The Bell That Tolled for the Surgeon

"The hour is the only guest who is never late, and the only one who can be made to arrive on purpose."

The linen press stood at the end of the second-floor corridor, a monstrous cabinet of black walnut, taller than a man and wider than a door, and it did not look like a door at all.

Thalessa had passed it a dozen times. She had noted its brass handles, its carved lilies, the faint smell of lavender and camphor that rose from its shelves. She had never thought to ask why a house of forty rooms should keep its sheets at the very end of a passage, in a cupboard built into an alcove with no window.

"Behind the press, Miss Haze said." Roderick set down the lantern and ran his good hand down the side of the cabinet. "A servant's way."

"She said it to the fog, Inspector. Not to us."

"It was good advice nonetheless."

"Perhaps it was bait."

"Then it's bait that Malakor has already swallowed." He felt along the wainscot with his fingertips. "Hold the light."

She held it. In the unsteady glow, she watched his hand move slowly over the carved lilies, pausing at each, pressing lightly, moving on. His face was shadowed and intent. A film of sweat shone on his forehead, and she knew what the effort cost him, and said nothing.

At the seventh lily, something went click.

The whole press swung outward on a hidden hinge, silently, ponderously, as a sleeping giant turns over in his bed. Behind it, where the wall should have been, a black rectangle yawned. A breath of cold air came out of it, smelling of damp stone and hot oil and something older, a sweetish, stagnant, long-closed smell, like the inside of a well.

A flight of narrow steps led up into the dark.

"I shall go first," said Roderick.

"You shall not. You have one arm."

"I have one good arm, and it's the one that holds the gun."

"And I have two good legs, and a lantern." She took the pistol from his hand, quite gently, and put it into the pocket of her coat. "You will keep behind me, and you will tell me if you feel faint, and you will not argue."

"I never argue."

"You argue all day."

"I debate."

"Come," said Thalessa, and went up.

…

The stair was hardly wider than her shoulders. It curved, and doubled, and curved again, twisting upward through the thickness of the wall, in a gloom so complete that the lantern light seemed to die a yard in front of her. The steps were of dark oak, worn, polished at the center by years of passage. The walls on either side had been whitewashed once and had crumbled to dust. Here and there she saw scratches in the plaster, tally marks, as of a prisoner's calendar, and further up a child's handprint in pale red clay, small and perfect, that she did not wish to think about.

Her own breath came very loud.

Behind her she could hear Roderick's tread, steady, patient, a little slower than before. Above them, faint and regular, the great wheel turned. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound grew louder as they climbed, until it filled the whole narrow shaft like a pulse.

At the thirty-first step, the stair ended against a low wooden door.

It was ajar. A line of dim yellow light showed along its edge.

She put out her free hand and pushed.

The door swung inward, and she stepped through it into the belfry.

…

It was a great round room, perhaps twenty feet across, with a floor of rough boards and a roof of black rafters that vanished into the dark. Louvred windows ringed the walls on every side, and through their slats the night came in as thin gray bars, striping the floor. The wind moaned in the louvres. The cold was bitter, a living thing, and it smelled of old iron and machine oil and birds.

In the center of the room hung the bell.

It was larger than she had expected. Perhaps six feet across the mouth, of dull green bronze, hung from an oaken yoke by iron straps, and so close to the floor that its lip hovered a hand's breadth above the boards. It was silent. Its great bulk filled the center of the belfry like a sleeping animal. A heavy leather strap ran from its yoke to a wheel on the wall, and thence to the clockwork.

And the clockwork was a marvel.

It stood against the north wall: a tangle of brass and steel and black iron, wheels within wheels, great toothed arbors thick as her wrist, a pendulum as long as a man swinging slowly behind a glass pane. Weights hung from chains in the shadow. Cams turned. A dozen small levers ticked up and down like the fingers of a pianist. The whole thing breathed, with a slow, cold, mechanical patience, and each tick rang through the room like a drop of water falling in a cellar.

A single hurricane lamp stood on the floor beside it, turned low. And beside the lamp, neatly placed, as if by a man who cared about tidiness to the last, sat a black leather bag.

"Malakor's," said Roderick, from the doorway.

"His bag."

"Where is he?"

She crossed to it. The clasp was shut. She did not open it. She turned and let the lantern sweep the circle of the room, slowly, the louvres, the rafters, the great shadowed bulk of the bell, the corners where the dark lay thickest.

"Doctor?" she called.

Her voice dropped into the vault and vanished.

"Doctor Malakor!"

Nothing. Only the wind, and the ticking.

"He's not here," said Roderick quietly.

"His bag is."

"A man leaves his bag when he is in a hurry."

"Or when he does not expect to need it." She walked slowly round the bell, with her lantern held low. "He came up here with the evidence. He meant to hide it, or burn it. He set his lamp down. He set down his bag. He..."

She stopped.

On the boards at the foot of the bell, in the lamplight, lay a small pile of something pale. She bent over it. Her lantern shook.

It was a heap of gray paper ash, and in the middle of it, half-consumed, a curled scrap of skin the size of a playing card, black at the edges.

"He burned them here," she whispered. "He climbed up to burn them where nobody would see."

"Then he finished."

