The Crying Doorbell

Faith Hartley was twenty-three years old, and she had driven four hours north to sit in somebody else's house and feel sorry for herself in peace. That was the plan, anyway. The tea house had other ideas.

She arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, the kind of gray Scottish afternoon where the rain doesn't fall so much as hang in the air waiting for you to walk through it. The village was small enough that she'd driven through the whole thing twice looking for the place. The tea house sat attached to a community hall, both of them squat and stone and older than anything Faith had ever lived in. A hand-painted sign said THE TIN CUP, which she thought was a genuinely good name for a tea house, and she'd thought about texting her sister that, and then remembered she was supposed to be not talking to anyone for a week, so she didn't.

Inside, the place smelled like old leaves and dust. Shelves of teacups everywhere, the ornate kind with gold rims and painted roses, arranged like somebody's grandmother was coming back to inspect them. Loose-leaf tins lined the wall behind the counter, labeled in fading handwriting. Jasmine. Lapsang. Something called Highland Heather that Faith suspected was just heather.

There was a note taped to the till. Mrs. Abernathy, the reclusive widow who owned the place, had apparently written it in a hurry, because the handwriting slid downhill.

*Faith. Milk is in the fridge, mind the cat if you see him, his name is Pickles and he bites. One more thing. The doorbell is broken. Do not worry about it. If it rings at night, it is only the wind and you must not answer it. Enjoy your stay. E.*

"Okay, weird," Faith said to the empty room. "If it rings at night it's only the wind and you must not answer it. Very normal note. Love that for me."

She'd broken up with Desmond six months ago. Six months, and she could still say the whole sentence without her chest doing anything dramatic, which she counted as progress. They'd been together since second year of university, her one and only serious anything, and when it ended it didn't even end dramatically. He'd just decided, quietly, over a takeaway, that he wasn't sure he loved her the way he used to. She'd said okay. She'd said okay! That was the part that haunted her. Not the leaving, the okay.

So when she'd seen the house-sitting ad, a month in a tea house in the Highlands, free rent, look after an old lady's teacups, she'd applied within the hour. She wanted silence. She wanted to be a person with no one to report back to.

She unpacked her bag in the little flat above the shop, ate toast for dinner because the nearest real shop was forty minutes away and she'd promised herself no errands on day one, and went to bed at ten as a woman twice her age would.

The doorbell rang at midnight.

Faith shot upright in the strange bed, heart going, disoriented by a ceiling she didn't recognize. Then the chime came again, a bright two-note ding that did not sound like wind. It sounded like a shop bell, the little brass kind on a spring hinge. Clear as anything.

She lay there for a full minute arguing with herself. It's the wind. Mrs. Abernathy said it's the wind. Mrs. Abernathy, who specifically wrote a note about the doorbell, unprompted, at length, which is a thing people only do when the doorbell is not the wind.

She got up. Obviously she got up. You don't drive four hours to ignore a mystery.

The stairs creaked. The shop below was blue-dark, teacups catching what little light came through the front windows. The doorbell itself was a brass bell bolted above the front door, and here was the strange thing she'd noticed on arrival and filed away: there was no wiring anywhere, no button outside, nothing. It was a purely mechanical bell with a striker that should have needed a hand to ring it.

It rang again while she stood there. Twice. Then stopped.

"Right," Faith said. "Cool. Great. Very normal."

She unlocked the front door, because what was the point of being brave enough to come down if she wasn't going to go all the way, and stepped out into the garden.

The garden behind and around the tea house was a mess of old rose bushes and a stone wall, and beyond the wall, the community hall stood dark, a banner half-unfurled over its door that she couldn't read in the dark. Someone was standing in the garden.

She nearly screamed. The figure was tall, over by the wall, motionless, and the whole scene had that flat quality of a dream, no shadows moving right, no sound but her own breathing. She opened her mouth to say something, hello, excuse me, please don't murder me, I've had a very long year, when the figure simply wasn't there anymore. Not walked away. Not turned a corner. Just gone, between one blink and the next.

Faith stood in the wet grass for a while, then went inside, locked the door, and did not sleep much.

---

In the morning she learned two things. One, Pickles the cat did exist and did try to bite her. Two, there was someone living above her.

