This weekend, something went bump in the night. Literally, I mean.
It was Sunday night/Monday morning. We’d been in bed for maybe half an hour – long enough to have completed the ritual of Rubin padding up to the bedroom door and being sent back to his own bed approximately eleventy-one times, anyway – when suddenly there was a loud BANG from downstairs.
The noise had definitely come from inside the house: there was no possibility of it having been something out in the street, say, and it was loud enough to send Rubin into a frenzy of barking, and make Terry and I sit bolt upright and stare at each other, each of us wondering who had left the front door open THIS time, and whether or not we were YET AGAIN in danger of being murdered in our beds.
Well, once again, Terry drew the short straw (because yeah, right, like I’d venture downstairs in the middle of the night to investigate a mysterious noise. I may like to THINK I’m Nancy Drew, but actually, I’m more like Scooby Doo in these situations, if I’m completely honest…) threw on his dressing gown and headed downstairs, and ONCE AGAIN I lay in bed, shivering slightly and imagining all kinds of horrible endings to this particular story.
Terry, meanwhile, got to the bottom of the stairs, stepped into the living room, and, as if on cue…
THE TV SUDDENLY SWITCHED ITSELF ON. YES, JUST LIKE IN THE RING!
I swear I’m not making this up.
Of course, Terry didn’t actually TELL me this had happened until the next morning. “I thought it might freak you out,” he said casually, as if it was totally no biggie, and TVs are just ALWAYS switching themselves on in the middle of the night, following a mysterious banging sound. And he was right about that, too: if I’d known that the mysterious BANG had been immediately followed by a mysterious switching-on-of-the-TV, I would instantly have deduced that, why, we were obviously in the middle of a horror movie! And I would have proceeded straight the basement, just like a good horror movie heroine who gets killed. OK, I wouldn’t have: and not just because we don’t got no basement. It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have gotten much sleep, though, and the reason I know that is because I didn’t get much sleep the NEXT night, on account of how I was lying awake the whole time, listening for mysterious banging noises.
Oh, and about that: Terry didn’t find anything at all to explain the bang during his nighttime tour of the house. He obviously wasn’t looking very closely, though, because when I went down to make coffee the next morning, I walked into the kitchen, and saw the two canvas prints which are currently propped up against one of the walls, both lying face down on the worktop, as if they had offended some ghostly hand and been thrown down there. (Which I bet they did, seriously.) This, I can only assume, had been what we’d heard the night before.
We have no explanation for this occurrence, or the switching on of the TV, other than that there is totally a ghostly presence in our house now, and it REALLY dislikes those prints. And possibly wanted to catch up on its soap operas, or something.
My money is on it being the ghost of our old friend NIGEL. And folks? He’s ANGRY.
(Image has nothing to do with post. Is cute, though, no?)
Tagged International Man of Mystery
Remember Nigel, the International Man of Mystery next door?
No, of course you don’t: it’s now been almost six years (SIX! YEARS!) since Nigel was last sighted, and almost two since I last wrote speculatively about the possibility of him being either a spy or a serial killer, so I doubt I have any readers left from Those Days. (“This was all fields! And we had to walk uphill in the snow, both ways! And we could go to bed and leave our door open… oh, we still do that, don’t we?”) It’s OK, though, because here is the series of deeply exciting and not-at-all-hysterical posts I wrote on the subject, you’re welcome:
An Introduction to Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door
Nigel is Sighted
Nigel Update
Nigel, the International Man of Mystery in my Attic
Nigel Alert!
Here Come the Men in Black
It’s OK, I’ll wait here while you read them.
You’re done? You’re sure? I will ask questions, you know. OK, well, anyway…
Today, people, I bring you A NIGEL UPDATE. And, actually, I’ve just realised that it’s almost exactly the same as the LAST Nigel update I brought you, so now I feel kind of stupid. Here is a completely unrelated photo I took of the Magic Garden Centre yesterday to distract you from the fact that I’m about to tell you the same thing twice. I said, I’m about to tell you the same thing twice:
I thought it looked a bit like some weird, alien culture attacking earth, no?
