The Glass Bell

I first noticed the bell three days after my return to the old mining town of Cinder Hollow, a place I had not visited in a decade. The town itself was all but dead, its streets lined with sagging, salt-eaten houses and boarded storefronts. My aunt had left me her cabin, and with it the task of clearing out the debris of thirty years. I had come to sell the land, to sever the last thin cord that tied me to that cold, isolated stretch of the coast.

The cabin sat on a bluff overlooking the gray sea, and the wind there had a voice, low and urgent, like a man praying in a language I almost knew. On my second night, I woke to the sound of a single chime, coming from the direction of the living room. I found nothing there except the cold and my own reflection in the dark window. But the next morning, I noticed a small, tarnished bell on the mantelpiece, a thing I had not seen before. It was shaped like a woman’s head, her mouth open in a silent call.

That first dream came on the fourth night. I stood in the center of a white room, featureless save for a single door. On the door, a crude painting of a lighthouse, its beam arcing through a black sky. A voice, my own but layered, said, ‘The keeper is still here.’ I woke with my nose bleeding, a thin stream of red that I wiped away with the back of my hand. The bell on the mantel was wet, as if someone had licked it.

The dreams drew me out of the cabin. I began walking the cliffs, following a path that was not on any map, a ribbon of crushed shells that led to a cove I had never seen. There, a lighthouse stood, its white paint long flaked away, its lantern room dark. The door was unlocked, and inside, the air was thick with the smell of brine and rot. A spiral stair climbed into darkness. At the top, I found a room empty of furniture but for a single chair facing a window that overlooked the sea. On the sill, another bell, identical to the one in the cabin, its clapper missing.

When I returned to the cabin, I threw the bell into the sea. It did not sink. It floated, bobbing like a marker, and the clapper’s absence was a silence that followed me through the night. In my dreams, I saw the woman on the bell, her mouth wider, her tongue a small, petrified finger. I heard a name, ‘Marg. Marg. Marg.’ It was my own name, spoken backward.

On the ninth day, I found the cabin door open. Snow had drifted in, though April. The bell was back on the mantel, and beside it lay a piece of paper with a single line: ‘TO END THE SONG, YOU MUST BECOME THE BELL.’ A cold settled in my chest that had nothing to do with the weather. I did not recognize my own handwriting.

That night, I gave in. I picked up the bell, and the metal was warm, yielding, like flesh. I held it to my ear, and I heard the sea, and beneath that, a voice, my own, but old, and sad. ‘You were always the other half. The clapper is you.’ The dream that came was not a dream. I stood at the base of the lighthouse, and above me, a dark figure dropped from the gallery, and the bell rang as it hit the rocks below. I woke in the cabin, on the floor, the bell clutched in my hand, now cracked, and my own mouth filled with salt.

I have not left. I cannot leave. The bell is on the mantel, and I am here, watching the sea. The town below is empty, but in my peripheral vision, I see a woman standing at the fence line, her head a perfect sphere of tarnished bronze. She is waiting. And I know the story is simple: there was a keeper, and there was a bell, and there was always a someone who would listen to the call and become the next voice. The newspapers in town said the lighthouse was closed in 1948, and the keeper, a woman named Margaret, disappeared. They found her bell on the floor, but the clapper was never recovered. My job is to wait for someone to find me, to hold my mouth to the wind, and to let the chime begin.