The Book and the Bell

Arthur sighed and tucked the wrinkled photo back into his wallet.

It had been three years since she had gone missing but it felt like a lifetime ago.

“I’ll do it” he said as he reached for the envelope containing the $20,000 they had agreed upon. Grayson abruptly grabbed his hand, “Remember, after it’s finished you’re no longer welcome in Socorro.”

“This town has nothing left for me cept’ dust and bones anyhow,” Arthur said, pocketing the envelope.

He drove through the night and into the morning, stopping only once to refuel his Lincoln in North Tulsa, and in the blaze of sunrise reached the decrepit outskirts of St. Louis. “Looks like Mosul,” he thought to himself. He drove into the city and found the checkerboard pattern of grandiose mansions nestled between pockets of squalor to be unsettling. He turned off of Kingshighway onto McPherson Avenue and into the lot adjacent to the crumbling edifice of the Second Baptist Church. It was a forgotten place, although registered as a historical site it appeared to be visibly neglected and pillaged, with many of its copper embellishments and terracotta roof tiles removed, in spite of the addition of an imposing chain-link fence around its perimeter.

“How can you be sure he has the book?” Arthur had asked. “As sure as shit. He’s been obsessed with that goddam book since we were stationed at Fort Bliss, never leaves his sight” Grayson muttered.

Arthur turned off the engine, leaned back in his seat and took off his Cattleman cowboy hat, repositioned it over his face, and closed his eyes.

When he awoke it was close to three in the afternoon and his stomach was nagging at him, empty since his last meal in Texas almost a full day ago. He left his car and walked two blocks to a corner bar, where he ordered a Reuben sandwich and a Macallan 15, neat. Upon satisfying his hunger he remained in his tattered vinyl booth for nearly two hours, idly aware of his surroundings, until the bartender hollered that unless there was something else he could get for him, he better move along.

When he returned to his car it was just after dusk and a swirl of bats was billowing outward from the church’s partially deconstructed campanile.

He got into the passenger seat and retrieved a pair of binoculars from the glove box, then began to survey the structure, paying particular attention to a broken stained glass window at the top of the tower. He thought for a moment that he saw something pass by the opening, but he couldn’t be sure. Following the departure of its nocturnal inhabitants, the compound appeared to be empty. Arthur put away the binoculars and sat motionless until nightfall.

As he approached the perimeter of the building he could hear the soft cacophony of the bar scene in the distance. But the church grounds were still now except for the windswept rustling of litter against the fence. He ran his fingers across the length of the barrier, pausing at the section in front of the base of the steeple. At the ground level, he observed a hastily cut hole. He sat down and leaned backward, placed his hat on the ground and positioned his head in the center of the opening and began to rock his shoulders back and forth, easing his way through. “You don’t belong here,” growled a voice from behind him, and he had barely made out the silhouette of a hulking form when a boot came down on his head.

When he came to he was confronted with the acrid stench of urine, piqued with a moldy, antiquated aroma, and another odor he could not name. He brought his hand to his face and felt that his forehead was caked in blood, and the area around his left eye swollen and tender.

“It’s been a minute,” Arthur said, surprised that his voice didn’t fail him. His back ached and he sensed that he must have been dragged a long way.

The figure that loomed across the room was illuminated by pale blue shone from the moonlight cast through fragmented stained glass. Arthur surveyed the room. He became aware of the rotted wooden scaffolding that encapsulated them, which wearily supported the massive bell of the tower directly above. Crumbled masonry and food wrappers littered the floor.

“Eight years to be precise, from the moment I was divined by the hand of God to lead his children to paradise” said Eddie in a scraggly voice that made Arthur’s skin itch.

“There ain’t nothin godly about what you’ve done” said Arthur. Eddie walked toward Arthur and reached out his hand, “Come, let me show you my masterpiece.”

Arthur begrudgingly accepted Eddie’s hand and was lead to the edge of the scaffolding, where a ladder rose upward. Eddie climbed the ladder and Arthur followed behind, surmounting twelve steps before reaching the top. Now the mismatched companions found themselves at eye level with the underside of the enormous bell.

“Look inside,” urged Eddie, as he pointed a crooked white finger into the orifice.

Arthur leaned cautiously over the wooden railing of the walkway and peered upward. “I can’t see anything” he proclaimed, “only darkness.” “Let me show you” Eddie hissed as he bent over the railing and grasped for the rope that dangled from the abyss, and in that instance Arthur reached up with both hands and shoved Eddie. Eddie buckled forward as the decomposed wooden guard crumbled away and he tumbled head first down into the chasm, landing with a grotesque thud at the foundation of the tower.

Arthur cautiously gained his footing at the top of the ladder and climbed down, and from the tower exited to the spiral staircase that emptied into the ground level.

At the bottom he found Eddie’s body, although the figure before him seemed almost inhuman, composed of an ordinary set of clothing placed upon an indistinguishable mass of crimson and sinewy mush, as if someone had arranged the components as a kind of sadistic prank.

The book. Arthur bent over the deformed carcass and rifled through its overcoat. Inside the left breast pocket he felt a rectangular object. He flipped open the jacket and the little black book was revealed, bathed in red and orange stained glass light which caused it to seemingly sparkle. Arthur grabbed it and righted himself upward.

The door at the base of the tower was ajar and he exited, located the gape in the fence and wriggled to the outside whereupon he retrieved his hat.

He drove out of the city and into the hills, stopping at a park in in the countryside, where he purchased a camp site for the night and built a fire.

Arthur sat idly by the fire and cracked open a can of kidney beans, consuming it raw. “Don’t look inside the book, no matter how much it tempts you.” Grayson had warned. “Once the job is done it don’t matter if it was him that did it or not, burn the book and we’ll all get on with our lives.” And he was tempted, his heart had begun to race the minute he pried it from Eddie’s limp body and his pulse had not slowed since. His mouth was dry and a trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck.

He opened the book. Inside was a shamble of disconnected thoughts. Musings on technology and surveillance, scripture and alchemy. Fragmented sentences and illegible words and alien characters, written in pattens and codices, either the cryptogram of a genius or the nonsensical ramblings of a madman. And then the list of names. First came

Tabitha Birchmont

Alyssa Turner

Mary Lee Packer

Jody Gibson

The list of names went on. He flipped through page after page, slowly at first and then faster and faster, as he began to feel panicked and ill. He flipped through the whole book, then turned it over and flipped through the pages backwards.

Her name wasn’t there. Some time passed in silence, the whirring of saccades and the soft calls of the thrushes were deaf to his ears. After a long while, Arthur tossed the book into the fire and watched it burn for a minute before producing his wallet. He took out the worn photograph, thumbing the corner once more before he held it to the flames.

Arthur waited until the fire smoldered, then stumbled back to his Lincoln and drove away.