Well, today was the day the mouse traps in our attic were scheduled to be inspected by The Man From the Council – or The Mouse Man, as he shall henceforth be known. Or maybe The Evil Mouse Killing Man, Enemy of Mice All Over the Land? Maybe that would be better?

From this you will gather than I am rooting for the mice here. Mice, I am ON YOUR SIDE! I’m having the ‘Team Mouse!’ t-shirts printed up as we speak. On Saturday morning, as I lay drifting in and out of sleep, I heard the little critters resume their scratching above my head. It was horrible. They were up there, happily eating my clothes, and not realising they were but moments from certain death! How could I lie there and do nothing, while all mousekind was at risk? How will I look Mickey in the eye next time I go to the Magic Kingdom, HOW?

Well, readers, I did nothing. But only because Terry was there at the time, and Terry is firmly on Team Man-From-the-Council. But I felt bad about those mice. And I still feel bad about them, even although….

*drumroll*

…THEY MAY NOT ACTUALLY BE MICE!

“Hmm,” said the man from the council, scratching his head after his inspection of our attic.  (At least, I’d imagine he was scratching his head. I don’t actually KNOW this for sure, on account of how I was still in my dressing gown when he arrived, and was listening to this conversation from the office, with my ear pressed against the door, and a hysterical Rubinman in my arms. Rubin hates the Mouse Man. I think it’s safe to say that he is also on Team Mouse.) “It’s strange,” said Mouse Man. “There are mouse droppings up there… but there are no mice in the traps. Which is unusual. We would normally expect to have a few of them by now. And the funny thing is…”

I pressed my ear even closer to the door. There was a FUNNY thing about the mice in the attic? Awesome!

“The funny thing is, whatever it is up there…”

WAIT! “Whatever it is up there“? We’re dealing with a “Whatever” now, rather than a mouse? GOD.

“…has eaten a hole in the top of one of the traps, but hasn’t taken the bait. We’d normally associate that with a much bigger animal.”

A MUCH BIGGER ANIMAL! Like a vampire, you mean? Or an International Man of Mystery, say?

“There’s definitely SOMETHING up there,” concluded Mouse Man cheerfully. “We just need to find out what it is!” And with that he headed off to murder mice somewhere else.

So. As I see it, there are a couple of options:

1. It’s a huge, mutant mouse, which is too big to get into the trap. Good for it. You go, Mutant Mouseman!

2. There are ordinary mice up there. But there is ALSO some kind of other, dastardly creature which eats mice for breakfast. Not so keen on this option, actually.

3.  Yeah, it’s NIGEL. And his months, nay, years, of living on the run have made him feral, so not only is he eating my clothes, he’s ALSO eating my mice. And when he finally tires of that – or eats all the mice in all the world – he will descend… and EAT OUR BRAINS.

Either that or we just have some particularly clever mice. Hmm.

I wish this could be a more interesting newsflash for you, folks, but the things that live in our attic? Yeah, they’re mice. Not vampires. Not Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door. Not even Shergar, or Lord Lucan, or some other famously missing person/animal, with a massive reward on their head.

Just mice.

This has been confirmed by a nice man from the council, who we finally called in last week, after another night spent listening to the scratching noises coming from directly above our head, and thinking about THAT scene in Paranormal Activity. (With the attic? And the going into the attic? And the DEMON?) . He came to investigate the situation today, and, of course, after waiting all morning for his arrival, TNMFTC arrived when I was in the shower, meaning that Terry had to deal with him alone, while I spent the duration of his visit trapped in the bathroom, which was a preferable option to running the gauntlet of the hall, dressed only in my ratty old dressing gown and a towel turban. (The hatch for the attic is directly outside the bathroom door. It wouldn’t have been pleasant for the poor man.)

I passed the time by re-organising the bathroom cabinet, and very nice it looks too. Rubin, meanwhile, passed the time by pretending that TNMFTC was a dastardly villain, sent to skin us alive and eat our brains for breakfast. I expect TNMFTC was absolutely terrified, which is a shame given that he now has to return every week, until our guests are gone, and by “gone”, I mean… well, you know.

(He put down traps. Apparently this is how our council deals with such things. I’m a bit upset about it, to be honest, because I had pictured the little mice being taken off to live out the rest of their lives in some sunny meadow somewhere. But I was trapped in the bathroom at the time, so the NMFTC got his way. Actually, maybe Rubin was onto something there?)

Anyway, one mystery is solved, and we now know that Nigel is NOT living in our attic. So where IS HE?

Remember our attic-dwelling “visitor” of last year? The one who made noises in the walls and went on a chewin’ spree among the bags of old clothes and other junk up there?

No, we didn’t either. We’d had the best of intentions about calling the council and asking them to come and investigate our “visitor”, but it happened right before we went on holiday, and then by the time we got back, and had Christmas, and then New Year, and the snow came, and blah,blah, blah, we’d forgotten all about the Madthing in the Attic. And there were no more noises to remind us, either.

Until this week.

On Tuesday night I went to bed as normal, only to be rudely awoken a few hours later by what sounded like a large animal trying to scratch its way through the ceiling and get me. “Uh-oh, Shaggy!” I thought, “It’s grown! It’s been up there all the time, feeding on my old clothes, and growing fat and wicked. OMG!”

I woke Terry, so he could lie awake and listen to the giant creature slithering along the ceiling too. “You know,” he said after a while. “I’m not so sure that IS a giant creature. I think it could just be snow falling off the roof.”

I wasn’t totally convinced by this. I was sure I’d heard the “snow” making scratching noises. And whispering, “Amber! Amber! I’m coming to get yoooooouuuu!” But then again, was I sure? It was late. I was sleepy. Maybe it WAS just snow sliding off the roof after all? I drifted off to sleep, to dream of… well, to dream of being trapped inside an airplane that was driving along the motorway in the snow, actually, but the point is, by the time morning came, I’d forgotten all about our mysterious visitor/snow.

Until last night.

Last night we got into bed and I was just drifting off to sleep when Terry spoke. “You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. I’m not so sure those noises last night WERE snow.” He paused. “In fact,” he said, “I don’t know WHAT the hell those noises were. Maybe a demon, though?”

Well, that was it for me. Because last weekend? Last weekend we watched Paranormal Activity. And as anyone who’s seen the movie will probably understand, the LAST THING you want after that is to start hearing strange noises in your house in the middle of the night. Especially when you were just about to get up and use the bathroom, but now you can’t, because your husband has just suggested that, hey, there may be a DEMON lurking in your home!

Sadly for me, I’d actually managed to fulfill my “drink two litres of water per day” resolution for once. I’d drunk most of this water before bed, though, in a stupid-ass “whoops, I forgot to drink my two litres of water again, I will just do it now!” move. I had to visit the bathroom more than once last night. And every time I did, I stood trembling behind the door for a few seconds, convinced that when I opened it, I would see something coming up the stairs. Or just hear it, which would possibly be worse, although I’d prefer not to put that theory to the test. Then I’d have to do that “run to the bedroom with your eyes closed, and pull the covers over your head instantly, because if you can’t see it, it can’t scare you!” thing. Ah, scary movies, how I love you!

Anyway. In the cold light of day we are once again convinced that our Tuesday night visitor was either:

a) a member of the animal kingdom, whether it be rat, mouse or squirrel. A bit annoying, but unlikely to steal our souls while we’re asleep.

b) snow falling off the roof. This doesn’t explain the earlier occurrences, obviously, because there was no snow then, but these noises were a little different from the first ones, so perhaps our animal visitor has left us, and now we’re just hearing snow.

Or it could be Nigel.

More news as we have it, folks…

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.