THE VISITER PART TWO

It was dole check Thursday. The best day of our fortnight. The day we had money in our pockets and things to do. The day we had direction and purpose. One day out of a fortnight when we would get up early, cash our money and go off into town to shop. We really made a day of it and enjoyed every little thing; even paying the bills was fun. We had coffee and a tea cake in our usual cafe and then hopped a bus homeward bound. We arrived home with bags full of shopping and lugged them up the seemingly endless stairs. We were foot saw and weary and dyeing for a drink and a sit down. Putting my bags down on the doorstep I pulled out my keys and unlocked the door to the flat, and pushed it open. It stopped, open only a little bit. I pushed again a little harder, it banged against something inside the hall but gave and opened a little more. I was puzzled. I had very little view but I could just make out through the crack I could see that the cupboard door was open. So that was what was preventing the front door from opening. I pushed again, pushing harder now that I knew what was obstructing the normal opening of my door. This time the door opened enough for me to squeeze in and gain access to the cupboard. Once in the cupboard I turned around and shut the front door allowing me to exit the cupboard and go into my hall. I then shut the cupboard door so allowing the front door to open fully for Kevin and the pile of bulging shopping bags to finally gain entrance to our home. The whole situation provided me with a certain amount of amusement. Kevin struggled into the hall with the shopping, grumbling complaints about people not shutting doors properly. I shrugged his complaints off; he was always grumpy when we came home from shopping. At least it made a change from his usual complaints about how little money we had left over and what he hadn't been able to get. We took the shopping down the hall and into the kitchen and dumped it down. I put the kettle on and busied my self putting the shopping away as it boiled away to it self. My task done I made the drinks and we sat down to recuperate with coffee and biscuits. Later I made us some tea and we settled down for a quiet night in with the telly. Apart from the cupboard door it had been a perfectly normal and uneventful dole check Thursday. As we settled down for the night we were blissfully unaware that our lives were soon going to change. We had no idea of what would shortly come to pass.

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Life continued in its normal routine. We would occasionally go to visit the family and some friends together. Sometimes when we came home the front door would open without a hitch, other times I'd have to go through the little ritual of squeezing into the cupboard, shutting its door and open the front door in order to gain access to the flat. It never failed to amuse me and never failed to raise a grumble from Kevin. Each time it happened he'd perform his own little ritual of checking the hinges, the handle and the catch. Each time he could find no reason why it should open by itself, and yet on a frequent basis it would defy all natural logic and open. This only happened when we were out and occasionally if only one of us went out. The occupant remaining in the flat was usually happily unaware of its opening until the other was trying to get in again. It defied logic but it didn't really matter it was only a little thing and it couldn't get us down.

It was early November and most evenings were spent huddled around the only heat source in the flat, the little wall mounted gas fire. Despite my initial thoughts that it would be ample enough heat, it was proving to be a long way from that. It was a cold flat, a very cold flat. The ancient metal window frames closed well enough but they created major amounts of condensation. This made every room feel colder and damper than it really was. Looking back on all my subsequent homes, I don't think I ever lived anywhere that was as cold and inhospitable as that flat. Even the old, draughty farm house, with its ill fitting doors, was warmer, in the winter we spent in it, than that flat. To help keep warm we would wrap ourselves in duvets while we sat round the fire, it was the only practical way. We were warming ourselves in this way on the evening I will tell you about now.

I was wrapped up cosily on the couch in my duvet, the telly playing away to it's self. Kevin and I were talking and making plans for the forth coming festive season. I was comfy and warm. I fancied a drink but the thought of braving the Arctic wasteland that was the kitchen really didn't appeal to me enough to make me thirsty. I heard a quiet click in the kitchen but took little notice; the fridge freezer was often prone to making its own peculiar noises. If Kevin had heard the noise he made no sign of it. Seconds later I could hear the hiss of boiling water and then the bubble and then another click. It sounded for all intent and purpose like the kettle had boiled and switched off. Kevin had heard it this time; he looked quizzically at me and turned in his seat looking towards the kitchen door. I shrugged my shoulders a little baffled.