What was I talking about? Oh yeah: Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door.
So, anyway, this morning there was a knock on the door (which was closed AND locked at the time, go us!), and for once it wasn’t the police. (Yeah, still not over that, obviously…) In fact, it was a Mysterious Stranger in a suit, with a long black overcoat and a leather folio thing full of official looking papers. I mean, I’m assuming they were official looking papers, here: I witnessed this man from behind the closed blinds in the bedroom window, so I didn’t actually get a close look at the papers. They could’ve been photos of shoes, for all I know. That’s what I would carry around in a posh folio thing, anyway. Let’s pretend they were official papers, though. And that the man was from MI5. Trust me, it will make this post much more interesting.
(Let’s also pretend I was wearing this dress at the time:
Dress of My Dreams
It won’t make the story any more interesting, unfortunately, but it WILL give me an excuse to post a photo of that dress, and God knows, I’ve been looking for one.)
Terry answered the door.
“The eagle flies at midnight!” said the man. OK, he didn’t. But he did start asking Terry a whole lot of questions about Nigel. Where is he? When was he last seen? Where does he work? Who is he REALLY? That kind of thing. All of the questions we ask ourselves about Nigel, really.
“Look,” said Terry, “If I knew all of this, I’d be a happy man, because then my wife would stop bugging me about this.” Yeah, no, he didn’t. Terry did, however, ask the man who HE was, and what he needed to know all of this for, at which point the mysterious stranger deftly changed the subject, and, without actually answering Terry, started repeating his “Where is he, have you seen him?” questions. Probably to see if he could catch Terry out, I would imagine. They do that.
(WHO ARE THEY?)
After that, the man went outside and had a good look around the property, looking exactly like a spy. Like, EXACTLY. And afterwards, Terry came upstairs and said to me, “Did you get a photo of him?” And I said, “GOOD GOD, MAN, WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR? It’s not like I’m going to Instagram the Mysterious Stranger at the door, am I? They’d probably cut off my hands for that, or something!”
(NO, SERIOUSLY, WHO ARE THEY?)
And then Terry looked at me, like, “Well, you Instagram everything else, so…”
Conclusion: er, there isn’t one, really. It’ll be six years this summer since we last saw him. The mystery continues…
Tagged International Man of Mystery
Folks, there has been a development in the mysterious case of Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door.
It’s not much of a development, to be honest. In fact, if you just clicked through from Twitter, or wherever, hoping for some kind of juicy development, you may just feel you’ve had a wasted trip, because this development actually happened last week, and was so insignificant that I totally forgot to mention it. In the interests of keeping an accurate account of the comings and goings next door (or, er, the goings and staying gones, as the case may be), and also in case one day the police need to use this blog as evidence, let the record show that, last week, Nigel had visitors. Two of them.
I say Nigel had visitors. Obviously he didn’t, because he isn’t there. So Terry and I took it upon ourselves to speak to these visitors. You know, as nosey good neighbours do.
The two men arrived by car, and spent a few minutes sitting outside, observing the house. Terry happened to be passing the window at the time, and this activity instantly triggered his “Nigel” sensor, so he called me over, and together we watched the men get out of their vehicle and approach Nigel’s door. Both men were wearing dark suits, and looked a bit like the Men in Black, only without the talking dog, which was a bit of a shame, because that would’ve made for an AWESOME blog post, no?
Anyway, no sooner had they knocked on the door than Terry was out of the house and headed towards them. (I’d have gone with him, but I was just back from the gym and out of the shower, so I was wearing my dressing gown and a towel turban at the time…) Sadly, however, Terry’s Nancy Drew skills are less finely honed than mine, possibly because he has never been a 12 year old girl, so he didn’t manage to get much more information out of the visitors other than that the usual, “When did you last see him? Does he ever come back to the house? What, NEVER?” Terry was left with the strong impression that they were debt-collectors, or similar. I’m still convinced they were, you know, galaxy defenders, but I do have a pretty active imagination, so maybe not.
