Three Knocks, Then Three More

Three Knocks, Then Three More is a quiet horror story by Elias Vance about a knocking at the door that follows a rule — and the night the rule changes.

“The knocking started three nights ago, three knocks and a pause and three knocks, and it has not once come from the door, which would have been easy, and it is getting closer.”

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The knocking started three nights ago — three knocks, a pause, three knocks — and it has not once come from the door, which would have been easy, and it is getting closer.

Precision is the only thing I have left. So let me be precise: I am not a woman who panics. I am a woman who keeps a floor plan. I have lived in this apartment for eleven years, on the fourth floor of a building that has five, and I know every sound it makes: the water hammer in the walls at six in the morning, the elevator's hydraulic sigh, the particular groan of the floor joists when the couple upstairs walks their dog at night. I have made a study of this building the way other people make a study of birds. I know its habits. I know its moods. And three nights ago, the building began to knock.

It was not a door. That is the first thing, and the thing I keep having to tell myself. There was no one in the hallway. There is never anyone in the hallway at 2 a.m. on the fourth floor. The knocking came from the front door — it came from at the front door — and I got up and I looked through the peephole, and the hallway was empty, and the knocking stopped, and I went back to bed, and I told myself it was the radiator. It was not the radiator. The radiator hisses. It does not knock.

The second night, the knocking came from the wall behind the sofa. Three knocks, a pause, three knocks. I stood with my ear to the plaster, and the knocking came again, and it was inside the wall, and it was loud enough that I felt it in my teeth, and I thought, absurdly, that it sounded the way you sound when you knock on a door you know is locked but you knock anyway, because you have nowhere else to be.

The third night, it came from the floor.

I have been plotting it. That is what I mean when I say I am a woman who keeps a floor plan. I have a map of my apartment taped to the kitchen cabinet, and I have marked every knock with a pencil dot, and I have drawn lines between the dots, and the lines do not lie. The knocking is not random. It is a path. It is a route. It is moving through the building the way a person moves through a building — from the front door, down the wall, across the floor, up into the ceiling — and it is moving toward me, and it is knocking on every surface between it and me, the way you knock on a door to announce yourself, the way you knock on a door when you want to be let in.

I have been telling myself the usual things — the building settling, the pipes, the weight of the apartments above, the ordinary creaks and groans of an old structure rearranging itself at night. And the ordinary things are true — this building does settle, it does groan, it has made every sound a building can make — but it has never once, in eleven years, knocked in threes.

Three knocks, a pause, three knocks.

I know that pattern. I have known it my whole life. It is my mother's knock. It is the knock she used at the door of my room when I was a child, the knock that meant it's me, open the door, the knock I have not heard in twenty years, because my mother has been dead for twenty years, and because no one else in the world has ever knocked in threes, because it was hers, because it belonged to her the way her voice belonged to her, and it is not a pattern a building can make by accident.

I am going to tell you what I have been afraid to tell myself, and then I am going to finish this, because I am running out of time and I want someone to know.

The knocking is not at my door. I have checked, and I have checked again, and I have spent three nights with my eye at the peephole and my hand on the deadbolt, and the knocking is not at my door. It is in my walls. It is traveling toward me, and it has been traveling for three nights, and I have been plotting it, and I have drawn the lines, and I have followed them backward, and the lines do not lie.

The knocking does not start at the building's entrance.

I followed the route backward tonight. I started at the last dot, in the ceiling above my bed, and I traced it back through the wall, and through the floor, and down the corridor of my map, and the route does not begin where a visitor would begin. It does not begin at the front door of the building, or the elevator, or the stairs. It begins at my front door. On the inside. And it runs outward, through the walls, through the floors, through the whole building, knocking on every surface as it goes, the way a thing knocks when it is looking for a way out.

I have been tracing the wrong direction. I have been reading the knocking as a thing coming toward me, and it is not coming toward me. It is going away from me. It has been going away from me for three nights, knocking on every wall, looking for a door, and three nights ago it stopped, and it turned around, and it has been coming back.

The knocking is me.

Here is what I have understood, and it has taken me three nights and a floor plan to get here, and it is the whole of it. I have lived in this apartment for eleven years. I have not been out of it in — I don't know how long. I don't know how long it has been since I opened the front door and stepped into the hallway and walked down to the street and let the door close behind me. I know I have a life. I know I have a job, and a mother who died, and a whole set of ordinary memories, and I know they are mine, because I can feel them, the way you feel a bruise. But I cannot feel the door. I cannot feel the threshold. I cannot feel the weight of the world on the other side of my front door, and I have been telling myself that is normal, that it is the building, that it is the quiet, that it is the ordinary shape of a life that has become very small.

The knocking has been in my walls for three nights, and it has been getting closer, and it has been getting closer because it is coming back to me. It has been out there — in the walls, in the building, knocking on every surface — and it has found no way out, and so it is coming back to the only door it has ever known, and the only door it has ever known is me.

There is a woman at my door now.

I have checked the peephole, and I have been telling myself the hallway is empty, and it is not true. There is a woman at my door. She is standing in the hallway, in the flat fluorescent light, and she is younger than me by a decade, and she is soaked — her coat is soaked, her hair is plastered to her face, and it has not rained in this city for two weeks, and she is dripping onto the hallway carpet, and she is knocking. Three knocks. A pause. Three knocks. She is knocking the way my mother knocked, and she is saying something, and I cannot hear it through the door, but I can read it on her lips, and I can read it because I know what she is saying, because it is what I have been saying for three nights, in my walls, knocking on every surface, looking for a way out.

She is saying my name.

I am at the door. I have my hand on the deadbolt. I have been standing here for a long time, and the woman in the hallway is me — I know this the way you know your own breath — and she is crying, and she is wet, and she has been out there for twenty years, and behind her, very far away, I can hear a car engine, and the rain, and a siren, and the sound of a night that happened a long time ago and that I have been keeping on the other side of this door ever since.

I understand now — the whole shape of it — and I am about to open the door, and I do not think I am coming back.

The knocking has been coming from inside my apartment for three nights, and I have been plotting it, and I have been tracing it, and I have been wrong about every single direction. The thing that has been knocking is not coming toward me. It is not going away from me. It has been me, and it has been knocking on the inside of the walls of the life I built, and it has been trying to get out, and I have been hearing it as something trying to get in, because it is easier to be afraid of a thing at the door than to admit the thing is already inside.

The door between me and the woman in the hallway is not the front door of my apartment.

It is the night of the accident. It has been knocking on the inside of me for twenty years, and I have been holding it shut with a deadbolt and a floor plan and a life that became very small, and the woman in the hallway is the part of me that has been out in the rain ever since, trying to get home, and she has finally found her way back, and she is knocking, and she is saying my name, and she is not going to stop.

I am opening the door.

I am putting my hand on the deadbolt, and I am turning it, and I can feel the cold of the hallway coming through the crack, and the woman is looking at me, and she is not a stranger, she is me, and she is going to come in, and we are going to be one again, and I am going to have to remember the night I have been working so hard to keep on the other side of this door, and it is going to be terrible, and it is going to be true, and it is going to be the first true thing I have felt in twenty years.

Three knocks, a pause, three knocks.

I am turning the deadbolt.

I am opening the door.

I have been out here in the rain ever since, and the apartment is warm, and it is lit, and it is empty, and I am the one knocking now — three knocks, a pause, three knocks — and I am telling myself that any minute now, I will open the door for myself, and I will come home, and the deadbolt will turn, and the rain will stop, and I will be one again, and the night of the accident will finally be a night that happened, and not a door I am holding shut.

I am knocking.

I am getting closer.

I am almost there.

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