The Bell Tower

by Sarah Rayne

  It was all a bit spooky, but it would be pretty good if she could get photos of the figure. She went as close to the seaward side as she could, angling the camera upwards. She was not sure how well the shots would come out, but at the third attempt she saw a small window halfway up the side of the tower. It was narrow, and it was barely wide enough for a bird to fly in, but if you were inside the tower you would be almost exactly in line with the figure. If you could lean far enough out, you might even get a close-up of the face.

  But to do that, Maeve would have to go inside the tower, and she felt a lurch of nervousness in her stomach at the idea. Still, it would be brilliant if she could get that close-up, and even some shots of the sea from up there. It would make her project the best of them all and it would be in the end-of-term display.

  She would do it. She would not think that this was Childe Roland’s squat turret surrounded by poisoned earth, or Mordor’s menacing citadel. She would just think about the monks who had come here to sound the bell for prayers.

  There was a small door on the side of the tower. It was battered and scarred, and there was a massive black iron ring handle on one side. It was firmly shut, and for a moment Maeve thought it was stuck or even locked. She had no idea whether she was pleased or disappointed. But then there was a teeth-wincing screech of old metal against even older wood and the ring handle turned. Maeve put her hand on the door’s surface, not liking its hard, harsh feel. It shivered, and for a moment it seemed as if it was refusing to move, but when she pushed against it, it swung inwards.

  Maeve stepped inside.

  FIVE

  It was like entering an old black cave with the thick stench of things gone bad inside it – ancient sea worlds washed up and left high and dry to slowly decay.

  But it’s only dead fish and seaweed, thought Maeve, fumbling for her handkerchief and putting it over her mouth and nose. I’ll only be here a few minutes, and it will be worth it if I can get photos.

  As her eyes began to adjust, she saw that threads of red sunlight trickled down from a narrow stairway and lay across the floor, like bloodshot veins in a diseased eye. There were coils of seaweed like wet snakes on the ground, and the walls were shiny with damp and crusted with salt. It was much smaller inside the tower than she had expected, but she understood this was not a room in the ordinary way, but a kind of hallway for people to walk through on their way up to the bell chamber. The stairs faced the door; only the first three steps were visible, then they twisted around out of sight. The window she had seen from the ground would be up there. It would be pretty scary to go up those stairs, but Maeve was not giving up now. As she crossed the room to the stairs, she deliberately stomped her feet hard down to prove she was not frightened.

  Iron staves were driven into the stair wall at intervals, and there was the remains of a rope, which must have been looped into them to act as a banister. Not much of the rope was left, but it was rather a friendly thing to see, because it made those long-ago monks suddenly real. Maeve thought they might have found climbing these stairs to perform their bell-ringing a bit of a struggle, so the rope had been put there to help them.

  The staves were cold and a bit slimy, but holding on to them made climbing the stairs easier. Maeve could still hear the gulls screaming and the sea washing in, and it reminded her that the ordinary world was not far away.

  Or was it? The sea was starting to sound different. Was that because of the thick walls, or the enclosed stairway? Was the sea coming in? She was supposed to be careful about the tides – Aunt Eifa and all the teachers at school had told her over and over that it was important to always carry an up-to-date tide table so she did not get caught. She would not get caught now, though; she glanced at her wristwatch and saw it was not yet four o’clock. She thought at this time on a Saturday the tide would be coming in, and when she pulled the tide table from her pocket she saw she was right. The tide would have turned around midday, but the evening high tide was not until seven thirty. It was a bit shivery to realize that in three more hours the room downstairs would be under water. Still, she would be gone long before then.

  The sea really did sound different up here. Maeve could almost imagine she was hearing singing inside the waves – wild, beautiful music that made you want to go towards it. There were legends about creatures who lived beneath the sea, and who sang to lure sailors on to the rocks and wreck the ships. She did not really believe those stories, but standing here it was easy to think she could hear a single, clear voice. It was even easier to think it was singing the song Maeve’s mother had recorded the day before she died.

  She listened for a moment, and this time made out some of the words, and the beginning of a new fear started up, because it really was the song her mother had sung that day. It was ‘Thaisa’s Song’. There was the line about not being able to see or hear, and about someone knocking on the tomb … The words were still in that strange, unknown language, but Maeve was sure it was the same.

  But now the voice was singing lines that she did not remember being on the cassette – or if they had been, she had not heard – or perhaps simply had not understood – them.

  The one stands by my tomb, my love,

  Can never save me now.

  For the sea will be my grave, my love,

  And you will be my own.

  The singing could not be real, and yet the singer’s voice sounded exactly like the second voice she had heard on the tape – the voice that had echoed her mother’s. Maeve glanced uneasily back down the stairs, imagining how the stairway would look when the water came slopping and trickling in. The sea will be my grave, my love … That meant drowning. It would be a bad thing to drown in here – to be trapped inside this tower and to see and feel the water pouring in and know you could not get out. But it was ages before high tide, and she had plenty of time to get her photos and go safely outside.