What this proves, however, other than that Terry and I would be useless detectives, is that wherever Nigel is right now, and whatever he’s doing there, not everyone in his life knows about it. He appears to have left some loose ends behind him, shall we say, and obviously if this was a novel, this would be the part where Terry and I (and possibly Rubin, because never underestimate the importance of a dog when it comes to solving mysteries) tie up those loose ends into a nice, neat little bow. It’s just a blog, though, so I’m going to have to leave you to try and tie them up yourselves. Enjoy!
P.S. I had to switch comment moderation back on this week, but I totally forgot to tell the site to notify me when comments came in, which means they’ve all been sitting in the moderation queue for a couple of days. If you posted a comment in that time, sorry, I wasn’t ignoring you – it should have been approved now!
Tagged International Man of Mystery
Well, after three years of barely even thinking about Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door, let alone writing about him, I now find myself writing about him TWICE in the space of just a few days. Just call me Magic Amber, Super Sleuth Extraordinaire. Or, perhaps more accurately: Girl Who Answers the Door in Her Dressing Gown With Jogging Pants and a Hoodie Underneath Because She is SO FREAKING COLD All the Time.
Or even “Girl Who Capitalises Too Much”. You decide.
Anyway, there was no super-sleuthing involved in this morning’s Nigel incident, but I DID open the door in my dressing gown (look, it’s REALLY cold here. Also, there is something wrong with our heating, apparently. It’s probably that a dead body has been stuffed inside the pipes or something.) to find a man from Scottish Gas standing outside, holding a clip-board and squinting at me suspiciously.
“Hello!” I said, trying to look like, why, I ALWAYS dress like a homeless person! (And actually, in winter I almost always do.) Whereupon he asked me if there was actually anyone living in the house next door.
“Not living, no,” I said, glad to have yet another excuse to talk about this. “But possibly lying dead on the floor, or inside the walls?” Then I embarked on a breathless tale of how Nigel hasn’t been seen for years – YEARS – and how this one time he turned up and then left in a hurry, and I think he is maybe with MI5, but if he isn’t, then maybe a dastardly villain of some sort, or dead?
(Of course, if he IS with MI5, they will probably come round now and “silence” me for blowing his cover on the Internet. If this is the last ever post here, you’ll know why. It’ll also mean he was a bit of a rubbish spy, though, to be honest, I mean, way to raise suspicion, Nigel! If that’s even your name.)
The man from Scottish Gas was most interested in all of this. It’s the way I tell ‘em, I guess. When I’d finished he raised his eyes to the heavens and thanked the Lord said “Really? REALLY?” but in a tone of voice that suggested, “Well, we’ll be doing something about that then, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” Then he made a note on his clipboard, which I assume said something about Nigel, but which may well have said, “Woman next door is mad” or “Homeless people have broken into house next door and are squatting there making up outrageous stories”.
He did spend some time after that walking around Nigel’s property and making further notes, so perhaps something has now been set in motion, which will lead inevitably to an exciting denouement involving everyone in the street standing out there in their dressing gowns while police surround the house and hostage negotiators try to talk Nigel down, using one of those loud-speaker things. And then Terry and I are rewarded handsomely for our role in the whole thing, which has been… er, nothing. (Although, to be fair, Terry does sometimes mow Nigel’s front lawn.) I hope all of this doesn’t happen while we’re on holiday next week. I also hope it doesn’t lead to a less exciting denouement, in which there is some prosaic explanation for the whole mystery, and Nigel’s house is sold to a noisy family of fifteen with ten TVs and five sound systems, which they proceed to blast music from all the live-long day, while throwing endless house parties and whistling.
I bet it’s the second one.
