The Uninvited Guests

The Uninvited Guests

This morning Warren woke up from a particularly terrible night of sleep. He had spent the night waking up repeatedly to sounds he would swear he heard coming from his basement. Too tired and cold to bother himself with getting out of his warm bed, he had tried to shrug it off. “If the sounds were important enough to be urgent, they would be louder.” He mumbled into his pillow, “I’ll take a look in the morning.”

Rolling with a groan out of his bed far earlier than he had planned for his Saturday morning, Warren made his way to the basement, his head scanning the floor for the rodent he had decided must have found its way inside. Instead of anything furry, he noticed a small wooden door. No less than a foot high, across from the base of the stairs, this tiny door looked like it should have been six times as high and on the outside of a cottage in the woods. Though the door appeared happy to be as it was.

It was at this moment that Warren became aware of a noise. His brain told him that his ears were trying to say that there were poker chips clattering against each other on a felt table. Warren knew, however, that there was no felt table nor were there any poker chips in his basement, so he turned to see what type of mistake his ears had made.

As it turned out, there had been no mistake. Warren found, much to his surprise, a tiny card table strewn with clay poker chips and playing cards. But that was the least of Warrens concerns. What concerned him most was the group of uninvited guests sitting in miniscule folding chairs putting the table, cards and chips to use. Four short men, average “Joes” no doubt, with the exception of their height, were having a game of five card draw.

“Um, excuse me, but…” Warren was a bit more confused than he might have expected to be when he first descended his basement stairs, so any more intelligent response was a bit beyond his grasp.

All four men turned to look up at him. None of them showed the tiniest sign of guilt or culpability at being caught trespassing in a stranger’s basement for their card game. In fact, they looked up as if annoyed by the interruption. The one with his back to Warren twisted a suspicious scowl and lowered his cards face down toward the table, and the one on the right took a large puff at his cigar.

“Can we help you?” one of the men said.

Warren decided that he had not yet woken up, turned, and without another word returned to bed. It was when he couldn’t get back to sleep that Warren realized he must be awake already, and returned to the basement to try his hand at confronting the poker game one more time.

With much more courage this time, he glided down the stairs, ready to ask his uninvited guests to find a new venue for their card game. It was not that he minded hosting a card game in his basement, but something about the circumstances didn’t feel quite right to him.

His chance was lost, though, as he found the four men lugging the last of their poker game back through the small door. They closed the door as they chatted amongst themselves. “Last time we come here for our game, Sid.” “Yeah, too many interruptions.” With these words, the door closed, and Warren heard small banging sounds behind it. The pointy end of a nail appeared on the wall to one side of the door, followed by another on the opposite side, and then several more at varying heights.


by Steven Hall