  She started up the next spiral. She could see the window now, and she could see the outline of the stone figure, the shape of the nose and lips and chin outlined clearly against the cliff immediately behind. The window was not as narrow as it had looked from the ground, and Maeve thought she could squeeze on to the sill and hold up the camera.

  The stairs widened out a bit here, and opposite the window, on the right of the stairs, was a doorway. Maeve hesitated, then stepped over to it, nervous but curious to know why there was a room up here. It was smaller than the room on the ground and there was a ledge all around the sides. Odd strands of rope lay on the ground. Light came from the window outside, and Maeve could see that there were two square holes in the ceiling far above her. She leaned back, craning her neck, and gasped, because directly above her was the bell itself. She could see straight up into its innards – she could see the torn, twisted metal stump where the tongue had been removed. The pieces of rope must have been attached to the bell in some way. Maeve could see how they would have hung all the way down into this room, and how the monks would have pulled on them to tilt the bell back and forth so that it chimed.

  Did she dare go all the way up to the bell room? It would be fantastic to be able to tell everyone about it at school on Monday, and when the photos had been developed she would be able to show them as proof. She came out of the ringing chamber and went up the last spiral of stairs, hardly daring to breathe. It was bitterly cold up here because the bell chamber had openings all round the walls. The wind blew strongly in, making her eyes sting and snatching at her hair. And now she was at the very top of the stairs and she was looking straight into the bell chamber.

  It was terrifying. It was like staring into a nightmare. Maeve had never been so frightened of anything in her life. The bell took up most of the room and it was huge; it was the hugest thing imaginable. It was like an ogre’s head made of bronze – and it was a head that might suddenly throw itself back and begin screaming with dreadful, iron screams.

  All ideas of going in fled, but Maeve made herself stand in the doorway for long enough to take a phot
ograph. It might not come out, and it would probably be blurry and horrible because her hands were shaking so much, but it was worth trying.

  The bell was clamped between two massive wheels. Maeve did not understand how they worked but, as she stood there, a faint thrum of sound came and something stirred within the massive bronze depths. The thick copper lip lifted very slightly, and Maeve’s heart leapt. At any minute it would start to scream at her and then she would die of fright. She backed away to the stairs, but the first step was there before she was ready, and she missed her footing and fell backwards. The world wheeled all around her, and for several crowded seconds she thought she was going to tumble all the way down to the ground, and that the bronze ogre’s head would laugh as she did so.

  She grabbed blindly at the wall, and her hand closed around one of the iron staves. It broke away with a shower of stone dust, and Maeve grabbed at the next one, not caring that it tore into her hands, only grateful that this one held firm and stopped her tumble. She had landed on the wide section of stair between the narrow window and the ringing chamber, and although her heart was racing and her hand was bleeding slightly, she was not hurt. She wrapped her handkerchief round her grazed hand and got up. What she really wanted to do was to run out of this place as fast as she could and leave the bell to crouch up there for ever, but she had come up here to get photos for her school project, and it would be really great if she could still do that. She glanced back up the stairs, but no further sound came. She was starting to feel slightly better. And if the bell really had moved, it had probably just been the wind nudging it. It might be something that happened quite often. This was so reassuring a thought that she looked back at the stone figure.

  The wall here must be very thick, because the sill of the window was a good two feet deep. Maeve could not reach out far enough to touch the stone figure, but to touch it was the last thing she was going to do. But, having got this far, she would not give up, so she positioned the camera until the figure was lined up in the viewfinder. It was a clear shot of the head and shoulders, and it would make a brilliant photograph. Maeve was so pleased she almost forgot about the bell. She pressed the shutter, and waited for the camera to whirr itself forward so she could take a second one.

  But before she could do so, something happened that was far scarier than the faint hum of sound from the bell – something that was so terrifying Maeve almost cried aloud.

  At first it was only a flicker of movement coming from the blind stone eyes – a movement so slight it could not have happened. It’s the sun going behind a cloud, or a bird flying past, she thought, staring at the figure, not wanting to keep looking at it, but afraid to look away.

  Then the stone eyes swivelled round and looked straight at her, and they were real; they were living, seeing, eyes.

  This time Maeve did cry out, and her cry echoed around the enclosed space. As she half ran, half fell down the stairs, she could hear the echo of her own voice. It was not until she got through the door leading to the safe outside world that the echoes died away.

  She had no memory of the walk back to Cliff House, although she thought afterwards that she had probably run most of the way, sobbing and terrified. But when she got back to the house, Aunt Eifa was still working in the garden, and it did not seem as if Maeve had been particularly missed, or even as if she had been away for very long. She took off her coat, and carried the camera up to her bedroom.

  She closed the curtains very firmly so that she could not see the bell tower. She would never look at it again – she would even ask if she could move to the bedroom on the other side of the house where there was no view towards the tower. Then there would be nothing to remind her of it.

  Except that there was something.

  It had been when she had fallen down the stairs. As she’d fallen, she had clutched frantically at the walls – the iron staves – anything that might save her. She had managed to grab one of the staves, but although it had stopped her, it had come partly away from the wall, and Maeve’s hand had slid into a cavity behind it. She had snatched her hand back at once, because there was no knowing what scuttly creatures might lurk in such a place, but she had registered the feel of something in the old stones that was not spidery or beetle-like.

