5th Investment! [VIDEO/TEXT]
[Someone sounds pretty pleased with herself. She's playing with a nice stack of credit chips. Is she waiting to put them on her card, or did she withdraw them just to count and play around with? It's hard to say...]
Not bad, not bad~! I should get jobs that pay me by the word more often! Maybe I'll get lucky, and they'll be hiring novelists next month!
[Yup, she's wrapping up her monthly job as short story writer. And what exactly did she write? Well, stories like...]
The deep, low tolling of an ancient bronze bell echoed far through the mountains.
Roused from sleep, he opened his eyes to a white sky and a damp ground. Below there was a fog blanketing the ground, thick enough to fill the whole valley until it looked like a giant pond of white water. But he had made his camp higher than that, high enough to look down upon the tops of the tallest valley trees that only barely broke through the fog like swimmers surfacing for air.
The bell tolled again, and he craned his head to try and spot its source. This was not the first time he had heard it ringing since he entered the mountains.
In fact, it had been the bell that drew him out there. Its sound had traveled beyond the mountains, into the hills and to the ears of a curious village, who thought a temple might be hiding somewhere out here. And so, when the young man arrived on their streets, they had asked him to take a long detour off his path to investigate the source of the bell.
A wiser man might have declined. But he was a fool and well aware of it, one who suffered from twice as much curiosity than anyone in the village. The romance of mystery ensnared his heart easily. Even if they had not asked him, he would have still set off into these cold, lonely mountains on his own.
And as he had ventured further into the mountains, the faint ringing had grown each day until it was a deafening clang, sending birds flying up out of the valley with each toll. It had struck twelve times every morning and every evening without fail, like a giant clock that was six hours off schedule. He was certain now that the bell had to be somewhere at the peak of this mountain, the highest in the range, because the sound was bearing down on him from above as if the sky itself was crying out.
Then the twelfth toll struck and faded, the sound traveling towards the horizon. He had not spotted the bell or any temple to house one, leaving him with no choice but to pack up his campsite and search for it.
He climbed out of his bedroll and pulled his coat on over his clothes. There was little reason to bother changing his clothes every day out here in the wilderness, where he would see no living person for weeks and only had the chance to bath every few days or so. He lifted his bedroll off the ground and shook it out near the cliff, letting the motes scatter in the wind over the valley. Once that was rolled up and packed away, he turned his attention to the campfire, which still had a wisp of smoke trailing up from it. Before falling asleep, he had packed a type of incense in it and let it smolder through the night, repelling monsters and beasts and evil spirits alike from his campsite. But now he revived the flame to cook a meal of meat and root vegetables, eaten with hard bread. Once he was finished that, he extinguished the flames completely, finished packing his belongings and set out on the trail to the summit.
Or what there was of a trail. The path was rarely traveled, and it had been years if not decades since anyone had bothered to clear it out. Even though he was above the tree line, plants were growing up here and beginning to reclaim the path as their own, and he found himself treading carefully to avoid stepping on clumps of small white wildflowers he had never seen before. But the trail could be walked, and that was enough to follow it as it coiled up to the top of the mountain.
Halfway through the day, the wildflowers became impossible not to step on. Even when he had reached a height where the grass refused to climb any higher, these flowers were only getting thicker, covering the ground like snow. When he approached the peak in the late afternoon, he could not even see the old trail any more. Fortunately, by that point, he didn't need it.
Though he couldn't understand what he had found at the summit. It was no temple, nor did it have any bell in sight. Instead, it was a building like many he had seen on other mountains, a outpost which had been built centuries ago out of stone and was on the verge of crumbling into dust. These had been constructed in the days before the humans and beastmen had begun living in peace, back during a time when beastmen tribes would sometimes attack the human villages.
The outpost was centered around a tower that housed a giant iron dish. When a beastman tribe was seen traveling through the mountains, a huge fire would be built inside of it, one that could be seen easily from the other mountains. The signal would be carried from mountain to mountain until it reached the village, giving them days to prepare for the attack.
But despite recognizing this, it was something he never expected to find here. There were six mountains between this one and the village. It would take too long and hard of a journey to bring rations to an outpost this remote, and it was too high to grow food itself unless one wanted to live off of these curious flowers. Or had it produced its supplies somewhere further down the mountain? Still, it didn't make sense. Even if it would give the village more advance warning than they would ever need of threats, this outpost was not worth the cost it would take to support it.
