The Sunday Bell

I’d been back at the Tidewater Market for three weeks now, long enough to forgive the creaking floorboards and the smell of old brine that clung to the cold cases. The new owners, the Yamadas, had kept the place afloat after I’d stormed out last October, a disagreement over how to handle the freezer alarms. Mr. Yamada and his wife, Reiko, were decent folk, but their son, Derek, had a nervous tick in his jaw that made me want to check my teeth. The other cashiers whispered that he’d seen things, but I waited until a slow Tuesday night, when the rain drummed the tin roof, to ask him outright.

He was hunched over the meat saw, scraping bone dust off the blade, and he didn’t look up for a long moment. ‘It’s the bell,’ he said, finally. ‘The old brass bell above the stockroom door. I know it’s not real, but every Sunday, before we open, I hear it. Once when I was grinding beef for the family pack special, and again two weeks ago when I was wiping down the slicer.’ His voice dropped. ‘It’s a single ring, like someone tapping it with one finger, but slow, like they’re mocking me.’

I knew that bell. It had hung there since the 1940s, when the store was a cannery, and it was rusted solid into the bracket. Todd, the old owner, used to say it was for the fishing boats, but I’d once seen him ring it with a chisel, and he’d looked scared. I told Derek I’d help him check it out before the next Sunday shift, but he shook his head. ‘It’s not the bell itself,’ he said. ‘It’s what comes after.’

He didn’t tell me more that night, but the next Sunday I came in early, coffee in hand, and found Derek standing in the stockroom, a tarp over the big mixer, his face pale as the flour sacks. ‘It rang,’ he said. ‘And then the freezer door—it swung open on its own, slow. But inside, I saw a woman. She was wearing a yellow raincoat, like the ones the old cannery workers wore. She had no face.’ He shuddered. ‘She just stood there, and then she reached out and touched the jars of pickled herring on the shelf. And I heard a child laugh, a little boy, but I was alone.’

I felt a cold knot in my stomach. I’d never seen a yellow raincoat in the store, but I remembered Todd’s story about the ‘lady in the yellow slicker’ who’d drowned in the river years ago, her son never found. I’d always thought it was just a ghost tale to scare the newbies. But Derek’s face told me he wasn’t lying.

We decided to stay until noon, to face whatever it was. I locked the front door, and we waited in the dim light of the stockroom, just below the bell. At exactly 11:47, the bell gave a single, dull clang. It wasn’t loud, but it vibrated in my teeth. The air turned cold, and the lights flickered. Then the freezer door creaked open. Inside, where the hanging beef sides should have been, there stood a woman in a yellow raincoat, droplets of water beading on the plastic. She had no face, just a smooth, pale void above the collar. She raised a hand, and I saw it was webbed between the fingers, like a frog’s. She pointed at the basement stairs, which I’d always thought were sealed.

Derek grabbed my arm. ‘We need to go,’ he whispered. But I couldn’t move. The woman began to hum a tune, something like a lullaby, and from the basement came a child’s voice, thin and reedy, singing along. The bell rang again, twice, faster. Then the lights went out. When the generator kicked in, the freezer was empty, and the basement stairs were slightly ajar, a single wet footprint on the cement.

Since then, I’ve taken to ringing the bell myself every Sunday, right before we open, three times, as a sort of offering. Derek quit last week, said he couldn’t take the sound of that child’s laugh following him home. Me? I still work the counter, but I always wear a yellow raincoat now, even on sunny days. Because sometimes, when I look in the cold case mirror, I catch a glimpse of a woman without a face, standing behind me, and she’s wearing my coat.