Don't Answer The Knocking

Chapter 1 The sign at the edge of town said PELLAM HOLLOW, POP. 212. Someone had scratched through the last 2 and written a 1 above it, and Nora Whitlock decided not to wonder why. "Is that it?" Junie asked from the back seat. The house stood where the pavement gave up and became gravel: a tall, narrow farmhouse the color of old teeth, with a porch that sagged like a tired mouth. Every window was dark except one on the second floor, where a lamp glowed behind a yellowed curtain. "Nobody's lived there since Grandma," Nora said. "That's just the sunset." It wasn't. The sun was setting behind them. But Nora was thirty-four years old, a hospice nurse who had held eleven years of dying hands, and she had a professional talent for telling herself the easy thing. The lawyer's letter was folded in her coat pocket. Margaret Whitlock leaves the property at 1 Pellam Hollow Road to her granddaughter, on the condition that she occupy it for three consecutive nights before any sale. Three nights. Nora had read it twice in the parking lot of the Dollar General, and both times she had thought of the same number: the money. The divorce had taken the savings, and Daniel had taken the good car. A house in Maine, even a bad one, was a door out of the hole. The front door was oak, black with age, and driven through at eye level with three iron nails in a neat triangle. A line of gray salt ran along the threshold, unbroken, gritty with years. Nora's key turned easily, as if the lock had been oiled that morning. Inside smelled of cedar, lavender, and cold. Junie stopped in the hall and looked up the staircase. "It's quiet," she said. "Old houses are quiet." "No," Junie said. "It's listening quiet." Nora laughed, a little too loudly, and carried the bags upstairs. She found the rules while looking for a can opener. The pantry door was the kind that stuck, and when she dragged it wide the inside face was covered in her grandmother's handwriting, in black marker, the letters pressed so hard they had scored the wood. THE RULES 1. The knocking starts at 3:07. It always starts at 3:07. 2. Never answer the knocking. Not once. Not for anyone. 3. It will sound like someone you love. It is not. 4. Keep the salt line unbroken. 5. Never say your name at the door. There was a number six. Someone had gouged it out with a knife until the wood was pale and splintered. Nora read the list three times. Mags had been sharp as a tack until the day she died. She had done the crossword in pen. She had not been the kind of woman who wrote on pantry doors. "Mom?" Junie stood behind her with her sketchbook. "What's the knocking?" "Grandma's joke," Nora said, and shut the door. They ate grilled cheese standing at the counter. Nora checked the windows and found salt along every sill, fresh enough to crunch. She told herself Walt Dunmore, the neighbor who had phoned about the funeral, must have done it out of loyalty to an old friend. She told herself a lot of things. At nine she put Junie to bed in the front bedroom, in the high iron bed that smelled of her grandmother's powder, and then climbed in beside her, because the thought of sleeping alone at the end of that hallway made her skin tighten. The lamp in the window, she realized as she reached to turn it off, wasn't plugged in. She stood there a long time, holding the dead cord in her hand. Then she lay down and watched the red numbers of the clock radio, and some time after midnight she must have slept. She woke at 3:07. She knew because the clock said so, and because three slow knocks rolled up through the floorboards. Not loud. Polite. The knocks of someone who had all the time in the world. Wind, Nora thought. A branch. Three knocks again. Evenly spaced. Unhurried. Beside her Junie breathed in the slow, wet rhythm of deep sleep. Nora held her own breath and listened to the house listen back. Then, from the bottom of the stairs, thin and cracked with crying, a small voice said, "Mommy?" It was Junie's voice. Nora knew it the way she knew her own pulse: the little hitch on the m, the lisp Junie had never quite lost. "Mommy, it's me. I got locked out. It's so cold. Please open the door." Nora's feet were on the floor before her mind agreed. She was halfway across the room with her hand on the bedroom doorknob when something closed around her wrist. Junie. Awake. Eyes enormous in the dark, fingers like a cold manacle. "Mom," she whispered. "That's not me." "I know, baby, I know, you're right here..." "No." Junie shook her head slowly. "It's practicing." The knocking stopped. The silence that followed was worse. It had weight. It pressed on the windowpanes. Somewhere beneath them, wood creaked: one step, then another, and then the slow dragging tread of someone climbing the outside of the house. Nora turned toward the window. The curtain moved, though the glass was shut. Three slow knocks sounded against the pane. Twenty feet above the ground.