He found himself staring in disbelief at the building and the thick clumps of flowers blooming around it. "Does nothing on this mountain make sense?" he asked aloud. No answer came except for the whisper of the wind.
At least he could rest assured that the building was abandoned, and that he would not need to knock before entering. The door resisted being opened, so he leaned all his weight on it, until something gave way and the door opened with a rusty moan. Inside was nothing but dark forms, impossible to see. If the outpost had any windows, they must have been sealed shut.
But as fortune would have it, there was an old lantern hanging on a hook by the door. More surprising than it being there was the fact that, after he brought it down, he found there was still oil inside of it and a dry, clean wick. Wondering if it had been left there by an earlier traveler, he pulled his fire striker from his pocket and lit the lantern with a single spark.
The light was small, but it was enough to reveal the room to him. For the most part, it was exactly what he expected: furnishings from centuries ago, the sort that would only fetch a high price in an antique shop. Wooden tables and chairs, dishware made of red clay. A few swords, a hatchet for wood, and a hunting knife, all rusted from lack of care. A stone fireplace to heat the outpost in the winter.
He furrowed his brow, noting something that did not fit with the rest. Specifically, the floor, which looked as though it had been freshly swept that morning.
And he was already ruining it. Besides leaving dusty bootsteps wherever he walked, he noticed something else was spilling on the floor. The lantern he held had a strange, fog-like smoke cascading down from it. He lifted it up to get a whiff of it, and found it had a strange, earthy scent, one that made him think of the root vegetables he had eaten that morning. Had there been incense in the lantern as well as oil?
At any rate, he was not satisfied exploring only this much of the outpost. He located the entrance to the stairs and climbed up the signal tower, up to where the iron dish was housed. Here he was treated to a spectacular view, one where he could see all six mountains he had climbed to reach this point and, since the fog had cleared, the village from which this journey had started. But he had hoped to find the bell hidden away in this tower in secret, and there was still no sign of it.
He went back down the stairs, and then to another set of stairs that headed below, where the storage had been dug out. Here he expected to find empty barrels that once held food, old weaponry, and dried wood for lighting the signal fire, if it had not already been cleared out. He found something entirely different.
Most of the storage was taken up by a work station. There were baskets of the flowers from outside littered all about, only a few days old, and a press to squeeze little drops of fragrant oil from each of them. From the rest of the workstation, which had sticks half-coated in a sawdust paste and papers that were being rolled into ropes, he guessed that someone was making incense from the flowers outside.
But there were other things in the storage as well. In particular, a bookshelf caught his eye, full of books with cracked leather covers and yellowed pages. He set the lantern down and ran his finger over the spines, before selecting one to browse the contents of.
Before he could open the cover, he heard a voice from behind him, as cold as a metal blade on a winter night: "Put that back." His heart leapt into his throat and he dropped the book on the floor.
Behind him was a woman who, from head to toe, was as pale and white as the fog. One could call her beautiful, except it was a cold beauty, lacking any sort of vibrant glow. Her hair was long with ends so frayed that they seemed to disappear into the air. Her clothes were plain white robes, long enough that they dragged along the ground. The only thing about her that wasn't pale white were her eyes, which were as blue as the sky above the clouds.
Even though it felt as though she had pulled the breath from his body, he found the question leaving his lips: "Who are you?"
She did not answer, stepping past him to pick the book up off the ground and return it to its spot on the bookshelf.
He tried a different question: "Do you live here?"
"I reside here," she replied. "But I would not call it my home."
She walked past him again, and he could swear he could feel the same breeze that had blown outside, on the face of the mountain.
"How long have you been here?"
"I have forgotten." She took a seat at the workstation, producing a coil of the incense. A spark appeared, though he could not say how, and the coil was lit. The room began filling with more of the fragrant smoke.
There was something unusual about this situation. He was standing in a storeroom, making smalltalk with what he guessed could only be a ghost.
After struggling with words, he asked, "Do you like that incense?" And immediately after, he regretted it, realizing that she wouldn't be burning it if she didn't.
"It is my last pleasure," she replied, leaning her head down on the table as if she were very tired. "I have forgotten the taste of food and the feel of water. Even if my heart knew love, my fingers and lips would never reach it. But I can feel this smoke. It sinks into my body. I can smell the flowers, and almost remember the sting of heat at my eyes."
