The knock on the door

In The Guardian recently, Australian illustrator Robert Ingpen explained why he is hooked on classic books, and why he wanted to produce a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (a copy of which, signed by Ingpen, is among my prized possessions):

When blind Pew knocks on Admiral Benbow's door in Treasure Island it's "the most scary sound in literature," he says. "It comes as a sound to you by the skill of the writing and the vision of the man. You hear the sound and, if you hear that sound when you're nine years old and you've read it yourself, you'll read forever."