The Fourth Bell

A folklore-tinged cosmic horror story about a foolish child, a winter village, and the fate that answers when the bell rings one time too many.

This one was written for Bradley Ramsey’s Power Up Prompts series in which this Prompt was made by J.M. Gooding, I ended up as always using all three elements for this week:

The main genre is this week is folklore. Folklore has always lived in that space between survival and story. It’s not “once upon a time” so much as “this kept happening until someone finally learned to warn the next kid.”

Grab something warm, imagine snow pressing against the windows, and let’s talk about why you don’t open the door after the bell.

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The Fourth Bell

They still tell this one
when the first snow holds,
not the flurry that dusts the roofs
and changes its mind,

but the fall that sticks,
that lays a hand on the fields
and says:

enough now.

That’s when they gather the children
around the stove,

when the forest is a black wall
pressed up against the windows,
and the river has forgotten
how to speak except in cracks.

That’s when someone says,

we’ll tell you
why you do not go past the last house
after dark.

We’ll tell you
why the marker stones
face inward.

We’ll tell you
about Anja.

The village is older than maps.

No one ever drew it clean
with neat ink lines,
just smudges of smoke
and a note in the margins:

here, the road narrows.
here, the trees lean in.

Before there were signs,
there was the bell.

It hangs in the square,
iron jaw in a wooden mouth.

At dusk it rings three times.

Once for the forest
and all its teeth.

Once for the river
and its black depth.

Once for the road
that leads away
and never comes back the same.

When the last chime shivers
through the rafters,
you go inside.

You bolt the door
with the carved pattern—

cross-hatch of river,
curve of road,
sharp little triangles
for the teeth of the trees.

You bank the fire,
turn the windows
into mirrors.

You pretend
you can’t hear the night
pressing its ear
to the glass.

Every village
has its foolish child.

The one who tests
every edge
just to be sure
it’s sharp.

In this village,
that was Anja.

She was all elbows and questions,
bare feet on frost,
hair like a knot of dry grass
no comb could reason with.

She could sit still
when she wanted to—

to gut fish,
to mend nets,
to listen to her grandmother’s stories

—but something in her eyes
was always counting doors.

“How far does the forest go?”

“Farther than you,”
they told her.

“What’s past the last curve of the river?”

“The sea,”
someone said,
though none of them
had ever seen it.

“What’s beyond the dark?”

“Sleep,”
her father said,
and rapped her gently on the head

as if he could knock sense into her
like dust from a rug.

Anja nodded,
said yes,
of course,
and tucked all their answers
into the pocket she kept
for questions that weren’t finished yet.

The old women
told the stories.

They always start the same way.

They say:

Once,
before your feet
ever touched the road,

there was a boy or girl
who walked out
past where the bell could follow.

Sometimes it’s for berries.

Sometimes it’s for a lost goat.

Sometimes it’s because
a light moved between the trees
and called them by name.

The story never ends
with them
on their own side of the door.

That’s the point.

You make the story heavy
so it weighs down the hand
that reaches for the latch.

Anja listened.

She knew all about
the white dog
that walked on hind legs
and asked you
if you were tired.

About the woman at the river
who combed her hair with bone
and traded drowning
for secrets.

About the cart
that came with no horse,
no wheels,

just a shadow
shaped like one,
driven by no one
you could describe later.

Anja could recite them
backwards.

She could tell you
which cousin vanished
in which version,
who drowned,
who wandered,
who came back
without their reflection.

She could point
to the marker stones
at the edge of the last yard—

flat rocks
set on their sides,
faces carved with

road, river, forest, teeth.

“These are not decorations,”
her grandmother said.

“They are borders.

On this side,
the stories listen to us.

On that side,
we listen to them.”

Anja nodded,
dutiful.

Inside,
her questions
paced.

The winter she turned twelve
came down hard.

Snow fell in sheets,
then in ropes,

then in the kind of
silent, suffocating wool

that swallowed sound whole
and spat it out miles away.

The river went still
under a lid of ice.

The trees grew beards of frost.

The days shrank
to a pale cough
between two darknesses.

In that hunger-blue season,
the village drew in around its fires.

They salted what could be salted,
burned what could burn,
counted what could be counted.

When there wasn’t much
to count,
they counted stories instead.

On the longest night,
they lit the lantern in the square.

Not for celebration—
this village had never learned
the habit of pretending joy
just because the sun
changed its mind for a while—

but as a signal.

Here.

We are still here.

We are still on this side
of the marker stones.

That night,
the bell rang
four times.

No one had ever heard
a fourth.

