A desease had happened on the fifth floor. Really bad things had happened there. And now the fifth floor was cursed; years and years later, it was still affecting the people living in the flat, even after they moved two flats down.
The flats were connected, and every one in the building knew each other. All the neighbours had family ties with each other. They had their conversations on the hallways, which were merely extensions to their living rooms, only on-looking the stairs. Parts of the flats.
The fifth floor flat was not in a living condition. It looked like a building site, and the family that wanted to move in had to do it up. They were not told about the curse so the unnameable events that happened, one after the other, caught them by surprise.
They tried to overcome it all but the suffering gradually made the family disintegrate. Moving to a different flat did not make much of a difference.
Even the rest of the street became more and more sombre. The building looked strangely older than the oldest buildings in the neighbourhood, at least from the outside. People tried to celebrate street-wide parties but those seemed cursed too.
Some of the neighbours moved out of the city. Those who remained wondered how it had all began, and eventually one of the eldest recalled the initial happenings. All had happened before any of the present tenants had moved in, even before the ancestors moved in, several generations earlier. The first occupants of the building. No one knew who they were; it was all made of the stuff of legend.
They tried to recall what the street used to look like, at the time of the first tenants. Not all of the buildings existed yet. In fact, the house with the fifth floor flat was the only one standing in the whole street. One sole proprietor rented the flats out and collected the rents money.
That had been several generations back. Now the terrible events affected especially one of the sons of the family in the fifth floor, to the point of illness. And the illness affected the whole family and, by extension, the rest of the neighbours.
The family tried to solve their problems but the problems were bigger than them. And they did not know the root of the problem, the initial curse.
When they moved out, no one wanted to live in that fifth floor. Another one of the sons had wanted to do the place up, build some furniture, clear the dust. He was not allowed.
They had hoped to rent the flat out to help pay for the new one, but it had to stand there empty to avoid any more disgraces. So the flat was empty, a building site forever after. Perhaps waiting for some one to tackle the curse, face the problem head on.
The dust gathered on the ancient clothes and on the planks the son had brought in order to build his bed.