Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
It had just been a woman and some bloke running last night, nothing to be bothered about.
He’d crouched down and hidden in the smallest of the glasshouses, tucked under the bench where it was dark and full of spiders and beetles.
Insects didn’t bother him; his gran hated woodlice because she said anything that had its skeleton outside of its body shouldn’t exist, but he liked them; they were the gardener’s labourer.
What he didn’t like was having other people in his space.
They’d noticed the watering cans and the tomatoes.
Hopefully they were just running through and wouldn’t think about here again and he could carry on growing things.
He had wondered if they were looking for somewhere they could be private, and then he’d had to think about what he’d do if they started touching each other, you know, like that.
But they hadn’t and he didn’t know if he was disappointed or not. Maybe that would’ve made up for the scare he’d had the other night when someone else had been there and he’d legged it back home.
He’d crawled from underneath the table, happy to stand up again.
His phone told him that he needed to get home quick else his gran would be serving him up for dinner, if she was back from her bridge night and there was a good chance she wouldn’t be since it was at Jill’s and Jill was serving her usual measures of gin and tonic.
As it was, Gran had been at Jill’s and he did get home before her.
He'd spent the night worrying about whether he’d be found out, whether now was the time to harvest his tomatoes although he didn’t know what he was going to do with them, and stick to exploring other places, maybe join with another urban explorer so he wasn’t on his own so much.
There were risks to doing this on your own; what if he injured himself – there’d be no one to find him and there was always the chance that some homeless person could be living in a place and attack him.
People had been back to the house today; he could tell with the amount of footsteps there were.
There were new boards up as well, the place where he’d managed to get entry to the house was completely sealed now, so he wondered if it was the police who’d been today.
Maybe the man and woman last night had been police officers and were worried about people breaking in here.
He supposed it was a bit dangerous, if you didn’t know what you were doing.
The door to the outhouse where he kept his bike so no one would see it was slightly ajar; maybe the people who’d been here hadn’t shut it properly.
He walked through into the second chamber, leaving his bike safely out of the way.
It had been the gardener’s storage, once upon a time, and there had been loads of gardening equipment that he’d been able to use, and an old petrol mower that was now gone.
Odd. Maybe it hadn’t been the police after all. It could’ve been someone who’d come back for more stuff, like with that room being emptied. He kept talking to himself inside his head, noticing the differences, something he was good at, stabilising his bike against a wall.
It wasn’t until he got to the door that he realised he definitely wasn’t on his own and the door was now locked, leaving him with no way out.
And it was then he smelled the smoke.