The first three notes
were the same—

forest, river, road—

but the last
hung too long,
bent strange,

like the tongue of the bell
had caught
on something
on its way back.

The old women
went pale.

“Inside,”
they said.

“Inside, inside,
shut the door.”

Nobody argued.

You don’t argue with people
who have watched
more winters than you have fingers.

They banked the fires higher
than usual.

They told the stories
louder.

No one wanted to hear
what the dark
was trying to say
in between.

Anja listened
like everyone else,

curled on the floor
near the stove,

face stung pink by heat,
back prickling
with the cold
pressing through the walls.

The stories rolled over her
like familiar waves.

She could almost mouth them
in time.

But when the old woman’s voice
reached the part
where the child
goes out,

something new
slid between the words.

A sound
not quite a knock,
not quite a wind.

A tangle of bells, maybe—
small ones,
like the kind the shepherds
tied to their goats

so they could hear them wander.

Except all the goats
were already in the pen.

The story paused.

The room did not.

The logs still settled.
Someone still coughed.
The soup still boiled over
in the pot.

“Did you hear—”

Anja started.

“No,”
her grandmother said,
too quickly.

“Go on.”

The old woman
who was telling the story
frowned,

pulled the words
back around her
like a shawl,

and kept going.

Anja tried to listen,
but the sound
had lodged in her teeth.

A little chiming.

Just out of time
with the fire.

Later,
hours later,

long after the last story
had been told,

after the last spoon
had scraped the last bowl,

when the house
had shrunk
to the red eye of the stove
and the pale crescent
of her grandmother’s shoulder
under the blanket,

Anja heard it again.

The bell.

Not the one in the square.

The village bell was big,
old,
with a voice like thunder
rolled in soot.

This was lighter.

A silver little laugh.

Coming from the door.

She sat up.

Her grandmother
did not move.

Her breathing
was steady,

as if someone
had pushed sleep at her
with both hands.

Anja whispered her name
once,
twice.

Nothing.

The bell rang again,
only for her.

She slid from under the blanket.

The floor was ice
wearing wood as a disguise.

She padded
toward the door.

The carved pattern
on the inside—

road, river, forest, teeth—

looked different
in the coals’ low light.

The triangles seemed longer.

The curves
seemed to reach.

“We do not open
after the bell,”
Anja muttered,

repeating the rule
just to prove she knew it.

The fourth chime
had been wrong.

Everything tonight
was a little wrong.

We do not open.

We do not open.

The latch
was a dark,
cold mouth
waiting for her hand.

She was a foolish child.

That was her job.

She opened the door.

The village
fell away behind it.

Not physically—

the houses were still there,
lined up like teeth,
chimneys smoking,

but standing on the threshold
Anja had the sensation
you get on the river
in spring,

when the ice breaks under you.

Nothing moves
for a long second,

and then suddenly
you are somewhere else.

The square
was full of fog.

Not the honest kind
that rolls up from water,

but a thin, dry mist
that smelled like
old paper and bells.

The lantern on its hook
burned steady,

but its light
did not go far—

just a shy circle
around its own feet.

Beyond that,
the world went gray.

A figure stood
beside the marker stones
at the end of the lane.

It was the size of a man
but thinner,

like someone had drawn it
with charcoal
and forgotten to shade.

Where its hands should be,
light pooled—

little lanterns,
swinging gently,

their flames
the odd, low color
of snow lit by stars.

On its head
sat a crown
of those same tiny bells.

No sound,
not really,

but each slow nod
tickled her ears.

“Anja,”
it said,

voice like frost
on glass—

a pattern more than a sound.

She should have been afraid.

Instead
she felt
seen.

It knew her name
without asking anyone
inside.

It was not the forest
or the river
or the road.

It was the thing
that walked between them,
wearing their shadows
like a cloak.

The Fate That Follows
has a hundred names
in a hundred villages.

In this one,
they had not given it one yet.

They were still busy
pretending it wasn’t listening.

“You opened,”
it said,

bells trembling
without ringing.

“You shouldn’t be here,”
Anja whispered.

“You shouldn’t be here,”
it echoed,
delighted,

like a child discovering
a new game.

Behind it,
past the marker stones,

the forest
stood straighter
than it usually did.

No wind.

Every branch
reaching in
the same direction.

“Come see,”
the figure said.

It lifted one lantern,
held it out,
palm up.

Inside the glass
an image swam—

the village
in another winter,

houses buried to their roofs,

a child
half-frozen
on a doorstep,

knuckles raw
from knocking
on a door
that never opened.

Anja jerked back.

Another lantern floated up,
unasked—

the river,
dark and wide,

ice cracking
around a small shape
that had chased
a ball
too far.