"Fancy a drink?" I asked, not sure if I should mention that it seamed as though the kettle had read my mind and boiled, from cold in seconds flat, without the aid of either one of us actually switching it on. Kevin looked like he didn't want to talk about it anyway.

"Umm......yeah, a coffee would be nice", he replied lackadaisical a blank look on his face. I disentangled myself from the comforting warmth of my duvet and got up and headed for the kitchen. The Arctic blast hit me as I slid open the door, I shivered as I entered the kitchen. By god it was chilly in there. I flicked the kettle back on, it clicked. I busied myself setting up the drinks. The kettle hissed very quietly. I shrugged and left the kitchen stepping back into the warmth of the living room. I headed out into the hall heading for the loo. The cupboard door was open; I didn't think it odd any more it happened with such frequency. I went to the loo and when I had finished I pottered down the hall and shut the cupboard door. It wasn't as cold now that I was moving around a little but it was still chilly out there away from the fire and my lovely duvet. I pottered back down the hall thinking how if it got any colder we'd be living in the one room around the fire. The warmth rushed out of the living room door to greet me as I pushed it open and entered. Reluctantly I went back into the ice box kitchen; the kettle was just boiling as I entered. I shook my head at it a little puzzled at its boiling speed this time. I poured the boiling water into the mugs and left the icy wasteland, gladly sliding the door closed on the chill behind me.

"Had I heard the kettle boil?" I thought to myself "It certainly sounded like it and yet it took its usual time to boil from cold." I put Kevin's coffee on his table next to him and scuttled back to the warm comfort of my couch and duvet.

"Thanks love," Kevin drawled absently. Then under his breath, "must be hearing things." I shrugged again not feeling much like looking for answers. Kevin was such a sceptic person and besides, "weird" things made him prickly. We didn't mention it again that evening.

The kettle continued its odd behaviour over the next few weeks. Each time it apparently boiled itself the cupboard door would usually be found open at some point afterwards. Subsequent checks on both misbehaving items showed no reason for their errant behaviour. The kettle was always found to be cold and took its standard time to boil when we put it on ourselves. The cupboard continued to deny us access when we went out and I can only presume that the kettle also boiled itself when we were out. The kettle seamed to play tricks on us, waiting till one left the room before it clicked, boiled and clicked off in record time. We would call to each other.

"I'll have a cup if you're making one" was the regular comment. Followed swiftly by “I wasn't," from the other. We both suspected each other of the joke but said little on the subject preferring to humour each other. Apart from the door and the kettle quandary life was okay. We weren't about to let a silly joke create problems, it was fine. Well that was how it seamed on the surface. The tension underneath was building.

It started with little bickering, nothing much really. It's hard to remember now how it actually happened and in what order. I know we were happy enough before the door began its peculiar behaviour but after there was a new kind of tension in the air. It wasn't anything you could put your finger on, but still something wasn't quite right. The pressure was to show on Kevin first, but I was unaware of it all back then. With the benefit of hindsight I realize now I could have seen the signs if I'd looked a little harder. I know if I'd seen them I could have handled it all a little better but as I said back then I just didn't see it coming.

THE VISITER PART FOUR

Next came the little things, small and un-noticeable to anyone but myself. These were probably the most irritating things that happened from my point of view anyway. I spent hours rearranging things back into my order after I found them in disarray. It began in the kitchen again but it would eventually find its way out. I had a rack on the wall by the sink for all my kitchen utensils. I had a set order to how I hung them on that rack and I liked my little order. In the middle was the smallest item and on ether end were the longest ones. In between I hung the middle sized items on each side. This formed a kind of upside down V shape. That was my order and I liked it that way. Often I would go into the kitchen to find my order changed and the utensils would be running from smallest to longest in a slope from one side to the other of the rack. I asked Kevin not to do it after the third time of rearranging them. I very gently explained how I liked them and he very quickly denied all knowledge of moving them. I was beginning to get a little confused. My normal life was suddenly developing some odd little quirks and I wasn't so sure I liked them any more. I'm not a huge sceptic but then nor am I a devout believer either, so accepting that what was going on was anything other than practical jokes was not sitting that easy with me. Kevin couldn't explain it and was quiet willing to accept the possibility of such entities as poltergeist, but while he was willing to accept it didn't mean he was happy to live with it, or like it for that matter. In fact the truth was it really bloody frightened him. As the weeks progressed and things moved around and towers got built and the kettle boiled away merrily and the damned cupboard door opened unaided, I began to see some reason in Kevin's spiritual theories. Disturbing though his ideas of poltergeist were I was fast running out of rational explanations. His ideas were not fully bullet proof, I could pick so many holes in them but still nagging questions spun my head. What if it was, what then? I thought it happened around teenagers or something like that. Why would it happen to us? We didn't seem to fit into any of the normal case studies examples and yet the practical jokes continued and the friction between Kevin and I grew.

