Eli March — Chapter 4: Don't Answer

The iron stair went up through the dark behind the organ, and the loft fell away under Eli's shoes one turn at a time.

Below him the nests kept rustling. Above him the false bell held a note that didn't finish. It wasn't ringing. It was waiting, the way a person waits when they've asked you something and you haven't said no.

Three marks glowed on the back of his hand. They gave off no heat. The stair did. The iron was warm under his palm, and the air thickened as he climbed: salt, wet paper, old bronze.

The stair ended in a square of storm light.

The belfry was smaller than the loft and older than the stair. Rain came through arches with no glass left in them. Salt crusted the stone floor, white in the cracks, and the wind moved it with a thin hiss. From a beam gone black with weather, the bell hung in the center of the room.

It was bronze, and it was wrong.

The throat had grown over. Salt furred the lip in a thick white rind, and inside the bowl the same soaked hymnal pages from the loft were packed into nests, gold leaf still caught on a few edges. The nests in there were empty. The pages moved anyway when the wind hit them, a dry riffle like a book thumbed open by someone looking for one line.

Eli stayed in the doorway with the rope on his shoulder and the knife in his fist.

He saw the chalk when he stepped in. Hard slanted capitals on the black beam just over the bell. The same hand as the board under his mother's house. The same hand as UP, and as LISTEN.

DON'T ANSWER.

The chalk was fresher than the salt. Someone had stood here and written it after the nests were already in the bell. They had known what it did.

Far below, the real bell rang.

The sound came up the stair small and true. Eli heard the water answer it, one step, under the loft. The notebook had said day three would put the water at the choir loft. He was above that. He meant to stay above it.

The false bell heard the real one.

Pages shifted in its throat. The bronze made a low wet sound, not a ring, a throat clearing. Then the unfinished note came back, warped, and sat in the belfry waiting for the other half.

Eli's mouth opened.

He shut it. His teeth clicked. The note in his chest died before it could get out, and the itch under the three lit marks went quiet, not gone.

He put his back to the stone and counted bells instead of answering them.

The next hour the real bell rang, and the water rose, and the false one asked again. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes on the chalk. The hour after that, rain thickened and the salt on the floor went slick. He ate nothing. He had nothing. The knife stayed in his fist until his fingers cramped, and then he moved it to his other hand without speaking.

By the gray thinning of the light, he could hear the loft. Not the nests. The water. It had reached the choir, the way the notebook promised, a slow pour over stone he had been standing on the night before. The almost-birds down there had gone quiet. Maybe they had moved higher. Maybe the water had taken the stalls. He didn't go look.

The false bell asked one more time.

It was louder with him standing under it. The packed pages fluttered like something trying to climb out of the bronze. The pitch sat in his teeth. His mouth opened again, and this time the shape of the answer was already there, the way you hum a song you hate because the person next to you won't stop. Salt tasted like the inside of a can.

On the back of his hand, the fourth mark began to itch.

Not heat yet. The moment before a burn, the skin deciding. The place under the other three went pale, then angry, bright at the edges.

DON'T ANSWER.

He bit down until he tasted blood and made no sound at all.

The false bell rang without him. The warped bronze went out through the arches over the drowned city, and far below, the loft answered with a dry rush of paper wings. Eli stayed against the stone. He didn't give it the rest.

The itch broke. The fourth mark lit, a small burn in a neat row, quick pain and then nothing.

Four.

He didn't say the number. The bell had wanted a voice, and he wasn't going to test what counted.

Rain came sideways through the arch above the salted bronze. Past it, the roofline showed black against the storm, higher than the belfry. The iron stair stopped here. The chalk on the beam hadn't changed. His hand was shaking, and he made it stop.

When the pages in the bell went still, he moved. Not back down. Up, along the wet stone toward the open arch, with the rope over his shoulder and the knife in his fist and four marks burning quiet on his hand.

Day four. He kept the words in his mouth.