>>5455744 >>5455890That chain lock is practically beckoning to you, but you think that concealing your presence is more important right now then getting yet another lock between you and whoever is on the other side of that door. To that end you refrain from looking through the peephole either, and withdraw to the living room as quickly as you can while remaining silent, hoping to get away before Folly starts squeaking about something or other.
You arrive in the living room without further incident. With some more space and wall between yourself and the front door, you place down your backpack and take a moment to place Folly back inside it. At the same time you take the opportunity to quickly remove your notebooks and laptop from it. There's no reason you have to carry all that around right now, and you're frankly lucky that one of either Madness or Folly hasn't pissed in your backpack already. You should save everything else while you have the chance.
With that dealt with you place your backpack down for a moment and creep towards the far window, running through what you're going to do in your head. You will pull back a corner of the curtain slowly, just enough to see through, as to avoid the notice of whoever is outside. Then, using the hedgerow as cover for your spying, you will do your best to catch some view of whoever is at the door, however nebulous it may be.
A deep breath allows a temporary calm to settle into your mind as you put your plan into action. The bottom right corner of the curtain, slowly peeled back. Your head carefully moving into the gap without moving the curtain up any further, and a view of the front door found through the overgrown leaves of the hedgerow. While the view is, frankly, shit, you imagine that it would be nearly impossible to catch sight of you from the front door even if it was a bit less dark. You suppose you can thank the old man for that, although you doubt such an arrangement was intentional.
Through the leaves you can barely make out a shadowy figure at the front door. Their features are hard to make out through the darkness, but you can gleam a couple of things. Their figure is rather short and thin. You would hazard a guess that it's a woman, although it's not impossible to be a man- you'll assume a woman for now. Some part of her outfit trails on the ground behind her. A dress or a robe, perhaps. When she raises her hand- <span class="mu-s">KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK</span>, you don't see a weapon in it although what you think are long, float sleeves droop down from her arm. The lack of a weapon doesn't mean much though- you can only see her from one side from where you are.
Now that you think of the knocking, it just occurred to you that every time she's knocked, it has sounded... very similar. Almost as if it's a recording being played back. That's clearly not the case, however- you just watched her knock at the front door. You still get an odd feeling from it, though.
