Lunch for Jaime Cryer was coffee and a cigarette. If he wanted to treat himself, he would read the paper or a book he never finished. Today was not one of those days. He slipped his jacket on and propped the back door open. His wife hated the smell of cigarettes in the hardware store, but she was adamant on that fact, just to be certain that he was, in fact, smoking when he said he would be. It was like his beacon, his leash. A way for her to keep track of him wherever he went.

  He took his seat atop the upturned milk crate and sighed as he lit his cigarette. While he had his hand raised, he checked his watch. He didn't have to, but he found humor in the act. HIs lunch break was always announced by the bells. The same goddamned bells that had rung everyday since they found the old witch.

  Margaret Kuiper's death had been a day of celebration. The woman had been old when Jaime Cryer, a man slowly reaching his mid-forties, was carrying milk money. Rumor was that it was spite that kept the old bat's heart beating, even when her hips gave out and she hobbled through the streets. Even death didn't want to deal with her.

  Henry Tavish felt the day had gone a bit too well when he looked in his delivery log. Then he realized why. The old lady Kuiper hadn't been in for her weekly complaints. Even when her usual order came in, the freshest Tavish could offer, she would venture down from her house on the hill and complain. She would scream in that willowy voice of hers that the man was conning her, giving her old produce and trying to poison her meat.

  Every time the old woman went to see the mechanic to get her ancient Rolls-Royce serviced, the seat was always meddled with and the brakes were always too slippery. Even when it was just an oil change, she was convinced the alignment was wrong and that they should redo the whole thing, free of charge and line of customers be damned.

  With a spark of hope and an eager step, Tavish had his son bike up to the house, to see if the widow Kuiper was okay. He didn't care if her health was good or not, but he did want to know if this feeling of levity was real or just a fluke.

  His cries could be heard for blocks around when Billy returned to report that he had looked through the window of the widow's house and found the old woman sitting in her armchair. Her face was just as cold and dead as her heart had been.

  The war was over. The town had won. For years, they had smiled and they nodded, placating the woman as best they could, because they knew she had the ultimate weapon in her arsenal.

  The deed to the Kuiper Quarry.

  The old bat was the unhappy widow to the once great William Kuiper, the Quarry King of Arsdale, Virginia. Jaime remembered his grandfather telling him that the man was a jovial soul that dressed up as Santa Claus for every Christmas parade, though any picture he saw of him told him that he had been worn down by his wife, who more resembled Krampus than anything else.

  In a cruel twist of fate, she outlived not only him, but her children. With the lifeline of the town in her arthrytic grip, she was one bad day away from selling the deed to some conglomerate, who would replace the local workers with cheap labor, sinking the town into bankrupcy.

  The news of her death was like a shot in the arm, sending cries of joy and shouts of celebration ringing out through out the town.

  Like the bells, he thought. Just like those damned bells.

  They should have considered the body an omen. Not the widow's, but the Greek fellow that they had found in the woods a few days before. Stephen Bruce had found him when he took his dog, Reuger, into the woods for a celebratory hunt, hoping to serve up some venison at the celebratory picnic. It was there, under a log they found the man broken and mangled at the base of a hill. It had been ruled an accident, though the doctor would later question that when after the bells began to toll. Because of the lack of ID, or any real ways to determine the poor bastard's name, they knew he was Greek because Dr. Peter Kontos recognized one his countrymen, even if it wasn't family.

  They set him aside and were ready to let the state boys deal with it as the town put the widow into the ground. The service was held in the morning, allowing the town to spend the rest of the day hosting a picnic in celebration.

  Ding-Dong-Ding! The witch was dead!

  The town was free of the iron claw. Jem Clemmons, the town lawyer, drafted up a document to ensure that the town would operate the quarry as a co-operative organization, keeping the labor home-grown and in good hands.

  Jaime puffed on his cigarette and looked toward the street. Matty Simmons passed, eyes shifting and cautious of his surroundings. Jaime raised a hand in greeting, but watched as the man sprinted around the corner. The once lean, powerful man was now slender and emaciated, the years of hiding were evident. It had been his name that the bells announced first.

  Jaime remembered that day. He was at one of the picnic tables, a fresh bone freed from its chicken prison in his hand, when he heard the chime. They came one after the other. Ding-Dong-Ding! The picnickers thought nothing of it, as it had to be the church bells, ringing in celebration.

  Instead, they all froze as a familiar voice rang out like a voice from Heaven.

  No, Jaime thought. A voice from Hell.

  "Good morning," the voice boomed. "This is Margaret Kuiper, here to report to you the news of our town..." Everyone felt the ice in their veins instantly. The widow Kuiper? They had just put her in the ground. The whole thing had been open-casket, setting their minds at ease that the old buzzard had actually died. How was this possible?

  "Matthew Simmons, age 35, has been a busy boy," continued the voice. "Not at work, mind you, but at the casino one town over. Instead of working, doing his job as night security of the quarry, he was playing poker. Good thing no children decided to play there while he was losing his own's college fund to the Indians. It seems the house truly does always win, after all."

  It took a long while for the crowd to recover. It took even longer for Matty register the wrath of his wife, as he didn't truly understand what had happened until he watched Mrs. Simmons pack their children into the station wagon, headed for Charleston and never to return. He would be quickly fired after that, and the town would chuckle, thinking that this was just the widow Kuiper offering one last dig at the town from the grave.

  Nothing more. Nothing less.

