Things that go scrabble in the night

Sometimes there is a strange sound up on the roof.  Or is it in the roof?  It’s a scraping sound, almost like something falling down the chimney, but it’s high up.  Sometimes the scrabbling sound intensifies.  Often it sounds like it’s coming from the top of the wall.  The top of the living room walls are dusty unvisited places with the yellow concrete straw tiles sloping over them, hiding goodness knows what.  But often goodness knows what sounds like it’s alive.  We found a lot of rodent and bird corpses and don’t doubt that their relatives are still alive and well and living here too.  We just haven’t met them yet.

We are pretty sure that the curious sound that scratches and scrapes and occasionally tumbles down the roof is actually outside the house, but we don’t know that it is, and we don’t know what it is.  I could almost swear it’s the branches tapping on the roof, but there is no tree above that roof.

But much, much worse is the sound in the bedroom.  That too has a scraping sound, but it’s more intensive.  And the bedroom ceiling isn’t so far away; I can almost touch it.  And the bedroom has a false ceiling so there is definitely plenty of space for a colony of creepy things to be very well settled up there.  And the absolutely worst thing about our nocturnal visitors is that they come at around 5am.  We are woken by the sound, mesmerised and unable to relax till it stops.  I don’t know how we’d find out what’s up there, but I’m not sure I quite want to know either.

We need a cat!