Chapter Six

The grandfather clock struck midnight, the heavy tones echoing throughout the house, and sending a chill down Craig’s spine. It must have had the same effect on the others because they stopped talking and were still. The TV still blared but it was eerily loud and jarred on their nerves. When Fiona turned it off, though, the silence was even more unsettling.

 

Perhaps feeling the mood, Fiona, in her too cheerful voice, asked if everyone wanted dinner.

 

“Yes, of course, that chicken smells heavenly,” Maggie said. She and a few of the guests wandered towards the dining room where Todd was setting the table and placing the food in the center. The chicken, rice, and blood orange salad looked and smelled wonderful and Craig took his seat. Thankfully, Nick, Maggie and the other woman studiously ignored him. He was seated next to an empty chair, Todd on his other side, Fiona in front of him.

 

Dinner was served. Craig was nervous, too many things could happen during dinner. Spilled salt, someone coughing, a broken glass. He waited, tense, for something to happen, someone to do something. At least there were only twelve people at the dinner table, though that was dangerously close.

 

At the dinner table the conversation moved more freely, mostly involving work and holiday plans. A few people talked about their children in half-disparaging terms. Craig felt out of place, as he usually did in these situations, having nothing to say and no one to say it to anyway. He ate his dinner in silence.

 

They were nearly done with dinner. People were now talking more than eating, pushing food away, leaning back with their glasses, when the doorbell rang and Fiona went to answer it.

 

“Look who finally showed up,” she said as she returned. A man that was her clone stood easily behind her, his smile reminiscent of the mischievous grins of youth.

 

“Hey, Mathew,” Todd said.

 

“Hey, ya.”

 

Mathew sat in the empty chair next to Craig and the conversation whirled again.

 

“Craig Klavans, man, I haven’t seen you in ages, how are you?” Mathew asked. He helped himself to dinner in that easy manner that Craig hated and envied. There were a lot of things about Mathew that rubbed Craig the wrong way. That he was perpetually late and unapologetic about it, that he faked an Irish accent whenever he was in company to make himself seem more exotic, that he played the roll of the Trickster.

 

But, at the moment, Craig was too frightened, too apprehensive, to notice Mathew and his affectations. There were now thirteen - thirteen! - at the table. No one seemed to notice, or if they noticed didn’t care. In the living room, the grandfather clock struck the hour, making Craig jump with supernatural horror. The salt shaker was near his hand and it toppled over, the cap coming off, and salt spilling onto the tablecloth.

 

Craig stared at it.

 

“Craig, man, are you okay? Jesus, someone’s jumpy,” Mathew said. Todd reached over to clean up the salt, carelessly brushing some of it into his hand, and Craig jumped on him. He picked up two fingers of salt and tossed them over his left shoulder whispering the incantation.

 

The others watched him. He knew they were watching him. It didn’t matter. Mathew, always the Trickster, poured some pepper into his hand and threw it over his left shoulder, a perfect imitation.

 

“I figured the floor needed some pepper, too, yeah?” he said.

 

The others laughed.

 

Todd and Fiona laughed, too, but stifled it more quickly, exchanged worried glances and tried to come up with a diverting topic. It was hopeless, of course, Mathew was the more clever twin and his wit kept the topic firmly on Craig, his favorite scapegoat.

 

“While we’re seasoning the floor, maybe some garlic. Todd? You’re the chef, what do you think about that?”

 

“Mathew,” Todd started.

 

“Oh, Todd, come on now, we’re just having a bit of fun. Right, Craig? He’s been locked up in that mansion for so long maybe he just forgot that people eat at tables, they don’t eat tables.”

 

And so it continued. Craig didn’t leave, he couldn’t. The first one to step away from the table once thirteen sat down would be the first to die. He stayed, no longer eating, no longer daring to, trapped into listening to the raucous jokes made in his honor. It was a nightmare situation.

 

And no one was leaving. Even after Mathew ate and drank his fill, which took hours, even after they’d all pushed their plates away from them, they sat, talking. Endlessly talking about mundane and inane s**t. Their kids, how wonderful they were, yeah, when someone else was watching them, but when it was just mommy and daddy it was a different story. Work was great, so great that I stay there fifty, sixty hours a week.

 

“Oh, you’ll never guess what I got Allyiah for Christmas,” said one woman, “I worked overtime for three weeks but there’s a Wii in our closet. She’s going to be so happy. And I’ll tell you, with the way that girl eats she needs to lose some weight.”

 

“So,” a man said, “I told my boss, I said, ‘listen, you aren’t paying me what I’m worth. I’ve got an MBA in business, I’m a harder worker than these Mexicans you’ve got working for you, you better give me a raise before I walk out.’ And you know what he told me? You know what he told me? He said, ‘no one’s getting a raise, John, the company’s gone bankrupt.’ Isn’t that a load of old s**t?”

 

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do next year. Kevin lost his job and he can’t find another one that will pay him what he was making. We lost so much money in the crash. We might have to move to an apartment. Isn’t that just horrible? Imagine, me, in a public pool,” another woman said. She shuddered and her friend put her arm around her shoulder.

 

“Oh, Honey, don’t ever have children. I lost my figure and my bank account when that condom broke,” another woman said. She sighed lustily and sipped her water, conscious that her Pilates body was as rock hard as it ever was.

 

Craig listened to the scraps of conversation, searching for something tangible in any of them, but they were the same complaints he’d heard years before, before he locked the doors of his mansion to the outside world. Nothing had changed because even with the newness of the century, the world, the market, everything, people hadn’t changed.

 

“Oh! The eclipse is starting,” Fiona said. Everyone jumped up and Craig jumped up as well, toppling over his chair in every effort to escape these people. These vapid, inane, worthless people. In his haste, he didn’t notice who had been the first to stand, he didn’t notice if it had been himself.