A Bat in the Belfry Read online

  Sam laughed. “You’re bad.” But he liked it. No one else he knew talked that way. Maggie was smart, way smarter than he was, and so thoroughly down-to-earth, her sense of humor embarrassed even him sometimes.

  “No, just accurate,” she shot back. She took no guff, and she was talented, too, at the violin as well as at a number of other activities he very much enjoyed.

  “Yeah, well,” was all he could muster. He never could win a verbal jousting match with Maggie, which was relaxing, actually, once he’d gotten used to it. And on top of all that, she was no-kidding gorgeous, a big, red-cheeked, luscious-lipped brunette with so many curves, he still hadn’t managed to find them all.

  And he didn’t want to stop trying. “You’re not going to go, though, right?” she asked.

  A tearful emoticon popped up in the text message box on his phone. R U COMING? MISS U.

  Unfortunately, this time Maggie heard the small bloop sound his cell made, notifying him of the new message.

  “I thought you said you weren’t texting.” In the background at her place, a jazz violin CD was playing.

  “But I can’t stop people from sending texts, can I?” he asked, realizing too late what the answer to that was.

  “You could shut your cell off.” Genius, she didn’t add. “But I have to go now, I’ve still got some practicing to do.”

  “Oh,” he said. He’d been about to suggest that he come over to her place. Just talking to her had reminded him pleasantly of all those curves, whose mysteries he now felt inspired to have another go at solving. His own room, with its plaid-covered twin beds and clutter of electronic gadgets looked down on by posters of sports heroes, seemed all at once unbearably male.

  Maggie’s place was a lush cave of velvet upholstery, soft rugs, and the smell of Constant Comment tea. She kept apples in a bowl on her table, and a clean white terrycloth bathrobe in her bedroom closet especially for him.

  R U COMING W8NG 4 U ??? NOT DOING GR8 PLZ

  Also, as Carol’s tipsy-sounding new text message reminded him, Maggie didn’t drink. That wasn’t a biggie for Sam, whose taste for alcohol nowadays was (thankyouthankyou) just about nonexistent.

  “Sam?” Maggie’s voice was gentle. “I’m hanging up now.”

  Refusing to drive him into Carol’s arms by nagging him was what Maggie called this tactic—she was perfectly open with him about it—and he had to admit that so far tonight it had worked.

  Unfortunately, it also meant that there was no chance of his getting to wear that white terrycloth bathrobe this evening, or pursuing activities that usually preceded his wearing of it, either. The sports heroes on his posters seemed to smirk down at him knowingly.

  Chump, their looks seemed to say. This Maggie, she’s a line drive, right down the middle. So whatchoo want with a pop fly?

  Easy for you to say, he thought at the poster athletes for whom pop flies were no doubt a regular occurrence. “Okay,” he said aloud, but once he’d hung up, he felt ridiculously lonely and unsettled. His phone blooped again; without looking at the text box, he shut the thing off.

  The room was suddenly very quiet, and the big old house all around him was, also; in another hour, it would be midnight. Carol was still waiting, probably, but the idea of giving Maggie the idea that he was staying home, then going out to some party the minute he’d hung up, just didn’t hit him right.

  Which was how Maggie had planned it, of course, but that didn’t change the fact: he was in for the evening. Idly snapping his penlight on and off—the blue plastic promotional item bore the name of his employer, Eastport Sailyard & Marina, Ltd.—as he leaned back in his office chair, propped his sneakered feet on the door-atop-two-filing-cabinets he used for a desk, and stared at the long crack in the plaster ceiling above him.

  So. Here he was, all woken up and nowhere to go, or at any rate nowhere that he wanted to. In the bad old days, he could’ve solved this problem, toot sweet: fire up a joint, break out the Bushmills, and have himself a nice, companionable little party of one. But not anymore.

  His landline phone jangled. He quickly shut the ringer off so it wouldn’t wake up the rest of the house: his grandparents, his mother and his stepfather, Wade Sorenson, and Sam’s houseguest, Chip, who’d gone to his room early and was by now probably sound asleep.

