The Register of Knocking

In the Pärnamäe district, there is a procedure for logging dead trees. You walk the section, you mark the trunk, you write the grid reference in the book. I have done this ten thousand times. I am telling you this so you understand I am not a man who sees things.

The knocking began in the third week of November, when the ground was iron and the light failed by half past three. It came from inside the wall of the eastern bedroom — the room my wife used, before she stopped using any room. Three knocks, always three, always at the hour when night becomes its own country. I assumed a bird. A woodpecker displaced by frost. I assumed pipes, though the farmstead has no pipes in that wall. I wrote in my notebook: three knocks, 02:14. Three knocks, 02:14. Three knocks, 02:14. After a week, I stopped assuming.

On the eighth night I put my ear against the plaster. The cold came through the wall in a way that cold does not usually come — not diffusing, not spreading, but arriving, as though something on the other side were breathing it deliberately outward. The knocking, up close, was not percussive. It was patient. A man waiting to be let in who knows, with great certainty, that eventually he will be.

I am not religious. But I know the old understandings. There are doors in this landscape that have no handles on the outside.

I found the source in the way you find such things: by going where you do not want to go. Behind the eastern wall, between the log courses, a cavity that should not exist — I discovered it when a section of inner plaster crumbled at my touch and the cold exhaled across my face like an open mouth. Inside the cavity was a bundle of rye straw bound with red thread, the kind of working the old people called a passenger. Something sent ahead of something else. Something that arrives first and knocks, to confirm the address is occupied.

I burned the bundle in the yard fire without touching it directly, using the iron tongs I use for the stove logs. The straw caught poorly. It smelled of turned earth and of a low tide, which is impossible, because we are one hundred and sixty kilometres from any sea.

The knocking stopped.

For eleven nights, nothing. I began to write in my notebook again: silence, 02:14. Silence, 02:14. I was careful. I was methodical. I was relieved in the way a forester is relieved when a fire scar stops spreading — not happy, only relieved, because you know the forest and you know that stopping is not the same as ending.

On the twelfth night I woke to silence so complete it pressed against my eardrums like deep water. And in that silence, very close — not from the wall, not from outside the wall, but from the room itself, from the air directly above the bed — I heard breathing that was not my breathing. It had no rhythm a living thing would have. It paused in the wrong places. It resumed without urgency.

I did not move. A man who has spent forty years in state forests knows that some things are triggered by movement, the way a snare is triggered, the way a startled elk turns and goes still and then turns again toward the sound. I lay on my back. I counted the pine boards of the ceiling. Eighteen boards. I have counted them before, in other sleepless hours, and there have always been eighteen.

There were twenty.

I looked at the two additional boards for a long time. They were the same width, the same grain, the same grey-brown colour of old interior pine. They had always been there, or they had not. I could not say with certainty which.

The breathing stopped. The board count, in the morning light, was eighteen again. I wrote this in my notebook and I drew a line under it, which is what I do when a section of the forest has been fully assessed and the work there is complete.

But I have not slept in the eastern room since. I have not looked at the ceiling after dark. And when I walk the property at dusk to check the woodpile and the gate latch, I do not look up at the eastern window.

Not because I am afraid of what I will see there.

Because I am afraid it will be nothing. Because nothing, now, is the thing I trust least.

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