The Bell on the Landing

The first time we raised the board, I was fifteen and my cousin Petra was staying with us for the summer. My grandmother had just passed, and my parents thought it would be good for me to have company. Petra had that strange obsession with old houses, and ours was the oldest on the street, a crooked Victorian with a bellpull on the landing that hadn’t worked in decades, the cord frayed to a grey stub. She found it the first afternoon, tugging it gently, expecting a chime. Nothing came, but the air in the stairwell went cold, and she laughed it off.

That night, after my parents had gone to bed, Petra pulled out a battered cardboard box from her suitcase. Inside was a board she’d made herself, the alphabet painted in her own shaky handwriting, the words YES and NO in blocky capitals. She set it on the floor between us, lit a single candle from the kitchen, and produced a small brass thimble as the planchette. ‘Your house,’ she said, ‘has history. Let’s see if it remembers.’ I was nervous, but the thrill outweighed it.

We placed our fingers on the thimble. At first, nothing. Then the thimble shuddered, slid to YES. I asked who was there. The pointer dragged to the letter M. Then A. Then R. ‘Mary?’ Petra said, and the board answered YES. Mary said she was eight, that she died in 1903, that she liked to play hide-and-seek in the attic. She said there were six spirits in the house, but one was angry and that we should stop. Petra, ever the skeptic, asked more. Mary spelled out: ‘The bell. The bell on the landing. Do not ring it again.’

We thanked her and said goodbye. The thimble stopped. We blew out the candle. But the next morning, when I walked past the landing, the frayed bellpull had been replaced. It was new, a bright red cord with a polished brass handle. My parents swore they hadn’t touched it. Petra grinned. ‘The house wants us to play.’

For the next three nights, we used the board in different rooms–the kitchen, the library, even the attic. We contacted a woman named Agnes who had run a boarding house here in the 1920s, a man named Thomas who claimed to be a soldier, and a little girl named Rose who kept spelling out the word ‘peek’. They all seemed harmless. But on the fourth night, we returned to the landing. I don’t know why. We just felt drawn there, like something had pulled us. The new bellpull gleamed in the candlelight. Petra said, ‘Let’s ring it.’ I told her no, but she reached out anyway.

The bell didn’t produce a pleasant ding. It let out a deep, resonant gong that shook the floorboards. A cold wind swept down the stairs, extinguishing our candle. In the dark, I heard a sound–not a voice, but a wet, scrabbling noise, like something dragging itself down the hallway above us. And then a child’s whisper, so close to my ear I felt breath: ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

We ran to my room, locked the door, and stayed up until dawn. In the morning, the bellpull was gone. But on the landing, there was a smear of something dark and oily on the wallpaper, in the shape of a small handprint.

That night, the board called to us. We didn’t set it up. It was waiting on my bedroom floor, the thimble already placed, the letters glowing faintly in the moonlight. We sat down, against our will, and put our fingers on it. The pointer flew across the board: ‘I am not Mary. I am not Agnes. I am the one who rings the bell. You woke me. Now I will play with you forever.’

We tried to lift our fingers, but they were stuck, as if glued. The pointer spelled out a name: ‘OLIVER.’ Then it stopped. And from the landing, we heard the bell ring again, softly, like a child testing it. The handprint on the wallpaper was gone. In its place was a small, child-sized silhouette pressed into the plaster, as though someone had been pushed through the wall.

Petra and I never spoke of it again. She left a week later, and I never saw her after that. My parents sold the house within a year. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear a bell ring in whatever apartment I live in, even though there’s no bell. And when I look at my hand, there’s a faint, greyish mark on my palm, like the beginning of a bruise. I think Oliver is still playing hide-and-seek. And I’m it.