The Bell

On the third day of each month, it was tradition for my family to ring a very peculiar bell in our front yard before sunset. Why we did this was still a mystery to me. As a kid growing up, I always thought it was one of dads unusual habits that he picked up from his time in the military. No matter how much I researched the bell, however, I could not find anything related to the topic. 

Every other night at our estate played out as usual. Mom would cook dinner while dad toyed with something in the barn out back. My sister, Hannah, would usually be playing with one of her dolls that she always kept close by. She was younger than myself—almost a full eight years younger, to be exact. Even with the age gap, I always did my best to spend time with her after. After dinner, we would watch a movie in the living room before bed. Nothing stood out to me as strange at the time when I was younger, although looking back on it, perhaps I should have payed more attention. Only how could I have known? 

My father was always a restless one, constantly pacing around the house and scratching his head. He was always thinking of the next big thing. Still, even in his sporadic pacing, there was one spot where he always stood still. The window above the sink in the kitchen always seemed to catch his eye. I for one have always hated the view out of that window. 

There was a nasty bog not too far from the house, and it was littered with a film of green algae that lay across the top. Gnarled vines crept up from its depths, and clunks of brown, half dead vegetation bordered its stinking mass. It wasn’t always the grotesque sight of the thing that usually made me queasy, but the fact that no living thing seemed to inhabit the place. No frogs, no birds, and not even an insect lay upon a blade of slimy grass that emerged from the bogs wet surface. 

The absence of life made the whole bog still, as if frozen in time. Not a peep could be heard from its direction. Its presence lingered like a stain in our back yard, waiting to be scrubbed away and purged.

My father must have also thought of the bog as a strange place, seeing how frequently he stopped to gander at the thing. Not to mention that the bell he had us ring every third evening of the month was placed directly between our house and that monstrosity. 

As I grew older, into my late teenage years, I grew tired of this routine of ringing the bell. I used to ask him, “Why do we have to keep doing this? Why is it so important?”

At the time, he looked at me as if I had just committed murder. “The day we forget to ring this bell, is the day we will have to move away from this house. Is that what you want?”

I looked at him wearily, “No, but I—”

“Enough.” He spat. “If you appreciate the life you have here, then you will ring this bell on the third of each month just before the sun sets. That is how this works.”

A few more years passed, and I was old enough to start looking for a place on my own. I had a girlfriend who was willing to move in and split the bills, and I was growing tired of living at home with my parents and now young teenage sister. The relationship I had with her was still close, but my father and I had begun to drift apart. There was one thing I grew to hate about him, so much so that I began to resent the task. Ringing that damned bell.

He insisted time and time again that I leave whatever it is that I was doing at the time, drive all the way home, just to be present for the ringing of the bell. It became a nuisance. Every time I was out, whether it was on a date, or out with friends, my old man would call me in a fury, screaming at me to rush home before sunset so that we may ring that bell. There were many times that I thought of simply staying put. I never did, of course, until the last time I saw him.

The last time he called me in a fit, I was over an hour away with my girlfriend, looking at a house to possibly buy in the future. I had honestly forgotten all about the stupid bell in our back yard. My fathers voice was course as he screamed at me for my so-called “ignorance.” Having enough with him, and partially embarrassed for answering the phone in front of my girlfriend and the realtor, I hung up. There were better things to do in life than ring that stupid bell. 

Once the tour of the house was over, I dropped off my girlfriend back at her house, kissed her goodbye, and headed home in the dark. It was after sunset, and everything was fine. All except the slight queasiness in my stomach that made me feel like I had done something wrong.

I pulled into the driveway, and to my surprise, the house was completely dark inside. I shivered, knowing that even if everyone went to sleep, my father always kept the kitchen light on downstairs. Had we lost power since I have been gone?

Stepping out of my truck, I approached the house with caution. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood. Normally, where there was silence as I walked towards the house, there was now the sounds of life coming from the bog behind the house. Crickets, frogs, and wild hoots and hollers filled the air, echoing off of the walls of the house. My heart stammered as I pushed open the door.

It was hard to see in the darkness, and I fumbled for the light switch. The lights flickered on, one of the bulbs from the hall even bursting as it was energized. Broken glass rained down on the floor, and to my surprise, the house was entirely mangled.

The couch in the living room had been flipped, and tables and chairs were either misplaced, or broken entirely, leaving a trail of splintered wood and debris. The carpet had been stained with a black, goopy substance that reminded me of nine grease smeared all about. The stuff had a stench to it, one that nearly brought me to my knees. It was a cross between rotting fish and sulfur, and my eyes burned as I crossed into the next room. 

The kitchen was the worst of it. Besides more shattered lightbulb’s, the refrigerator door had been ripped clean off, leaving the open fridge with broken shelves inside. My heart pounded as I bolted from the kitchen and down the hall to my parents bedroom. When I reached the end of the hall, I froze at the sight of large claw marks which littered the walls and ceiling. Their were four claws each, and they resembled something you would see out of your average dinosaur movie. 

With trembling hands, I opened the door to my parents room, expecting the worst. Instead of my two parents and loving sister possibly being dead inside, what I found instead was a ghastly pile of… Goop? Slime? To be honest, I didn’t know what it was. It was like a nest of the gnarliest, bright green boogers the size of a car pulsing in the corner of the room. Slick tentacle-like arms stretched up the walls of the room, and an oozing puss dripped down from the ceiling, collecting on the floor in a shining heap. 

