The Bell

Ella didn’t even remember the street having a shop there. Not really.

It was the sort of place you walk past a hundred times without registering it. Wedged between a shuttered bakery and a dentist’s office that always seemed closed, the building looked too narrow to be useful. One filthy window displayed a single wooden chair and an eyeless porcelain doll. The glass was dark, the interior darker still. A tilted hand-painted sign above the door read only “ANTIQUES,” but the letters had almost faded into the gray wood.

Still, she stopped.

It was raining. Her umbrella had flipped inside out in the wind, her coat was soaked through, and her boots squelched with every step. She hadn’t planned on going inside. She didn’t even know why her feet carried her across the threshold.

The air changed the moment she stepped in.

It smelled like damp velvet and mothballs. A grandfather clock ticked slowly somewhere near the back, although she couldn’t see it. The lights were dim—barely more than candle glow from the fixtures overhead—and the walls seemed to lean inward, shelves pressed close together in crooked aisles. Every surface was cluttered: old photographs in tarnished frames, rusted instruments, disjointed doll parts, keys with no teeth, candles melted into bowls, and books whose covers had rotted away.

She moved slowly, careful not to touch anything.

There was no sound, not even her own footsteps.

Then, at the very back of the shop, she saw it.

A bell.

It sat by itself on a small velvet cloth in a glass dome. She didn’t know why it drew her. It wasn’t beautiful, exactly. About the size of a plum, carved from what looked like ivory or some old yellowed bone. Its handle curved sharply like a hook, etched with delicate symbols she couldn’t decipher. There was no price tag. No label. No explanation.

She leaned in.

The bell rang.

A single, clear note.

It shouldn’t have. It hadn’t moved.

She looked around, startled.

The shopkeeper was already standing behind the counter.

She hadn’t heard him enter.

He was tall, with white hair and a thin, weathered face like melted wax. His eyes were a pale gray, almost clouded, but they focused on her like a hunter sighting prey.

“You heard it,” he said. His voice was dry. Brittle.

“I—didn’t touch it.”

“No. It touched you.”

She stared at him. “What is it?”

The man hesitated. “Old.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s not a question you want the answer to.”

Something about his tone made her feel like she’d already said yes.

“I want it,” she said, without meaning to.

The man didn’t name a price. He simply nodded, reached behind the counter, and handed her a box made of soft black wood.

When she touched it, she felt heat pulse through her palm.

As she turned to leave, the man called after her.

“You must never let it ring more than once. Do you understand?”

She didn’t reply.

Because deep down, she already knew she would.

The first night, she left it on her desk.

It didn’t ring.

The second night, she had a nightmare. Of something walking through her apartment. But when she woke, the bell hadn’t moved.

The third night, she dreamt again—this time of her floorboards creaking in a steady rhythm, as though someone were pacing back and forth below the surface of her room. She woke up gasping.

The bell had moved three inches.

She hadn’t touched it.

And there, in the floor beneath her desk, was a thin crack. Barely visible. Almost like a splinter.

By the end of the week, Ella had grown pale and distant. Her friends asked if she was sick. She said she was just tired. They didn’t press.

The crack in the floor had widened into a line.

It made no noise. It didn’t shift or groan. It simply grew.

She stopped sleeping in her bedroom. Moved the bell to the closet. But it always returned. She’d find it in the kitchen, on the coffee table, once even in the shower. Each time, it would ring once.

Only once.

And each time, the floor grew weaker.

On the ninth day, she placed the bell in a metal box, sealed it with rope, and drove it ten miles out of town. She dropped it into a lake.

That night, it was on her pillow.

The crack had formed a circle.

She returned to the antique shop.

It was gone.

The building was there—but empty. The windows were boarded. The inside gutted. She asked the shop next door, but the woman there swore no such store had existed in the five years she’d worked there.

Ella stopped asking.

She started writing down the times it rang. Always at 3:00 a.m. Always once. Never louder than a whisper. She tried filming it. The camera battery died every time.

On the twelfth night, it rang twice.

The circle in her floor splintered at the edges.

She could smell something below—dry rot, but older. Thick, iron-rich air that didn’t belong above ground.

That was the night she realized the bell wasn’t a warning.

It was a lock.

Every ring was a turn of the key.

On the fifteenth night, Ella set up candles around the circle. She didn’t know what she was trying to do. Protect herself? Appease it? Delay the inevitable?

At 3:00 a.m., the bell rang again.

Five times.

The candles went out.

The circle cracked fully down the middle. She fell backward as the floor split open in silence.

No wind.

No roar.

Just absence.

Darkness, perfect and unbroken, rose from the opening like steam. It was not a shadow. It did not move with the light. It pulsed with intelligence.

The bell floated above the hole now. Turning slowly.

Ella stepped back.

Something moved below. Not climbing. Not rising.

Just… waiting.

And then—

A voice, from the depths.

Not spoken aloud, but pressed directly into her skull.

We remember you.

The bell rang once more.

A final, high, shimmering note.

And the last piece of floor beneath Ella’s feet gave way.

She fell.