THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Five - Part Two

The first person to get a half decent look at the sixth guest was not a resident of Beltane Boarding House.

Pam Turpin had spent the early part of the evening in town with her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. She didn’t even know why she thought of him as her boyfriend considering they’d only been out together five times. Did sleeping together make the distinction from seeing somebody to going out with them? She wasn’t exactly sure if there was an official ruling. Either way he was soon to be dumped.

The first two dates had been fine – great even – but cracks had started to appear on number three and by the fourth date she’d started to get a tad irked. Tonight when she’d left him she’d been steamed – had almost ended it then and there. But it hadn’t been the right moment; not with his goofy friend Eric in tow. Instead she’d cut the night short and fumed her way up the hill to the open air car park that backed onto the old wooded churchyard where Mary Shelley’s grave was. Even the crash she’d heard that sounded almost like an explosion had not managed to knock her out of her fury – nor had the storm.

Forgetting his wallet once had been excusable. Twice in a row was too much! Especially when gormless Eric didn’t have money either. And who invited single male friends along on a fifth date? It was ridiculous! Also, he was a racist; and not the relatively benign joking around kind. He was the mutter-nasty-comments-under-his-breath kind.

If he’d been good in bed, maybe she could have overlooked the odd glitch in his character, but no! Oh no! Not good at all!

It was all just a matter of where and when now. She hated the idea of text dumping but she had to weigh her guilt against the horror of actually seeing him again to say it to his face. Maybe it was worth thinking of herself as a bitch for a while if she could avoid that!

She strode across the car park on the plateau, leaning into the wind then missed the keyhole on her car door in her anger. She got it on the second try but a noise to her far left made her stop short of opening it. It wasn’t something she recognised: a metallic twanging and then a wooden clattering.

Fifty yards away, on the tree line at the church yard edge of the car park, something was happening. She couldn’t process it immediately because it was so completely counter to her expectation. A length of the waist high fence there under the trees was unravelling. It had broken and the horizontal beams that held up the wire mesh were rising into the air, trailing the mesh and vertical posts after them. The fence on both sides of the break rose perhaps twenty feet in the air and then from the darkness between where the fence had stood a figure appeared on foot.

Pam still didn’t open her door. She just stared, her mouth flaccid.

The figure – a man; a big muscular man – walked calmly under the hovering fence and onto the tarmac of the car park. She could barely make him out because he seemed to be holding a powerful lamp at head height that gave off enough light to dazzle her, even from that distance. Behind him the fence crashed down where it had once stood as though the invisible hands that had lifted it had let go. The man kept walking, the light at his shoulders pulsing but getting smaller, even as it grew brighter.

He wasn’t coming straight toward her. If he had done, she would have screamed and run desperately away as fast as she could in utter terror. He walked in a straight diagonal line toward the upper entrance to the car park at the opposite corner. Cars couldn’t get out there but pedestrians could. He didn’t falter from the path; didn’t even seem to see Pam; he just went on walking.

Then there was a bright flicker and a flash and the light level with his head went out.

It was too dark to make out his face, even if her night vision hadn’t been ruined by the light, but she caught his silhouette against the lit windows of the block of flats beyond and saw thick curly hair. And in the dim street lamp light she saw that he was naked. Completely naked. But also very tall and athletic.

She caught herself thinking that she wouldn’t kick him out of bed.

And then she remembered the fence.

He passed into shadow and then disappeared behind a parked van. Pam stepped back to reacquire her view and caught him a dozen or so yards further on. Except now there was something different about him; about his shape in the gloom. When he passed into direct light again, now quite a way away, she saw why. He was wearing clothes. He hadn’t slowed or stopped. He definitely hadn’t had time to struggle into something when he passed out of her view. His walk was strong and steady; neither racing nor dragging his feet. He couldn’t have got dressed. But he had done somehow. She was sure he had been naked. But of course she was equally sure that he couldn’t have been. It simply wasn’t possible. Just as the fence being torn up into the air wasn’t possible. But the fence still lay tangled where it had come down.

The man was at the far end of the car park already, almost out of sight. Pam was in two minds whether to jump in her car and try to follow him. But her gut – the part of her that told her it was time to type out that text to dump her idiot boyfriend – let her know succinctly that she would be a fool to do so.

There was something wrong with the man. Something very wrong. Wherever he was going, she didn’t want to be anywhere close to it when he got there.