Tagged International Man of Mystery
It’s been a long, long time since I last wrote about Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door, so for the benefit of any new readers, a little bit of background…
Nigel is – or was – our neighbour. Our houses are semi-detached, so we share – or shared – a wall with him. Nigel bought his house about six months after we bought ours, and within about an hour of moving in, he was out there, mowing and weeding and pruning the already immaculate garden. Seriously, he couldn’t even have had time to unpack. “Wow,” we thought, “Dude’s going to totally put us to shame with all this obsessive gardening!”
But we were wrong about that. Because, just a few short months later, Nigel left. And never returned.
OK, that’s not totally true. Nigel DID return to the house next door, but only for minutes at a time, and almost always under cover of darkness. According to this very blog (Which will probably one day become important evidence about… something), the last known sighting of the International Man of Mystery was on February 23rd, 2007. ALMOST THREE YEARS AGO! On that night, he entered the house (“To leave food for the prisoners!” I speculated), banged about a bit (“Probably bricking up bodies in the wall!”) and then left, just a few minutes later. That was the first we’d seen of him in well over a year, and we haven’t seen him since. It works out pretty well for us, to be honest, because other than the fact that his garden now resembles a small jungle, at least we don’t have any neighbours. Well, other than the dead bodies I am periodically convinced he has hidden in there.
The house is still fully furnished (which means that someone is still paying council tax on it). It has not been repossessed, so either the mortgage is being paid, or Nigel owns it outright – which, of course, begs the question: why buy a house you have no intention of living in, renting out, or even maintaining properly? If it was bought as an investment, why go to the trouble of furnishing it, spending a few weeks obsessively tending the garden, and then not bother to even visit it for years, during which the property will surely be losing value due to lack of maintenance? Mail is still delivered for Nigel, although after we stopped accepting parcels addressed to him (circa 2006), it has tailed off significantly. No one ever visits the house for maintenance purposes – or not that we’ve seen, anyway. It’s not like we actually have lives, though, so I’m pretty sure we’d have noticed if someone had been in. It is a mystery.
Current theories:
1. Nigel works for MI5, and the house next door is a “safe house”. We will only find out about this when it is one day blown sky-high, probably with us inside.
2. Nigel is a an arch-villain, involved in some nefarious goings-on, which we will only find out about one day when the house floods and someone is forced to enter it, only to find DEAD BODIES BRICKED UP INSIDE THE WALLS. And then Terry and I will be on the news, as those dumb-ass neighbours who say, “No, we had no idea he was a serial killer! He always seemed like such a nice, quiet man!”
3. That’s pretty much all I got, to be honest. Your suggestions are welcomed, though…
Anyway, because we haven’t seen or heard from Nigel in such a long time, Terry and I had more or less forgotten about him.
UNTIL LAST WEEK.
Last week I was working in the office, and Terry was downstairs watching TV, or something, when I suddenly became aware of this… noise. I thought it was Rubin’s paws on the wood floors, at first. In fact, I’d keep looking round, expecting to see him there, and then realising that Rubin wasn’t even in the room with me: he was downstairs begging for food from Terry, and probably waiting for the right moment to pee on the washing machine.
Then I realised that the sounds were coming from….
* drum roll *
INSIDE THE WALLS.
Yes.
As creepy as this was, I… more or less forgot about it. I was listening to music through my headphones at the time, and I pretty much managed to convince myself that what I was hearing was either something in the background of the track I was listening to, or was maybe just the radiator cooling down, or heating up or something.
Yeah, I’d be a rubbish detective. This is probably why Scooby Doo never called me back that time.
Anyway. A few nights later, it happened again. This time both Terry and I heard it. We’d just gone to bed, when we started to hear a scratching/shuffling noise IN THE ROOM WITH US.
Well, this time I naturally freaked the hell out.
Terry didn’t. He got up, had a look round, and determined that the noise was coming from the attic, or inside the walls of the house.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I totally meant to tell you: someone is living in our attic! I heard them a few nights ago!”
The noises continued for a few minutes, and have been heard several times since, although always in the dead of night.