The dancing utensils got to be so infuriating I finally gave up and left them to their own order. I hated it every time I looked at it but I was sick of putting them back into my order only to find them an hour or so later back in disarray. It was a battle I didn't have the heart to win so I gave ground and let it be. I thought ignorance was the best policy since it seemed to serve Kevin well. For a while the utensils stayed in their new order and only the towers got built and the door continued to play its little game. After a little while the utensils returned to my order and I smiled with satisfaction because I had won a small portion of the game. The towers slowed again and eventually stopped but the door continued to open of its own free will. It all seemed to be going quiet again, but the games were still just beginning. Kevin's mental health was beginning to go down hill again by this point and his temper would flare with rapid succession. Emotionally I was bruised from the regular out bursts but I was holding it together painting over the cracks in our relationship with a happy smile for those around us. It was hard to smile sometimes but I always seamed to manage it when I needed to. Kevin's sleep pattern was all over the place. He would frequently wake up in the middle of the night and get up. He would crawl back into bed hours later and sleep all day. I tried to maintain as close to a normal sleep routine as I could but the disturbed nights were beginning to show in the dark rings under my eyes and the constant yawning. All was not well in our domestic nest but I didn't know what was wrong or how to fix it.

The next game began with Kevin's light sleeping. We would go to bed together turning off all the lights as we went. Later when Kevin awoke he would get up to find the living room light on or the kitchen light on and on one occasion all the lights in the flat were ablaze. He was now fully believing that we had some kind of spiritual entirety cohabiting with us and I was finding it hard to disagree with him. Kevin was pretty spooked out by it all and no amount of my pointing out the innocence of it all would make him feel any happier about it. It was all far too weird for him. I tried to keep laughing about it in an attempt to make him see it was just a silly little thing but he was so far into his fear for that to reach him.

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Early December found us in our regular evening position crowded round the fire with duvets. We were writing Christmas cards and chatting. The customary click came from the kitchen as the kettle switched itself on. I had discovered that if I managed to get to the kitchen before the kettle boiled the entity would leave it to finish, so we got hot steaming drinks in record time without having to spend too long in the icy wastelands of the kitchen. This would often result in a mad dash to get to the kitchen as the entity seemed to know just when I was about to get to the kitchen and the kettle would switch itself off and on my entry it would be like the kettle had never been boiling just seconds before. On hearing the kettle switch on I placed my pen down on the cards on the table and went into the kitchen to make a drink. I didn't have to dance around in the cold kitchen for long before the kettle boiled and I was able to make the drink. I returned to the living room, it wasn't even as warm in there these days since December had arrived. I put our drinks down on the table and flopped down onto the couch and reached for my pen to continue the endless Christmas cards. I looked, no pen, I looked on the floor, in case I had knocked it off but still no pen. I stood up again checked my chair and shook out the duvet, still no sign of my pen. I was puzzled.

"Honey have you got my pen?" I asked Kevin, he waved his pen at me and shook his head.

"It's on the cards where you left it isn't it?" He looked up and noticed the pen was no longer there. "Well it was there a minute ago," he said puzzled. "Have you looked on the floor and the chair?" I nodded. "The visitor must have nicked it," he commented attempting to improve my annoyance.

