She must be patient. Eventually one would come, one who is as she herself had been; the kind of person sensitive enough to perceive the plea of things unseen. The kind of person who might have empathy enough to pull out the nail and free her, the kind who is willing to forge a new link in the chain.

Three Knocks on a Buried Door

Three Knocks on a Buried Door

Never love thy neighbour. Were anyone ever to ask him for sage advice (which, in his forty-eight years on Earth, had yet to occur), that would be the hard-won wisdom Kolkamitza would offer: never, under any circumstances, love thy neighbour.

He himself had done so, had in fact deeply loved the woman who’d rented the upper storey of the house whose ground floor apartment had been his home for years. Her name had been Erin and she’d been several years his junior. She’d had a thin nose and barrel thighs and hair that had smelled of bergamot. Kolkamitza had courted her for two months, coupled with her for one, and for these efforts found himself rewarded with the unexpected role of executor after an aneurism had snuffed out Erin’s life.

Her death had been sudden, yet she’d had the uncanny forethought to write a will within a week of her demise, one that left everything to Kolkamitza. Erin’s prescience in this matter confirmed his suspicion that she had been, and perhaps still was in some form, a witch. But witch or not, Kolkamitza found himself as the unbidden owner of two settees, a sewing machine, sixty-three novels, a wardrobe stuffed with pencil skirts and wide-brimmed hats, cotton lingerie, a horn comb, five distinct nail buffers (she did not wear cosmetics), and a jackdaw named Rheims whose home was a standing bronze cage.

To hear Kolkamitza tell it, this burden was a calamity that would have broken Job, but in truth the ordeal cost him only a single weekend of his life. The various charities he’d approached were grateful for the donations, and all unwanted leavings were simply bagged and covertly tossed into the dumpsters of the nearby plaza.

Rheims, however, remained Kolkamitza’s charge. He was an unobtrusive creature who rarely cawed and never stirred loudly enough to wake him. Also, the bird’s diet of insects and grain did not appreciably dent Kolkamitza’s budget. (And it truly was his budget; Erin had possessed no money to leave him.)

In the end, having been saddled with belongings and bird was scarcely a hardship. The true burden came in the form of an inexplicable compulsion, a behavioural tic that began to chew on Kolkamitza’s psyche day and night, abating only if he succumbed to its command. This compulsion was, of all things, a need to knock on strange doors.