The Knock in the Night

The Knock in the Night

The last thing a hermit expects to hear is a knock at his door. The sound is alien, it lumbers ugly without consent. Wood and will combined to keep the world away. But not tonight, tonight the world has come knocking.

Knock. Knock.

Startled, the hermit snatches at his pillow, checking that the sound he just heard was not born beneath his ear. But no answers are to be found in the bedding below; and the room slips back into silence. Satisfied, the old man flips the heat of his head over and buries his face back into the plump, feathered cleavage of sweet, sweet slumber… but not for long.

KNOCK. KNOCK.

A second round of knocking begins, this time infused with far greater urgency than its limp-wristed predecessor. Upright and uptight, the hermit peers into the gloom, trying to hold both his breath and nerve long enough for the room to reveal itself. The foul stench that sometimes spills from under his closet door wafts and curls inside his nose, briefly stealing his mind away from the night time knocks. But when the third set of knocks arrive, the old man knows this is no ordinary caller, that something awful lurks outside, loaded with intent; and it puts butterflies in the soles of his feet.

The old man narrows his eyes, squinting as if fuelled by the power of a thousand lemons, until finally; the room begins to distinguish itself. Fuzzy Tetris blocks start to fall into place as a familiar landscape unfolds. To his relief, the hermit makes out the shape of his trusty candlestick, accompanied by a box of matches next to the bed. Fumbling at first, he finally manages to strike the match true, lingering its burning head on the crooked wick until the entire room is dancing in shadows to the flickers of the naked flame. Relieving the brittle black carcass from his fingers, the hermit slips out his sheets and into his battered brown boots below; their lolling tongues hanging out like a pair of panting spaniels. The boots feel cold and unwelcoming and three sizes too big. It makes the old man think of his father and the expectations that still drape around his neck like a hangman’s noose. His father’s words filling his thoughts, taunting him relentlessly:

Death is patient and waits for all men. Guilt is restless and will pursue all that brush shoulders with it.

Gulping hard, the old man swallows the words and doubts deep into his belly. With his tongue tort and trembling, he calls out to the night.

“H-h-hello?" The old man stammers. "Who… Who’s there?”

It has been so long since he last heard his own voice that he barely recognises it. The words taste funny, and so he spits them out like a mouthful of broken teeth. He can only hope that the sounds and shapes he made through his lips were bent and twisted enough to carry meaning.

And so, with breath held tight, he waits for a reply.

A solitary blink marks the first minute of silence. Thirty seconds later and he allows himself a single, hard, swallow. Finally, unable to endure his respiratory torture any longer, the old man slowly starts to evacuate his wheezing lungs; the stagnant air slowly slipping out in single file. With courage, and perhaps foolishness both inflated by the perennial silence, the hermit finds himself uprooting and shuffling towards the door.

As he draws near, the terrain begins to change as scattered pieces of paper pepper the floor. And with each shuffled step, the old man wades deeper into an ocean of discarded pulp that laps gently against the door. Once there, he reaches out, gently placing his hand on the cold, hard surface before him. The rough touch of timber soothes and solidifies the world around him. It melts away the myths and irons out the bumps in the night. This is what’s real, he thinks, this, what you can touch and feel; hearty oak and tenacious steel. Yes! And in this buoyant moment, within this euphoric bubble where he now dwells, the hermit is no longer hostage to the fear that once held him. And so he opens his mouth, ready to proclaim this new found bravado to the world… but no words come out. His body clenches like a fist, vessels constricted; his entire being plunged in arctic ice water shock.

He sees them.

Two foul, bodiless eyeballs, suspended in mid-air with no regard for decency or physics; piercing through the very fabric of the once impenetrable bolted door. The old man can feel their poisonous intent radiate through the room as they twitch and jerk, frantically scanning for any sign of life. The epileptic dance stops the instant the eyes fix on the hermit, who shrieks aloud and falls back awkwardly amongst the wispy foliage. He curses the demon eyes to Hell as the hot syrupy wax of the candle spills down his arm and over the back of his hand, trickling around his wrist like a naughty serpent. The old man’s free hand reaches out to scoop a pile of parchment, clenching his fist around the homemade paper projectile. Then, moving with all the speed he can muster, he hurls the makeshift missile at the levitating eyeballs in a desperate attempt to strike.

But the old man’s arm is an old man’s arm and not nearly fast enough for the task in his old man’s hand. And as quickly as they had first appeared, the eyes vanish out of sight, leaving the hermit’s balled-up hopes to miss and fizzle limply against the door.

Before the spilled wax can even solidify on his skin, the eyes return. Strange noises bellow from outside and suddenly, the door doesn’t feel as thick as it did a few moments ago. A sharp, metallic jingling sends the old man scuttling backwards across the room like a crab on skates. Cowering out of sight under a table, he clings to its legs like a shy toddler on the first day of school.