"On yea right and I believe in the tooth fairy," I replied caustically. Then just to humour him "Okay please whatever you are can I have my pen back, because it's really a very silly joke and I'm very short on humour tonight." I smiled sarcastically around the room at the thin air before I turned the smile on Kevin. As my gaze came to rest on him his eyes fell to the table. His face dropped from a grin to straight and the colour drained from his checks as he took a swift intake of breath. I followed his furtive gaze only to be greeted by the sight of my pen spinning slowly on the cards just as I'd left it. Kevin jumped up and left the room swiftly preferring the chill of the bathroom with its safe lockable door to that which was unseen and unexplainable in the living room. I sat and watched as my pen slowed and stopped it's revolving. Now I had to accept Kevin's ghostly theories. The entity was now responding to me directly or so it seamed. For Kevin this was more frightening but for me it was just getting interesting. As I sat in my duveted comfort a shiver of excitement ran the length of my spine. I had a feeling things were just getting started. I heard the bathroom door unlock and open and then muttering from the hall as Kevin went to shut the cupboard door once more.

"I'm going to bed," he called from the hall. I took a last look at the pen and put the lights out following him to bed were I lay wide awake staring into the blackness, considering what this all meant and what, if any, the implications of it were. I shivered a little under my duvet and snuggled down further tucking out the drafts. In the darkness I held my breath straining to hear any possible sounds of unrest in my little familiar home but all that greeted my ears was my own expectant silence.

THE VISITER PART SIX

Money was imposably tight after Christmas and so I jumped at the chance of a part time job working nights in a care home just five minutes walk from home. With Christmas over and done some of the tension had gone out of our home life and things had settled down to a little more normality. The entity had continued to move things around in the living room but mostly this went unnoticed by Kevin and so my life regained some of it's peace again. Kevin's paranoia had eased off and since the argument in the cafe no more had been said about my involvement with the doctors in their clandestine affairs to rid the world of Kevin. I started my first nights work feeling content and happy. Kevin had his brother round for company and I spent the first warm evening of the winter bedding down residents and reading in the quite night surroundings. I returned home just after eight the next morning to find Kevin looking tiered and sleepless.

“I couldn't sleep,” he told me. “The lights kept going on all night. I don't like you working.” I sighed, he knew we needed the money and he knew it was easy for me to get a job since there were lots of homes in the area but there was no point in saying anything. I sat and had coffee with him and then we both went to bed.

I continued working and over the next few weeks people went off sick and the work load became heavier so I was working more hours and Kevin was becoming more and more unhappy with the situation. The dancing ornaments began again with earnest and the tension at home began to grow once more. If I wasn't out working I was putting my things back in their places or trying to smooth out the tattered edges of our relationship. Kevin wouldn't stay in the flat alone any more finally accepting again that I was not playing any part in the movement of personal items. When I worked he had his brother stay over with him or went to friends. I would return home from a hard night to find him awake waiting for me and would have to listen while he told me how much he hated me working. One morning I came home to another note on the door.

“AT MUM'S” was all it said. I was tiered out and could easily have done without having to walk all the way down to his mothers but I had to go and get him so I trudged wierly down the road to her house. I arrived to find an ashen faced Kevin and a slightly worried looking brother.

“Okay,” I said “What happened this time?” I looked from one of them to the other and waited for the story to come out. It was Paul, his brother who related the tale to me. It seamed they had spent most of the evening watching telly and chatting and that all had been very quiet until the mobile above the telly had begun to spin erratically. I pointed out that heat thermals from the telly being on so long would have possibly caused this but Paul shook his head. He explained that it was spinning round far to fast for it to have been simply that. He said that, that was not really too much of a problem until the lampshade had exploded. I looked at him quizzically wondering at what lengths these men would go to to cover up the damage they must have done to my home while I was out. I quite naturally thought that they had been fooling around and had somehow broken the lampshade and were concocting an elaborate excuse to ease my anger. My face must have displace a level of my disbelief since Paul continued elaborating explaining how the paper globe lampshade had begun to swing and then just unravled itself into their heads. Apparently at that point they had left the flat in a hurry and gone to spend the rest of the night at their mothers. Kevin said nothing throughout the relating of the tale, he just sat looking down at his knees pale and miserable.

