The Bell Jar

Ringing.

Somewhere from the other side of his dream, Edward could hear the ringing. It reached across the landscape of subconscious, pushing down the nocturnal thoughts of his sleeping mind and ever-so-briefly opening that door between two worlds. The second ring of the cell phone resting atop his nightstand slammed that mystical door further shut. He awoke.

Edward glanced at the digital clock as he groped awkwardly in the darkness to find the phone. The clock’s bright red numbers cut though the darkness of the room telling him it was 3:20 a.m. Phone calls to a clergyman in the early hours of the morning were rarely good news. 

Someone is dead. Someone has been in an accident. Something bad has happened.

The phone was midway through a third ring by the time he got it to his ear.

Had he been dreaming about his brother?

“Hello,” he answered, his voice unable to quite reach normal. “This is Father Ed.”

“What do you know about séances?”

“Amy?” Edward asked rhetorically. The door to his dreamland was now sealed tightly and double-locked from the inside. “Amy, its three o’clock in the morning.”

“What do you know about séances?” the voice of his niece repeated. Her voice void of emotion; flat and unfeeling.

A pregnant silence filled his world.

“Uncle Ed?”

“Yeah, I’m still here….”

“Tell me what you know about séances,” His brother’s daughter asked for the third time. This time he could hear a hint of emotions in her words. Impatience. Frustration. Possibly anger.

“Why are you asking me this Amy? Does this have something to do with your father?”

This time the silence came from the other end of the line. When she finally spoke, Edward had no doubts about the degree of anger in her words. She spoke in seething syllables, cold expression, laced with an edge that teetered on rage.

“Why would you ask that? What does any of this have to do with Daddy?”

Any of this?  

Edward was sitting on the edge of his bed now. The prospect of a return to slumber now completely out of the equation. Somewhere in the recesses of his soul he suspected sleep would be a taking an extended holiday from his life for at least the next few nights. Sleep would be replaced by memories and scotch whisky. 

“Amy, sweetheart,” he was doubtful his attempt to hide his fear was fooling the young woman. “It’s the middle of the night. Can we talk in the morning? I have breakfast with the elders at eight…I could be at your house by ten at the very latest. Or we could have lunch at Milo’s if you like?”

More dead air.

“No. No, morning won’t do,” her voice had lost the edge, her hostility being replaced by a sad desperation. “Please Uncle Eddie. Please… I am begging you. Please tell me what you know about séances… and why you mentioned Daddy…”

Eddie.

In her entire eighteen-year existence, had she ever called him Eddie before? No one ever called him Eddie. Only his brother. Only Richard had called him Eddie. He was certain now that he had been dreaming about his brother.

“Please Amy… this isn’t a conversation for the middle of the night…”

“Okay…. I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

There was more than desperation now. There was a deep, almost palatable sadness. A hurting sadness. A sadness his mother would have called “good-bye sad”. A sadness he hadn’t heard since that night with Richie…

“Amy, wait,” it was his voice that was hinting desperation now. “Please, just wait a moment. We can talk now but please just give me two seconds to wake up.”

Silence was followed by a sigh that only widened the sense of despair shrouding his bedroom. He took a deep breath, found the air of the past inside himself, and began to speak.

“You were so young Amy. The night that Richie took his own… the night we lost your father. You wouldn’t remember those final days. I guess it’s something we tried to shield you from. It’s why we left the mid-west and moved here. I suppose we did it out of love. Maybe we did it selfishly; to hide ourselves from the memories too. I don’t know. I supposed I always knew that you would eventually want to have this talk,” he paused, looking for courage in the darkness. “I’ve had this talk a thousand times in my head.”

“Tell me now Uncle Edward.”

Her voice was still hard but much less angry. Relieved. Anxious perhaps.

“Do you know the glass jar that sits on my dresser?”

“The one with the little bell inside? What has that got to do with...”

“Stop,” he said in a tone harsher than he intended. “I’m going tell you this damned story, but you need to just hush yourself and listen. When I’m done, we politely say good night and hang up. No questions. No mention of it ever again. If that is going to be a problem, this chat ends now. Understood?”

“I remember the jar with the bell.”

“Your father gave me that God forsaken thing the night before we found him,” Edward paused, testing to gauge her reaction. When no words came from the other end of the line, he calmly resumed speaking. “The last time I touched Richie was when he was handing it to me.”

Mustering more confidence, he cleared his throat and spoke at length. He was inadvertently staring at the old glass container on his dresser as he talked.

“You were still a baby, barely six-months old. Your mom had been gone for three of those months. It was just you and Richie. Truth be told, it was probably you that kept him alive those last three months. Partly at least.” Tears were forming in the corner of his eyes as he continued. “The other thing that kept him going was his need to find her again. When Mary passed, Richie became obsessed with death. No, that’s not right… it wasn’t death… he became obsessed with life after death. It seized him. It owned him. For those last few months, he became a man possessed with reaching the other side. You, me, his career, his family, his health… all that became secondary to his drive to reconnect with her spirit. There were fortune tellers, and mediums, and spirit boards and witchcraft of all shapes and sizes. Connecting with her again became his life. He lost his job. He lost any respect, any empathy the community held for him. He eventually lost his sanity. And yes, yes there were séances.”

Edward paused again. He could taste the saltiness of his own tears. When he started again, his sentences were broken by quiet sobs.

“I tried baby. We all tried. We prayed. We yelled. We begged. We pleaded. He couldn’t be reached. His soul was already gone…”

More sobs.

Silence.

“May I speak Uncle Ed?”

“Yes.”

“What has any of that have to do with the jar?”

“Richie brought me the jar that last night. Said it was something he found in New Orleans. He called it a spirit jar. It’s a goddammed mason jar with a bell hanging from the inside of the lid. His eyes were so wild that night. He set it on my kitchen table and made me promise never to give it away; said when I heard it ring, I would believe. He was my brother and my best friend, and I loved him. God knows how I loved him. God knows. But Richie was already on his way out. Those eyes. God damn well knows it too. Richie wasn’t right that night.”

Silence.

“Uncle Ed,” her voice had softened to the point where Edward heard his brother’s echo within it. “He was going to a séance that night, wasn’t he? “

Silence.

“He was, wasn’t he? 

Silence

“Jesus Christ Uncle Ed. Can you please just be honest with me. Was there a séance involved with Daddy’s death? Why won’t you tell me the truth?”

“The truth Amy,” Edward started, guarding his words from the emotion within him. “The truth is that, regardless of where he went that night, it was his thirst for the dark side that took him from me… took him from you. I swore I’d never speak of it again. Don’t you see Sweetheart? That’s what it wants. It wants us to talk about it… to search for it. Please. Please, I am begging you. Just let it go. Please.”

The silence now came from Amy’s side of the conversation.

“Amy?”

“I’m here.”

“Can you promise me you will let it go? At least until we can talk in person. Can you do that for me? For us? “

“I don’t know,” her voice was a distant as Edward had ever hear it. “I don’t know. Maybe. I got to go Uncle.”

“Amy, please.”

“I… I love you Uncle Ed.”

There was a telltale click, followed by a final and lasting silence.

“I love you too, Amy,” he said to the empty room.

Sleep was a long time coming. He finally did reach that moment of bliss when his conscious mind began to again drift into the abyss of slumber. Before he crossed that blessed threshold, the ringing once again jolted him upright in his bed.

This time it wasn’t coming from his phone.

The ringing was coming from the mason jar on his dresser.

And then the screaming began.

END