Whispers Of Maplewood

“Wait!” she called, though the watchman could not have heard her over the storm.

The lantern near the tower shifted. A figure stood beside the gate, looking up.

Mara climbed faster.

By the time she reached the rise, the watchman had turned toward the road. He was wrapped in a dark oilskin coat, his lantern held close to his chest. The iron gate between them was locked, its bars shining with rain.

“You heard it?” Mara shouted.

The watchman’s face tightened. “Everyone heard it.”

“Open the gate.”

“I can’t.”

He lifted the lantern toward the chain. A heavy padlock held it shut.

Mara gripped the bars. They were cold enough to sting her palms. “You’re the watchman.”

“I watch the town. I don’t break into sealed buildings.”

“Then why are you here?”

The bell sounded above them. The tower answered with a low vibration that Mara felt through the gate and into her wrists.

The watchman looked toward the boarded windows. “Because it started ringing.”

Another strike followed, deeper than the last. Somewhere beneath the tower, something scraped across stone.

Mara released the bars.

“Who has the key?” she asked.

“No one.”

The watchman’s answer was quiet, almost lost beneath the rain.

Mara looked at the lock again. The chain was old, but the padlock was not. Its metal showed fresh scratches around the shackle.

“Then we find another way in.”

The watchman caught her sleeve. “Miss Voss, you should go back.”

She turned on him. “You came here.”

“I came to make certain no one else did.”

The bell rang once more.

Then it stopped.

The silence that followed seemed larger than the tower itself.

Mara stared upward. Rain ran from her hair into her eyes. The watchman lowered his lantern.

For several seconds neither of them moved.

A faint light showed beneath the tower door.

It should not have been there.

The door stood beyond the gate, half hidden by weeds and a fallen section of fence. Its lower edge was dark with damp, but a narrow line of pale light appeared beneath it.

Mara stepped back from the gate.

The watchman whispered, “That door was chained.”

“Was?”

He did not answer.

Mara followed the fence toward the western wall. The floodwater had risen there, filling the ditch with brown, moving water. The only crossing was a plank laid from the bank to the stones. It bowed when she stepped onto it.

“Don’t,” the watchman said.

The plank shifted beneath her boot.

Mara pressed one hand against the tower wall and moved sideways, feeling rough stone scrape her glove. Water soaked through the hem of her coat. Halfway across, the plank gave a sharp crack.

She froze.

The watchman’s lantern swung wildly. “Come back.”

Mara looked toward the door. The pale line beneath it had vanished.

“I’m almost there.”

“You don’t know what’s inside.”

“No,” she said. “That’s why I’m going.”

The plank settled. She reached the far side and climbed over the low wall. Her boots struck stone. The tower rose directly above her, wet and blind, its sealed windows staring down through their boards.

The door was open.

Not wide. Only enough to show darkness beyond.

Mara stood beneath the dripping eaves, listening.

No bell. No scrape. No footsteps.

Behind her, the watchman called, “Miss Voss.”

She turned. He remained on the other side of the ditch, the locked gate between them and his lantern trembling in the wind.

“I’m going in,” she said.

“That is not what I asked.”

Mara pushed the door with two fingers. It opened without resistance.

The smell inside was of wet wood, rust, and something earthy beneath both. Her lantern cast a weak circle across the floor. Dust covered the first stones, but not all of them.

A footprint marked the mud just inside the threshold.

Fresh.

The heel was sharply defined. Water gleamed in the impression. Whoever had made it had entered only moments before.

Mara crouched beside it. The mud was the same dark brown as the flooded lanes below. A narrow line of crushed maple leaves ran from the print toward the interior stair.

The watchman’s voice came again, thinner now. “What do you see?”

Mara raised her lantern.

“Someone’s been inside.”

He said nothing.

She stepped over the footprint.

The tower swallowed the light. A spiral stair climbed along the inner wall, its wooden rail swollen from years of damp. Above, the bell chamber disappeared into darkness. The air was colder there, and the stone beneath Mara’s hand seemed to carry a faint trembling.

