The Drew Oliver story first chapter

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The Drew Oliver story
Chapter one
Alex was startled by a loud noise while out in the garden
It was the first day of the long summer holiday and he was already restless.
The noise seemed to come from the large shed in next doors garden. He headed over to the fence curiously.
There were new people next door he had been told. Alex went to a boarding school two hours journey from his home so never really made friends in the village he lived in. He found it maddening particularly as he was an only child.
He would stay at friend’s houses over the summer and they would come to him but it still left a good deal of time when he was stuck by himself.
Whilst he was peering through a convenient knothole (the fence was 7 feet tall and impossible to see over), a face raised itself to look directly at him. Alex very nearly screamed. It was a gorilla. A full sized gorilla separated from him only by a flimsy wooden panelled fence. His brain screamed run at him but his feet seemed incapable of responding.
Just then the shed door banged open and a smallish slight  boy came out. He carried in his hand a tablet of paper and he walked towards the gorilla completely calmly. Alex was transfixed. The gorilla turned its head to look at the boy
Alex noticed the boy was rubbing at something on the paper. The gorilla suddenly seemed to be missing an ear, then an arm then he was gone. The boy was now standing where the gorilla was and Alex moved involuntarily.
The boy shrieked and flung down paper and pencil and stood there gasping with shock.
Hello said Alex awkwardly
Have you just moved in?
The boy didn’t answer just stared at him
What happened to the gorilla? asked Alex after a few minutes silence
The boy backed off a few steps and then ran away towards the house.
Alex stared thoughtfully after him. he started to wonder  if he had really seen a gorilla or if it was a trick of the light.
Then he looked around the garden thoughtfully. It was only 10 in the morning. The sun was shining brightly down and there were no shadows here as both gardens faced south. Could he have imagined it he wondered?
He looked through the knothole again. The garden was empty except for the sketchpad that the boy had thrown down.
A slight breeze was ruffling the pages.
Alex glanced around him again and then moved toward their own shed. He lifted out the stepladders and positioned them by the fence. Then he took a deep breath and headed up the ladder and hopped lightly over the fence.
Standing next door made him feel very vulnerable and he looked anxiously around for the gorilla or the boy.
The garden was completely quiet, and. like his own garden narrow and long. You couldn’t see the houses from here at all.
Alex stooped and picked up the paper. He could see close up that it was a sketching pad.
He grabbed it and shoved it into his belt and turned to head back over the fence.
Only then did he realise that with the steps on the other side he was going to struggle to get back
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He could feel his heart thudding in his chest as he considered what to do.
Further up the garden he heard the sound of the door shutting and then voices.In panic he bolted down the garden to the end of the property.
The fence continued all the way round but there was more cover here and he crouched under a weeping willow tree hoping the voices wouldn’t come any closer. They didn’t and after 10 minutes or so he began to feel a little calmer.
The garden was quiet again. But he still had to find a way out. Looking behind him he noticed that the fence here had been erected back to front meaning there were ledges at sections in the fence. To his relief he was able to use them to shin up and over though it was an effort and caused him to lose quite a bit of skin from hands and knees and across his stomach and he leant over and then dropped over the other side. He was now in the field behind the row of houses.
Too late he remembered there was a bull and cows in this field.