The Knocking - Part I

The day the knocking started, we couldn’t have known what it would bring

I don’t know what they are. The sane portion of my mind bays out to me the word “ghoul.” The ever-growing insanity inside me knows no word for them, however, and only whispers, somehow more loudly than the baying, “Come in.” I am alone now, save for the strange and desolate creatures knocking at my basement door. I wasn’t alone one day ago, though. I cannot be sure what has happened to Brother and Mother, but my mind runs ‘round me horrific visions of what they may have become.

I do not know where they came from either. This house is far into the woods and hills of our small town — no neighbours for kilometres. We never listened to the radio Father bought for us after he died, so if any explanation had been given by others who survived this waylaying, we would not have known of it. What we did know is only what we could hear.

It began two days ago with a simple, slow rapping at our front door at some point in the late night or in the very early morning. We were in bed, asleep, and so did not initially hear the knocking. It was only in the morning, when Mother went to check to see who was knocking at our door, that Brother pleaded with her not to. He stopped her at the bottom of the stairway and told her not to answer the door, to check first through the high, narrow glass pane windows above the door. She gave him heed and only checked the window, verifying the deadbolt was still locked in.

She backed away from the door, confusion and alarm sweeping across her face. She instructed us to go into the kitchen and wait for her there. We did so, Brother being in a veritable excitable horror as he hid underneath the table. I was reluctant to follow, but given the show of alarm from Mother, and Brother’s panic, I decided it would be wise to mimic his position. From our lack of vantage, we were only allowed to know what was going on through sound alone until Mother came to retrieve us. There were small scuffing sounds on the floor: Mother walking about in a frantic manner for what Brother and I soon discovered to be her attempt to find Father’s old hunting rifle. We could hear the bolt throw back and a slide of metal on metal as she loaded the rifle and locked the bolt back into place. More scuffing, then Mother shouting at the knocker to leave saying, “I’ve got a gun! And don’t be surprised that I know how to use it when you find a hole through your belly!” But the knocking continued, even while she spoke. Then we heard a yip of consternation, then silence, then, quietly, “How many are you?” Two scuffles back toward the kitchen and, “No, get back and go! I amn’t letting you in here!” Mother grew silent, and that silence bore new terrors. We heard the knocking become slightly louder, and quicker, but now the rhythm was confused sounding. “I’ll shoot you! All of you!” Knocking was her only reply.

Mother was under the table with us a moment later. She told us there were four of them out there now. She hesitated any more telling, but decided it was safer for the two of us to know what was out there. “They ain’t normal people,” she said. “They don’t walk right, like they’re drunk from a bad night at the pub. Maybe they’re just that too. And I couldn’t see their faces; they were covered in hair stuck on, probably from the heavy rain we’ve been having. And they just keep knocking like they’re asking me to let them in, but I amn’t, don’t worry none about that.” She told us we needed to go upstairs and wait in Brother’s room. There was a window there that looked over the front of the house, five meters above the front door. We scurried our way from underneath the table, Brother taking up the rear behind me, and made to run up the stairs. That’s when I remembered Olly. I stopped and tried to ask about her, but mother grabbed my wrist and pulled me up the stairs. The knocking had then spread to the window next to the door. A quiet tap-tapping I could hear even as we rushed up the stairs; a flash of a grey, knotted fist knocking on the glass.

Mother rushed us into the bedroom and slammed the door to. She turned to Brother, and in as calm a manner as she could bring to show, asked him what he had seen and why he had stopped her from opening the door. His face blanched and sagged a bit, what little stubble was on his face standing on end. He looked at me and then back to Mother. “Whatever it is, your sister is old enough to know,” Mother said. He looked away, out the window, a single tear dripping from his chin, his face reddening.

“I heard it last night,” he began. “I woke up and heard it.” His voice choked and cracked.

“What’d you hear, lad?” Mother’s hands were clamped over his shoulders, I think more to keep herself from collapsing, though.

He choked again, then said, “I had my window open like always. I heard a rustling coming from the woods there, and thought it was a deer or stoat or something, and just rolled over and ignored it. But it didn’t sound like any deer or stoat; I know what those sound like. So I get up to look out the window. And I see it stumbling out of the woods. It sees Olly, but the damn girl is asleep with just her deaf ear pointing to. It was so fast, once it saw old Olly, I couldn’t even track it; it just blurred from where it was to where Olly was sleeping. I tried to find something to throw at it, but when I looked back-” He choked on a sob, then paused. “I didn’t want to wake you up or make any sounds. I closed the window as quiet as I could, but I was afraid if it saw me move or heard me it would just be standing in front of me and I’d go too.” He broke down then, and Mother brought his face to her chest to stifle the sobs.

My shock must’ve been showing, because Mother told me Olly was dead. She saw her body on the ground outside. She also said she saw exactly what Brother was saying about not being able to track their movements. When the other three came out of the woods and spotted the other knocker at the door she said they “got all fuzzy,” then they were right at the door, adding their knocks to the other. I broke down as well, and Mother pulled me in to her chest and the three of us had a short cry over Olly. But Mother didn’t let it last. She knew we had to find out how many of them there were, and if we could escape. She told us to stay there, and she left the room, shutting the door behind her.

Brother and I sat under the window waiting for her to return. Occasionally I would straighten up and twist over the windowsill to get a look below. There were four at the door, knocking rapaciously, slowly. There were still two more stumbling out of the woods, disappearing and then reappearing, one at the door and the other at the window. They lifted their hands in half fists, as heavy looking as if they were holding pails of water. Their fists fell upon the wood and glass, their wrists snapping back and forth in time with the rhythm. I couldn’t get a good look at any of their faces, as their hair was long and matted to their grey skin, leaves and thick spider webs woven throughout.

I was pulled down by Brother the third time I looked. He told me I was going to get us all killed if any of those things saw me. I wanted to argue because I knew we needed to know what those things were, but he was right. It was better to play it cautious, or at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Maybe if we had acted quicker, before they all came in, maybe if we had broken the back window and ran out, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten them.

Brother still looked like a ghost, and he was even shivering by then. We sat side by side underneath the window of his bedroom and stared at his door, afraid that at any moment we’d hear the knocking there too. We could hear it through the floorboards. It echoed up and enveloped us like a dread mist, settling into our minds — a constant droning that threatened to evict our sanity. I swear more had come in just the few moments that had passed since I looked. The knocking was louder, faster, but each knock could still be distinguished, and I counted the dead space between the knocks. Each one had three seconds of nothing before the next crack at the door or window. Brother must have been doing the same.

“It’s like they’re talking to us,” he whispered, his voice coming out in a low, hoarse tone. “Their knocks are saying, ‘Let… me… in…’” He emphasized each word with a small tap of his finger on the wood floor.

His eyes were on the handle to his bedroom door as he said this, and I got a tingle up my spine. But I knew what he meant. I could hear it too. But it was different in my head. It sounded to me like they were saying, “Help… me.”

The door creaked open and Mother slid her way in. She said she looked through any window she could, but most of the first-floor windows had Knockers at them in the front of the house, and she could see more coming up from the field behind the house. “We’re being surrounded,” she said.

The echo of the Knockers was morphing into a din. By the time I’m writing this, it has become a roar. Now, as I sit in the basement, the Knockers know where I am, and knock on the basement door, the walls, the windows. There is only one knocking that can be distinguished from the rest, a knocking on the very floor. My heart knows who it is, but my mind is holding it back. But the walls around my mind are breaking, and I can feel the cracks beginning to crumble away just as the candles I lit around me are slowly burning down to the wisps.