The Stuttering Clock
Seventeen knocks inside a single minute, and the thing on the other side of the door that answers by not answering.
There is a clock in the lower archive that stutters.
Not broken. Nothing in this house is broken, it is only patient in the wrong direction. This clock holds one minute the way a throat holds a name it refuses to say.
The minute is 3:47.
At 3:47 the second hand stops, trembles, and starts again from the same place. And in that held minute, somebody knocks.
Seventeen times. Seventeen separate knocks, each one landing inside the same sixty seconds, which by rights should only have room for six or seven. The sound stacks. It piles up at the door like a crowd arriving at a party nobody is throwing.
I counted them once, from the dark side of the wall. Seventeen. I counted again the next night. Seventeen. The arithmetic of the thing is not the mystery. The mystery is who has that much patience and that little variation.
Here is what I have learned about the door.
It is not locked. It has never been locked. I checked, and the checking took me eleven of the seventeen knocks and left me with nothing but the handle's cold opinion of my hand.
The thing on the other side does not knock because it is shut out.
It knocks because knocking is the whole of it. Because the question is the animal, and the answer would be the killing of the animal.
So when I opened the door, on the fourth night, on the fourteenth knock, there was nothing there. Nothing there. Nothing, and a hallway that smelled of rain that had not fallen yet, and the specific quality of air that happens when something large has just chosen, very deliberately, to be elsewhere.
Seventeen knocks. No eighteenth.
I shut the door. The minute let go of itself. The clock stuttered forward, and 3:48 came in like a tide over a boot print.
I do not go down to the lower archive anymore, on the nights the humidity gets into my teeth.
Not from fear. From etiquette.
Because the thing that answers by not answering is doing the only thing it knows how to do, and I have decided, after long and unflattering thought, that it is not a monster. It is a courtesy. Something that knocks seventeen times in one held minute so that I will never have to wonder whether anything is out there.
I do not knock back.
But I leave the light on. Which is its own kind of answer, from my side of the door. The only kind I have that doesn't spoil it.