The Other

I do not know who, or what, lives upstairs right above us. In the first two of nearly three years that we've moved in our house, we've had to deal with daily sounds of drilling, hammering, screeching and all sorts of other noises that suggest house renovation or repair; causing us not a few distress. Since we worked at night and slept during the day during those times, we had to alternate between the two rooms in the house each day, choosing the one farther from the noise.

One time, my brother reached the end of his tether, complained to the building admin and asked them to look into it. They came back with the news that the culprit was from a unit on the 18th floor doing renovations which was weird because we live on the 10th floor. Unless the building owner was superstitious and thought the numbers 11 to 17 unlucky, thus deciding that 18 should be the floor next to 10, we're positive that the noise was coming from the 11th! But we made no further fuss about it since admin personnel assured that the perpetrator was already advised (warned) to keep the noise under control, which he/she/it actually did. So we enjoyed relative peace for a few months.

This year, the tormentor suffered a relapse and decided to go back to its first love. Not only that, it got bored with fixing the house and took on a new hobby: rearranging furniture, which shouldn't be so bad except that it's always done midnight onwards (how did it know that we now sleep at night?) at intermittent intervals. The poltergeist, which I've started to believe is what it is, would start pushing a chair, table or cabinet and wake us from sleep, or cause us insomnia for the rest of the night if we're just getting ready for bed. (Yes, they take place right above our bedroom!) For variety, there would also be occasional sudden loud thuds; like the pratfall of a heavy ass, or that of a watermelon dropped on the floor, each time causing our ceiling to threaten to fall on us. My dad once joked that we should be careful because our ceiling already has these cracks on it and they might just rain all over us one day. With what the one upstairs continues to do, I won't be surprised if my father's joke turned to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I am again tempted to approach the admin to warn this poltergeist to stop its tricks that are far from funny. I'm just a little terrified of what this evil entity might do after the complaint. I don't want to see a dead cat on our doorstep or a warning letter written in blood ink on my mailbox after that, you know. So I'm thinking of buying a little more time, hoping this ghost will exorcise itself. The question is till when?