"Yes."

"And went out."

"Not by the way we came. We would have met him." She raised her head. "Roderick, the louvres are nailed. The door below is locked. There is no other way down but the stair we climbed. Where is he?"

Roderick took one step into the room.

"Thalessa."

"What?"

"Listen."

She listened.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The wheel. The pendulum. The steady slow beat of the machine. But under it now, rising slowly out of the silence, something else. A deep, thin, humming note, like the sound of a wet finger drawn round the rim of a glass. It trembled in the iron. It hummed in the bronze. It seemed to come from the bell itself.

"The hour," said Roderick. "It's nearly eleven."

"Back away from the bell."

"What is it?"

"Back away."

She had seen the wire.

It was so fine that she had missed it till now, a strand of bright steel, thin as a hair, gleaming in the lamplight where it ran from a ring in the rafters, down along the curve of the yoke, and into the dark mouth of the bell. It was not slack. It was drawn taut as a bowstring, humming with tension, and as she stared at it, it gave a tiny, shuddering twitch.

The pendulum swung to the end of its arc.

Somewhere in the brass, a catch let go with a sound like a sigh.

And the bell began to swing.

…

It came slowly at first, a ponderous, grinding lean, as if the whole green mass of it were thinking. The yoke groaned. The iron straps creaked. The lip rose off the floor and rolled back, and a gust of cold, stale, brazen air breathed out of its mouth into Thalessa's face.

Then the clapper struck.

BOOM.

The sound was a physical blow. It rolled through her body from her heels to her skull. The boards trembled under her feet. The lantern leapt in her hand. The louvres rattled in their frames, and a flurry of dust fell from the rafters, and from somewhere far below a hundred small panes of glass sang in sympathy.

BOOM.

She was backing away. She was backing, step by step, with the lantern held out before her like a charm. She heard Roderick shout. She could not hear the words. The air was full of bronze, thick and trembling, and the bell was swinging wide now, wider, a green dragon rearing against the dark.

BOOM.

The third stroke.

On its upward swing, the lip of the bell rose, and for an instant the lamplight reached into the hollow of it, and Thalessa saw.

She would remember it all her life.

Hanging from the clapper, by a thin shining cord of wire that bit into his throat, suspended in the black bronze belly of the bell, like a clapper himself, like a hideous second tongue, swung the body of Doctor Malthus Malakor. His head was thrown back. His mouth was open. His spectacles hung from one ear, glinting, and his long gray face was swollen and purple and utterly calm.

The bell swung out.

The body swung with it. It struck the bronze with a dull wet thud, and swung back, and struck again. The wire sang. His arms flopped loose. And with the fifth stroke, the wire gave, snapped like a harp-string, and the doctor fell out of the bell in a long limp tumble, and struck the boards at Thalessa's feet, and rolled over, and lay still.

The bell tolled on above them. Six. Seven. Eight. It rang out over the sleeping house and the white gardens and the cold, indifferent sea.

On the eleventh stroke, it stopped.

The silence that followed was very large.

Thalessa found that she was on her knees on the boards, with the lantern spilled beside her and her hands pressed over her ears. She took them away slowly. Her fingers were shaking. A thin, high, ringing note sang in her skull.

Roderick was beside her. He had her by the shoulders. His mouth was moving, and she realised after a moment that he was saying her name.

"I am all right," she said. "I'm all right."

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"You're white."

"I have been white all week." She drew breath, and found that it would come. "Roderick, he was dead."

"Yes."

"He was dead already. He wasn't killed by the bell. He was in it. He'd been hung there, and the bell was only the stage." She gripped his sleeve. "Look at him. Look at his color. The fall did not make that. He has been dead for hours."

She crawled across the boards to the body.

Doctor Malthus Malakor lay on his back with his arms flung out and his legs crossed at the ankle, in a posture of absurd and terrible repose. His face was a mask of dusky violet. A thin bright line, as fine as the mark of a razor, circled his throat just under the jaw, and from it a few beads of blood had welled and dried. His collar was soaked. His spectacles lay beside him, whole, unbroken, quite unharmed.

She laid two fingers against his neck. The skin was cold as a stone.

"He's been dead since eight," she said. "Or earlier. Rigor is established in the jaw and neck. Look at the livid patch under the ear."

"Eight."

"At least three hours." Her voice was low and thin. "The killer waited, Roderick. They killed him at eight, and hung him in the bell, and set the clock to tell us at eleven. They wanted to be elsewhere. They wanted us to find him at the stroke of the hour, in the full light of ten witnesses..."

"There are no witnesses."

"There's the whole house." She wet her lips. "Every person in this house heard that bell. They all know he's dead. They are all awake, and they are all listening."

"And one of them is sitting somewhere quietly," Roderick said, "with an alibi."

"Yes."

"Three hours ago."

"Yes."

They looked at each other across the dead man's body. Neither of them spoke.

Below them, in the depths of the house, a door slammed. A voice cried out, thin and frightened and far away. Then another. Then footsteps, running.

And in the stillness of the belfry, as the last echo of the bell died away among the rafters, Thalessa saw something small and pale lying in the dead man's open mouth, between the gray teeth, resting lightly on the black tongue.

A single wisteria petal.