There was a lock, so I locked it

I don’t know why my bedroom door has a lock.

This is a one-bedroom apartment, so the lock isn’t there to protect me from children, room-mates, or an elderly relative wandering in to ask whether I’ve seen her glasses. The only person I could possibly lock out would be someone I was already sleeping with. There are very few scenarios that I can imagine where this will make sense, and all of them involve no longer sleeping together.

But that night as I headed to bed, some exhausted reptile curled around the controls of my brain saw the lock and told me to lock it.

A few hours later, I woke up with a start. Five knocks hammered against the bedroom door: loud, strident, deliberate.

Five is an upsetting number of knocks. Two is probably accidental. Three could be someone trying to appear polite. Five says, I know you’re in there.

The problem is that to knock on the bedroom door, you must already be in my apartment.

There are two ways in. The first and most civilized was through the building’s front door and up to the elevator to the sixth floor. This required a pass key and for my front door to be unlocked.

There’s a stairwell with a door that locks on my side of the landing. Had I locked it?

I was almost certain that I had. It would be deeply strange to instinctively lock the bedroom door while leaving the stairwell landing door and the apartment’s front door unlocked.

I understand that I am deeply strange. But even so.

Maybe, though, I had left my front door unlocked. I’m the only one on the sixth floor at night and theoretically only people with a pass could reach me. I began counting the people with access.

I knew there was one on the ground floor. The bored reception staff handed it to anyone who claimed to be delivering to me. But it was dark, it was 3:45 am, and there was no delivery person in the building.

The building administrator had told me that she had a key to my door, which seemed fair. She told me that if I locked myself out, I could call the police.

Did that mean the police had a key?

Were the police standing outside my bedroom?

Or perhaps it was the fire department. This had happened to me once in Tallinn when a very nice man in uniform knocked on the door to say that there was a fire in the basement and they were evacuating the building.

Was there a fire in the basement now?

Surely, if the building was on fire, they would knock again and ideally shout “fire” in some language that I understand. Didn’t they have axes for exactly this situation?

They surely wouldn’t knock five times politely and then wander off. “Yeah, boss, the entire place was going up in flames, but she locked her bedroom door so we left her to burn.”

(Why is there a bolt on my bedroom door, I wondered again.)

The other way into the apartment was via the roof where the gulls live. Some maniac could get on the roof, perhaps by helicopter, and then stroll across the wooden deck of my terrace. The terrace door can’t be opened from the outside, so he’d have to smash through a window.

Surely I would have heard that.

Lying there, in the dark, I did not think of the TV heist show trick of using a diamond-tipped blade and suction cups to cut a man-sized square out of the glass. This would allow the maniac to leap into my apartment, assuming he didn’t catch his foot on the lower ledge and tumble through the gap head-first and get himself killed.

This would make for a very difficult conversation with the building administrator. Maybe the gulls would eat him.

It was fortunate that none of this occurred to me that night. Instead, I concluded that as I had not heard smashing glass, no one had broken into my living room.

Besides, even if he had smashed his way in and I had somehow slept through it, he was unlikely to politely knock on my bedroom door to let me know he was waiting to rob and murder me.

The most likely explanation was that there was no knock. I had dreamed it. A very brief nightmare of five knocks on a locked inner door that shouldn’t have a lock.

I considered every possibility again. Every scenario except the dream required me to unlock the door and see who was there.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that.

I fell back asleep.

It was about six months later when I heard it again: a sharp rap-rap-rap-rap-rap. The bedroom door was unlocked, in fact, I had never locked it again. If the fire department were here, they could rescue me without needing the axe.

There was no evidence that fire department was here.

I tiptoed into the living room and looked around. It was dark and quiet. There were no helicopters depositing confused diamond thieves onto my roof.

My front door was locked. I did not unlock it.

Over the next couple of years, the knocking woke me at least twice more, five clear and deliberate knocks that I was increasingly sure I had not imagined it.

And then, to my genuine excitement, it happened while I was awake! I was up late, playing a video game, when I heard it: five clear and distinct knocks.

My bedroom door was open, ruling out the possibility that there was something on the inside, knocking to get out. I shivered.

But I am very brave, or at least I’m trying to learn how to be. So, I went to the front door and opened it very slowly.

Nothing.

The sensor-triggered landing light was off, which meant either that nobody had approached my door or that they were invisible.

I sat back down at my desk. The doors were behind me, but it seemed to me that the knocking had come from in front of me, the north side of the apartment facing the roof.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the knocking had come from above me.

Where the jackdaws live.

The rooftop has a remarkably clear ecosystem. My apartment is perched on the south side of the roof. The gulls control the north side. The hooded crows, including my friend Gary, hang out on the ledge along the east side and stare at me until I go out with food. My terrace is on the northwest side, though the gulls consider it disputed territory and have never shown much interest in my paperwork.

And above all of us, on the roof of my apartment, are the jackdaws.

I ran to Google. “Do jackdaws knock?”

Apparently, no.

“Not even a little?”

Google reconsidered. Apparently, they sometimes pick up large snails and fly them to a high, flat solid surface and smash them open.  

Google’s AI summary was uncomfortably specific: They grip the snail in their beak and swing it downward repeatedly against the roof tile until the shell shatters. This requires a great deal of force, resulting in incredibly clear, heavy, deliberate thuds directly above your ceiling before the bird eats and flies away.

Had I even mentioned my ceiling?

Another option was a territorial dispute: A dominant jackdaw will sit on a prominent roof feature like a metal chimney cowl and violently hammer it with its beak.

However, angry jackdaws and rooftop escargot parties are daytime phenomena. Neither explained why I only ever heard knocking at night.

I still don’t know who is knocking; I only know that it lives above me, which is progress. The realistic possibilities at this stage are nocturnal jackdaws or the supernatural.

Neither possibility requires me to open the bedroom door at three in the morning, which is all I really needed to know.

Still, it bothers me.

Up until now, whenever I put out breakfast for Gary and his crow friends, I have left a little food on the ledge where the jackdaws sit in the sunshine, so that they get a treat too.

No more.

Those grey-eyed bastards are not getting another crumb from me until they admit what they have done.

The jackdaws know what they did. Until they confess, their treats will be diverted to paying subscribers.