Eli March — Chapter 6: Day Five

He didn't sleep. He sat under the oilcloth with the cracked disc against his chest and listened to the water climb.

It took the belfry in the dark. He heard it go one bell at a time: a soft slap against stone, then quiet, then the next. Sometime before the light came back, the slapping stopped. What replaced it was deeper and hollow, water lapping at itself in a closed stone room.

When the gray came, he crawled to the gap in the roof and looked down.

The belfry floor was gone. Black water filled the room halfway to the arches, flat as a tabletop, and the salt that had crusted the stone floated on it in pale rafts. The bell still hung from its beam above all of it. Its lip cleared the water by less than his own height. The pages in its throat stirred whenever the wind came through.

Five marks glowed on the back of his hand. He watched them for a long time. None of them itched. There was no place left on the row for anything to itch.

Five days. Not four. Not six.

Far below, deeper than he'd ever heard it, the real bell rang. Day five.

The false bell heard it. The pages shifted, and the warped note rose out of the drowned room, up through the broken battens, and found his teeth. Then it waited.

Eli kept his mouth shut. He looked at the disc in his hand, and then at the bell, and he thought he understood what the camp had been for.

Somebody had pried this glass out of something. Somebody had wrapped it in a blanket, carried it up here, and camped over the bell, watching it the way he had watched it all yesterday. They had stood on that beam with chalk in their hand. They had known what the bell did. Maybe they had known that not answering wasn't the only way to make it stop.

Leave something if you can. I couldn't.

He didn't know that was what the note meant. He didn't know anything. But it was day five, and the board under his mother's house said not six. If he was going to try, it had to be today.

He waited for the next bell to make sure he had the hour right. Then he took the rope off his shoulder.

The iron hooks in the slate held when he hung his whole weight from them. He tied the rope to the nearer one with the only knot he trusted and then tied it again. He tested it the way the notebook would have wanted, and then he tested it again the way his mom would have. He pushed the knife through his belt. The disc went into his right hand, the marked one, because that hand had never let go of anything yet.

Then he lowered himself feet-first through the gap.

Broken battens scraped his ribs. Rain ran down the rope and into his sleeves. He came down past the black beam, close enough to touch the chalk, and the letters were still sharp. DON'T ANSWER. His sneakers dangled over the water. Cold came up off it like the breath of an open freezer.

The bell hung six feet away and a little below him. It might as well have been across the city.

Up close it was worse than he remembered. The salt rind on the lip had thickened overnight. The pages packed into the throat had swollen gray and soft, crammed so tight he couldn't see any bronze behind them. Somewhere in there hung the tongue that rang it. He didn't have a plan for the tongue. He had a broken piece of glass that stayed warm in the rain, and he had a rope.

He planted his feet on the wet stone beside the arch and kicked off.

The first swing came up short. His fingers brushed salt and nothing else, and then the rope dragged him back and slammed his shoulder into the wall. He hung there and breathed through his nose until the room stopped ringing in his ears. Below him the water had crept up to lick the bottom of the bell's lip.

The real bell rang.

Pages shivered in the throat. The bronze made its low wet sound, the throat clearing. The almost-note started to gather.

Eli kicked off again, harder.

This time he reached it. He swung in under the lip with his arm out, and his hand went into the bell up to the wrist, into pages that were cold and slick and moving. He felt them close around his knuckles like a mouth. He shoved the disc in deep, past the paper, until its rim grated on bronze.

The crack in the glass flared. Red light came through the pages and lit the inside of the bell, and for one second he could see the whole throat: the wet curve of the metal, the packed paper, and the dark weight of the tongue hanging an inch from his fingers.

The false note faltered. It didn't stop, but it caught, like a voice that had swallowed wrong.

Then the rope reached the end of its arc and began to pull him back.

He felt it at the same time, under his skin. All five marks went hot together, not a burn but a pull, the same pull his hand had felt on the chair's armrest. It felt like a question had been asked and something in him had already answered.

DON'T FIGHT IT, the board had said.

He fought it for one more inch. He jammed the disc deeper with the heel of his hand, felt it wedge between bronze and paper, and let go.

The belfry stretched away from him like a reflection in a spoon. The beam, the chalk, and the drowned arches all pulled long and thin. The bell went small and bright and far away, with a red glow somewhere in its throat. Or it might have been a red glow falling out of it toward the water. He couldn't tell. The rope went slack in a hand he could no longer feel.

He never saw whether it held.