Short story · 3 min read · Set in Halloran Cross ·
The Hotels of the Alternate Knocks
On Halloran Cross the six lodging houses keep one printed house rule of knocks, and the third knock is always somebody else's to answer.
Halloran Cross is one short block of six lodging houses over shops, and the houses agree on exactly one thing, though no minute book anywhere records them agreeing. Inside every room door of every house there is a green card, printed by Scarr & Son at the top of the Cross, carrying three lines and a footer:
FIRST KNOCK: STAFF.
SECOND KNOCK: THE GUEST.
THIRD KNOCK: SOMEBODY ELSE ENTIRELY.
Footer: House rule, all houses, Halloran Cross. Please keep to the count.
The rule is kept. A first knock brings a maid, or the boy on the desk, or in the smaller houses the landlady with her glasses pushed up into her hair. A second knock is the guest's own business; guests are asked, by the card, to answer their own seconds, and they do, all of them, year in and year out, from the smallest room over the Compasses to the best of the Toll House. A third knock is not anybody's business in particular, and that is where the card does its work. On a third knock the Cross answers. Not the desk; not next door; not the house. Somebody else, entirely, as printed. The desk books of all six houses carry the same column for it, and the column is headed seen to, and under it goes the time, and nothing more. Guests who asked about it over breakfast were shown the card. The card is the answer. Nobody living on the Cross has ever seen the somebody else, and after some years nobody asks to, the way you do not ask after arrangements in a family that are plainly settled.
Ask the landlords what the rule is for and they will tell you in one breath: first knocks keep strangers' hours, second knocks keep a guest's own pride, and a third is better seen to than disputed. They say it quickly, and go straight back to their ledgers, because there is nothing after it to discuss. The Cross is not a credulous street. The pawnbroker on the corner rates every story against weight, the newsagent has heard them all twice, and even the lodgers who write to the borough about the damping get polite replies and never write again about the knocking.
The cards were last reprinted in November 1987, and came back from Scarr's the same as ever: three lines and a footer, and the whole run delivered on the one pallet with the invoice reading as previous. Old Scarr set them the way he always set them and said there was nothing else for a rule to say — a rule ends where the count ends, he said, with one hand flat on the chase, and he would not have known how to set a fourth.
Nor will the houses. There has never been a rule for a fourth knock. The cards stop at three the way the Cross stops at the toll gate: tidy, and on purpose. What no one on the Cross will settle on paper, on the nights the stair-lights burn a shade past their hour and the column sits open with its time blank, is the arithmetic of the thing. The third knock is answered by somebody else entirely, and the houses, all of them together, are only ever the houses. Nobody has ruled what happens at a fourth — whether the count there resets and the stair goes back to listening, and the next foot on it is staff again; or whether the somebody else keeps the knock-count the way the houses keep their books, all night long, counting every first and second as its own. And if that is so, and the count is already running, the question the Cross will not put on any card is whose turn a fourth would fall to, and whether the houses have been answering it for years without knowing, and what else in these six stacks of rooms has been keeping the tally of everybody's knocking against the night the total comes due.