The Bell That Rang Itself

About

Its magic is a single sentence long: a bell rung with no hand answers a question somebody asked out loud and did not mean to. Wenna Rooke, 39, keeps sixty ewes and forty-two lambs on the top of that ridge and walks a drystone wall every nine days to keep them off a ninety-foot drop. A year ago, on a Thursday in February, the noon bell rang once in Carrow with nobody on the rope, and a nine-year-old girl named Salla Ilsen did not come home for dinner. Four adults were each doing one thing that afternoon. They were not doing it together. Within a fortnight the whole parish had merged their four partial afternoons into one warm story — the bell rang with no hand, the child was in the tower, the bell took her, and the bell has not rung since, which everybody agrees is the proof. The village is not lying. It is four true afternoons held together so fast that nobody had to be alone with the ga

Cast

• W Wenna Rooke Protagonist and viewpoint. Keeps sixty ewes and forty-two lambs on the ridge, walks the north-face wall every nine days, and is the only one of the four who is certain of anything no portrait yet
• D Dael Tussock The carpenter who fitted the bell's new sheave in January, advanced two pounds eight of the four pound eleven the vestry owes him, and was in the chamber at noon on the ninth of February no portrait yet
• P Perrin Awe The schoolmaster who sent the child out at the dinner hour by telling a room rather than a girl, and wrote her question on a slate instead of answering it no portrait yet
• M Marda Ilsen The child's mother. Has heard every version of the afternoon and answers none of them, and will not hand her daughter to a bell or to a wall no portrait yet