![]() ![]() ![]() He’d choked up several times while relaying Rob’s story, and the way his shoulders were slumped reminded me of the way Rob’s parents had looked at their son’s funeral. I had so many more questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t think Fletch could take it. “So you believe him?” I tried to say it in as comforting a tone as I could, but I think it came out a little accusatory. “He ran and swam and ran and swam and didn’t look back again until he was in the car.” Fletch put his face in his hands. He took two more as he lay there on the ground, before realizing that although he hadn’t a clue what time it was, he couldn’t be there when the bells chimed. The fresh air felt alien in his lungs, as if it were his first breath. He tore his way through the window and collapsed on the ground. Rob scrambled up the twisting stairs on all fours like a dog. With what little control he had over his frenzied mind, bolted for the surface, and an escape from the moist pit. His flailing limbs struck a step, the first of many. Until he hit the wall, and even then he didn’t stop but pushed against it with all his strength, hoping to retreat further. Like a wounded animal, he crawled and clawed his way back. Rob shrank and shriveled, collapsing to the floor. He saw her face as she ran the endless race. He saw her, alive and dead, the blush of youth, the maggots of decay, twitch and scream and moan as her body was pierced by countless bayonets. He’d sat there in the dark, his unseeing eyes transfixed by the clockmaker’s wife as she was dragged on her post through the twirling gauntlet of Union automatons. The bells rang again, if only inside Rob, as his mind’s eye showed him the endless dance. His fingers were in the eye socket of a skull. Rods? Dowels? His probing fingers traced up the object’s outer edge until he felt something he could identify. The cloth hung loose over something hard that his hands couldn’t identify. ![]() It only extended out to about the width of his shoulders. What was it? He shook as he reached out, letting his hands land once more on the chest-high object in front of him. His outstretched fingers recoiled from the soft surface they encountered. Instead he found nothing, forcing him to shuffle deeper into the impermeable darkness. He hoped he’d find a wall or a banister to the stairs, anything that would give him a clue about his surroundings. He held his hands out in front of him and groped blindly. It gave him the impression he was sitting Indian-style inside of a living thing, like Jonah in the whale. ![]() He could feel wood, dank and rotting, pressed against his bare calves. Once the silence returned, Rob strained in vain to see. As the bells continued to chime, he pulled his shuddering body down the stairs, deeper and deeper into the enveloping darkness within, until he lost himself once more in the ethereal sounds and their radiating warmth. They gave way and he squirmed his way inside. He pushed against the slats of the window. Unable to resist their song, yet too overwhelmed by their warmth to walk, Rob crawled to the Spire like an infant to its mother. Framed by the dead trees and bathed in moonlight, it called. Its white paint was oddly untouched by age. In the center of a grove of dead trees, the Spire jutted out from the ground like a pike set to receive a charge. The Island was nearly two miles long and a half mile across, he could search it all night and never find a damn thing. As the bells’ siren call faded in his mind, he began to doubt himself. He stumbled barefoot through the woods, increasingly aware of how dark it was beneath the trees. Rob emerged from the reservoir onto the rocky bank of the second, and far larger, island. He ran to the shore and dove into the waters. He’d hear the bells, feel them, up close. In an hour he’d be there, he’d be standing before the Spire. He rose on unsteady legs, sure of only one thing. He could hear nothing but frogs and crickets. Rob found himself shivering on the ground. The bells rolled back, like the ocean at low tide. He fell to his knees, letting their sensation, their warmth, wash over him. Being so much closer now, they were even clearer. He’d been searching fruitlessly for nearly 40 minutes when he heard them. ![]()
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