He shakes his head. "It's not good to get addicted to poisons like this."
The woman gave no reply.
"What about fresh air? Can you feel and smell that? Even for someone like you, spending your whole life in a place like this..."
"You wouldn't understand."
Their conversation was cut short by the bell tolling, louder than it had ever been. And yet, somehow, he was still certain the sound was traveling from higher up. He made a break for the stairs, to dash up to the top of the signal tower.
He did not reach the first step before he came to a sudden halt. His entire hand felt like ice. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the woman had jumped out of her seat and grabbed him, trying to stop him.
"Don't go out there," she said, her eyes suddenly full of fear.
He stared back, before pulling his hand away. "This might be my only chance." And he dashed up the stairs, up to the ground floor and then up to the signal tower.
He was greeted by a flame in the iron dish, burning large and bright without any fuel. Below, on the six mountains he had already crossed over, he could see lights shining from six other outposts, set in a straight line that pointed at this tower, the seventh.
But the bell was nowhere to be found, and it still sounded distant. The twelfth toll came, followed by silence. He cursed into the air.
Running all the way back down to the storage room, he found the woman hiding, cowering as far from the stairs as the small room would allow.
"Come," he said.
She looked up at him with fearful eyes.
"Come. Stand up," he said again, offering his hand. "I don't know how long you've lived here, but I don't think you know what a view you have upstairs. You would never stay down here if you did."
The woman hesitated, before taking his hand with the same frozen grip as before. Gently, he pulled her weightless body to its feet, and then led her slowly out of the storage room and back up the signal tower. She hesitated again at the top of the stairs, as if afraid of exposing herself to the open air. But led by his hand, she stepped up to the top, where she could gaze out over the mountains around them, including the six he had crossed to meet her there. And he, behind her, noticed that he could almost see through her to the mountains beyond, as if her body was full of smoke and mist.
Deciding that staring at her would probably make her uncomfortable, he turned around, looking out in the other direction. It took him a moment to look it all over before he spotted something unexpected. And then he gaped at it.
Quietly, he asked, "That bell was tolling for you, wasn't it?"
She turned around to face him. "How did you guess?"
He continued to stare out, not at the mountains but at the sky above, still covered in clouds as it had been all day. There, hidden in the mists, was a light. And it lined up perfectly with the towers on earth, an eighth signal fire in the sky. If there was more beyond that, or anything beyond that, he could not see it in the clouds.
The woman looked away. "This is where I reside."
"But someone's calling you home."
He turned and stared at her more, and then noticed something. The woman's white color was not evenly distributed. The very top of her head almost disappeared into the air, while her feet appeared as solid white. Like fog sinking to the ground.
He narrowed his eyes. "It's that incense. It really has poisoned you. The smoke is binding you to the earth, isn't it?"
She gave no reply. Her blue eyes refused to meet his, too weakened to defend her attachment with it or fight against it.
"Then we'll have to cleanse it from your system."
He took her hand again and led her once more. This time, however, he walked towards the signal flame.
"The flowers are drawn to cold. Heat might be the best way to purge them." He paused, before asking, "Can you walk through this fire unharmed?"
"Yes. But if you do not release my hand, yours will be burned."
"If I release it, will you have the strength to walk through?"
She did not answer.
"I can live with a few burns."
And so he guided her, hand submerged in scathing fire and grasping stinging ice, as she slowly walked through the cleansing flame. As she did, the smoke and oil was pushed out of her body, up into the air and disappearing. When she emerged from the other side, she was no longer white, but an ethereal blue, and only barely visible to his eyes.
But he could make out the faintest form of a smile on her lips. "Thank you."
And then she turned towards the eighth signal, and walked straight into the sky, her form fading.
He leaned out over the edge, cupping his hand to his mouth as if to call out to her. "Make it home safely. Don't stop to sniff any more of those flowers on the way. I mean it!" No answer came except for the whisper of the wind.
For the better part of an hour, he stared out at the sky, trying to spot the giant bell beyond the clouds. But there was nothing, and even the eighth signal fire eventually flickered out of sight. Then the seventh was extinguished beside him, and one by one the rest disappeared, no longer needed to light the way home.
