Now that it was empty, Emilie went into the attic room.

  The person who occupied it had only sparsely filled it with the contents of their barrel-shaped bag. There was something interesting happening in the wardrobe: electricity used to cultivate a plant. Some foreign form of worship, perhaps? She had no frame of reference to understand why the person hadn't planted it in the garden.

  Except for the mist grasping its way across the lawn. Perhaps it was noxious in some way, or its chill fingers would wither the plant. Certainly Emilie felt as if it could wither her.

  On the nightstand sat a few tattered yellowbacks, some wedged open, pages coming out of their cheap binding. Emilie perused the splayed pages, understanding neither the short English sentences nor the annotations in the margins - and how the person had marked the page with some lurid translucent ink was completely beyond her. She browsed the authors' names of the volumes which sat closed, not wanting to disturb the open ones: Hemingway. Palahniuk. McCarthy. She hadn't expected to read a familiar name amongst them, but it unsettled her nevertheless.

  Had her husband invited this person too? Who were they? The guest had brought the smell of tobacco into this room, but other than that, and the plant and the books, there was so little else of them. They were a cipher. She needed to know more.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The person was outside, alone, the three other guests all in their chosen bedrooms. Emilie stepped through the door to the patio, blinking against the harshness of the midday sun filtering through the mist. On the patio table sat the person's notebook and pen, but the guest themself stood a good ten metres away.

  Smoke haloed the person, mingling with the mist with every polluted breath they exhaled. Emilie used the opportunity while unobserved to look at the guest's notebook.

  The breeze ruffled the pages, revealing to Emilie the toil of weeks, months before. She could not read the words, but she could see the terseness of the sentences in imitation of the passages upstairs, and the lines struck angrily through words too inadequately expressed. There was unhappiness here, striving, emptiness, seeking.

  She could relate very much to these feelings.

  Emilie turned to regard the guest. Could they be the one she was searching for? The person let out a huff of smoke again and as it wreathed their head, Emilie lost sight of them for a moment.

  Between the smoke and the mists, the guest was being erased, bit by bit. Claimed, consumed. The smoke was not the only vague fogginess around them: so too was there a cloudiness from another land emanating from them, and a fog of memory, of inebriation, of constant tussles with oblivion.

  It would be too easy to disappear into this guest. She wanted to be seen and heard; they wanted to vanish.

  Much like the other two she had considered so far, this one could not hear the cry. The cry coming from the heavy stone around their neck drowned it out.

  She supposed that was for the best. The lament coming through the pendant was their burden to bear. The plaintive wail in the house was hers.

  Emilie stepped back inside to pursue it once more.