You can make the house knock on purpose, and that is the opposite of haunted.

You try what you can reach. A loose shutter, three beats. A vent cover in the pantry, if you found that world under the floor, slaps when you do not hold it. The chimney vowel happens when the gale hits a certain angle; at the flue, air is a moving thing, not a mouth. Downstairs, the kitchen still answers the wind on its own.

If anyone is in the doorway, they say, “So we were the audience.”

“And the orchestra was weather,” you say. “Mice on percussion, if they clocked in.”

You write a whole-house theory: Wind + wood + holes + brains that hate blanks = haunting. You add Mara’s margin style: time, wind, what you touched. Proof is a thing you can repeat. Ghosts that only happen when nobody looks are a different hobby.

The kitchen table is the place such theories go to become neat. The house is also still a house: you could walk it once more, quiet, starting and stopping the knocks you actually found, like a science fair that learned manners.

Thunder. The power blinks and returns, sheepish.