  The caller was almost certainly Carol, wanting to try by her voice what she hadn’t succeeded at accomplishing via text. Getting up, he snapped off the lamp on his desk, leaving on only the lava lamp that Carol had given him for a joke of the “look what the old folks used to like!” variety.

  Now the lamp’s tall glass cylinder seemed to smolder from within, its hypnotic swirlings of green, orange, and dark purple oddly pleasant in the dim room. Maybe the old hippies were on to something, he thought, but then the silence hit him again.

  He didn’t feel like watching TV or playing video games, and his chronic dyslexia made reading for pleasure an oxymoron. But he enjoyed being read to, and he had the audio version of Simon Winchester’s Atlantic on his iPod. So he cued that up.

  Fifteen minutes later, he’d washed and brushed his teeth. By some trick of light, the young man looking back at him from the bathroom mirror, with his curly dark hair and long lantern jaw, so much resembled his dead father that Sam had startled briefly, thinking he was seeing his dad’s ghost.

  But of course he wasn’t. Now he padded downstairs; at this late hour, the big old kitchen with its tall bare windows and beadboard wainscoting was a shadowy, clean-smelling cave. Only a night light burned by the soapstone sink.

  The woodstove in the corner made faint crinkling sounds as Sam passed it carrying his snack of cookies and milk. The two dogs curled in their beds near the stove shifted, muttering, but didn’t get up as Sam checked the door leading out to his stepfather’s workshop, where guns were repaired and where a variety of other weapons were stored, too, to make sure that it was locked.

  His guest, Chip Hahn, had been fascinated with the hunting knives in the workshop when he’d gotten the tour from Sam’s stepdad this afternoon. Glancing out the kitchen window, Sam wondered idly if any of the knives or other implements his stepdad owned might make it into one of the books Chip researched and cowrote.

  Or maybe Chip was just being polite as usual. Sam peered up at the sky where a full moon with a rainbow ring around it hung hazily, the ring promising rain though the sky was a moonlight-infused blue, the ragged clouds of earlier dissolved away.

  But if the weather forecast held, that clear sky was only temporary, and the ring around the moon sealed the deal as far as Sam was concerned. Rats, he thought; he might have to postpone tomorrow’s kayaking trip with Chip, and he’d been hoping for at least a day away from both his unnervingly demanding girlfriends.

  A week, actually, wouldn’t be too much. The strong wish for radio silence on the romantic front, building in him quietly over the past month or so, suddenly felt huge as he headed back down the hall past the massive old cast-iron hot-water radiators and under the front foyer’s antique chandelier, to the stairs.

  Heaped near a metal stepladder leaning against the front hall radiator was a collection of patching and painting supplies that Sam’s mother was using to repair the hallway’s ornate acorn-and-grapeleaf-patterned tin ceiling: a roll of duct tape, a tin of white-tinted

  Kilz metal primer, the painting tray, and a new, still-in-the-wrapper extra-thick paint roller and roller handle.

  There were other collections like this one all over the old house, as his mother—a fervent if not necessarily very expert home-repair enthusiast—got ready for a long winter of indoor projects. If only he had some massive project planned, too, Sam thought as his hand slid along the curved oaken banister, its surface smoothed by two hundred years of people going up to bed in this house. Some excuse not to see Carol or Maggie for a while. Something he had to do, important and all-consuming …

  But both young women knew his job schedule at the boatyard, and knew, too, that except for it, his
time was his own. Or theirs, whichever one of them won the fight they seemed to be waging for it.

  Flattering, he guessed, but also confusing; sighing, he climbed the stairs, got into bed, and put the iPod’s earbuds into his ears. As he settled back against heaped pillows, the audiobook began playing and the author’s own voice began narrating a story of an ocean voyage that he himself had taken when he was only eighteen, and of a curious incident that had punctuated it.

  Sam sighed with happy anticipation: a curious incident! But then he noticed that he’d left the window shades up and the lava lamp on, its colorfully smoky swirls roiling lazily like the crayon-hued eruption of some miniature underwater volcano.

  Drat, he thought, and crossed the room once more to snap the lamp off. He tucked a penlight into the pocket of the pants he’d be wearing tomorrow so he’d have it with him at work; the thing was surprisingly handy. Then he turned to lower the window shade.

