The Bell Below

The answering bell rang again before Tommy could decide whether to leave the room.

Ruth flinched. Her hand went to the bedpost, and for a moment she seemed less old than frightened, as if the gesture belonged to a woman who had once hurried through this house without considering what waited in it.

“That one,” she said. “That’s the one he used.”

“Where is it?”

She looked toward the doorway. “Downstairs.”

The small bell in Tommy’s palm remained quiet. Its clapper rested against the brass, though he had not moved it. He wrapped it in the cloth again and put it in his coat pocket.

Ruth did not ask why. She went into the hall and started down the stairs. Tommy followed, keeping one hand on the banister. The house had changed in the few minutes they had been upstairs. Nothing obvious had moved, but the air smelled of rain and river mud. He glanced toward the front door. It was closed. The bolt remained in place.

At the bottom of the stairs, Ruth passed the sitting room and entered the kitchen. A square table stood beneath the window, set with three plates and four forks. One of the plates held a crust of toast gone hard at the edges.

Tommy had noticed the extra place before, on other visits. He had assumed Ruth used the table for sorting mail or left dishes out when she became tired. Now he saw that the fourth fork had been placed beside the empty plate with care. Its handle pointed toward the doorway.

The bell rang from behind them.

Tommy turned. The sound had come from the hall, not the kitchen. It was clearer there, a bright metallic note that seemed to hang in the narrow space after the clapper stopped.

Ruth stood beside the table, staring at the fourth place setting.

“Did Ethan sit there?” Tommy asked.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Sometimes.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember washing a plate.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“No.” She looked at him with sudden irritation. “I know what I remember.”

Another ring came from the hall. This time the sound was followed by a faint pull against something beneath the floorboards. Tommy felt it through the soles of his shoes: a quick vibration, too slight to be the house settling.

Ruth moved toward the pantry door.

Tommy caught her sleeve. “Wait.”

“I need to see.”

“You don’t know what’s in there.”

“I know what isn’t.”

She opened the pantry. Shelves crowded the narrow room, loaded with tins, flour, jars of preserves, and a stack of newspapers bound with twine. At the back was a blank wall painted the same pale yellow as the kitchen.

Ruth stepped inside and pushed aside a sack of potatoes. A dark line showed in the plaster beneath it, vertical and straight. Tommy crouched and ran his fingers over the surface. The wall had been painted, but the paint did not meet evenly. There was a door there, or had been one. Its outline continued up past the lowest shelf and stopped beneath a wooden lintel.

“Who sealed this?” he asked.

Ruth did not answer.

“Ruth.”

She was looking at the line beside his hand. “It opened into the yard.”

“From the pantry?”

“It used to.”

“You said the door was upstairs.”

“I said there was another one.”

“No. You said the door was taken.”

Her gaze shifted to him. “It was.”

The small bell in Tommy’s pocket gave a muted click against its cloth wrapping.

Ruth stepped back. “Don’t bring that near it.”

“What happens if I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew enough to tell me not to.”

She folded her arms, but the movement failed to hide the tremor in her hands. “Ethan put it in the room. He said it was the last one.”

“Last one of what?”

“He had been ringing for me.”

“When?”

“After dark. Before he left.”

Tommy waited. The answer had come without his forcing it, and he did not want to break whatever narrow path Ruth’s memory had found.

“He rang from the kitchen,” she continued. “I was upstairs. I thought he wanted tea. I told him to stop making such a fuss.” Her mouth pulled tight. “He rang again. Then I heard the back door open.”

“Was he outside?”

“I went down. The kitchen was empty.”

“Did you look in the yard?”

“There was rain.”

“Ruth.”

“I looked.” She rubbed her thumb over the knuckle of her other hand. “The door was open, but the yard ended at the fence. I could see the whole thing. There was nowhere for him to go.”

Tommy pictured the yard beyond the kitchen window, the slope descending toward the trees. He had seen it from upstairs. The fence leaned in two places. Behind it stood a narrow strip of weeds and then the woods.

“What did you do?”

“I shut the door.”

“You didn’t call anyone?”

“I thought he had gone to the river.”

“Why?”

Ruth looked at him as though the question were unfair. “That’s where he always went.”

The bell rang again.

This time the sound came from inside the pantry wall.

Ruth made a small, involuntary motion toward it. Tommy stood and put himself between her and the painted outline. The shelves rattled. A jar of cherries shifted forward, struck the one below it, and settled.

Behind the wall, something scraped once from top to bottom.

Neither of them spoke.

Then a voice came through the plaster.

“Tommy?”

It was not loud. It might have been a boy calling from the far end of a hallway. Tommy knew the voice before he could tell himself he did. Ethan had sounded like that when they played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, trying not to laugh while Tommy searched between the blank stones.

Ruth turned to him. “Who said that?”

Tommy could not answer. The wall held no opening, no crack wide enough for a voice. He reached for the pocket containing the little bell.

Ruth seized his wrist.

“Don’t.”

The voice came again, quieter this time.

“Tommy, don’t let her—”

The rest vanished beneath a hard metallic strike. Every bell in the house rang together: the one in his pocket, the unseen bell in the wall, and something upstairs at the end of the hall. The noise lasted only a second, but afterward the kitchen seemed to have lost its proportions. The pantry stood farther away than it had before. The ceiling rose. The fourth place at the table no longer looked unused. A smear of butter marked the plate.

Ruth released him and stared at the empty chair.

“Ethan?” she whispered.

Tommy stepped out of the pantry. “You remember him.”

She looked at him, confused. “Remember who?”

“Your son.”

“My son is dead.”

The words struck him with the force of recognition, though they were not new. Ruth had said them before, years ago, at Ethan’s funeral, when everyone else had still known what she meant. But she had not said them now as a woman remembering a lost child. She had said them as though the answer had been supplied to her.

Tommy crossed to the kitchen table. The fourth plate was empty again. He picked up the fork. A dark thread, wet as river silt, clung to one of its tines.

Ruth watched him. “Are you the mailman?”

His hand closed around the fork.

“Yes.”

“What is your name?”

He looked toward the front door. The bolt had slid open. No one had touched it. Beyond the glass, the street lay gray with rain, and the covered bridge showed between the houses at the end of Wren Street.

Tommy put the fork down. He took the small bell from his pocket and held it in his palm. Its brass was warm now. On its underside, where the metal had been hidden by the cloth, a name had been scratched into the rim.

ETHAN VALE.

Ruth began to ring the bell in the wall.

Not with her hand. From the sound of it, something on the other side was pulling a cord, patiently, waiting for him to answer.