excerpt from “The Bell Will Tell”

I approached the church, my footsteps still audibly crunching in the snow. Even though the cathedral emitted light from its windows, it was as eerily silent as the rest of Lozère, and my footsteps were still the only sound in the night. The snow sounded abnormally loud to my ears - or perhaps it just seemed that way, now that I was approaching the only building with any indication of occupation. If there were people in that cathedral, surely they could hear my approach. What could they possibly be doing inside there? For all I knew, the entire township was huddled inside, in ghostly quietness.

I paused at the door. I didn’t know what I expected to find; I only hoped that whoever was inside was still alive. I raised my hand to knock, but the thought of breaking the unnatural silence was suddenly reprehensible to me, and I could not complete the action. Instead, I lowered my hand to the door handle, where it paused as I summoned the courage to enter. I took a deep breath, reminding myself that churches are typically places of warmth and hospitality. With a steady push, I opened the door wide to look inside.

I don’t know what I expected inside, but I immediately realized that I had expected the door to creak. The cold weather, under normal circumstances, would cause contraction in the brass hinges, while simultaneously expanding the moisture remaining in the wooden door. Truthfully, even the most masterfully crafted doors eventually learn to groan and creak.

But not this one.

The door swung open with nary a sound. The still, cold air behind me began to mingle with the warmer air from inside, but there was no wind outside to announce my entrance. Pale moonlight entered through the door ahead of me and cast my shadow before me, mixing it with the wavering golden shadows caused by hundreds of hand-held candles seated in the benches.

The movement of the door was enough to cause the candles to flicker, but nothing more. I stepped inside, and the door swung shut behind me, as silently as it had opened. The benches were filled with people, none of whom turned their heads to look at me. Everyone was dressed in somber tones of mourning, with their attention fixated toward the pulpit across from me.

A coffin lay there, directly in front of me, down a long, carpeted aisle. The lid of the coffin was partitioned in two, and half of it--I assumed the upper torso half--was open. The raised lid had a square glass window set in the center, the purpose of which mystified me. A line of people, also holding candles, was proceeding past the coffin to pay their respects, still in that horrible utter silence. More than anything, I wanted to grab someone, ask them what was going on, and demand some answers about this horrid ceremony, but I could not bring myself to make any noise that would disturb the solemnity of the situation.

For lack of a better idea, and possessed by my own macabre curiosity, I grabbed a nearby candle and took my place at the end of the line of mourners. As I proceeded closer to the front of the cathedral, I stole furtive glances at the people seated in the benches. I would have expected to see more than a few tearful eyes, or even heard a wayward sob, but these faces were completely dry, each one expressing a mixture of sorrow and shock.

I reached the open casket. Upon looking inside, I could not help myself - I gasped audibly in shock and fright.

A young lady lay within the coffin, with her arms tightly bound to her body with rope, completely immobilized.

Her eyes were wide open.

*****

For a moment I was as paralyzed and lifeless as the corpse in front of me. Too terrified to make a sound, too terrified even to turn around. I could feel the stares of hundreds of silent townsfolk piercing the back of my head. What was this? To the best of my ability, I acted the part of a sorrowful, silent mourner, bowing my head over her bound body. I reached out to touch her, and her skin was cold and clammy. I carefully watched, but she showed no signs of breathing, blinking, or a beating heart. Was she truly dead? Or suspended in some total paralysis? Was her mind conscious behind those unblinking eyes? I shuddered to think of that possibility - that soon, the people of Lozère would quietly bury a living person, unable to cry out because her breath was frozen in her chest.

I nearly leapt out of my skin when a large bell, hung high in the steeple of the cathedral, rang out its sonorous ring. It was the first sound I had heard during my entire visit to this horrid village, other than my own footsteps. The mighty bell rang out again, and again, a total of eight times, apparently sounding the hour of the night. As the last echoes of ringing faded away into the night, four large men stood up and surrounded the casket. A fifth man also approached the front end, shuffling forward with an uneven gait. He was tall and gaunt, with a long, black cloak lined with red satin and a wide-brimmed hat (much like my own) pulled low to mask his face. I remained in place, unable to move, transfixed on the ritual playing out before me. Without lifting his gaze to meet my eyes, the tall, gaunt man reached into the coffin with his right hand, and wielding a pair of scissors, cut the ropes that bound the corpse. He waited for a moment, as if in expectation that she would burst forth in resurrected life. Once satisfied that she would remain motionless, he reached up and closed the lid of the coffin, and I understood the purpose of the window in the lid. Through this window, the woman’s pale face and wide eyes continued to haunt me as the four large men lifted the coffin and carried it out of the church.

In a neat, orderly fashion, the congregation silently stood up and filed out after them.

*****

The procession led me outside and around to a small cemetery beside the cathedral. The townsfolk surrounded an empty plot as the pallbearers lowered the coffin into it. During this process, I glanced around the graveyard. Although the ground was covered in a uniform layer of snow, more than a few of the graves seemed freshly dug, covered in mounds of loose dirt where the falling snowflakes refused to accumulate. I counted more than twenty such graves, and this, more than the falling snow, gave me sudden shivers.

Being smaller in stature than the townsfolk, it was a simple matter for me to nudge my way through the crowd and stand at the foot of the lowered casket. The pale face and wide eyes stared horridly up into the night sky. The pallbearers, finished with their initial task, grabbed four nearby shovels and solemnly stabbed them into a nearby pile of soil. The first shovelful of dirt landed next to the glass window, as I continued to stare at her face in horror. A second scoop landed even closer, partially covering the window. My wild and morbid imagination transported me inside her coffin, watching the dirt falling on top of me, covering the window and obscuring my last glimpse into the world of the living. Could she still be alive? Those eyes, wide open, continued to speak of her paralyzed terror, until the dirt finally covered the window and I lost sight of her horrid face. The pallbearers systematically shoveled dirt into the grave until it was full, and then tamped the loose soil with their shovels.

When the last man set down his shovel, he bent down to pick up the end of a string that had apparently been buried with the coffin. Curiously, I watched him tie that string to a small bell that dangled from the headstone, and in a burst of recognition I understood its purpose. I had heard tales of what was called a “safety coffin,” but had never actually seen one before now. To mitigate the risk of being buried alive, certain taphophobic inventors had come up with the crazy idea to leave a bell above ground at the grave site, and attach the bell to a pull string that would run underground to the buried individual. Should that unfortunately inhumed individual wake up and find themselves trapped in a wooden box under six feet of dirt, they could ring the bell until someone noticed and dug them back up again to set them free. Homes had doorbells for those who wished to enter; now tombs had doorbells for those who wished to leave.

At long last, my soul quieted down within me and the horrible tension of the situation left my body. I understood how the rest of the community could tolerate this terrible spectacle, now that I knew that the lifelike body beneath us had means of communicating her survival, should she prove merely paralyzed and not, in fact, deceased. The calmness and quietness of the townsfolk were merely their means of coping with a horrible situation for which they obviously had more experience than I did. In the same quietness that I had come to expect from the people of Lozère, they slowly trickled out of the cemetery, presumably to return to their homes.

I followed suit, turning only at the edge of the cemetery to glance back at the grave. The tall, gaunt man with the red & black cloak remained by the headstone. My curiosity compelled me to stay, and I melted into the shadows of a nearby tree, that I might surreptitiously observe him without causing any alarm. I waited there, patiently and quietly, wondering the reason for his lingering attendance.

When he seemed assured that no one else remained, his right hand reached into his pocket and withdrew his scissors, and with them he severed the bell-string.