It would be days, even weeks before he returned to the village with a bag full of antique books and dishware to sell, along with the unbelievable story of the source of the bell. By then, the villagers had all forgotten about the curious sound.
Not bad, not bad~! I should get jobs that pay me by the word more often! Maybe I'll get lucky, and they'll be hiring novelists next month!
[Yup, she's wrapping up her monthly job as short story writer. And what exactly did she write? Well, stories like...]
The deep, low tolling of an ancient bronze bell echoed far through the mountains.
Roused from sleep, he opened his eyes to a white sky and a damp ground. Below there was a fog blanketing the ground, thick enough to fill the whole valley until it looked like a giant pond of white water. But he had made his camp higher than that, high enough to look down upon the tops of the tallest valley trees that only barely broke through the fog like swimmers surfacing for air.
The bell tolled again, and he craned his head to try and spot its source. This was not the first time he had heard it ringing since he entered the mountains.
In fact, it had been the bell that drew him out there. Its sound had traveled beyond the mountains, into the hills and to the ears of a curious village, who thought a temple might be hiding somewhere out here. And so, when the young man arrived on their streets, they had asked him to take a long detour off his path to investigate the source of the bell.
A wiser man might have declined. But he was a fool and well aware of it, one who suffered from twice as much curiosity than anyone in the village. The romance of mystery ensnared his heart easily. Even if they had not asked him, he would have still set off into these cold, lonely mountains on his own.
And as he had ventured further into the mountains, the faint ringing had grown each day until it was a deafening clang, sending birds flying up out of the valley with each toll. It had struck twelve times every morning and every evening without fail, like a giant clock that was six hours off schedule. He was certain now that the bell had to be somewhere at the peak of this mountain, the highest in the range, because the sound was bearing down on him from above as if the sky itself was crying out.
Then the twelfth toll struck and faded, the sound traveling towards the horizon. He had not spotted the bell or any temple to house one, leaving him with no choice but to pack up his campsite and search for it.
He climbed out of his bedroll and pulled his coat on over his clothes. There was little reason to bother changing his clothes every day out here in the wilderness, where he would see no living person for weeks and only had the chance to bath every few days or so. He lifted his bedroll off the ground and shook it out near the cliff, letting the motes scatter in the wind over the valley. Once that was rolled up and packed away, he turned his attention to the campfire, which still had a wisp of smoke trailing up from it. Before falling asleep, he had packed a type of incense in it and let it smolder through the night, repelling monsters and beasts and evil spirits alike from his campsite. But now he revived the flame to cook a meal of meat and root vegetables, eaten with hard bread. Once he was finished that, he extinguished the flames completely, finished packing his belongings and set out on the trail to the summit.
Or what there was of a trail. The path was rarely traveled, and it had been years if not decades since anyone had bothered to clear it out. Even though he was above the tree line, plants were growing up here and beginning to reclaim the path as their own, and he found himself treading carefully to avoid stepping on clumps of small white wildflowers he had never seen before. But the trail could be walked, and that was enough to follow it as it coiled up to the top of the mountain.
Halfway through the day, the wildflowers became impossible not to step on. Even when he had reached a height where the grass refused to climb any higher, these flowers were only getting thicker, covering the ground like snow. When he approached the peak in the late afternoon, he could not even see the old trail any more. Fortunately, by that point, he didn't need it.
Though he couldn't understand what he had found at the summit. It was no temple, nor did it have any bell in sight. Instead, it was a building like many he had seen on other mountains, a outpost which had been built centuries ago out of stone and was on the verge of crumbling into dust. These had been constructed in the days before the humans and beastmen had begun living in peace, back during a time when beastmen tribes would sometimes attack the human villages.
The outpost was centered around a tower that housed a giant iron dish. When a beastman tribe was seen traveling through the mountains, a huge fire would be built inside of it, one that could be seen easily from the other mountains. The signal would be carried from mountain to mountain until it reached the village, giving them days to prepare for the attack.
But despite recognizing this, it was something he never expected to find here. There were six mountains between this one and the village. It would take too long and hard of a journey to bring rations to an outpost this remote, and it was too high to grow food itself unless one wanted to live off of these curious flowers. Or had it produced its supplies somewhere further down the mountain? Still, it didn't make sense. Even if it would give the village more advance warning than they would ever need of threats, this outpost was not worth the cost it would take to support it.