  Which was how he noticed that Chip Hahn was not sound asleep in his room at all but obviously wide awake, slipping silently down the front walk and away down the street, toward downtown and the gleaming bay.

  The rabbit’s foot Chip had always carried ever since Sam had known him flashed whitely in the shimmering moonlight, the good-luck talisman dangling as it always did from the dully glinting chain clipped to his friend’s belt loop.

  2

  If the huge bell hulking silently in the tower of the two-hundred-year-old All Faith Chapel in Eastport, Maine, had been working that night, none of the rest of it would have happened.

  Or at any rate it wouldn’t have happened there, or to her, because she wouldn’t have been able to gain entry to the belfry at all and neither would the person who followed her in.

  Decades earlier, when the bell still did ring out the hours and the half hours, the door to the enclosed stairs leading up to the slatted-in belfry was kept locked, because it was well known that the bell’s monstrous peal could flat-out kill a man unlucky or careless enough to experience it at close range.

  But not anymore. All Faith Chapel, built in 1824 a stone’s throw from the larger and more respectable Hope Lutheran, was the second house of worship on the aptly named Two Church Lane. Meant as an alternative to the traditionally doctrined Hope, in its foursquare construction, white-clapboarded height, and towering spire, it resembled its huge neighbor so closely as to be almost a twin, right down (or up, in fact) to its massive (and massively troublesome, eventually) old bell.

  Cast in 1819 and finally hung in the belfry at All Faith in 1825, the bell first malfunctioned while bonging out the news of World War II’s end in Europe. The tidings, so welcome at first, grew calamitous when the bell didn’t stop but instead clanged on deafeningly for hours, terrifying the horses and causing local farmers’ pregnant pigs to abort. People swore later they’d heard it in Bangor, and that it scared schools of codfish right out of the icy salt water of Passamaquoddy Bay, local people gathering up the still-flopping silvery victims in baskets.

  Once the din stopped, the church’s custodian had scrambled up four flights and a rickety ladder to where the big bell still vibrated, the air inside the belfry humming, he said later, like a million maddened bees. He unhooked the flywheel from the clock-driven timing mechanism (praying all the while that the thing wouldn’t start up again before he got done, and scramble his own mechanisms) and was forever afterwards regarded as a hero.

  But even though he’d stopped any chance of the bell ringing uncontrollably—that is, by stopping it altogether—he was not able to fix it. Oh, he got it jiggered around so that when it ran it would strike the hour, all right, but not the correct hour. The bell wouldn’t turn off for the night anymore, either, a problem for neighbors who wanted to sleep more than thirty minutes at a stretch.

  Still, at first it was thought that the trouble might be simple. After all, the custodian wasn’t a clock expert, just a fellow in blue overalls with a big bunch of keys on his belt. A real clock man, people believed, would do the job up elegantly.

  But over the next thirty years, every one of the skilled clock technicians who could be found (and persuaded to make a long trip by rail and ferry to a remote downeast Maine island town) tried his hand at the repair. After a while the bell became a grail and the journey a sort of pilgrimage, as one timepiece genius or revered clockworks sage after another threw his hands up in defeat.

  Finally, sometime in the 1970s—the exact date isn’t known—the enormous white-faced clock on the outside of the tower was stopped, deliberately and for good. Afterwards, the huge Roman-numeraled face read perpetually 11:49 and the sound of the bell faded swiftly into Eastport’s collective memory.

  Sadly, said some. Criminally, said others, who thought still more repair funds should have been found. But they were not, and subsequently the door leading to the bell tower, no longer a potentially fatal chamber, was left open or shut as the custodian (not the same one who had scrambled so bravely up the tower at the end of World War II) saw fit.

  After a while, tattered hymnals and missals began to be stored on the narrow steps leading upward, as did lost scarves, umbrellas, and orphaned gloves whose owners might still come hunting. The way up and up to the tower became storage, then degenerated into a catchall area. One day a latch on the door to the stairway came loose, and then the key was lost, so it couldn’t be locked or even closed very tightly at all. Not that there was any real reason to do so; there was nothing of value in the stairwell, and the old church’s massive front door still did lock properly.

