The Bell Without a Rope
They left Mercy while the lamps still burned in the upstairs windows.
Hollis rode ahead with his shotgun across the saddle. Mary Jane followed him, her tool bag secured behind her. Eddie brought Jack last.
At the edge of town, he looked back.
Clara stood on the boardinghouse porch with her account book beneath one arm. Through the open door he could see Nathan sitting at the table, listening while Esther read from a sheet of paper.
Clara raised her free hand.
Eddie returned the gesture.
Then the road bent, and the buildings disappeared behind the ridge.
***
The old quarry track climbed through stone that looked black beneath the red moon.
In places, the ruts had worn deep enough to catch a wagon axle. Elsewhere, loose rock covered the road entirely. Hollis slowed at every turn, examining the ground by lantern light.
They found the newer track where the old man had said they would.
Half of it had fallen into the gorge.
Mary Jane dismounted and walked to the edge.
A pale strip of road continued on the opposite side of the washout. Between them lay thirty feet of empty air.
“How long ago?” Hollis asked.
She crouched beside a broken root.
“Not last night.”
Eddie looked down into the cut.
Brush had grown through the fallen earth. A rusted wheel rim lay half buried near the bottom.
Yet across the surviving strip of road, coming toward them, ran a line of small footprints.
Lucy’s.
They ended at the far edge.
On their side, they began again.
Hollis took off his hat.
“She said he helped her.”
Eddie studied the distance.
Mary Jane stood.
“We take the powder-house road.”
Neither man argued.
***
The powder house had lost its roof.
Its walls remained, thick stone crowded with weeds. Someone had nailed a board across the doorway long ago, but one end had pulled free and hung at an angle.
Beyond it, the track narrowed between two shoulders of rock.
They led the horses through.
The quarry opened suddenly.
A broad face of pale stone rose above a pit filled with dark water. Terraces had been cut into the wall, each connected by a broken wooden stair. Rusted rail emerged from the dirt and vanished beneath a fallen loading platform.
The camp stood on the western side.
A cookhouse. Three bunkhouses. A row of smaller dwellings.
The bell frame rose between the office and the storehouse.
The bell still hung inside it.
Eddie stopped.
It was larger than he had expected, dark bronze beneath a crust of weather. One side bore a pale scar where something had struck it years before.
No rope hung from the wheel.
Hollis followed his gaze.
“Could’ve broken.”
Mary Jane was already looking at the ground.
“There’s none here.”
A lamp burned on the office steps.
Beside it sat a man in a brown coat.
He had a closed book across his knees.
“You came early,” he said.
***
Hollis kept the horses between himself and the office while Eddie and Mary Jane tied theirs to a length of surviving rail.
The man watched without rising.
His lamp was hooded on three sides. Through the open face, the light lay steady across the steps.
It made no smoke.
Eddie approached only far enough to see the man clearly.
Clara had been right about his face.
There was nothing remarkable in it. A narrow mouth. Brown eyes. A faint hollow beneath one cheek. Eddie thought he might have passed him at a freight office and forgotten him before reaching the next street.
“You sent a child down that road,” Eddie said.
“I brought her past the washout.”
“You sent her the rest of the way alone.”
“She needed to arrive before the bell.”
“Why?”
The man looked toward Hollis.
The marshal had dismounted. His shotgun was held low, but it was in his hands.
“Is that necessary?”
“Answer him,” Hollis said.
The man closed his fingers around the edge of the book.
“The count follows arrival.”
Mary Jane glanced toward the bell.
“Arrival where?”
“Where they are received.”
“Clara’s house?”
“The stable first. Then the house.”
Eddie stepped closer.
“What’s happening to their memories?”
“They’re losing their attachment to the places that held them.”
“You wrote that they’d forget.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know?”
The man’s eyes moved to Eddie.
“Because it happened before.”
***
They stood in the yard between the abandoned buildings.
No one accepted the man’s invitation to come inside.
He gave his name as Orrin Shaw.
Hollis asked whether that was his real name.
“It’s the one I use.”
“Then it’ll do for the report.”
Shaw looked at the shotgun again.
Mary Jane had taken out her notebook.
“What is your work?” she asked.
“I keep the receiving register.”
“For whom?”
“For this crossing.”
