The rain had been pounding on the windows now for nearly two hours, relentless in its bid to shatter the glass and enter the house. Mark Sullivan sat listening to the attempted invasion of his home, every draw on his cigarette spurning an intense orange glow that cut through the darkness. The electricity had gone off an hour earlier, but he didn’t really care. The black of night that had leaked in from outside was only too welcome after the day he had. He liked the peace and quiet that it brought, and the opportunity to sit down and think, instead of having the way too tempting option of turning on the TV. Stubbing out his cigarette Sullivan stood up, made his way over to the living room window and tugged back the curtain. Finally, the rain seemed to be ceasing, slowing down gradually as if it were fatigued by its own constant onslaught of the last two hours. The world on the other side of the glass was pale. It was as if the dark had spread itself more thinly to fill the homes which had no power. From where Sullivan was standing he could see no sign of light from any of the other houses in his neighbourhood, apart from the dim flickering glow caused by the occasional candle.

He was just about to pull the curtain back into place when moving shadows caught his eye. Was someone at the end of his driveway? He squinted harder, trying to make out what he was looking at through the misty drizzle but it was hard to gain any real definition. Despite his own car acting as a visual obstruction Sullivan was pretty sure he could see someone hanging around on the road outside his house.

Any normal person would simply accept this as neighbours walking their dogs, or kids playing out in the street but not Mark Sullivan. In his job of working for a national newspaper he had seen it all; burglaries, car theft, drug dealers, rapes, beatings and even murders. This gave him a naturally suspicious mind and plus he was always looking for that next story. As if that wasn’t enough only a few months ago a group of youths had attempted to steal his beloved Porsche 911 from the very same driveway. Sullivan smiled to himself as he remembered the looks on their faces at the end of his shotgun barrel. No one could really blame him for his paranoid curiosity.