The old man had pasted new door gods every New Year for forty years and would never let anybody else do it. One rule, which he said often enough that it stopped registering: never take them down before the year is out.
He died in February. In March his son, clearing up, found the pair on the outer doors curled at the edges and stained through where the rain had got at them, and said out loud to nobody that they were a disgrace, and put a finger under the lifted corner, and pulled.
The paper came away in one long tearing sound and left a clean dark rectangle on the wood underneath. He did the other one too. Both of them went into the yard in a ball.
The knocking started that night. Three, always three, always light, always on the outer door. He stood in the dark passage with the line of light under the door broken by something on the other side of it and watched the bar, and the bar did not move.
Seven nights. Never the handle. Only ever three.
On the eighth day he went into town and bought a new pair and pasted them up himself, badly, with too much paste, and that night nothing knocked at all.
He was standing in the passage with his hand flat on the door, letting his breath out, when three knocks came from the other end of the passage — from inside, from the archway to the courtyard.
He turned around slowly, and then he looked at the inner face of the door under his hand, which he had never once looked at in his life.
There was a pair of door gods pasted on that side too. Faded to exactly the same age as the pair he had torn off the front.
Forty years, and the old man had always insisted on doing it alone, so that nobody would notice which way they were facing.