Eddie looked around the empty quarry.
“This is a quarry.”
“It was.”
“When did that change?”
Shaw did not answer immediately.
Mary Jane waited with her pencil poised.
At last he said, “When enough people died here that the road stopped ending at the camp.”
The wind moved through the broken cookhouse.
Somewhere inside, a loose sheet of metal lifted and settled.
Eddie thought of the lower workings at Ash Springs. Men below a flooded passage. A door older than the machinery that had disturbed it.
He let the comparison pass without trusting it.
“Did you bring me back?” he asked.
“No.”
“Lucy said you meant to wake me.”
“I meant to call you.”
“That isn’t what you told her.”
“No,” Shaw said. “It isn’t.”
Hollis shifted his grip.
“Try getting it right this time.”
Shaw looked toward the moon above the quarry face.
“I was told your name would reach someone who could carry a road without losing himself in it. I made the call. You didn’t answer.”
“So you kept trying,” Mary Jane said.
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
Shaw lowered his gaze.
Eddie looked at the bell.
Seven people in Clara’s house.
“Who answered instead?”
“The ones nearest the opening.”
“Dead people.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know that would happen?”
“Not the first time.”
The silence afterward was long enough for Jack to stamp against a stone.
Eddie moved another step toward him.
“But the second?”
Shaw held his ground.
“I thought you would come when you heard.”
***
Mary Jane walked away before Eddie could speak.
She went directly to the bell frame.
Shaw turned.
“I wouldn’t touch that.”
She stopped beneath it and looked up.
“Then tell me what touching it does.”
“It isn’t the bell itself.”
“What is?”
“The fitting.”
A square iron plate had been bolted into the crossbeam above the bell. It was newer than the timber around it.
Mary Jane studied the joints.
Eddie could see where old wood had been cut to accept the plate. Fresh tool marks showed pale along one edge.
“You installed it,” she said.
Shaw said nothing.
She looked back.
“Recently.”
“Yes.”
Eddie came to stand beside her.
From below, the fitting appeared to be a simple replacement bearing. But a thin brass strip ran from it along the beam, then down the inside of one post.
At shoulder height, the strip disappeared into a wooden box.
The box had a lock.
Mary Jane held out her hand toward Shaw.
“The key.”
“That won’t restore their memories.”
“It might prevent an eighth person.”
Shaw’s mouth tightened.
Hollis stepped forward.
“The key.”
This time, Shaw reached into his coat.
***
Inside the box was a mechanism small enough to fit on a kitchen table.
A toothed wheel. A spring drum. A narrow slot beneath a brass pressure arm.
Eddie leaned closer.
Someone had inserted a strip of paper into the slot.
Not ordinary paper.
It was stiff with age and dark along the edges, as though cut from a page that had once been soaked.
On it, in black ink, was his name.
**EDWARD BONE**
Beneath that, in a different hand:
**ASH SPRINGS**
For several seconds, he heard nothing at all.
Mary Jane touched his elbow.
“Eddie.”
He drew breath.
“Where did you get that?”
Shaw stood beyond the open box.
“It was supplied with the fitting.”
“By whom?”
“A man who knew the work.”
“What man?”
“I never heard his name.”
Hollis made a short, disbelieving sound.
Shaw looked at him.
“Men have bought powder from this office without giving me their names. They’ve bought freight space, passage, bodies from collapsed workings. A name is not always part of the transaction.”
“It is now,” Hollis said.
Eddie kept looking at the strip.
The lettering was familiar.
Not because he knew the hand.
Because he had seen those two words written together above a place where he should have remained.
Mary Jane examined the pressure arm.
“Can we remove it?”
Shaw hesitated.
“That would end the call.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
“The opening would remain.”
Eddie turned toward him.
“And you needed me badly enough to keep pulling people through.”
“I needed someone who could close it.”
“You had seven chances to stop.”
Shaw looked away.
***
Mary Jane would not let Eddie touch the strip.
She took a pair of fine pliers from her tool bag and inspected the mechanism before placing them against the brass arm.
“Hold the wheel.”
Eddie braced it with a screwdriver.
She eased the pressure off the paper.
The spring drum turned a fraction beneath his hand.
Above them, the bell moved.
Hollis raised his head sharply.
