Read Hollow Bell free: the opening chapter

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 archivist?"

"There's always a last archivist."

---

She wrote back that night. She asked about housing, about the condition of the archive, about access to records concerning the school's founding. She did not ask about the last archivist. She told herself it was because the question was rude. Really it was because she didn't want the answer to matter.

The reply came nine days later, in the same black hand.

Dear Dr. Ainsworth,

Your rooms will be in the old manor, on the second floor, adjoining the archive itself. You will want for nothing. The records are extensive and in disarray. As to our founding, you will have full access. I ask only that you complete the cataloguing before you draw conclusions.

I should mention one thing more. The winters here are long, and the school is empty of students in the off-season save for a few staff. You will find it quiet. Some find the quiet restful. Some do not. I trust you are the former sort.

We shall expect you the first week of September.

Yours, S. Blackwood

She read the line about the quiet three times. Some do not. It was the strangest sentence in a strange letter, a warning dressed up as a pleasantry. It should have put her off.

Instead she found herself at her desk that same night, pulling her notes off the shelf. New England founding charters. Suppressed town histories. The old, half-forgotten stories that towns brushed off their porches like snow. She worked until two in the morning. She had not worked past ten in almost a year.

That should have told her something too.

---

Martin drove her to the train station in Boston on the first of September. The morning was gray and warm, the tail end of a humid summer. He loaded her two suitcases and her crate of reference books onto a cart and stood with her on the platform.

"You'll write," he said.

"I'll write."

"Every week. If there's no phone, you write. If I don't hear from you in two weeks, I'm calling the state police."

"Martin."

"I'm serious." He took off his glasses and cleaned them, which was what he did when he was upset. "Margaret would kill me if I let you disappear into the woods."

The name landed the way it always landed. Eleanor looked down at her shoes. A crack ran through the platform concrete, and a weed had pushed up through it, thin and stubborn.

"I'm not disappearing," she said. "I'm working."

But the word stayed with her as the train pulled north. Disappear. She watched the city loosen and fall away, brick giving way to clapboard, clapboard giving way to trees. The other passengers got off one by one at stops that amounted to a bench and a sign. By the last hour she was nearly alone in the car.

She took the second letter out of her bag and read it again, though she had it by heart now. Some find the quiet restful. Some do not.

She thought about Margaret. She thought about the year she'd lost, the gray water of it, twelve months where she'd moved through her sister's house like something half-sunk. She had not been able to work. She had barely been able to read. The letter from Blackwood was the first thing in a year that had felt like a hand reaching down to her. Even if the hand belonged to a stranger. Even if it was pulling her somewhere cold.

A commission. An untouched archive. A cracked bell on the letterhead.

She told Martin it was an opportunity. That was true. But there was another truth under it, one she had not said out loud, even to herself, until the train crossed into Vermont and the hills rose up on every side like walls.

She didn't care what the place was hiding.

She wanted to find out.

---

The train slowed. Through the window she saw a platform no longer than a porch, a wooden sign with peeling paint. The conductor came through the car, an old man with a face like a folded map.

"Harrow Creek," he called. Then he saw her gathering her bag, and something crossed his face. Not surprise exactly. Something quieter. "You're for the school, then."

"Yes. Blackwood Academy."

"Mm." He looked at her suitcases, her crate of books. "Long way up that road."

He didn't say anything else. He didn't have to. He helped her cases down onto the platform, glanced once up at the hills that crowded the little station, and then he climbed back aboard.

The train pulled away. Eleanor stood alone on the empty platform with her luggage at her feet.

The sign said HARROW CREEK, and under that, smaller, a number she took to be the population. It was low. Lower than she'd expected. There was no one to meet her. There was no station building at all, just the bench, the sign, and a dirt road that ran between a shuttered general store and a white church with a leaning steeple. Beyond them, the hills. Beyond the hills, hidden somewhere in all that dark green, a school with no telephone, and an archive no one had ever touched.

It smelled of pine and wet stone.

Somewhere far off, so faint she might have imagined it, a bell rang once.

It did not sound like the church bell. The church bell would have been bright. This was lower. Older. A single note that hung in the air longer than any note should, and when it faded, the quiet it left behind felt less like an absence of sound and more like something that had been waiting for her to listen.

She stood listening for a long moment, but it did not come again.

She was still standing there when a truck came down the dirt road, moving slowly, the way vehicles move in places where there is no reason to hurry. It was an old Ford, the green paint gone chalky with age, and it pulled up beside the platform and idled. The man behind the wheel leaned across and pushed the passenger door open.

"Dr. Ainsworth?"

"Yes."