With a yell, I stumbled backwards, landing on something hard. I rolled over to see that it was my sisters old doll she used to play with. What was it doing here in my parents room? Only then, with my eyes no longer distracted by the pulsing ooze in front of me, did I notice that the bell that which could easily be seen from their window, was gone.

I frantically rushed outside, having enough of this nightmarish encounter. Where the bell once stood, now was another smudge of that black grease. This time, however, it was a trail that led directly to the bog. I began to grow angry, resentful at what was happening. Was this some kind of joke by my father? Was this how he was going to try and trick me into thinking that the bell was so damned important? 

“Thats enough!” I shouted. “Where are you!” My voice echoed through the night, and as I spoke my last word, the bog became silent.

My breath was the only thing I heard, not even a gust of wind was present to relieve me from the silence that hung. I trembled, knowing that something was wrong with that blighted bog. With a heavy sigh I inched toward it, following that greasy black trail that littered the dark moonlit grass. Sweat poured from my temple as I finally arrived at the base of the bog. It was the closest I had ever been to that forsaken thing. 

There was an energy in the air, a sort of buzzing. It was electrifying, and the hair on my body stood as I looked into the patches of mucky water. My heart thudded, but there was another rhythm distracting me from my own beating chest. It was as if there was another heart beat present, one that thudded on much slower, and much deeper. 

The air grew thick, and my eyes heavy. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to sleep as the dense fog closed in around me. I hadn’t even realized it was there until I collapsed to my knees. With my head swimming, I looked into the fog and saw the great relief I had been looking for. 

There they were, my mother, father, and sister stood before me. Each of them had a smile, and nodded as they held out a hand to assist me to my feet. Tears swelled in my eyes. They were okay. The things back inside the house, that blob of green heap, must have been a hallucination. The fog continued to swirl around me as I took in its mystifying scent. No longer did I smell the rotting stench of death, nor did I feel as panicked as I once was. This was bliss. Everything was okay.

When I reached out to grab my fathers hand, an alarm went off inside me. Something churned in my stomach, my heart dropping deep into a cove I never thought was there. This wasn’t right. My conscious screamed at me to pull back, to not take his hand. I stared at it for a moment, contemplating this feeling. 

The fog continued to swirl, its misty tendrils flaring around my head. The warm embrace was a welcomed feeling, and the rest of the world seemed not to matter. But that alarm inside my head—that stabbing thought in my brain that was telling me to turn and run—it was too much to let go. Suddenly, I saw the truth.

My father was not the one holding out his hand. What was once the man I loved, was now a corpse, standing before me. The sunken eyes looked down upon me, and its dislocated jaw which hung loosely on its left side—like a broken door hanging off only one of its hinges—sent shivers through me.

I screamed, my voice carrying on through the night. The bog itself came to life immediately, and I have never before heard nature return its own scream. It was as if all of the creatures that supposedly lived in the bog all cried out at once, as if they had their own alarm for danger. 

I gave no second thought to my choice to turn and run. Whatever creatures were behind me were not my family. Exasperated, I leapt into truck, turned the key, and threw it into reverse. I nearly flipped the thing cutting it to the right and dropping down into the ditch beside our driveway. I stomped on the gas, peeling out of the driveway while taking one last look in my rearview mirror to see if whatever those things were followed me.

To my dismay, nothing appeared in the mirror. Not even the bog itself! I forced myself to stomp on the brakes, craning my head to look back. I was in disbelief. The entire bog itself was gone, replaced with an open grass field. I sat there for a long moment, questioning may sanity. Hell, part of me had the idea to want to go back inside and see if my family was there all along, and perhaps I had just had some kind of mental episode! I had shown no signs of insanity since before tonight, at least that was what I had thought. Could a person know whether or not they had been driven mad? 

Knowing that, I left the house that day and never looked back. I had spent the night at my girlfriends house, deciding to leave the story to myself until the next morning. When I told her what had happened, she insisted that we go back and see the house for itself. After all, she had been over many times since we had started dating, and she knew of the bo that lurked in my back yard. 

Her expression when we pulled into the driveway only to see there was no bog brought me relief. I truly had thought that I was slipping away into a path of madness. But instead, what I saw was true. Not only with the bog, but with the damage that had been inflicted onto the house as well. Unfortunately, whatever green mass that was growing in the corner of my parents bedroom had seemingly disappeared.

The police arrived later that afternoon to investigate the house. They didn’t get far, of course, and I didn’t bother telling them what I had seen. At this point, I only wanted to forget about the whole situation, and I had already begun accepting the fact that my family had gone missing. Whether or not they had died, I am still unsure to this day. 

Now I live far from that old family house, and I have a family of my own with my now wife and two kids. She and I have both moved on from the strange incident, and to this day I live without any closure of what happened to my family. Only now, I have recently been having dreams of the bog, and the face of the corpse that tried to take my hand in the fog. I didn’t understand why at the time that I was suddenly having to relive these memories, all until my youngest child came running into the house in a frenzy. 

She pointed to the back of the house, insisting that I go see something that has happened. I followed her outside, and collapsed at the sight. There in my back yard, where there was once a clean, freshly mowed field of grass, was now a stinking, thickly vegetated bog that made no sound, and with it, only a few short paces from my house, was that damned bell…