The Bell Tower
by Irene W Collins
[this is the third in a four part series.
read The Town that Forgot It’s Name from the beginning.]
The Bell Tower
Every noon, the bell rings.
No one knows who rings it anymore.
The townspeople pause – hands midair, spoons hovering above soup, words frozen on their lips. The sound trembles through the streets like something alive, something remembering.
High above them, the bellkeeper dreams.
In his dream, the bell rings him. He feels it in his ribs first – the vibration humming through bone, deep and resonant. His lungs fill with the echo, and each breath tolls another hour into existence.
He no longer remembers when he began this work, or whether it was ever his. There’s only the rhythm: pull, release, reverberate. The town forgets its names, forgets its purpose, but still… at noon, the air shakes with worship.
Sometimes he wonders if the bell itself is dreaming him or if he’s merely the body it uses to make sound.
From his tower, he watches the square below: faces upturned, wordless, waiting.
The silence before the ringing is the purest thing he knows – a heartbeat before the world remembers it’s alive.
And when he wakes, his hands are blistered from the rope.
Though he hasn’t touched it in days.
Every Sunday, they gather beneath the tower – farmers, widows, the mayor in his gray silence. No one remembers when the gathering began, or why it endures, only that it must. Tradition holds them like gravity, gentle and absolute.
The tower looms like a vertebra of God. Wind gnaws at its stones, pigeons circle its steeple – yet still, at the appointed time, the bell moans.
The sound is neither chime nor note, but something wounded – half prayer, half machinery remembering purpose. It rolls through the crowd, into the soil, through the soles of their shoes, as if the earth itself were tolling for them.
No one speaks. They don’t dare. Language feels sacrilegious here. Instead, they bow their heads, letting vibration pass through them – an invisible baptism.
Children mimic the motion, giggling at first, until even laughter feels wrong.
When the final echo fades, the crowd disperses in silence, each step measured to the ghost of rhythm.
Above, the bellkeeper leans against the rope, exhausted but unsure why.
He can’t recall the scripture, the purpose, the saint, only that the ringing must go on.
Because without it, the town would fall still. And stillness terrifies them.
That same Sunday, as dusk melts into the cobblestones, a child tugs her mother’s sleeve.
“Why do we ring the bell?” she asks. Her voice is soft, but the question echoes like a crack in the air.
The mother hesitates. She wants to say because we always have, or because the mayor said so, or because the sound keeps us from forgetting.
Instead, she says the truest thing she’s ever known:
“Because silence is heavier.”
The child nods, not understanding but feeling the weight of it. She repeats the words as they walk home – a chant, a spell.
By morning, others are murmuring it too. In the bakery, the smithy, the empty square:
“Because silence is heavier.”
It becomes the town’s new scripture, passed mouth to mouth like a relic.
The bellkeeper hears it drifting up through his window, their small defiance against the void.
He smiles, and for the first time, when he pulls the rope, he swears the bell answers in words:
“Yes. Heavier.”
And the sound rings truer than memory, brighter than faith.
The storm comes without warning – a throat-clearing of heaven. The sky bruises purple; the air trembles.
Then, lightning finds the tower.
A white vein of fire splits the night, kissing the bell’s bronze lip. The sound that follows is not thunder, but something lonelier – a metallic sob that seems to tear the sky open wider.
When the smoke clears, the bell hangs cracked. It rings flat now, mournful, a sigh of metal remembering music.
The mayor… thin as paper, voice fragile as dust – declares that it must be repaired. But when he tries to order it, the word won’t come. “Re… re…” He falters, stammers. The people wait, but “restore” is gone.
So instead, they listen.
Rain seeps through their clothes. The bell moans its broken hymn, hollow but tender. One by one, they whisper the only name that feels right.
“Home.”
And in that naming, the word becomes both wound and comfort, a reminder that what’s cracked still carries sound.
Above them, the bellkeeper kneels, touching the fracture like a scar on a friend’s face. He does not weep. He only listens.
Days pass. The bell no longer rings on its own. The silence is vast, patient, almost kind.
Then, without command, someone hums.
A low note – trembling, human, imperfect. Another joins. Then another. Soon the entire square vibrates with sound, each voice slightly off-key but achingly alive.
The bellkeeper leans from the window, watching them – men, women, children, their mouths open not in worship, but in remembering. Their humming rises like mist, wraps around the tower, fills every hollow the bell once claimed.
He feels the vibration climb up the stones, into his chest.
He laughs, softly, the sound almost a toll itself. “We’ve become the ringing,” he says.
And it’s true. The people are the bell now, breath and bone reshaping silence into meaning.
The tower, relieved, seems to exhale. The cracked bell sways gently, not from rope or wind, but from resonance.
The hum lingers – long, golden, wordless, until it becomes one with quiet.A final vibration.
A shared heartbeat.
A note that blends with silence…
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