"Hale. I keep the grounds up at the school." He was perhaps sixty, maybe older, with the kind of face the years had worn smooth rather than lined. He wore a canvas jacket despite the mildness of the afternoon. "The headmaster sent me down. He thought the train might be late. They generally are."

He loaded her cases into the truck bed without being asked, handling the crate of books with a care that surprised her, setting it flat and wedging it between the suitcases so it would not slide.

"You read much, Mr. Hale?"

"Not those." He shut the tailgate. "But I know what's heavy."

They drove. The road climbed almost at once, switching back and forth through stands of birch and pine, and the town, if you could call it that, fell away below within minutes. Eleanor watched out the window. She had spent her professional life in rooms, in libraries, in the company of paper. The sheer volume of trees unsettled her in a way she could not have explained. There were so many of them, and they stood so close to the road, and the light under them was green and dim like light through water.

"You're the first one he's brought up in a while," Hale said. "Specialist, I mean."

"There have been others?"

"Years back. Before my time, most of them." He took a switchback without slowing, an easy habit of the wheel. "Man from Yale, I heard. Woman from Boston. They didn't stay long."

"Why not?"

"Couldn't say. School has its ways."

He said it the way a man says it is going to rain, without emphasis, and Eleanor understood that she would get nothing more from him on the subject. She let it go. There would be time.

Instead she watched the hills and thought about what had brought her here. Not the salary, though it was generous. Not the archive alone, though an unprocessed collection was the kind of thing historians dreamed about and almost never found. It was the name on the letterhead, and what the name meant to her.

She had published exactly one article on the Harrow papers, in a journal with a circulation of perhaps four hundred. It concerned a cache of letters held by a historical society in Concord, correspondence from a woman named Patience Harrow, dated 1843 to 1846, describing her preparations to found a school in the Vermont hills. The letters stopped in October of 1846. Mid-sentence, nearly. Eleanor had spent two years trying to discover why, and had found nothing, no death record, no obituary, no trace of Patience Harrow after that autumn. It was as if the woman had walked into the hills and the hills had closed over her.

No one else had seemed to care. The article had been read, she suspected, by eleven people.

But Silas Blackwood had read it. He had kept it. He had written her name in that black hand and offered her the one thing she wanted most in the world, which was the rest of the story. His school bore the name of the family Patience Harrow had written about. His archive, unopened to outside eyes since 1846, might hold the answer to where she had gone.

She had almost declined. That was the part Martin never understood. She had sat with the first letter for three days before answering, and her reluctance had nothing to do with the remoteness or the missing telephone. It was the seal. The bell, and the crack running through it from crown to lip, rendered in careful detail, as though the crack were the point. As though the crack were the thing being commemorated.

She had stared at that seal and felt, briefly, the way she had felt in the worst of the gray year, standing at the window of Margaret's spare room at three in the morning. The world had a door in it somewhere. Some doors opened inward.

Then she had written back accepting the commission, because she was a historian, and historians do not leave sentences unfinished.

"There." Hale touched the windshield with one finger.

The road had levelled onto a ridge, and the trees drew back, and Eleanor saw the school for the first time.

It stood alone at the far end of a long meadow, gray stone, four stories, with a steep slate roof and a chapel built against its western flank. No other buildings. No road beyond it. Behind it the ridge dropped away into a valley full of shadow, though the sun was still hours from setting. The windows faced the meadow in long rows, and something about their arrangement, their evenness, made the whole structure seem less built than assembled, patient, like a thing that had been sitting in that spot long before there was a school to excuse its presence.

Above the chapel rose a small open belfry.

It was empty.

"There is no bell," Eleanor said.

"No, ma'am." Hale turned the truck into the drive. "Not anymore."

She waited for him to go on. He did not. The truck rolled between two stone pillars that leaned slightly inward, whether from age or design she could not tell, and the meadow grass stood high and unmoving on either side, and the school grew larger and larger in the windshield until it filled the whole of it.

Hale stopped before the front steps. A man stood at the top of them, waiting. He was tall and straight, dressed in dark gray, his hair white and cut close, and even at a distance Eleanor could feel the quality of his stillness. It was the stillness of someone who had been standing there for some time. It was the stillness of someone who had heard the truck on the road long before it came into view.

"Headmaster Blackwood," Hale said.

Eleanor got out. The air was colder here than it had been at the station, a good five degrees, though the meadow was open to the sky. She looked up at the rows of windows, at the empty belfry, at the door standing open behind the headmaster like a held breath.

She thought of the sound she had heard from the platform. The low note. The long hanging of it.

She thought: there is no bell.

Then she picked up her satchel and climbed the steps to begin her work.

The sample ends here.