TERRY’S THEORIES:
1. Bats in the belfry, dude!
2. Rats. In the attic.
3. Or possibly squirrels. I really hope it’s squirrels, because, you know, they’re cuter than bats/rats.
(No offence to any bats or rats reading this, by the way.)
MY THEORIES:
1. A vampire
2. NIGEL, International Man of Mystery Next Door
Well, Terry made the trip into the attic last weekend, in a bid to try to find out what, exactly, we were dealing with. His verdict? “Something that chews things, particularly bags of clothes.” Uh-huh. This would SEEM to rule out the possibility of our unwelcome guest being Nigel, IMOMND himself (although you never really know, do you?), but given that we can’t find any access points on OUR property, it does make us wonder if the general state of neglect of the house next door means that it’s now teaming with vermin, dead bodies and the like, which have managed to find their way into OUR property via the attic space.
Either way, we’re calling the council to ask them to come and take a look. If that fails, I’m calling the Famous Five.
Tagged International Man of Mystery, the thing that lives in the attic
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you the news that after more than a year of neglect, the lawn of Nigel: International Man of Mystery Next Door was cut this afternoon. Front and back, people. The lawn was not, sadly, cut by the IMOM himself – that would have been more excitement than I could take on a Monday afternoon (and would also have broken Nigel’s “not seen since February” record, which would have been a shame, really). No, the lawn was mown by a workman who had obviously been employed for that very lawn-cuttin’ reason. The question now is:
WHY?
I mean, it’s not like Nigel has ever bothered about the state of the lawn before. Other than that two-month period just after he moved in, when he would tend the garden obsessively, obviously. Why, last year the lawn didn’t get mown at all, and we had to rely on the neighbourhood kids trampling the grass down every day to keep it in check, and reassure us that there weren’t people living in it or anything. So why now? Could it be that Nigel is planning a return to the neighbourhood? Is he thinking of selling the house? Have the police finally caught up with him, and now he’s languishing in jail, and the house is being sold off to pay his debts?
More importantly: if someone is, indeed, coming to live in the house, HOW WILL I COPE? I am, as you all know, notoriously intolerant of noise and, well, other people. And because Nigel has been MIA for around three years now, I’ve become used to not having neighbours. I don’t want neighbours. They will annoy me. They’ll be all trampling up and down their stairs, playing loud music, having their TV on all the time, and just generally BEING THERE. I hate that.
I mean, it could just be that he sent someone round to cut the grass because GOD, that grass needed cut. Please let it be that.
In other news: I am once again up to my eyeballs in Huge Projects O’Doom, and barely even have time to breathe at the moment, let alone update my blog. Expect lots of updates this week, then: you know how I love to procrastinate…
Tagged International Man of Mystery
OK, I have to come clean here: the sighting of Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door referenced in this entry actually happened AN ENTIRE WEEK AGO. A whole week ago, and I didn’t even tell you. I hold my head in shame, people, I really do. Anyway, because I know you all care deeply about the issue, and also because Terry and I have been watching a lot of old episodes of Spooks recently, which has freaked me out afresh, here it is…
Last week, after almost a year – A YEAR – without being seen, Nigel TIMOMND appeared briefly at the house, and when I say “briefly” I mean “he walked in, got his mail, slammed around inside the house for five minutes (probably searching for bugs) and then disappeared again”. The day before, however, we’d been visited by yet another “heavy” in a suit, who asked a lot of questions about the whereabouts of our Man of Mystery and then muttered something about Nigel falling behind on his car finance. Not 24 hours later, the IMOM paid his first visit in a year. I suspect the two events are not unconnected, but then I also suspect Nigel is totally working for M15 or something, and now that I’ve written that I’ll probably be picked up by the Spooks, tortured and then killed. For real.
If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know what happened. Well, you probably won’t actually, because They’ll track you down to and interrogate you about What You Know. Yeah, I should stop watching Spooks…
Tagged International Man of Mystery
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