She took one step upward.

From somewhere above came a soft movement.

Mara lifted the lantern.

“Is someone there?”

The question echoed up the stairwell and returned altered by the stone.

No answer came.

She climbed another step. Behind her, the watchman called her name, but the sound was distant, muffled by the open door and the rain.

Mara reached the first landing. A strip of torn cloth clung to a nail in the banister. It was dark, nearly black in the lantern light, and wet at the edges. She touched it with the tip of one finger.

The bell rang.

The sound burst through the tower so suddenly that the lantern flame jumped. Dust sifted from the ceiling. Mara gripped the rail as the note rolled through her ribs.

The watchman shouted from outside.

Mara looked up.

The bell was directly above her, yet the chamber remained hidden beyond the next turn of the stair. She climbed quickly, boots slipping on damp wood.

At the second landing, she found another trace: a smear of mud across the floorboards, followed by two partial prints. The marks led toward a narrow door beneath the bell chamber.

Mara reached for the latch.

Before her fingers touched it, the bell stopped.

The sudden quiet struck harder than the ringing.

She waited, lantern held close, while rain tapped against the boarded windows. The tower seemed to lean around her. Somewhere below, the watchman called again, but she could no longer make out his words.

Mara opened the narrow door.

Inside was a cramped passage ending at a wall of old timber. No bell rope. No mechanism. No room large enough to contain the sound that had just shaken the valley.

Only a small iron hook fixed to the wall, empty except for a strand of wet fiber.

She backed into the stairwell.

A floorboard creaked below.

Mara lowered the lantern.

The open doorway stood at the bottom of the stairs. Beyond it, rain silvered the threshold. The watchman’s lantern was gone from view.

“Are you still there?” she called.

No answer.

She descended carefully. The muddy footprint remained where she had seen it, but a second print now marked the stone beside it.

Someone had been standing inside the tower while Mara searched above.

She reached the threshold and looked out.

The watchman was at the gate, visible through the rain. He had not moved far. His lantern rested on the ground beside him, and both hands gripped the bars.

“Come out,” he called. “Now.”

Mara stepped into the doorway.

“What happened?”

“I heard the stairs.”

“So did I.”

The watchman stared past her into the tower. “Did you see anyone?”

“No.”

His gaze dropped to the mud near her boots. “Then whose is that?”

Mara looked down.

The fresh print she had first noticed was still there. Beside it, the second mark pointed inward, its toe angled toward the stairs. The tread was narrow and deeply cut, unlike her own worn soles.

A third print appeared farther inside.

It had not been there before.

Mara raised the lantern, but the light reached only as far as the first turn. Beyond it, the stairwell was black.

The bell began again.

One strike.

The tower shuddered. The sound rolled over the valley, through the flooded lanes and sleeping houses, and out toward the dark maple groves.

The watchman flinched. “Leave it.”

Mara turned toward the stairs.

A second strike followed.

Then a third.

She climbed two steps before the bell stopped.

The silence returned, but the cost of it had changed. The watchman was no longer looking at her as a curious stranger who had arrived in the rain. He was looking at her as someone who had crossed a boundary and carried its evidence into the open.

Mara glanced at the mud on her boots.

She had reached the tower before he left. She had found the door open, the stair marked, and the bell ringing beneath a chamber with no visible means of making a sound.

But the ringer was gone.

Behind her, the watchman said, “You were inside when it stopped.”

Mara faced him.

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have to tell them.”

“Tell whom?”

He looked down toward Maplewood, where a few lamps had begun to appear along the lower road.

“Everyone,” he said.

Mara turned back to the tower. The open door moved slightly in the wind, widening and narrowing like a slow breath. On the stone just inside, the newest footprint filled with rainwater.

She stepped away from it only when the bell began to ring again somewhere beneath the floor.

End of chapter one. 39 more chapters in the full book.