97: Delicious Dark

The sky looks like velvet strewn with tiny glittering diamonds. He knows that's clichéd but isn't that how things become a cliché he thinks? Because they are so accurate? He tries to think of other things the night sky looks like as he waits. A dark pond, rippling slightly in the evening wind, reflecting the sky. No, that's the same thing. Perhaps a deep hole in the ground littered with wiggling maggots. He smiles, but it's more like a grimace.

He's been here every night this week, and some last week, always standing in the same place. He waits at the line of trees around the edge of the park, and watches. From there he can see the whole park and the street and the school, but what he watches most is the row of houses. Four pairs of semis back directly onto the edge of the park. Some of them have gates that lead directly onto the park, and he wonders if the council knows.

House number 5 has a gappy gate, paint flaking from the planks of wood that remain and a rusty hinge. That's how he found out about the way onto the park in the first place. He was sat on the floor of the bandstand, watching between the pillars. Nobody could see him, he knew, from experimenting with bricks piled where he sat and checking out all round the park. He liked to watch with no-one seeing.

So the gate to number 5 squeaked open one night and out came her little dog. Horrible little yappy thing, pee'd all over the flowers and took a dump at the edge of the trees. He hated all the dog crap in the park and she didn't clean up after it, just hurried it back through the gate and into the house. She didn't latch it properly or it worked loose, because it squeaked and clattered for ages afterwards. In the end he just left.

He brought a little bottle of oil he lifted from the local DIY store and when she was out, he oiled the hinges. That dog yipped and boiled at him from inside the house, but nobody came to see what it wanted. That same night he watched from the bandstand and when she let the dog out, the gate moved noiselessly. That's when he got the idea. No noise coming out. No noise going in.

Once the dog had done it's night crap, the woman took about twenty minutes to go upstairs, another 30 before she turned out her light. It had been the same every night and tonight was following the same pattern.

He thought some more about what the sky looked like, took up the steak with ground up pills in, then slipped inside the gate and towards the house.