  Or anyway it locked when people remembered to lock it, which on that particular day perhaps someone hadn’t.

  All of which was why Karen Hansen, a local fourteen-year-old with big plans but few distinguishing qualities other than the fact that her father was the town drunk, had been able to get in. Then she made her way with the aid of a small flashlight to the narrow enclosed stairway’s first cramped wooden landing. But once she got that far, her courage deserted her suddenly and she sat, surrounded by lost gloves and hats and, inexplicably, a clutter of tools.

  Claw hammer, pry bar, a retractable tape measure … Squaring her thin shoulders under the long-sleeved plaid flannel shirt she wore, Karen idly fingered the items that lay on the steps while trying hard to feel as romantically tragic as the main character in the Twilight series, books about vampires and werewolves that she and her friends all loved.

  But the only emotion she could summon up was loneliness. That, and a trickle of fear … Oh, don’t be a dumbass, she scolded herself stoutly. Pulling a lighter and a pack of Marlboros out of her denim vest pocket, she lit up efficiently and sucked in a steadying drag. There, that was better …

  But then she abruptly drew her blue-jeaned knees tightly to her chin and nearly busted out bawling. Karen the crybaby, her dad would’ve jeered, just a damned useless crybaby.

  No good for anything. His harsh voice rasped in memory, its rough edges tearing at the already sore places in her heart. But the thought of the flat-handed slap that often followed his words got her moving again: I’ll show you. You’ll be sorry.

  You’ll be very sorry. She swiped her sleeve across her nose, had a final drag off the cigarette, then pinched it out the way she’d seen him do often, between a spit-moistened thumb and forefinger.

  That was when she heard the sound from somewhere below in the stairwell’s thick, musty darkness. A scuffing sound, like a shoe’s sole sliding just the tiniest bit as it landed on the next stair’s wooden tread. Not a loud sound.

  But real. No question about it. And coming toward her. She stood up, listening, too frightened to shine her flashlight’s fading beam down the steps. Suddenly the vampires and werewolves from Twilight weren’t romantic at all, only hungry.

  Hungry and mean. Who’s there? she might have ventured, but she couldn’t make her throat move. A need to pee seized her, along with a wish, deep and piercingly hopeless, to be home in her own bed with the covers pulled up and her flashlight illuminating the pages
of a library book; her dad said reading at night was just a waste of expensive electricity.

  And reading in the daytime’s a waste of eyesight, probably, she thought bitterly, since if it weren’t for her father and his drinking and his meanness, she wouldn’t be doing this at all, she wouldn’t be here.

  But she was, and so was whoever—or whatever—had made the sound, down there in the darkness of the old wooden stairwell of the All Faith Chapel on Two Church Lane in Eastport, Maine.

  No further sound followed. Gradually, her heart slowed. Her breathing, which had felt like an iron band was tightening around her chest, came a little easier, and her urgent need to relieve herself was no longer quite so acute.

  She still couldn’t move, though. The sound didn’t come again but neither could she un-hear it. It had been there.

  Hadn’t it? Gradually, she became less sure. Crybaby, one side of her mind jeered meanly at her. Useless little crybaby, dumbass, scaredy-cat. But the other side still knew … what?

  Slowly, she turned. In the flashlight’s weakening glow, the stairs vanished into the gloom above. Three more long flights to go, and then a ladder for the last part of the climb, or so she’d heard. She’d never even been in the church before, her dad being more of a regular worshipper at Murphy’s Tap Room and her mother being dead.

  Also, Karen was afraid of heights; luckily it was nearly midnight and pitch dark out, so at least once she got where she was going, she wouldn’t be able to see very well just how high up she was. Do it. Just do it and be done with it. And then …

  Then she could get out of this hick town. Far away, where nobody would ever find her, not her dad or anyone else. The idea sent her scrambling up the bare, dim-lit wooden steps to the next landing, and the next. Her job was not so hard, after all: climb to the top, stick the flashlight out between the slanted wooden slats in the belfry, then snap it on and off so Harvey Spratt and his creepy friends could see that she’d done it.