  A book. It was scarcely believable, but at some time in this place’s history, someone had put a small book into the crevice behind the iron stave on this part of the stairs. For a moment Maeve had been sufficiently intrigued to almost forget the dead bell overhead. As she had drawn the book out, she had had the oddest feeling that it was not her hand that was holding the book – that it was a hand from a long time ago, and that it belonged to someone who wanted Maeve to know what had happened.

  It was probably nothing more than an old tide table or somebody’s abandoned tourist guide. It felt cold and slippery, which was a bit shudder-making, until Maeve realized there was a wrapping around it. Polythene? Plastic? She thrust it into her coat pocket, and forgot about it in the panic-stricken scramble to get away from the terrible stone eyes.

  Later that night, as the clock downstairs was chiming half past eleven, Maeve opened the wardrobe very quietly and reached into her pocket for the book she had found. The cold, slippery wrapping turned out to be oilskin – Maeve recognized it because fishermen along the coast wore oilskin macs and hats as protection from the sea and the wind. It kept things safe for years and years. How many years had oilskin kept this book?

  Still moving stealthily so as not to wake Aunt Eifa, she switched on the bedside lamp. Then, with extreme care, she unwrapped the layers of oilskin from the book taken from the bell tower.

  There were several pages of handwriting. It was slanting and it was not the kind of writing people did these days, so it was not very easy to read. Maeve frowned and concentrated. At first she could not make out many of the words, then she suddenly saw the pattern and how the letters were formed, and the first line jumped out at her.

  ‘I think I have about three hours left before I die … ’

  Something seemed to trail dank, cold fingers across her face and across her neck, and all around her Cliff House seemed to have plunged into a deep silence. Maeve pulled the blankets around her and began to read.

  I think I have about three hours left before I die.

  There’s no means of telling the time in here, but there’s still some light coming in, so I know that dusk has not fallen altogether.

  I’ve struggled to break down the boards they nailed across the doorway –

  I’ve dragged at them until my knuckles are bleeding and my nails torn, but I’m a musician, for pity’s sake, and the strength in my hands isn’t the kind of strength that can smash oak planks. They nailed the planks very firmly indeed, and it would take seven giants with seven hammers the size of Thor’s to tear them down. My gaolers – my executioners! – did a thorough job. I watched them do it, their faces greasy with sweat from exertion, their eyes mean and greedy in the light of the candle flares.

  I have to accept that I’m trapped here, inside the bell-ringing chamber. It’s a terrible place. The stench is like the rotting carcasses of a thousand fish or the putrefying souls of all the sinners who ever lived. I make no apology for the extravagance of that description, for surely a man is entitled to extravagance when facing death, and anyway I have been sick twice already from the smell, and will probably be so again.

  Darkness is closing down and the tide coming in. The sea will wash into the tower below me and, inch by inch, it will come up into this room – the level will gradually rise until it reaches the ceiling above my head. Even in this uncertain light I can see exactly the level the sea will reach – it has left its salted print all around the walls, near the ceiling. So I can see that the sea will reach a level that’s a good three feet over my head. If I could get out of this room and go up to the bell chamber itself, I should be above the sea’s level, but I can’t get out, so I shall drown.

  Before they dragged me up here, they nail
ed more of the oak planks over the floor downstairs. I fought them with every ounce of strength I had, but it was no use. If I start to think about what they nailed under those planks, I shall succumb to real madness. Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven, Keep me in temper …

  And now I am quoting from the Bard, and surely a sane man would not do so, even when facing his own certain death? But the thought of what lies beneath the floor far below me is enough to send the sanest man into madness.

  But if God wills that I am to become mad, let it not be until the end – that hour when the sea starts lapping and seeping through the stones … Will it be quick? They say drowning is an easy death as deaths go, but how can anyone really know?

  I believe the madness may already have begun to take my mind. As I write this – using a charcoal stick and one of the notebooks I always carry for my work; even as I write these words, I can hear the sound of soft, sweet singing quite close to me.

  I know it cannot be real. I know it will be part of the madness. But it’s so clear, so near.

  It will be a terrible irony if my madness takes the form of hearing music that can’t exist. Music has been my life – is it to accompany me to my death?

  And yet the people here delighted in the music I arranged for the choir in our monastery – and the music I played for our High Masses and feast days. The villagers had even started to walk up to our chapel to listen, which pleased Father Abbot.

  ‘Andrew,’ he said to me, ‘you are bringing these people to God through music.’

  The singing is louder now. I can hear the words and I understand them. I understood them on that night I first heard this music. I heard it emerge from its cobwebbed dimness, and I felt the life breathing into it. The music is known as ‘Thaisa’s Song’, although I have no idea if that is its real name. I made copies of it so that its beauty and its strangeness could be heard once more. I thought I was doing something good and useful. I didn’t know, not then, what the music really was. Now I do know.