The Hollow Beneath the Bell: The Keepers Daughter

The pages crackled beneath Maren's fingertips, dry as birch bark, and the ink had faded to a rust-brown that bled at the edges. She had spread the journal across Edris's kitchen table, the same scarred oak surface where he had eaten porridge every morning of their shared childhood, and the familiarity of the wood grain almost made her forget why she was here.

Almost.

She turned the page with the care of someone handling a wound.

Edris's handwriting shifted between the entries, growing cramped in the early passages and loose in the later ones, as though the hand that formed the letters had forgotten the shape of restraint. He had not been a man given to flourishes. He had written the way he spoke, plainly, with the soft consonants of the Yorkshire coast, and Maren could hear him in every line. The sound of him saying her name lived between the words.

She found the passage she had been searching for near the back of the book, where the binding had begun to separate from the spine.

Great-Aunt Edie returned to Dernford in the spring of 1962, he had written. The fishermen still speak of the year she came back, though few will say what they remember. I found the record in the church registry, in Father Merton's careful script, and I cross-referenced it with the shipping logs at the harbour office. The dates match. She arrived on the morning tide, three weeks after her father's body was carried down from the headland.

Maren smoothed the page flat. The lamplight caught the surface of the photograph tucked into the margin, a small black-and-white print of a man in a wool coat standing at the base of a white tower. The lighthouse. Its lantern room was dark, and the man held a peaked cap in one hand. His face was turned slightly away from the camera, as though he had been caught mid-thought.

Keeper Enoch Ashworth, the caption read in faded pencil. Found at his post. Bell in hand. Lungs full of brine.

She read the words twice, and her throat tightened around a sound she did not release.

Edris had written more.

The official record, signed by the coastguard and the rector, said he had died of a seizure. That was the word they used. A seizure, as though the body had simply forgotten how to continue. But the bell, Maren. They never explained the bell. Enoch Ashworth was a keeper for thirty-one years, and in all that time he never rang the bell at anything other than the appointed hour, because the bell was not his to ring. The bell was a warning. It was never to be used except in the gravest emergency, and yet there he was, dead on the flagstones with the rope still wrapped around his wrist, and the brass cold against his chest.

She turned the page.

Great-Aunt Edie was seventeen when they brought her father's body down the cliff path. She had been raised by an aunt in Whitby since she was nine, sent away because her mother had died in the influenza epidemic and Enoch could not raise a girl alone on the headland. She returned the moment the telegram reached her. She wore black for the rest of her life, according to the woman who sold me tea at the post office. She never spoke of the night her father died, not to the rector, not to her husband when she married, not to her daughters. She took a room above the chandler's shop and worked the till until her hands gave out.

The kettle on Edris's stove began to whistle, thin and high, and Maren rose to lift it from the heat. The kitchen smelled of dust and cold tea and the faint brine that crept through every window in Dernford, even on a still evening. She poured water over the leaves she had measured into the pot, and the steam curled up to meet her face.

When she sat again, she read on.

I went to the headland at dusk. I wanted to see the lighthouse from below, the way the keeper would have seen it when he climbed the path at the end of his shift. The wind was off the sea, and it carried a sound I could not place, a low rhythmic tone, almost like breathing. I stood at the foot of the cliff and listened until the dark came down. The lantern had not been lit in years. The tower stands empty. And yet the sound continued, beneath the wind, beneath the waves, as though something inside the stone was keeping time.

She closed the journal and rested her hand upon the cover.

Outside, the harbour bell rang the half-hour, a single clear note that travelled across the slate roofs and the empty street and faded into the black air above the water. Maren listened until the silence after it felt heavier than the sound had been.

The photograph of Enoch Ashworth looked up at her from the table, his face still turned away, his cap held loosely at his side, and the lighthouse behind him pale against a sky the colour of unpolished tin. She thought of her brother walking that same path in his heavy coat, standing where his great-grandfather had stood, breathing the same salt air, listening for something he could not name.

She thought of the brass bell, cold against a dead man's chest.

She thought of her great-aunt returning to a village that had taken her father from her, wearing black for the rest of her life, never speaking of the night the bell had been rung at the wrong hour for the wrong reason.

The lamp on the table flickered, though the air in the room was still.

Maren opened the journal again and turned to the next page, and the handwriting there was looser, the letters leaning as though they had been written in a hurry, or in the dark.

The handwriting on the next page was not Edris's.

Maren knew her brother's script the way she knew her own breath, the long-tailed e's he had learned from their mother, the way his capital T always leaned to the left as though listening. This was different. The letters were smaller, cramped, pressed close to the page as though the writer had been cold, or afraid, or both. The ink was a darker brown than the rest of the journal, and it caught the lamplight strangely, as though there was something gritty mixed into it.