Finally he looked up at me, a picture of misery and said in a cold monotone voice, “I don't want to go back there Diane and I wont spend a single minute in that place alone.” I had to accept their story, at least on the surface, no matter how rediculase it was. I was too tiered to argue the toss and all I wanted to do was go home get into bed and sleep for the next few days I had off. I explained this fact to Kevin and left it up to him to follow me home if he wanted to. Then I trudged back up the hill to the flat and let myself in. Other than the torn and trampled lampshade there was nothing amiss so I deposited the remains in the kitchen bin and retreated to bed falling into an instant deep and welcome sleep. Kevin did not return until tea time.

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The days that followed were very eventful, I gave up putting my ornaments and pictures back in their places. Now that Kevin finally fully believed in the haunting, I no longer felt it needed to be hidden to prevent my being bound up in some elaborate paranoid reality. I had to give up work though since Kevin was becoming so over rout each time I had to go out it was impossible for me to carry on caring for others when my own husband was unable to care for himself. The doctors had upped his meditation levels but things were no easier so I packed the part time job in and returned to a full time job of caring for my nerve jangled husband. I didn't understand why he felt so frightened of the entity that shared our home, sure it was annoying but it never did anything in our full view and didn't seam to be dangerous. If it had moved ornaments when we were close to it then that might have been a little worrying but it mostly did it's rearranging when we were in another room. I was happy just to know it wasn't venturing out of the living room into our bedroom but then it had no reason to when the room it was in provided it with such amusement.

One morning we were getting ready to go out. I had left my money for our trip on the telly and was waiting impasiantly for Kevin to ready himself. Finally he came into the living room with his coat on ready to go so I went to the telly to get the money. On one side of the telly top was a bottle with a candle in it, on the other side was a lamp that was on spilling a little light into the otherwise dull room, the money was in the middle of these two. I reached for the money and turned as Kevin spoke to me, “Why have you swapped the light and the bottle around?” he asked me, “ it doesn't give as much light to the room on that side.” As I turned back to look I saw that inexplicably the bottle and light had swapped round and yet I knew they were not out of place when I had reached out for the money. I would have noticed the light shining in my eyes from the other side as I did now.

“I didn't move them,” was my only reply. Kevin turned and hurried out of the flat and I followed him taking a last look at the lamp to be sure it really had changed places. That was much closer, that even made me feel a little uncomfortable. I was no longer so sure of the innocence of the invisible dis organiser who share our domicile with us. It was in a heavy brooding silence we returned to the flat after our shopping trip that day and the cupboard door once again was found to mock our easy access. The next visit to the doctor saw yet another rise in medication and after that the tensions at the flat seamed to lower a little and the invisible dis organiser seamed to settle into the background a little. Things still moved places but it was easier to ignore it than acnolage and since the lamp and bottle incident it seamed happy to fade back to distance moving of objects. Life was finding it's own kind of normality. The lights still randomly went on in empty rooms, we still had to negotiate the cupboard door from time to time but these things had happened so frequently before that it all became normal. Normality is after all a state of perception and we humans are incredibly adaptable so as even the most unusual can, given time and frequency become regual. As the new year moved into it's second month even Kevin seamed better. His mood swings were less frequent and he had finally found the motivation to start weight training again. His bench had been brought out of storage and was taking up a heavy space in our bedroom. As February brought the earliest signs of spring, I was finally feeling a little happier and the future had a little less of the bleak dis pare about it that I had previously been foreseeing. I was even able to go out of an evening on my own occasionally though Kevin would only tolerate this for a few hours. I had taken to going to an open circle in a local spiritualist church and it was there that I first discussed the seemingly paranormal activities of our house hold with someone other than our family. The people there were very kind and offered many possible reasons for the odd occurrences but on the whole I just felt a lot better for talking about it and as I related the tales they began to regain a little more of their original humour. I began to see the funny side again and would often have the group in hysterics relating incidents of boiling kettles and dancing objects. I began to view my ornaments as sentient and having their own ideas about interior design. This light hearted view never seamed to transpose itself fully to Kevin and he continued to furtively glance round a room when he entered looking for the next tower of pots or the next design order. I resigned myself to the fact that he would never see the funny side and so settled myself into my own privet jokes with the entity who liked it's own way.

geez... Steven Spielberg talked to you a while back, didn't he?  But then, you didn't get sucked into the ether... but seriously, I honestly thought you were just pulling our legs until the end.  The talc? spooooooky...