It was July 2007. I was up North spending a few weeks with my family and writing. I came home one night, poured a drink and threw myself down onto the comfortable sofa in the snug. Flicked on the TV and found The 'Burbs was on. Tom Hanks 1989. Mock spooky comedy classic. I love this film. I was chuckling away at Tom Hanks looking down from his bedroom window, watching his neighbours, the Klopeks, out in the pouring rain with lanterns, hacking away at their garden with shovels, as if digging up a grave... ... the commercial break comes on and I shuffle through to the kitchen for a refill. Outside the rain is still hammering down. Something catches my eye. A flickering light, coming from near the bottom of next door's garden (Les' side). I squinted through my own reflection in the window but couldn't see a thing. I turned off the kitchen lights and could now clearly see the flickering glow of...a lantern, and what looked like a figure out there in the rain. Eh? What? I hurried! upstairs, cracked open the window and took a better look. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Almost an exact duplicate of the scene on the television a few minutes earlier... one man, dressed in a heavy coat slick and glistening with rain, standing near an electric lantern, weilding a shovel and digging up the earth. There was Les, the neighbour, digging something up out of the earth...he'd reached a point where he'd cleared away the top layer of soil and was now carefully scraping away the deeper ...
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