She turned back a page, then forward again, and confirmed what she had already half-known. The new hand began halfway down the page she had just finished, and it continued for the next six pages without interruption. Edris's own writing picked up again after that, shakier than before, with long pauses between the lines where the nib had been lifted and set down again, and again, as though the writer could not decide whether to go on.

She bent closer to read.

The name of the keeper is not spoken in winter. The name of the keeper is spoken only by the keeper, and by the one who keeps the keeper, and by the door that will not open until it has heard itself named three times in the proper voice. I learned this from the woman at the well. Her hands were stained with yarrow and her eyes were the colour of river water and she told me she had been waiting for me since before I was born.

She said: you have his mouth.

I did not ask whose.

Maren turned the page.

The cottage at the end of the lane is not empty. It has not been empty since the year my great-grandfather lit the lamp that had been waiting for him in the tower, though he did not know until afterward that the lamp had been waiting, and not he who had lit it. The woman at the well said: the light you see is not the light you think you see. She said: there are more of them than there are of you, and they have been here longer, and they are more patient.

I went to the cottage at the end of the lane. I stood at the gate. I did not go in.

Yet.

She sat back in the chair and let the breath leave her lungs in a long, slow thread.

The woman at the well. The yarrow on her hands. The cottage at the end of the lane that was not empty.

Maren set the journal down on the table, open to the page she had been reading, and looked across the room to the window. The glass was black with the night behind it, and her own reflection hung there like a face in dark water, pale and watchful and not quite her own. She raised one hand, slowly, and the figure in the glass raised its hand at the same moment, and for an instant she could not be certain which of them had moved first.

She lowered her hand. The figure lowered its. She did not look again.

The kettle on the hob beside the range had begun to tick, the metal cooling in the quiet of the room, and the sound was so small and so close that she could feel it in her teeth. She rose, crossed to the range, lifted the kettle, and poured the water into the teapot she had left ready on the slab. The steam rose in a thin white column and vanished into the air above her head. She set the kettle down, found a cup, and poured.

The tea was too weak. She drank it anyway, standing at the range with both hands around the cup, letting the warmth soak into her fingers. The cottage was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air. It was the cold of a house that had been empty for too long, the cold of rooms that had forgotten what it was to be lived in. She could feel it pressing against her back as she stood at the range, the way the dark water of a deep pool presses against the legs of a bather who has waded in too far.

She went back to the table, and to the journal, and to the cramped handwriting of the woman who had spoken to her brother at the well.

The next pages were harder to read. The ink had been applied in layers, as though the writer had gone over the same lines two or three times, and in places the brown of the writing was almost black. Maren held the journal closer to the lamp and narrowed her eyes and made out the words one by one.

He came to the door at the turn of the year. He came without knocking. He stood on the threshold and he waited for the door to open from within, and it did, though there was no one there to open it, and the room beyond was not the room I had left when I went out that morning to gather yarrow by the well.

He said: I have been waiting for you since before you were born.

I said: I know.

He said: you have his mouth.

I did not ask whose.

We sat at the table and he did not drink the tea I poured for him and I did not eat the bread I set out, and we talked until the lamp burned down and the dark came in from the corners of the room and sat with us at the table as a third.

He told me his name. I will not write it here.

Maren turned the page. The next entry was shorter, and the ink was the rusty brown of old blood.

I went back to the cottage at the end of the lane on the third day after the new year. I stood at the gate. I did not go in.

I went back on the fourth day. I stood at the gate. I went in.

The door was open. The fire was laid. The kettle was warm.

There was a cup set out on the table for me. It had my name on the bottom in a hand I did not recognise, and yet I knew it, and yet it was mine.

Maren closed the journal.

She sat with her hands flat upon the cover, the way she had seen her father sit at the desk in the parlour on the night the telegram came, his hands flat upon the folded cloth, his head bowed, not praying, not weeping, only waiting for the shape of the thing to settle in him. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth and felt the cold of the room press against her back, and the warmth of the cup in front of her, and the weight of the journal beneath her hands, and the weight of all the pages she had not yet read pressing against her from within.

She opened the journal again and turned to the first page that was in her brother's hand.

The letters were larger now, and steadier, and there was a confidence in them that had not been there before, as though he had decided something and the deciding had settled him.

I went back to the cottage on the fifth day. The woman was there. She said: you have come at last.

I said: I have come.

She said: you have his mouth.

I said: I know. I am his.