She found this out by knocking on her own ceiling with a broom handle at nine in the morning, because whoever was up there had been pacing, or moving furniture, or possibly performing a tap routine, since dawn. Then she felt bad and went up the outside stair to apologize.

The woman who answered was twenty-nine maybe, dark curly hair pinned up with what appeared to be a pencil, wearing headphones around her neck and a cardigan with actual holes in it. She looked delighted to see Faith, which was not the reaction Faith expected after broom-handle-ing someone's floor.

"Oh thank god, you're real! I thought maybe the house sitter thing was a rumor. I'm Samira. Samira Tuttlehill. Sorry about the noise, I was recording foley at like six because the village birds are unbelievable."

"Foley?"

"Sound effects. For podcasts. I produce them, it's mostly true crime and one very popular show about haunted lighthouses." She stepped back from the door. "Do you want tea? I have actual tea, not that dust in bags. I steal the good stuff from downstairs when Mrs. Abernathy isn't looking, which is always, because she's never looking, she lives on an island apparently."

"I," said Faith, who had planned a day of silent moping, "yes. Okay. Yes!"

Samira's flat was chaos, recording equipment everywhere, a big fuzzy microphone on a boom arm in the corner, wires everywhere. But she made a genuinely excellent pot of jasmine tea, and Faith sat down at her cluttered table and told her about the doorbell before she'd even decided to.

Samira put her cup down very slowly.

"Tell me again. When did it ring, how many times, what did it sound like?"

"Midnight. Twice. Then twice more when I went down. Bright little ding-ding, like a shop bell. And Samira, there's no wire on that thing, there's no button, there's nothing to ring it."

"Did you go outside?"

"How do you know I went outside?"

"Because everyone goes outside," Samira said. "Did you see anything?"

And Faith, who had planned to keep the figure to herself on the reasonable grounds that it made her sound insane, heard herself describe it anyway. The tall shape by the wall. The stillness. The vanishing.

Samira was already rummaging for a notebook. "That's it. That's the bell spirit, oh my god, you actually heard it on your first night, do you know how long I've been recording dead air trying to catch this?"

"The bell what now?"

"The bell spirit. Local thing. There's a whole legend, the woman who used to run the tea house, before Mrs. Abernathy, before that even, she kept a diary and it's in the village archive, I've read it eleven times." Samira was talking with her hands now, tea going cold. "The bell rings at night for people who are hollow inside. That's the phrase the diary uses, hollow inside. It rings for you, and if you answer, it shows you something. Nobody knows what, because everyone who wrote about it got vague right at the interesting part, which is so typical of primary sources."

"Hollow inside," Faith repeated. She thought of six months of okay, okay, okay. She took a long sip of tea and did not say anything else about that.

"Here's the thing," Samira said, leaning forward. "I moved here eight months ago for a podcast job and everyone told me about the bell like it was a cute tourist story. But I've had three separate people, separate people, tell me they heard it the week before something went wrong for them. A divorce. A fire. And now there's a wedding."

"There's a what?"

"Saturday! The reception's in the hall right next door to you. The whole village has been decorating for a week, you must have seen the bunting." Faith had seen the bunting and assumed it was a festival. "Terence Tillman and, um, some bride, I'm terrible with names, she's from Inverness. Except. And this is the part I haven't been able to put in a podcast because it's not confirmed." Samira lowered her voice like the walls had ears, which, given the day's theme, felt fair. "The groom has been missing for three days."

"Missing?"

"Missing. His best man, some big serious guy named Caleb, has been going door to door since Tuesday. Nobody's seen Terence since Monday night. And the last place anyone saw him?" Samira pointed down, through her floor, toward the tea house. "Right around here. Buying loose leaf. At ten at night. From a closed shop."

Faith looked at her cup. "You're telling me the doorbell in my house rang for a missing man."

"I'm telling you the doorbell in your house rang for a missing man, and then rang for you, and I would very much like to record it tonight, if you'll let me camp in your shop after midnight."

Faith should have said no. She'd come here to be alone. But the truth was the alone hadn't been working, six months of it hadn't been working, and Samira was looking at her with the first genuinely excited face Faith had seen since she got north of Glasgow.