Another—

the forest,
full of thin white trees
wearing red fruit
that wasn’t fruit.

Each light
held a story
that hurt to look at.

Each story
had no words
until the village
forced one around it.

“You tell them,”
the figure said,

tilting its head.

“Over and over.

You dress them in wolves
and witches
and river-women
so your little ones
cannot see
what really happened.

But I see.”

It leaned closer.

Where its face should be
there was only depth—

a suggestion of features
made of absence.

“I follow,”
it said.

“When you do not listen
to your own warnings.

When you send your foolish children
into my mouth
wrapped in hunger
and curiosity.

I am what happens
when the story
is not enough.”

“Why me?”
Anja asked.

It seemed important,
somehow,
to know
what kind of mistake
she was.

The bells shivered.

“You opened,”
it repeated.

“You know the stories
but you still opened.

You are
the hinge.”

People like to imagine
folklore is tidy.

Child disobeys.
Child is punished.
Everyone claps the moral
back into its box.

But sometimes
the story itself
gets tired.

Tired of ending
in the same grave.

Tired of being dragged out
only to scare children
into an early obedience.

Sometimes
the story wants
another shape.

The figure at the markers
regarded Anja
for a long time.

In that stillness
she felt the whole forest
leaning toward them,

the river
holding its breath
under ice,

the road
curling in its sleep.

“I could take you now,”
it said.

Its lanterns
flickered greedily.

The little scenes inside
shifted,
making room.

Anja swallowed.

“Will you?”

The foolish child
is not always
the one
who stepped wrong first.

Sometimes
it is the one
who cannot imagine
anyone else leaving.

The figure
tilted its head.

“Do you know
why the bell rang
four times?”

She shook her head.

“On the fourth,”
it said,

“the village
does not get to pretend
the world ends
at its doors.

On the fourth,
someone has to listen
back.”

It reached out.

Cold folded around her hands,
finer than snow,

sharp as the first bite
of river water in spring.

“You will walk the boundaries,”
it said.

“You will gather
what the stories forgot.

You will make them heavier.”

Lanterns rose
around them,

each one
catching the shape
of her face,

stretching it,
aging it,
turning it
into someone else’s grandmother.

“You will not leave,”
it added,

and there was
the decision.

Not teeth.

Not drowning.

Just a path
that narrowed
until it was only her.

Anja looked back
at the house,

its windows dull,
its roof sagging under snow.

Inside,
her grandmother slept on,

unchanged,
as if the world
did not have new edges tonight.

She thought
of all the doors
that had not opened
in the lanterns’ stories.

She thought
of cold hands
and unanswered knocks.

“Will they listen?”
she asked.

The figure shrugged.

“That is not my part.”

It pressed something
into her palms.

When she looked,
she was holding a bell.

Small.

Plain.

Its tongue
was a chip of ice.

“Ring it
when they wander,”
it said.

“Ring it
when the story
is not enough.

I will follow
your sound
instead of theirs.”

A mercy,
in its way—

a thin one,
like the edge of a blade.

In the morning,
they found her
at the marker stones.

Alive.

No frostbite.

No missing pieces
you could see.

Her hands
were red
to the wrists,

as if she’d tried
to hold the cold still
until it stopped
moving.

She wouldn’t say
what had happened.

Not directly.

But when the children
clustered around her
that evening,

faces lantern-bright,
voices tumbling over each other
in the old demands—

tell us about the dog,
tell us about the river woman,
tell us about the cart—

she told them
something new.

She told them
about the bell
that rings four times.

About the figure
at the stones
with lanterns full of
what comes of not listening.

She told them

exactly
how cold it felt
to open the door
when you were the hinge.

And at the end,
when their eyes were wide,
she took the small bell
from her pocket

and rang it
once.

The sound
wasn’t loud.

It was the kind of sound
that lands in bone,
not air.

Out in the dark,
something paused.

Listened.

Turned away.

Now,
when the snow holds,

when the first fall
does not melt,

they tell Anja’s story.

They call her foolish,

because the word
is easier
than admitting
she chose
to stand in a doorway
no one else wanted.

They say:

this is why
we do not open
after the bell.

This is why
you do not go
past the last house,

past the stones
that face inward,

past the place
where the road,
the river,
and the forest

stop listening
to our names.

They do not say
that some nights

they hear
a small bell ring
out there,
on the boundary.

They do not say
that sometimes,

when a child’s feet
are already
one step beyond safety,

the sound
pulls them back.

Folklore
is not about
what happened once.

It’s about the one child
who did not come home

and the one after them
who almost didn’t

and the one after that
who
because of the weight
of these words

never opens the door
at all.