Every night, late at night Dougie Hampton walks the streets. He used to do it so he could take the dog out for a last pee before bed but then the dog died and he carried on, just to get out, clear his head, ‘review the events of the day’ as he used to put it. Even when the weather was bad, when it was coming down with that freezing, almost thick rain that the wind would push in under your collar, he would step outside and just walk.
There was one street in particular that his feet seemed drawn to so that he marched down it almost every night. And there was one house on that street where the living room curtains were kept open, even as late as it was, so Dougie just couldn’t resist looking in as he passed. The first time he did, all he could see across the garden, from the pavement outside, was the flickering light of the television and an empty sofa in the otherwise dark room. Nothing remarkable but somehow he couldn’t not turn his head and peer in as his feet carried him past. The second time, whether the next night or later he couldn’t say, there seemed to be a figure on the sofa, watching the tv. But what with the wind and the rain and the television flashing from one scene to the next. He couldn’t see. It was still windy and raining the next time he passed, and he wondered when the weather would break and when was the last time he’d seen the moon or the stars. He thought of not turning his head, of keeping his gaze straight ahead but in the end he couldn’t resist. There was the flickering tv, the sofa, the figure slumped on it but now behind the sofa, partly hidden in the shadows he thought he could discern someone else. For a second he felt he should stop but that was immediately followed by the thought that the couple would think he was some kind of Peeping Tom, so he kept on walking.
And the rain and the wind kept on too, so that he was constantly wiping his eyes and shrugged his coat even more tightly around him. The curtains were still open when next he walked by and the light from the television still erratically illuminated the room, casting odd shadows across the walls. But the person on the sofa seemed to have slumped down even further, so Dougie could only just see the top of their head. And the person behind it was now looming over and had something, something he couldn’t quite make out, in their hand.
Dougie’s feet pulled him on but with a conscious effort, he stopped and leaned forward over the low garden wall and waved his hands to try and catch the person’s attention. “Hey!” he cried out, “Stop! Stop that!!” He waved his arms some more but it seemed he couldn’t catch either figure’s attention. They seemed transfixed in the flickering light of the tv, which now spread outside the window and across the garden, so that it was all around him. Dougie blinked the rain from his eyes and looked at the man who had appeared next to him. “In there,” Dougie told him, pointing to the house, “Something’s going on in there!”
Steven French is semi-retired and lives in West Yorkshire, U.K. He has stories published at eastoftheweb, Bewildering Stories, 365Tomorrows, Idle Ink, Land Beyond the World (soon to be defunct, sadly), Liquid Imagination, Literally Stories and others due to appear elsewhere.