The Knocker on Death's Door

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THE door was of oak, roughly five feet wide by more than seven feet high, with a top in the form of a flattened late-Gothic arch. The timbers from which it had been made, with loving care, some five hundred or more years ago, were nearly six inches thick, and carved on the outer side into crude vertical folds, and with the wear and tear of centuries, and the rigours of recent cleaning to remove the gloss of dirt from accumulated time and the touch of many hands, the colour of the wood had clarified into an exquisite matt brown fading away into pure grey, the colour of subdued light at the onset of evening after a clear day, and the grain to a veining of liquid silver, so that the carved folds were no longer related in any way to anything so solid as linen, but appeared rather as shot silk of a cobweb fineness. In certain lights the door seemed almost translucent, so that you might have tried to walk through it in the belief that it was mere mirage, and no more palpable than mist. Actually it weighed an unconscionable amount, and had elicited fervent curses from the modern workmen who had had the job of moving it. They were accustomed to the gimcrack soft-woods of today, and only one of them had so far forgotten himself as to stroke the silken meshes with a loving and wondering hand, and feel for a moment deprived and born out of time. He was an old man, of course, reared in the trade. The others thought it was simply a quarter of a ton of over-valued junk.

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