1:21 A.M.

Knock-knock-knock. . . ?



Three short, sharp shocks to her bedroom wall. To be specific, the wall behind her bed.



She doesn’t know what to make of this. She lives in a row of attached houses and she’d never thought the walls thin until now. As she lays in bed with her latest Grisham novel slipping out of warm, nerveless fingers, and a mug of Darjeeling tea on her night table, the knocking is a dash of cold water, startling her out of a voluptuous half-sleep where she was Grisham's latest beleaguered and ethically-challenged young lawyer.



Being short and sharp, even the echo is gone before she’s completely awake. She’s not really sure she heard it, half thinks it was the reverberation of a particularly noisy dream. So she finishes her tea and lays the novel on the night table next to the empty mug.



She’s asleep before her head hits the pillow again.

*

Knock-knock-knock?



The same as last night, only lacking some of the curiously hesitant, testing quality.



Coming from the wall behind her head and behind her headboard--slightly above, actually--it's not a tapping, but a knocking, as if someone is entreating entrance.



From next door, perhaps?



She stifles a yawn then sips her tea. She can only imagine ninety-six year old Mrs. Karabatsos hauling her tired, arthritic bones up at after one a.m. to knock on their adjoining wall.



But the knock sounds almost . . . something. Something odd. Even if Mrs. K. was inclined to knock on walls in the wee hours, that gut-churning strangeness belies her involvement.



There's definitely something about that knocking . . . something off, she decides muzzily, before her eyes drop shut. The half-empty mug of tea sags out of lax fingers.

*

Knock-knock-knock. . . .



The knock is hollow.



That’s what the strangeness is, the feeling of off. And the knocking is most definitely coming from between her wall and Mrs. Karabatsos’s. It has such a distant sound, as if the knocker were, in reality, thousands of miles away and this is the echo of that far knock.



Yet it also sounds solid and immediate.



Close.



With an accuracy that calls to mind Swiss timepieces, at one twenty-one a.m. exactly, the knocking returns. No longer interrogative and questing, as the previous two nights, but sure, confident. Teasing. The knock of a man who knows what you’ve been needing all your life yet going without, and, by golly, he just happens to have one to sell you.



The Grisham novel sits unfinished on her nightstand. She quickly chugs her now tepid tea. An ignoble way for Darjeeling to die, in her opinion. But waiting for the knock she had, without even realizing it, touched neither novel nor tea. The knocking seems to have taken up residence in her unguarded thoughts, edging out such mundane comforts as tea and novels. . . .



She shakes her head to clear it. Such thoughts are, of course, worse than silly, they’re useless. The fruits of an over-tired mind. It is merely an old pipe banging, or rats cavorting--or a depressingly large spider, working to some indecipherable scheme and schedule.



Random knocks do not have characteristics or personalities or intent.



Simple as that.



Secure in her certainty, She puts her mug down and turns out the light. Sleep is quick in coming, but less than gracious about staying.

*

Knock-knock-knock--



Every night for two weeks, on time and without fail.



Her curiosity had, predictably, overcome her. Some days ago it had done so, and now she sits on her bed and contemplates the wall behind her headboard. She is tired and anxious. Her eyes are wan, glittering stones set in the slack dough of her face. In her hand is a mostly empty glass of white zinfandel that has been totally forgotten in her anticipation. On her night table, the Grisham novel has acquired a fine layer of dust.



She drums her fingers impatiently on her thigh. It is one-nineteen a.m. and twenty seconds according to her newly-purchased stopwatch. When she sleeps, she does so not in her flannel nightgown. Lately, she sleeps in a worn tracksuit that has collected numerous Darjeeling and white zinfandel stains. She often falls asleep with her cup or glass in hand.



She is always merest seconds away from nodding off, only to jerk awake again.



Not so, tonight. . . .



Despite the nearly empty bottle of wine, she will be quite awake tonight. It took her longer than it should have, but she finally noticed the connection between the knocking and the time she falls asleep. Like clockwork, the knocking would start and, like clockwork, when it ceased, she would fall almost immediately to sleep.



Not so . . tonight.



Tonight, she fights the urge, will fight the urge--the instinct to fall asleep; the instinct for self-preservation.



One-twenty a.m. and forty-five seconds.



For the first time in these many days, she will be awake after the knocking has stopped. Even in the places between one wall and the next--between one world and the next--her will to stay awake and answer the knock can be felt. Her desire to know what comes after the answering is a roaring fire in this wintery exile of an existence.



Tonight, she will answer, and the Closed Way will at last be opened.



Tonight . . . I will be reborn unto this Earth.



One twenty a.m. and fifty-nine seconds. . . .



Knock. Knock. Knock.