The Thirteenth Bell

I never believed in curses.

Even growing up in Elmridge, where myths bled into daily life, I always thought the stories were just ways to explain the things we didn't understand. The weather, grief, madness. But that changed the night the bell rang thirteen times.

It started with Sarah Moore. She was the kind of woman who still left fresh bread on her windowsill, even though no one ever took it. I used to mow her lawn as a teenager. She had this way of calling me "sweetheart" like she meant it. That night, she was alone in her cottage making chamomile tea when the bell started ringing from Saint Halwen's chapel.

One. Two. Three. It went all the way to twelve, as it always had.

And then—

DONG.

Thirteen.

She called me the next morning. Said she hadn't slept. Said something was "inside the sound." Her hands were shaking so badly she dropped the phone. That was the last time anyone spoke to her. By the time I got there, she was already dead. The coroner said it was a stroke.

But her eyes were open.

Staring at the ceiling like she was still listening.

We should've left then. I wanted to. I told my wife we should pack up and go, but she laughed. "It's a bell, Noah. Not a ghost story."

The next night, our neighbor's daughter disappeared. Her name was Elsie. Nine years old. She'd drawn me a picture the week before—a stick figure version of me with a bright orange sun overhead. They found it in her bed. But not Elsie.

No broken locks. No signs of struggle.

Just silence.

And every night after that, when the thirteenth toll came, someone else was taken.

By the fourth night, the chapel was barricaded. We tried smashing the bell with sledgehammers. They shattered. We doused it in kerosene. Nothing caught fire. One man—crazy with grief—tried to climb up and cut the rope. He fell. Broke his neck.

Then Father Renald spoke up.

He said the bell wasn't a thing. It was a memory.

A relic from something we'd buried and forgotten.

A story came with it. That a monk centuries ago had been sealed alive inside the wall of the chapel, left to die because he rang the bell too early during a funeral. The town had blamed him for cursing the dead. For disturbing the hour.

His screams were never answered.

Renald said the thirteenth toll was his way of being heard.

I remember the way he looked at me as he said it—like he'd already made up his mind. That night, we helped him into the wall. No prayers. No hymns. Just bricks and mortar and silence.

He didn't fight us.

"Let the bell forget," he said before the last stone was placed.

And that was it.

The next night, the bell only rang twelve times. And it stayed that way.

People tried to forget. We stopped mentioning the names of the lost. We called it an old folk tale. The bell still hangs in Saint Halwen's, and every year, we repaint the chapel, fix the pews, keep it clean—out of respect. Or fear.

But I still live here.

And sometimes at night, when the wind shifts, I don't hear bells.

I hear sobbing—muffled and steady—coming from behind the chapel walls.

And I wonder if Father Renald is still trying to tell us something.