She said: then you will understand what I am about to tell you.

Maren read on.

There is a hollow in the hill above the village. There has been a hollow in the hill above the village for as long as there has been a village in the valley. The hollow is not a hole in the ground. It is a place where the ground has been thinned, the way a sheet of paper is thinned at one spot by much rubbing, until the light comes through. The light that comes through is not the light of the sun. It is the light of the thing that is on the other side of the thinned place, and the thing on the other side has been waiting for a very long time for someone to come close enough to hear it speak.

I went up to the hollow on the sixth day. I stood at the edge. I looked down.

I did not hear anything.

The woman said: you will not hear it until it has seen you.

I said: how will it see me?

She said: you will go down.

Maren turned the page.

The next entry was not dated. The ink was the rusty brown of the pages before, and the hand was the cramped hand of the woman at the well.

He went down on the seventh day. He stood at the bottom of the hollow and he looked up, and the thing that had been waiting for him looked down, and it saw him, and he heard it speak.

It said: you have his mouth.

He said: I know. I am his.

It said: then you will understand what I am about to ask of you.

He said: ask.

It asked.

I will not write what it asked. I will not write what he answered. I will only say that when he came back up the path to the village the light had gone out of his eyes, and when he came to the door of the cottage at the end of the lane I did not know him, and yet I knew him, and yet he was mine.

Maren read the page a second time, and a third, and the words did not change.

She sat in the chair and looked at the lamp and the lamp burned, and the dark pressed against the window, and the harbour bell did not ring again, and the kettle ticked on the hob, and the cottage at the end of the lane waited in the cold below the hill for someone to come to its door.

She thought of her brother walking up the path from the hollow with the light gone out of his eyes.

She thought of the woman at the well with yarrow on her hands.

She thought of the door that would open from within when no one was there to open it.

She closed the journal and laid her hand upon the cover and did not open it again.

She did not sleep that night. She sat in the chair with her coat still on and her boots unlaced and her hands folded in her lap, and the lamp burned down to a blue and trembling flame, and then she fed it more oil, and it steadied, and the dark went on pressing.

In the small hours she heard the harbour bell ring once. She did not move. She heard the wind rise off the sea and rattle the window in its frame. She heard, very faintly, the sound of water moving in the well across the lane, though there was no wind to move it.

At first light she rose and made herself wash her face in cold water from the basin, and she laced her boots, and she put on her coat, and she took her stick in her hand. She did not take the journal. She left it on the table under the lamp.

She went down the lane.

The village in the early morning was a place of small sounds. A rooster crowed behind the inn. A cart rattled on the cobbles somewhere down by the harbour. Smoke rose from two chimneys and was taken sideways by the wind. The sea was the colour of slate and the gulls hung over it like white scraps torn from a letter.

Maren walked the length of the lane and turned up the hill towards the church, and when she reached the lychgate she stopped and stood a moment with her hand upon the wood. The wood was cold. The churchyard was empty. The yew tree at the far end stood very still, as though listening.

She went in through the door of the rectory and knocked, and after a little while Father Merton opened to her. He was in his shirtsleeves and his collar was off and he had a cup of tea in his hand that he set down upon the hall table. He looked at her face and did not speak for a moment.

You have not slept, he said.

I have not, she said.

He stepped aside and let her in and led her into his study and set another cup upon the desk and poured tea into it from the pot that stood there. The tea was strong and a little bitter and it tasted of the smoke of the fire that burned in the grate. She took it in both hands and held it.

He sat down across from her and waited.

She did not tell him of the journal. She did not tell him of the well. She did not tell him of the woman with the yarrow on her hands. She told him only that she had walked the cliff path the day before and that she had stood above the hollow and that she had felt something there that she could not name and that she had come to ask him what the village believed about the place.

He was quiet for a long time. He drank his tea. He looked at the fire.

The village, he said at last, does not speak of it. The village has not spoken of it in my time. Before my time I cannot say. There are stories. There are always stories. I have heard two.

He set his cup down.

The first is that it is a place where the sea comes up from below. That the land there is thin. That a man may stand on the edge and feel the ground give a little under his foot, as though the earth were the skin of a drum. That the sea is not only beneath the sea. That it is everywhere beneath.

He paused.

The second, he said, is older. The second is that there is a thing that lives in the hollow, or under it, or in the shape of it. That it has been there longer than the village. That it takes what is offered and sometimes what is not. That it is not malicious, or not only malicious, but that it is hungry in a way that malice does not cover. That it has worn the faces of the ones it has taken and that the faces are kept somewhere beneath the hill.

Maren sat very still.

