwise the most direct route to his destination. James found himself turning his head along the man’s path as he crossed the grass verge onto the road so that he could see where he was going, but there was nothing significant that he could see; just the open entrance to Gladstone Road East next to the mini roundabout where the road split. A car zoomed up from the right fork (drunk driver by the look of the way he swerved past the roundabout as though it wasn’t there and shot down the road past James.

He looked back at the walking man and cried out in alarm.

The man was in the middle of the road, not crossing but moving down its length at a shallow diagonal. He was directly in the path of the speeding car. It was going to hit him!

The drunk driver saw the man and hit his brakes. The car slowed but the front wheels locked tight. The back of the car waggled in the skid. James reached out toward the man as though he could pluck him away from there but the car was stopping. It didn’t hit the man. It was close – bonnet and bumper only inches away – but it didn’t strike him.

James simply watched.

The walking man had stopped walking. The drunk driver was shouting muffled expletives from behind the wheel. James wasn’t that close but he could see that the man wasn’t making much, if any, reaction. It struck him that maybe the man was on drugs or there was something wrong with his brain. He’d almost been run down! But he stood there, doing nothing more than looking down at the bonnet of the car by his thigh.

James glanced to his left, scanning for anyone else who might be around in case this got ugly. As he started to turn back to look at the scene he heard a crash from out of his field of vision, then another crash. Then the drunkards car landed on its side in front of him, rolled, lifting off the road and cracked down again. It rolled and crashed over and over again, flying back down the length of the road, sparks flashing up on each impact, the roof completely caved in already. It reached the mini roundabout, still rolling and bouncing at incredible speed then it buried itself in the front of the narrow sign-making shop that faced the road.

James stared after it, struggling to understand how a stationery car could suddenly be rolling down the street like a dinghy in the wind; as though it had just come through a ninety mile an hour collision. Then he slowly – so very slowly – turned his head back toward where the man had been standing.

The man was still there, completely stationery, and he was looking down the road down the path that the shattered car had taken, his face completely passive, as James’s wife’s might have been when she was watching one of her action thrillers: as though the destruction in front of him were meaningless.

Then he started walking, looking directly at James. He was about forty yards away but getting closer every second. At thirty yards, James’s breathing became suddenly erratic. He couldn’t move. He wanted to run away (though he hadn’t ran anywhere for more than eighteen years). He wanted to scream. He couldn’t do anything but stare at this person coming towards him. Twenty yards away. Fifteen yards. Ten. James raised his right hand to ward him away, clutching at his chest with his left. He thought about his wife; the woman he’d fallen in love with who was still buried somewhere beneath the wrinkles and the dull staring eyes of the woman she was now.

At five yards away, James’s heart failed. He dropped onto his knees. The man was almost on top of him but it was only now that James realised the man wasn’t coming at him at all. He was following his path. He was staring exactly where he’d been staring before. James couldn’t catch his breath. His eyes were blurring up. There was pain somewhere he had never felt pain before. And the man hadn’t been coming for him. He was merely walking close by. He passed him as James collapsed onto his face, completely indifferent to any of it. The man was going where he was going and anything else was irrelevant.

Life shuddered quietly out of James’s body as he lay there on the pavement alone. The walking man was already nearing the end of the road, close to his destination now but not hurrying, still only walking at the same steady pace, his approach to Beltane Boarding House imminent and inevitable.