He found himself staring in disbelief at the building and the thick clumps of flowers blooming around it. "Does nothing on this mountain make sense?" he asked aloud. No answer came except for the whisper of the wind.
At least he could rest assured that the building was abandoned, and that he would not need to knock before entering. The door resisted being opened, so he leaned all his weight on it, until something gave way and the door opened with a rusty moan. Inside was nothing but dark forms, impossible to see. If the outpost had any windows, they must have been sealed shut.
But as fortune would have it, there was an old lantern hanging on a hook by the door. More surprising than it being there was the fact that, after he brought it down, he found there was still oil inside of it and a dry, clean wick. Wondering if it had been left there by an earlier traveler, he pulled his fire striker from his pocket and lit the lantern with a single spark.
The light was small, but it was enough to reveal the room to him. For the most part, it was exactly what he expected: furnishings from centuries ago, the sort that would only fetch a high price in an antique shop. Wooden tables and chairs, dishware made of red clay. A few swords, a hatchet for wood, and a hunting knife, all rusted from lack of care. A stone fireplace to heat the outpost in the winter.
He furrowed his brow, noting something that did not fit with the rest. Specifically, the floor, which looked as though it had been freshly swept that morning.
And he was already ruining it. Besides leaving dusty bootsteps wherever he walked, he noticed something else was spilling on the floor. The lantern he held had a strange, fog-like smoke cascading down from it. He lifted it up to get a whiff of it, and found it had a strange, earthy scent, one that made him think of the root vegetables he had eaten that morning. Had there been incense in the lantern as well as oil?
At any rate, he was not satisfied exploring only this much of the outpost. He located the entrance to the stairs and climbed up the signal tower, up to where the iron dish was housed. Here he was treated to a spectacular view, one where he could see all six mountains he had climbed to reach this point and, since the fog had cleared, the village from which this journey had started. But he had hoped to find the bell hidden away in this tower in secret, and there was still no sign of it.
He went back down the stairs, and then to another set of stairs that headed below, where the storage had been dug out. Here he expected to find empty barrels that once held food, old weaponry, and dried wood for lighting the signal fire, if it had not already been cleared out. He found something entirely different.
Most of the storage was taken up by a work station. There were baskets of the flowers from outside littered all about, only a few days old, and a press to squeeze little drops of fragrant oil from each of them. From the rest of the workstation, which had sticks half-coated in a sawdust paste and papers that were being rolled into ropes, he guessed that someone was making incense from the flowers outside.
But there were other things in the storage as well. In particular, a bookshelf caught his eye, full of books with cracked leather covers and yellowed pages. He set the lantern down and ran his finger over the spines, before selecting one to browse the contents of.
Before he could open the cover, he heard a voice from behind him, as cold as a metal blade on a winter night: "Put that back." His heart leapt into his throat and he dropped the book on the floor.
Behind him was a woman who, from head to toe, was as pale and white as the fog. One could call her beautiful, except it was a cold beauty, lacking any sort of vibrant glow. Her hair was long with ends so frayed that they seemed to disappear into the air. Her clothes were plain white robes, long enough that they dragged along the ground. The only thing about her that wasn't pale white were her eyes, which were as blue as the sky above the clouds.
Even though it felt as though she had pulled the breath from his body, he found the question leaving his lips: "Who are you?"
She did not answer, stepping past him to pick the book up off the ground and return it to its spot on the bookshelf.
He tried a different question: "Do you live here?"
"I reside here," she replied. "But I would not call it my home."
She walked past him again, and he could swear he could feel the same breeze that had blown outside, on the face of the mountain.
"How long have you been here?"
"I have forgotten." She took a seat at the workstation, producing a coil of the incense. A spark appeared, though he could not say how, and the coil was lit. The room began filling with more of the fragrant smoke.
There was something unusual about this situation. He was standing in a storeroom, making smalltalk with what he guessed could only be a ghost.
After struggling with words, he asked, "Do you like that incense?" And immediately after, he regretted it, realizing that she wouldn't be burning it if she didn't.
"It is my last pleasure," she replied, leaning her head down on the table as if she were very tired. "I have forgotten the taste of food and the feel of water. Even if my heart knew love, my fingers and lips would never reach it. But I can feel this smoke. It sinks into my body. I can smell the flowers, and almost remember the sting of heat at my eyes."