Who told you this, she said.

My predecessor, he said. A man called Halloran. He had been here forty years. He did not speak of it lightly. He said that when he first came to the parish he had walked the cliff path out of curiosity and that he had stood above the hollow and that something had spoken his name, and that he had left the village that evening and had not returned for three months, and that when he returned he had made a promise to himself that he would not go near the place again, and that he had kept the promise until he was too ill to keep any promise at all.

He looked at her.

I have never been there, he said. I have never stood above it. I have believed what I was told because the man who told me was not a man given to fancies. But I have never tested it.

She drank her tea.

She said: my brother was here for six weeks before he died.

He looked at her.

She said: he kept a journal. He wrote of walking the cliff. He wrote of the hollow. He wrote that he had been there more than once. He wrote that he had gone down into it on the seventh day and that something had spoken to him and that he had answered, and that when he came back up the light had gone out of his eyes.

The priest did not speak.

She said: I do not know what to do with this.

He said: you have come to me because you do not know what to do with it.

She said: yes.

He was silent again. The fire shifted on the hearth. The wind rose against the window and was gone.

He said at last: there is a woman in the village. A widow. She lives alone on the far side, near the old quarry road. Her name is Crewe. She is the last of her kind. She keeps the herbs and she keeps the memories and she does not come to church. If there is anyone in the village who knows what is in that hollow, it is she. But she will not speak of it to me. She never has.

He paused.

She may speak to you, he said. I do not know why I think so. Perhaps because you are from here. Perhaps because your brother was from here. Perhaps because you have asked.

Maren set down her cup.

She said: where does she live.

He gave her directions. Down the lane, past the well, out along the quarry road until the cobbles gave way to a track of broken stone, and then a cottage set back from the track behind a low wall and a gate that did not latch. He told her to take something with her. A gift. Tea, or bread, or a jar of honey. The woman did not open her door to those who came empty-handed.

Maren rose.

He rose too and stood at the desk and looked at her.

He said: Maren.

She stopped.

He said: be careful what you ask her. She speaks in such a way that you may not be sure, afterwards, what it was she told you.

She nodded.

She left the rectory and went down the lane and past the well and out along the quarry road. The cobbles gave way to broken stone. The wind off the sea came in gusts that set the gorse shaking along the verge. She had brought with her a small jar of honey from the kitchen of the cottage, wrapped in a cloth, and she carried it in the crook of her arm.

The cottage of Widow Crewe stood at the end of the track, low and grey-roofed, with a single chimney from which a thin thread of smoke rose straight up into the still air. The gate did not latch. She pushed through it and crossed the small yard and knocked upon the door.

After a little while the door opened.

The woman who stood in the doorway was small and bent and her face was a map of lines, and her eyes were very clear and very dark. She wore a shawl over her shoulders and her hands were bare and her fingers were long and the nails were trimmed close. She smelled of yarrow and of smoke and of something older than either, something that Maren could not place.

The woman looked at her a long moment.

She said: you are the archivist.

Maren said: I am.

The woman said: you are the sister.

Maren said: I am.

The woman said: come in, then. You have brought something.

Maren held out the jar.

The woman took it and turned it in her hand and nodded once and stepped back from the door, and Maren went in.

The room within was small and low and very clean. There was a fire upon the hearth and a kettle upon the hob and a single chair beside the fire and a settle against the wall. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the beams. A row of jars stood upon a shelf. The light came in through a single window and fell upon the flags of the floor.

The woman set the honey upon the table and poured tea from the pot that stood there and set a cup before Maren and sat down in the chair by the fire. She did not ask Maren to sit. She waited until Maren had taken the settle and then she spoke.

You have come about the hollow, she said.

Maren said: I have.

The woman drank her tea.

She said: your brother came to see me. He came more than once. He asked the same questions you have come to ask. I did not answer him at first. I never answer at first.

She set the cup down.

He was a gentle man, she said. He had the look of one who had not yet learned to be afraid of the things he ought to have been afraid of. He had your mouth. He had your eyes. He stood in my door the way you stand in it now.

She was silent.

She said at last: he went down on the seventh day.

Maren said: I have read what he wrote.

The woman looked at her.

She said: he wrote it down.

Maren said: he wrote it down.

The woman said: he wrote it down for you.

Maren said: I do not know that.

The woman said: I know it. I knew it when he sat at my table and wrote. I knew it by the way he held the pen. A man who writes for himself writes differently from a man who writes for another. He wrote for you.

The fire shifted.

Maren said: what did he answer, in the hollow.

