The Cicada’s Knell

The summer I turned ten, we moved into a prefabricated bungalow on the edge of a dying town, where the cornfields whispered secrets and the heat hung like a wet blanket. My mother had found a man, a salesman named Gerald, with a smile that never reached his eyes. He moved in with us two weeks after the boxes were unpacked, and that’s when the knocking began.

At first, I thought it was a cicada, one of those big, buzzing bugs that clung to the window screens and drummed their legs in that maddening rhythm. It was always at night, after the last porch light flickered off, and I would lie in my narrow bed, counting the knocks: three quick, then a pause, then two slow. I’d tiptoe to the window, but the yard was empty, the streetlight casting long shadows that never seemed to move. As soon as I lay back down, the knocking would resume, a sound that seemed to come from inside the glass, not outside.

I told my mother, but she dismissed it as ‘settling’ or ‘tree branches.’ Gerald would just chuckle, pat my head, and say, ‘Got an overactive imagination, kiddo.’ But I saw how his eyes would dart to my window every time I mentioned it, and how he’d suddenly find something to do in another room. One night, I decided to stay at the window, my nose against the screen, and I saw them: pale, slender fingers, impossibly long, tapping on the glass from the outside, just above my eyeline. They withdrew when I gasped, and the knocking stopped for a week.

The silence was worse. The house seemed to hold its breath. My mother and Gerald fought more; their arguments were muffled but angry, always ending with him slamming a door. I started sleeping with my blanket over my head, but the heat was suffocating, and I’d wake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, to the sound of that rhythm again. Once, I felt a cold draft on my face, even though the window was shut, and a faint humming, like a distant saw, came from the direction of the abandoned silo down the road.

Then Gerald left, the day before the wedding, just as suddenly as he had appeared. He packed a single suitcase and drove away, leaving a note that made my mother cry. That night, the knocking was relentless, a frantic drumroll that vibrated through the floorboards. I summoned the courage to yank open the window, and this time, I saw a shape pressed against the screen: a man, or something like a man, with a face like melted wax, and eyes that were no more than empty sockets. It opened its mouth, and the knocking poured out of it, a sound that was both a plea and a warning.

I screamed, and my mother came running. She saw it too. She went pale and slammed the window shut, pulling the curtains across. We stood there, trembling, as the knocking slowly faded, replaced by the low buzz of cicadas outside. The house was quiet after that. Gerald never returned, and we moved out by autumn.

But I still hear it sometimes, that rhythm: three quick, pause, two slow. It comes to me in my new room, in the middle of the night, and I know now that it was never about Gerald. It was about the space he left, the invitation he opened when he brought his own dark passenger into that house. And I wonder, if I had ever knocked back, what would have stepped through the glass to meet me.