The Last Gasp of the Coral Bell

On the third of November, 2019, the night nurse’s voice crackled through the phone, telling us that our aunt Miriam wouldn’t see the dawn. We drove through the rain-slicked streets of Port Blossom, a town that seemed to hold its breath against the sea, to the Sandpiper Rest Home, a Victorian mansion turned care facility that perched on a cliff overlooking the churning Atlantic. The building groaned like a ship in a storm, its windows glowing with a sickly yellow light.

We gathered in Aunt Miriam’s room on the top floor, a space that smelled of salt and lavender and something else, something metallic and hard to place. She lay in the bed, a frail shell of the woman who had once told us stories of her childhood in a lighthouse, her voice a whisper that had carried the weight of the sea. By midnight, the family had thinned out, my cousins and their spouses leaving one by one, muttering excuses about work and children and the need for sleep. Only my father, my sister Lena, and I remained, along with Aunt Miriam’s younger brother, Uncle Paul, who had been a merchant marine and had seen things he never spoke of.

As the clock on the mantelpiece ticked past the hour, Aunt Miriam’s breathing changed. It became a ragged, wheezing thing, a sound that seemed to come from a place deep within her chest, not quite human. It was like the sound of a ship’s hull scraping against rocks, or a creature gasping for air in the shallows. Uncle Paul, his face gray in the dim light, said, ‘That’s the death rattle. I’ve heard it before.’ We sat in silence, the sound filling the room like a rising tide.

The nurse, a young woman named Elsie, came in to check on Aunt Miriam and told us to call if anything changed. When she left, the door to the room, which had been heavy and solid, swung open with a soft click and then closed again, as if pushed by an unseen hand. There was no draft; the window was sealed shut, and the air in the room was still. We looked at each other, my father’s knuckles white on the arm of his chair, and said nothing.

It was almost two in the morning when we gathered closer to the bed. Aunt Miriam’s eyes were closed, her face a mask of suffering, and the rattle had grown louder, like the grinding of stones in the surf. The room felt colder, and the shadows in the corners seemed to deepen and shift. I noticed that the small coral bell, an antique that had always sat on her nightstand, began to vibrate, its chime singing a single high note that cut through the rattle. It was the bell Aunt Miriam had rung as a child in the lighthouse, to call the keeper’s dog back from the cliffs.

Suddenly, the rattling stopped. A profound silence fell, broken only by the distant moan of the foghorn from the harbor. Aunt Miriam’s eyes snapped open, and they were not her eyes. They were black, like the deep water under a pier, and they fixed on us with a terrible awareness. She opened her mouth, and instead of a voice, a gust of cold, salt-scented air issued forth, extinguishing the lamp on the table. In the darkness, we heard a sound like a rope being strained taut, and then a wet, tearing noise.

When the emergency lights came on, Aunt Miriam was gone from the bed. The sheets were thrown back, and the window, which had been sealed, was now wide open, the curtains billowing like ghostly sails. The rain had stopped, and the moon cast a pale path across the water. We rushed to the window and saw, far below, a figure on the rocks, small and black, moving with a jerky gait toward the sea. It was Aunt Miriam, or what had become of her, and as we watched, it dove into the waves and vanished.

We never spoke of what happened that night. The authorities ruled it a case of dementia-related wandering, though the window was impossible to open from the inside. But I can’t forget the sound of that rattle, and I can’t forget what I saw in her eyes. Sometimes, on quiet nights, when the fog rolls in off the ocean, I hear the coral bell ring, and I know, with a certainty that chills me to the bone, that Aunt Miriam is out there, waiting beneath the waves, for the sea to give back its dead.