The woman did not speak for a long time. She drank her tea. She looked at the fire. The wind rose against the window and a bundle of dried rosemary swung upon its hook and gave out a faint resinous scent.

She said at last: he answered yes.

She said: I will not tell you what was asked. I will only tell you that what was asked was not a thing that a man should answer yes to, and that he answered yes, and that when he came back up the path the light was gone out of him, and that he came to my door and he stood where you stand and he did not speak, and I gave him tea, and he drank it, and he went back to the cottage at the end of the lane, and he sat down at the table, and he wrote what he had written, and he closed the journal, and he did not open it again.

She paused.

She said: he did not open it again because there was nothing more to write. What he had given could not be given back. What had been asked had been answered. What had been taken had been taken.

She looked at Maren.

She said: you have read what he wrote. You have read of the face. You have read of the mouth.

Maren said: I have.

The woman was silent.

Then she rose, and she crossed the room, and she took from the shelf a jar that stood apart from the others, a jar of dark glass with a stopper of wax, and she set it upon the table between them. She did not open it.

She said: there is a thing I will show you. It is not a thing I show to everyone. I show it to those who have already seen, and who must understand what it is they have seen.

She pressed her thumb into the wax and turned the stopper and lifted it.

Within the jar, folded small, was a piece of cloth. The cloth was yellow with age. The woman took it out with two fingers and shook it once and unfolded it upon the table.

It was a face. It had been painted, or drawn, or cut, in a manner that Maren could not decide. The eyes were open and the mouth was closed and the hair was drawn back from the brow. The likeness was not exact. It was not a portrait. It was a memory of a likeness, held in cloth and pigment and given over to the slow dark of the jar.

Maren looked at it.

She knew it.

She said: it is my face.

The woman said: she wore your face before you.

Maren did not speak.

The woman said: the thing in the hollow wears the faces of those it has taken. It wears them in the way that a woman wears a shawl. It does not become them. It is not them. But it has them, and it will wear them, and when it speaks to one of its own it will speak with their mouth, and the one who hears will not know, at first, whether it is the dead who speaks or the living.

She folded the cloth and replaced it in the jar and stoppered the jar and set it back upon the shelf.

She said: your brother went down with his mouth already known to it. It had seen him in you. It had heard him in you. When he stood at the bottom of the hollow and it looked down at him it knew his mouth before he spoke.

She sat in the chair.

She said: that is why it asked him what it asked. Because it had been waiting.

Maren sat upon the settle with her hands in her lap and her tea cooling at her elbow and the smell of yarrow and of smoke and of something older than either filling the small room. The fire burned. The wind rose and fell. The gulls cried far out over the slate-coloured sea.

She said: is there a way to give it back.

The woman did not answer.

Maren said: is there a way to undo what he did.

The woman looked at her a long time.

She said at last: I do not know. I have never known. I have kept the memories and I have kept the herbs and I have kept the faces in the jar, and I have not known. Your brother asked me the same question, and I did not know then either.

She paused.

She said: but I will tell you what I know of the hollow. It takes. It does not give back. It has kept what it has kept since before the village, and what it has kept it has kept, and the keeping is not a thing that may be argued with.

She drank her tea.

She said: but I will tell you this also. The hollow is a place, and a place may be left. A face may be worn and laid aside. A mouth may be heard and forgotten. The dead do not stay in the hollow because they wish to. They stay because there is no one to call them out. Your brother wrote his journal and closed it and did not open it again because there was no one to read it.

She set the cup down.

She said: you have read it.

Maren said: I have read it.

The woman looked at her.

She said: then you must decide what you will do with what you have read. I cannot decide it for you. The priest cannot decide it for you. The village cannot decide it for you. It is a thing that falls to the one who has seen.

She rose and went to the door and opened it and stood aside.

She said: go home. Think. Do not go to the hollow until you have thought. The hollow will wait. It has always waited. It is very patient.

Maren rose and went to the door and stood in the doorway with the wind off the sea cold upon her face and the gulls crying and the slate-coloured water far below.

She said: the door of the cottage at the end of the lane opened from within when no one was there.

The woman was silent.

Maren said: was it he.

The woman did not answer.

Maren turned and went down the path and through the gate and along the broken stone of the quarry road, and the wind came in gusts that set the gorse shaking, and she did not look back.

She went home to the cottage at the end of the lane and she sat down at the table and she drew the journal towards her and she opened it at the last written page and she read it again, and the words did not change, and the lamp burned, and the dark pressed against the window, and the kettle ticked on the hob, and somewhere far below the hill, beneath the thin skin of the earth, the sea moved, and the hollow waited, patient as it had always been, for someone to come to its door.