Hollow Bell: Blackwood's Echo

Shadows Fall: The Drive | First Impressions

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, tucked inside a second envelope, as if the first one had not been trusted to carry it alone.

Eleanor Ainsworth found it on the hall table of her sister's house, where she had been living, if you could call it living, for the past eleven months. She almost didn't open it. Most of her mail these days was sympathy cards from people she'd never met, or bills addressed to a woman who no longer existed.

But this envelope was different. Heavy cream paper. Her name written by hand, in ink so black it looked wet. No return address. Just a small embossed crest in the corner. A bell. A bell with a crack down its side.

She carried it to the kitchen and slit it open with a butter knife.

Dear Dr. Ainsworth, it began.

The trustees of Blackwood Academy have read your monograph on the lost parish records of northern New England. We would like to offer you a position for the coming academic year. The school requires an archivist of unusual patience and discretion. Our records go back to 1846 and have never been properly catalogued. Many are in poor condition. Some are in Latin. Some, frankly, we cannot identify at all.

The salary is generous. Room and board are provided. The school stands in the hills above Harrow Creek, Vermont, some distance from the nearest train stop. You should know this before you accept. We are very far from anything.

Please reply to the post office box below. We do not have a telephone.

Yours, Silas Blackwood, Headmaster

Eleanor read it twice. Then she read it a third time, standing at the kitchen counter with her tea going cold.

No telephone. In 1991. She was a historian. She knew what that kind of sentence usually meant. It meant the place was broke, or hiding something, or both.

She should have thrown it away.

She showed the letter to Martin that evening. Martin was her brother-in-law. He had been kind to her in a careful, exhausted way ever since the funeral, the way you might be kind to a dog that had been hit by a car and might bite.

"Blackwood," he said. He turned the page over as if the answer might be on the back. "Never heard of it."

"It's a boarding school. Vermont."

"Those hills are full of boarding schools. Half of them are shut down." He set the letter on the counter and looked at her. "Ellie. You don't have to take a job right now."

"It's a commission. It's exactly my field. Parish records, founding documents, nineteenth century." She heard her own voice pick up speed the way it did when she was building a case. "Do you know how rare that is? A private archive, unprocessed? Nobody's touched it. Nobody's published a word."

"Nobody's touched it," Martin said. "In almost a hundred and fifty years. Doesn't that strike you as strange?"

"It strikes me as an opportunity."

"It strikes me as a place that doesn't want to be found." He rubbed a hand over his face. "There's no phone, Eleanor. They don't have a phone. What if something happens?"

Something had already happened. That was the whole reason she was standing in his kitchen in her dead sister's bathrobe at seven in the evening, drinking tea she didn't taste.

She didn't say that. She said, "It's a year. Nine months, really. I'll catalogue their papers, I'll write it up, and I'll come home with a book."

Martin looked at her for a long moment. He was a good man. He had loved Margaret. She could see him deciding, again, not to say whatever he was actually thinking.

"At least write back and ask questions," he said finally. "Ask about the town. Ask why the last archivist left."

"You think there was a last ...