He shakes his head. "It's not good to get addicted to poisons like this."
The woman gave no reply.
"What about fresh air? Can you feel and smell that? Even for someone like you, spending your whole life in a place like this..."
"You wouldn't understand."
Their conversation was cut short by the bell tolling, louder than it had ever been. And yet, somehow, he was still certain the sound was traveling from higher up. He made a break for the stairs, to dash up to the top of the signal tower.
He did not reach the first step before he came to a sudden halt. His entire hand felt like ice. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the woman had jumped out of her seat and grabbed him, trying to stop him.
"Don't go out there," she said, her eyes suddenly full of fear.
He stared back, before pulling his hand away. "This might be my only chance." And he dashed up the stairs, up to the ground floor and then up to the signal tower.
He was greeted by a flame in the iron dish, burning large and bright without any fuel. Below, on the six mountains he had already crossed over, he could see lights shining from six other outposts, set in a straight line that pointed at this tower, the seventh.
But the bell was nowhere to be found, and it still sounded distant. The twelfth toll came, followed by silence. He cursed into the air.
Running all the way back down to the storage room, he found the woman hiding, cowering as far from the stairs as the small room would allow.
"Come," he said.
She looked up at him with fearful eyes.
"Come. Stand up," he said again, offering his hand. "I don't know how long you've lived here, but I don't think you know what a view you have upstairs. You would never stay down here if you did."
The woman hesitated, before taking his hand with the same frozen grip as before. Gently, he pulled her weightless body to its feet, and then led her slowly out of the storage room and back up the signal tower. She hesitated again at the top of the stairs, as if afraid of exposing herself to the open air. But led by his hand, she stepped up to the top, where she could gaze out over the mountains around them, including the six he had crossed to meet her there. And he, behind her, noticed that he could almost see through her to the mountains beyond, as if her body was full of smoke and mist.
Deciding that staring at her would probably make her uncomfortable, he turned around, looking out in the other direction. It took him a moment to look it all over before he spotted something unexpected. And then he gaped at it.
Quietly, he asked, "That bell was tolling for you, wasn't it?"
She turned around to face him. "How did you guess?"
He continued to stare out, not at the mountains but at the sky above, still covered in clouds as it had been all day. There, hidden in the mists, was a light. And it lined up perfectly with the towers on earth, an eighth signal fire in the sky. If there was more beyond that, or anything beyond that, he could not see it in the clouds.
The woman looked away. "This is where I reside."
"But someone's calling you home."
He turned and stared at her more, and then noticed something. The woman's white color was not evenly distributed. The very top of her head almost disappeared into the air, while her feet appeared as solid white. Like fog sinking to the ground.
He narrowed his eyes. "It's that incense. It really has poisoned you. The smoke is binding you to the earth, isn't it?"
She gave no reply. Her blue eyes refused to meet his, too weakened to defend her attachment with it or fight against it.
"Then we'll have to cleanse it from your system."
He took her hand again and led her once more. This time, however, he walked towards the signal flame.
"The flowers are drawn to cold. Heat might be the best way to purge them." He paused, before asking, "Can you walk through this fire unharmed?"
"Yes. But if you do not release my hand, yours will be burned."
"If I release it, will you have the strength to walk through?"
She did not answer.
"I can live with a few burns."
And so he guided her, hand submerged in scathing fire and grasping stinging ice, as she slowly walked through the cleansing flame. As she did, the smoke and oil was pushed out of her body, up into the air and disappearing. When she emerged from the other side, she was no longer white, but an ethereal blue, and only barely visible to his eyes.
But he could make out the faintest form of a smile on her lips. "Thank you."
And then she turned towards the eighth signal, and walked straight into the sky, her form fading.
He leaned out over the edge, cupping his hand to his mouth as if to call out to her. "Make it home safely. Don't stop to sniff any more of those flowers on the way. I mean it!" No answer came except for the whisper of the wind.
For the better part of an hour, he stared out at the sky, trying to spot the giant bell beyond the clouds. But there was nothing, and even the eighth signal fire eventually flickered out of sight. Then the seventh was extinguished beside him, and one by one the rest disappeared, no longer needed to light the way home.
It would be days, even weeks before he returned to the village with a bag full of antique books and dishware to sell, along with the unbelievable story of the source of the bell. By then, the villagers had all forgotten about the curious sound.