The hermit now knows that the door will not hold, that the world will not be kept away and that he must face whatever evil enters; for this is not the first time that the old man has been haunted. So with a wispy puff from his dusty lungs, the hermit blows the candle out and plunges the room back into darkness.

At first, only a small rustle is heard, a few scraps of paper trickle down from the top of the mound, its weight still slumped nonchalantly against the door. But like the subtle shifting of pebbles that precede an avalanche, disaster is ready to unfold.

The grind and clunk of moving metal parts sounds its arrival as a tiny slither of light leaks through the doorway, crow-barring at the edges of the darkness to make room for more. A tidal wave of paper swells and breaks as the door heaves open and a hunched, ghostly figure emerges, dripping with malice; and with each step forward its shadow spills deeper into the room, staining everything it touches like a disease; or beetroot. Despite the urgency in its deranged, obsessive eyes, the ghostly figure moves slowly, smoothly and with a cold, calculated precision only found in the very best and worst of things.

Knock. Knock.

The familiar sound of knuckle on wood fills the room once again - not from the door, but from the table top above the Hermit’s head! The dark figure begins to shrink its form, retracting phantom limbs and lowering itself slowly to the ground; the piercing eyes still sworn to the pursuit of its prey.

But for the very first time, the eyes blink; both sets of pupils dilating into giant black saucers of disbelief. All it finds under the table is a discarded candle, its lifespan half spent; a melted body sagging, rendering a smirking grin that now ridicules the intruder’s mistake. So consumed were the eyes with the hunt for the old man that they never saw it coming!

The candlestick connects with a sickening thud as the hermit strikes from the darkness. No transparent, supernatural swing and miss, no Hollywood puff of smoke or flash of light to mark exorcism. Instead, the dark figure simply crumples in a heap to the ground, the hermit still riding on top, the shift in power now played out in physical form. The old man closes his eyes and prays aloud to drown out the terrible sounds from beneath. What little faith he has left in God is summoned and poured blindly into every blow he delivers, his arms thrashing and pumping in relentless rhythmic perfection, like a souped-up set of industrial pistons. The brutal onslaught doesn’t cease until the candlestick snaps in two!

Still breathing hard, and with tears cutting paths through his blood-splattered cheeks, the old man drops the remaining half of the candlestick and buries his head into his hands; sobbing violently until all he can hear is the sound of the sea roaring in his ears. Eventually, the tears run dry and the hermit brings himself to look upon the face of his tormentor. The eyes, those venomous, predatory eyes that had squeezed his chest tighter than the last drop of toothpaste from the tube, are still open; but never again will they stalk another living soul. He gently places his thumb and forefinger on the broken, bloodied face and wipes the eyes shut forever.

Standing to an ovation of arthritic clicks and cracks, the old man rises and shuffles his way back to the table, where he retrieves the grinning candle and mounts it back upon the remains of the bloodied candle stick. He pulls out the matchbox from his pocket and strikes another redheaded soldier into battle, bringing the wick and the room back to life.

No sooner had the extinguished match been discarded, that the hermit noticed the curious objects now sitting on the table he had cowered below. One small manilla coloured envelope with bold letters stamped aggressively in red. An enormous set of silver keys and a navy blue clipboard filled with a fat wad of papers.

It was not the first time things had appeared from out of nowhere, for as stated earlier, this was not the first time that the old man had been haunted. The first ghost had arrived precisely a month after the lights had gone out, the second materialised four weeks after the hot water had started to run cold. Who would have thought that the spirit world worked with such ruthless and efficient bureaucracy?

The old man shrugged and tossed the unopened envelope and papers with the rest of the crusty, curled fodder by the door. As he did, a violent gust of wind rattled through the room, throwing the closet door wide open. The wind whispered words into the ear of the hermit as it passed:

Death is patient and waits for all men. Guilt is restless and will pursue all that brush shoulders with it.

It was only then that a small germ of guilt started to bubble in the hermit’s gut. Stepping tentatively towards the broken figure on the floor, he crouched, setting the stumpy candlestick carefully to the side. Tenderly, he took the icy, white hands into his own, caressing the very knuckles that had knocked at his door only minutes before. The old man gave both hands a gentle squeeze and sighed wistfully in a silent, final gesture of goodbye… before dragging the leaking, cracked carcass roughly across the floor to dump in closet with the rest of the rancid dead ghosts.

And with that, the hermit slammed the closet door shut and dusted the death off his hands. The world was back on the right side of his door. The world was right again. He trudged his weary bones back into bed, slipping off the boots from his feet and the noose from his neck. He took one final look around before returning the room to darkness with a pinch from his licked fingertip and thumb.

More ghosts would come, the old man was sure of that, but not tonight.

Not tonight, he thought, knocking on wood.