This marks the second time we have been awakened from early morning sleep by the definite sound of something amiss within the house. The first time occurred a year previous to this one. A year separates the events, yet they are clones. Apart from the sound.

On the first occasion the sound was remarkably loud, a true shattering sound. On the second, the sound was that of something shuddering, slipping, scraping against a wall. On each occasion the cause was the same.

Over the past fifty years we have amassed a collection of paintings. We share a passion for paintings, and always have, indulging ourselves whenever we could manage it, coming across a work of art that truly appealed to us, until now we have mostly 19th Century North American and European art, not immensely valuable, but of great value to us aesthetically.

They hang, of course, on our walls. Multiple paintings on each wall. Including paintings hung within the stairwell leading to the basement of our house. And for some strange reason, it has been the paintings hung there, on the wall of the stairwell going down the stairs from the first floor below, where these events have taken place.

We had no idea, in the first moments after being startled awake by the sounds what had caused them. And discovered on a subsequent search of the house what had occurred.

On the first occasion it was a glass-fronted etching, a large one, and the glass had shattered causing the sharp commotion of breakage. On the second, a few mornings ago, it was an old oil painting on canvass that had slid off the wall, causing far less sound, but leaving us no less puzzled.