"If it rings," Faith said, "you have to hear it too. I'm not being the only one."

"Deal," said Samira, already reaching for her microphone.

Friday morning came grey and drizzling, the way it apparently always did in the village, and Faith woke at nine feeling like she'd dreamed everything about the night before. Then she saw the recording equipment stacked by her shop door and remembered she had agreed to let a podcast lady lurk in her tea house after midnight.

"Nothing," Samira said, appearing at the back door with two mugs and the defeated face of a scientist whose experiment failed. "Not a squeak. I got four hours of ambient rain. It's mocking me."

"Maybe it only rings when something's actually about to go wrong," Faith said, taking the tea. "And last night was quiet."

"Or maybe it rang already. For Terence. Monday." Samira stood at the back window, looking out at the garden. The garden was a long strip of grass gone wild, hemmed in by a stone wall, and beyond the wall sat the community hall with its bunting sagging in the wet. "Faith. What's that in the grass?"

Faith looked. There was a dark shape halfway down the garden, near where the grass gave up and turned to mud. "Is that a phone?"

They both went out into the drizzle without coats, because apparently neither of them was sensible. It was a phone, face down in the grass, thoroughly soaked. Faith picked it up with her sleeve and turned it over, and the screen lit up in that stubborn way drowned phones do, showing a lock screen photo.

"Oh my god," Samira said. "That's him. That's Terence. Caleb's been showing his picture round the village, that's the exact beard."

The man in the photo was grinning at the camera in a way that made Faith's stomach hurt. It was a hen party behind him, blurred, everyone laughing, and he looked like a man on the happiest night of his life who wasn't happy at all. Faith had seen that exact smile in her own mirror for about a year before Desmond ended it.

"Wait," she said. "Swipe. Is it unlocked?"

It was. The last photo in the camera roll was taken Monday at 10:14 PM, the very hour he'd been buying tea, and it was mostly dark. A patch of pale grey in the middle. When Faith zoomed in, the grey resolved into something that might have been a shape, a tall pale smear standing beside the old well behind the hall.

"Is that the well? The one behind the hall?" Faith turned the phone so Samira could see.

Samira went very still, the way she had when Faith first described the figure. "There's no well behind the hall. There hasn't been a well there since before the war. It's capped, it's under the ground, there's a car park on top of it."

"Then what's that?"

"That's what I'd like to know," Samira said, and her voice had gone quiet in a way that was worse than loud. "We should give the phone to Caleb."

"Caleb the best man?"

"Caleb the best man. And Faith? Before we do, can we just walk past the hall? Ten minutes. I want to see where that photo was taken."

Faith should have said no. She had said no to very little lately, which was its own kind of problem, and part of her brain pointed out that a woman whose only plan for the day had been moping about Desmond should probably not follow a stranger toward a haunted car park. But Samira was already walking, and Faith was already following, and the rain had thinned to that fine Highland mist that doesn't so much fall as hang there thinking.

The hall's car park was empty, chairs stacked inside for tomorrow, folding tables against the wall. The bunting looked worse up close. And in the corner of the car park, where the photo's pale smear had stood, there was nothing at all. No well, no structure, just tarmac with a drain cover.

"That's it?" Faith said. "It's a drain?"

"That's it," Samira said, crouching down beside it. "Unless." She put her ear to the drain cover, which Faith thought was a dramatic gesture until Samira's face changed. "Faith. Come here. Listen."

Faith crouched. The rain, the wind, the distant sound of a village going about its Friday. And underneath all of it, thin as a hair, a sound like a voice. Not words. Just voice-shaped.

"Samira, is there a maintenance guy we should call?"

"There's no maintenance guy who fixes this," Samira said, standing up and brushing off her knees. "The diary talks about the well. It says the bell is the well's bell. The tea house and the well were the same property once, before they built the hall. Hollow inside, Faith. What do you think a capped well is?"

Faith stood there in the mist and felt something she didn't have a word for. It wasn't fear, exactly. It was more like being called. Like when your phone buzzes in your pocket and you know who it is before you look. Except the caller was under the tarmac.

"We should go," Samira said. "We should get the phone to Caleb and let actual people deal with