Day 704

We had our new dining room carpet arrive today, a lovely rich brown that worked perfectly with the beige wallpaper. We'd been planning this for months, measuring and re-measuring to get everything exactly right for the space.

Everything was going so well too until we peeled off the old carpet and saw a sliding wooden panel in the very corner of the room where a large potted plant had been before.We'd been told that there were uneven surfaces all over the house and that it was a fixer-upper but we had the money and the time to work with it.

This was the first room we were changing and it's the only room we got round to changing, we moved out pretty soon after we went down the tunnel we found beneath the wooden panel. My husband Chris thought it could lead to an underground storage space, maybe even an old prohibition era liqueur cellar. With the age of the house it seemed plausible enough that we just headed right on down, torches in hand and hoping for wine.

The ladder took us into a room filled with boxes we easily recognised as being ours, clearly labelled with "kitchen and dining room". We knew these boxes would have been left in the kitchen, I know I'd left  a couple in there and yet there they were under the house. The strangest part was that they hadn't been opened, just stacked to one side near a large opening, about the size of a door with cobblestone paved steps leading further down.

Chris went down in front of me with both of us trying to hold our breaths in case we weren't alone as we now suspected. The steps led to a metal walkway above a cavern that looked to be natural with the addition of metal support beams all across the top, or roof rather. We could see little lights below us (one recognisable as the standing lamp my mother gave us as a wedding gift), in fact once our eyes adjusted to the dimness we saw that the cavern had been sectioned off into several rooms.

It was basically a house right underneath ours and being furnished by whoever was dumb enough to buy it - this time it was us. I caught movement to the far right of the house, a large grey lump shifting and standing. It looked sort of like a dog mixed with a wild pig and dressed in layers upon layers of curtains. As its head rose it began to sniff the air, lolling its head around until it focused on our position.

Now I swear we headed up the same place we went down but somehow the ladder led into one of the kitchen cupboards and we had to squeeze our way through and back into the house, quickly blocking the door with a particularly heavy box just in case.

Despite the estate agent's pleas and protests we left within the month to a new place, a lot smaller than the first but on the eighth floor. At least we know that the person living under us now is human, though we've never seen them. All we know is that they like to move about late at night and they have difficulty breathing, they wheeze like a sauce bottle on its last droplets.