The Name on the Other Side

“Don’t let him answer for you.”

The figure stopped beneath the next beam.

Tommy could not see its face. Water ran from the brim of its hat, from its sleeves, from the hem of a jacket that belonged to another decade. The brass bell in its hand was the same size as his own. Its handle was wrapped in black thread.

“What does that mean?” Tommy asked.

Ruth gripped the back of his coat. “It will say your name.”

The figure lifted its bell.

Tommy moved first. He swung his own bell hard against the railing.

The note cracked through the bridge. Ruth cried out behind him. The figure’s bell answered at once, lower and deeper, and the planks shuddered beneath Tommy’s boots.

“Tommy Reyes,” the figure said.

The voice was wet and muffled, but the words were clear.

Ruth’s fingers tightened in his coat. “No.”

Tommy stared at the figure. “Who are you?”

“Tommy Reyes,” it said again.

The bridge gave a long wooden groan. Somewhere below, the river struck the stone supports with a force that shook dust from the rafters.

Tommy looked down at his bell. The underside was bare. Ethan’s name had gone, leaving only scratches where the letters had been. His own name was not written there. It had never been written there. Still, the figure had found it.

“What happens if you say it?” he asked.

The figure tilted its head.

Ruth pulled him backward. “You disappear.”

“Like Ethan?”

She did not answer.

The figure took one step forward. Water spread beneath its shoes across the planks, though no rain reached that far into the bridge.

“Tommy Reyes,” it said a third time.

This time, the sound did not come from its mouth alone. It came from the beams, the nails, the black gaps between the boards. The bridge repeated him in pieces.

Tommy. Reyes. Tommy. Reyes.

Ruth’s hand slipped from his coat.

Tommy spun toward her. “Stay behind me.”

She was staring at him with the blank, polite expression she had worn in her kitchen when she could not remember why he was there.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He caught her wrist. “Ruth.”

She flinched at the touch. “Please let go.”

“I’m Tommy.”

The figure’s bell rang.

Ruth’s face changed. Recognition flickered there, weak and sudden, like a match struck in a cellar.

“Tommy,” she whispered.

The figure answered for her.

“Tommy Reyes.”

The recognition vanished.

Tommy understood then. The figure was not calling his name. It was claiming the answer. Every time it said him, the bridge carried the sound back, and the town took another piece.

He released Ruth and stepped toward the figure.

“Ethan,” he said.

The figure stopped.

The bell in Tommy’s hand trembled.

“Ethan Vale,” Tommy said louder. “You were sixteen. You hated tomatoes. You cheated at cards and hid the evidence under your pillow. You broke your left wrist jumping from the quarry wall and told everyone you’d been attacked by a dog.”

The figure’s head lifted.

Ruth pressed both hands to her mouth.

Tommy kept walking. “You had a scar over your eyebrow. You drew boats in the margins of your schoolbooks. You were afraid of deep water, but you went down to the gorge anyway because you heard a bell.”

The figure raised its free hand.

Its fingers were pale and wrinkled from soaking. Around one finger hung a strip of red cloth.

Tommy knew the cloth. Ethan had worn a red scarf the summer he vanished. Tommy had mocked him for it until Ethan tied it around Tommy’s wrist and said it made him look less like a undertaker.

“You came back,” the figure said.

The voice had changed. Beneath the water and distance was the boy Tommy remembered.

Tommy stopped three yards away. “I came back for you.”

“You answered.”

“I didn’t know what I was answering.”

“You said my name.”

The figure lowered its bell. For the first time, Tommy saw its face clearly.

Ethan looked older than sixteen and younger than twenty-seven. His skin had the gray cast of river stones. His hair lay flat against his forehead. The scar over his eyebrow was there, though the skin around it had stretched and blurred. His eyes were open, but the bridge lights reflected in them without seeming to reach the pupils.

Ruth made a broken sound behind Tommy.

“Ethan?” she said.

Ethan turned toward her.

His expression did not change, but his mouth opened as if the name had struck him.

“Mother,” he said.

Ruth stepped forward.

Tommy blocked her. “No.”

“He’s my son.”

“He wants you to answer.”

Ethan looked back at Tommy. “She gave me the house.”

Tommy glanced over his shoulder. Ruth’s face had gone white.

“What does that mean?”

“The house opened. She answered. The door took what was hers.” Ethan lifted the bell. “You answered after.”

“Where is the door?”

Ethan pointed beneath the bridge.

Between the planks at Tommy’s feet, a narrow line of blackness had appeared. It ran across the width of the bridge, too straight to be a crack. Water leaked through it from below, flowing uphill around Tommy’s boots.

Ruth shook her head. “Don’t open it.”

“You said the house gave up the door.”

“The house is not the bridge.”

“Then what is it?”

Ethan’s gaze moved to the bell in Tommy’s hand. “A mouth.”

The line in the planks widened. A smell rose from it—mud, river water, and something sweetly rotten beneath the stones. The bridge’s darkness pressed down around them.

Tommy looked at Ethan. “You sent the letters.”

“No.”

“Then who did?”

Ethan’s grip tightened on his bell. “The ones who are still waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For someone to remember them.”

Behind Tommy, Ruth whispered, “I remember my son.”

Ethan turned toward her again. “Say it.”

Tommy caught her arm before she could answer. “Not to him.”

Her eyes filled with anger. “You have no right to keep him from me.”

“I have every right if this is how it took him.”

Ethan’s bell began to ring without movement. The sound was soft at first, almost tender. With each note, the black seam beneath Tommy’s feet spread farther along the bridge.

Tommy looked at the strip of red cloth around Ethan’s finger. Then he looked at the bell.

“What did you take from him?” he asked the bridge.

The ringing stopped.

For an instant, nothing moved except the water.

Then every bell in Bellweather rang at once.

The sound came from behind them, from the town, from Ruth’s house and the police station and the dark rooms of houses where forgotten people still sat at set tables. Ruth dropped to her knees and clapped her hands over her ears. Ethan bent double, his bell striking the planks.

The seam opened.

It was not a crack beneath the bridge. It was a doorway standing upright in the floor, black on both sides, its frame made of wet timber. Beyond it lay no river and no earth. Tommy saw a narrow pantry with a white door, then Ethan’s bedroom, then the hawthorn tree beside the gorge. The images slid past one another like rooms in a house being searched.

At the center of the darkness lay a heap of envelopes.

One had Tommy’s name on it.

The ink was fresh.

Tommy reached down and seized the letter.

Ethan straightened. “Don’t read it here.”

“Why?”

“Because this time, it’s addressed to Ruth.”

Tommy tore open the envelope before the bridge could answer for him.

Inside was a single line.

BRING BACK THE NAME YOU LEFT BEHIND.

A second line appeared beneath it in wet black ink.

ONE OF YOU MUST STAY.

The doorway slammed shut.

Ethan’s bell fell from his hand and rolled toward Tommy. Ruth rose unsteadily behind him. Across the bridge, the far end had disappeared into white fog, and the road beyond it was no longer visible.

Tommy picked up Ethan’s bell.

His name had returned to the underside.

So had Ethan’s.

But beneath both names, a third line had been scratched into the brass.

RUTH VALE.