Eddie tightened his grip.
“Easy,” Mary Jane said.
“I’ve got it.”
She drew the strip free.
The wheel pressed against the screwdriver once.
Then the pressure faded.
No bell sounded.
Mary Jane set the strip on a clean cloth and folded it carefully.
For a moment, nothing else changed.
The red moon stayed above the quarry.
The lamp continued burning on the steps.
Then a thin sound came from the row of houses.
A door dragging across a floor.
Shaw closed his eyes.
Eddie turned.
At the far end of the row, one door stood open.
Blue paint clung to its lower half.
***
Hollis remained with Shaw.
Mary Jane and Eddie crossed the yard.
The little house leaned slightly toward the gorge. Its chimney had collapsed, leaving brick scattered through the weeds. One window was boarded. The other held a single pane of glass, clouded almost white.
Eddie stopped at the threshold.
The door had swollen against the floorboards.
A dark scuff marked its bottom edge where someone had kicked it repeatedly.
He thought of Lucy sitting beneath the quilt.
*Papa kicks the bottom.*
Inside, a table stood beside the window.
One leg had been repaired with a piece of packing crate.
Two shelves hung above a cold stove. On the lower shelf sat three cups and a cracked blue bowl.
The house was dusty.
It was not empty.
Mary Jane stood beside him.
“Look at the table.”
A spoon lay near the edge.
Beside it, a shallow circle marked where a bowl had stood.
The dust inside the circle was thinner than the dust around it.
Eddie entered carefully.
There were small footprints on the floor.
They began beside a narrow bed in the corner.
Lucy had got up here.
He followed the prints to the table, then the stove, then the doorway.
“She came home first,” he said.
Mary Jane knelt beside the bed.
A second button boot lay underneath it.
She did not touch it.
“Eddie.”
He turned.
On the wall above the bed, marks had been cut into a doorpost.
A child’s height measured in short, uneven lines.
Beside the highest one, somebody had written:
**LUCY — 9**
Below it was a date.
Eddie read it twice.
Then he took out his pencil and copied it.
Mary Jane watched him.
“What is it?”
“The year.”
He showed her.
Lucy had died long before Eddie was born.
***
Behind the stove, they found a small tin box.
Its lid had rusted into place. Mary Jane worked it loose while Eddie checked the shelves.
Inside lay sewing needles wrapped in cloth, two buttons, a receipt for flour, and a folded letter.
The letter had been addressed to Anna Vale.
Eddie did not open it at once.
Instead, he looked toward the little bed.
“We should take it to Lucy.”
Mary Jane nodded.
“With the shoe.”
She wrapped both separately.
As she lifted the boot, something beneath it caught the lamplight.
A small brass disc.
Eddie crouched.
A number had been stamped into its face.
**8**
He did not reach for it.
Mary Jane leaned beside him.
“Quarry check?”
“Maybe.”
He turned the lamp slightly.
The disc lay in a clean patch of floor.
Around it, the dust had been disturbed by the same small footprints they had followed into the house.
Lucy had stepped over it.
Or someone had put it there after she left.
From the yard came Hollis’s voice.
“Bone.”
Eddie stood.
The marshal called again.
This time, louder.
***
Shaw was on his feet beside the office steps.
His book lay open on the ground.
Hollis held him by the coat.
“I didn’t touch it,” the marshal said.
The lamp had gone out.
Eddie looked from the dark glass to the book.
Seven names filled the left-hand page.
He recognized Nathan Pell.
Esther Bell.
Benjamin Bell.
At the bottom:
**LUCY VALE**
Across from them, on the right-hand page, an eighth line had appeared.
The ink was wet enough to shine.
**ANNA VALE**
Mary Jane stopped beside Eddie.
“The fitting’s disconnected.”
Shaw stared at the page.
“I know.”
“Then what’s making the entry?”
No answer.
From inside the little blue-doored house came a dull thump.
Something heavy settling onto a wooden floor.
Eddie turned.
A woman stood in the doorway.
She wore a faded dress and a work apron. One hand rested against the frame as though she had stood too quickly.
For a moment, she looked across the yard without understanding any of it.
Then her gaze settled on the small boot in Mary Jane’s hand.
“Where,” she asked, “is my daughter?”
Hello World!!! 3