  Jaime missed that na?veté. Truly, he did. They had been so happy in that moment, they joked as the next day, they heard the same sound ring through the town at noon sharp, as it would for so long. Ding-Dong-Ding!

  They expected Matty Simmons to be shamed once more. Perhaps he had been the last one to insult the widow and she took that anger with her. Instead, it was the sheriff, Billy Coolidge, who was the focus of her attention.

  The message started as it always would, offering a good morning before presenting the news of the town. This time, it projected something that made Billy shiver. "William Coolidge, age 43, has been a card carrying member of the Klu Klux Klan's Dickens county charter, and he has made it a habit of giving particularly heavy fines to the town's negro residents. In his shed is a cross he intends to burn in demonstration, in case any of them decide to protest."

  The town flocked to the sheriff's home, where he ran red-faced and frantic to see them rip his shed open. Sure enough, there had been a wooden cross-ready for the torch. His robes were found under his bed and he had, in fact, been carrying a membership card in his wallet.

  Billy was quickly fired and run out of town, lambasted by his neighbors. He left behind his home and his wife, who cried ignorance to her husbands dealings. To her, his weekly absences were due to a poker game at the veterans' hall, though he rarely seemed to gain or lose any money from them. Jaime could see her crossing the street now, a scarf pulled over her nose as she walked briskly, hiding from the eyes of the townsfolk, still unsure of whether she supported her husband's bigotry.

  By the third and fourth day, while everyone was still on edge about the bells, they learned the routine. After learning of Jack Valenti's ritualistic pot smoking behind the family barn and Kenneth Hudson's habit of betting against his son's varsity team, had to wonder how Margaret Kuiper even knew these things.

  Had she been a witch, casting an evil eye over the town? Did she have spies? They laughed it off, but there was still that sense that someone had helped her, feeding her rumors and truths that she put to tape.

  Jaime looked past Beverly Coolidge-who was now adamant to use her maiden name of 'Cowley'- catching a glimpse of Bruce Mason. The small, bespectacled man drummed his fingers on the counter, spinning the ring he still wore on his finger. He had not been a victim of the widow's bells in the traditional sense- though Jaime winced as such a thing now existed. It had been a year since the widow Kuiper died, but a month before things escalated.

  The bells made themselves heard, and the widow began to speak. "Millie Mason, age 30, has been lying to her husband."

  Jaime could remember the look of shock on the two's face as they quickly looked at each other across the store. He remembered the horror in Millie's eyes as the widow explained everything.

  "The Third Street Literary Women's Club has always ended between the hours of eight and nine. Not once has it ever gone as far as eleven in the evening. Where do the remaining hours go, you may ask? Into Gina Bowie's bed."

  The gasps were heard across town like a wave. "It seems the club enjoys the work of Sappho, as the two have been having congress with each other for four years now. To think she would partake in such buggery, then share a bed with her husband is shameful to say the least."

  There had been whispers about the local bookstore owner, who rode into town on a Harley ten years prior and was fond of bomber jackets, but Millie, who had been set on marriage for as long as anyone knew, raised several eyebrows. Perhaps the town was too backwoods to understand their reasoning. All they knew was Millie and Gina disappeared that night. Bruce was left with her ring and a note with two words: SORRY, FAREWELL.

  Jaime didn't know if he ever got closure. He never pried on the matter with Bruce, who seemed to respond with a stiff upper lip, but he was curious sometimes.

  Curiouser still was how the widow Kuiper knew about the affair. Did she have binoculars or a strong enough telescope?

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  They hoped to find out soon enough.

  The pool of candidates was small. Roscoe Billings, the newly appointed sheriff rustled up a group of volunteers whose names had not been said after the mysterious bells. Tracking down the bells was all but impossible, as the sound was projected into the valley, echoing throughout the Appalachians. This made pinpointing the source a Herculean task, though there was one thing they could try.

  Billings turned the search party onto the old Kuiper mansion, left to rot and collapse under the weight of its age. There had to be something inside. A notebook? A plan? A schematic? Something...

  Jaime had been among them as they searched, upending every box and fixture in the old bitch's home. It had been him that found the remains of the paper in the fire place. It was a corner of a blueprint, which showed that it was, in fact, a speaker planted somewhere in the mountains. However, so much of the paper had been burned that the only thing they could know for sure is that their suspicions were correct. This left them to wonder if the man the doctor had dubbed 'Ionnes Doe' had been the one to install it. That, in and of itself, raised the question of if the widow Kuiper had somehow orchestrated his death, pushing him from the mountains to his doom.

  It had been Dean Hollister who found the journals, hidden in a box deep in the old woman's wardrobe.

  It did little to help, as they had not been added to since the late sixties, but they shined some light on the widow's past. Their reading was only interupted by the ding-dong-dinging of the bells and the knowledge that Paul Pembroke was indebted to the mafia, and had commited insurance fraud to pay it off.

  They would address it later, as they dove into the mind of Mrs. Kuiper. Sure enough she was old as sin, she married young to the Kuiper name. The early life of the marriage was as miserable as it could be, but the posse was intrigued to find the old man Kuiper had taken to slipping out on his battleaxe of a wife. He found comfort in a nearby bordello. Too much, it seemed, as he would lament the day she answered a knock at the door and found a madam demanding that William Kuiper take and legitimize his child.

  Historians of the town would remember the name of Loretta Nielson, who had been fostered by the family and raised beside their son, but her parentage had been up for debate for several years. They would also remember how the girl would be found mangled as she was launched out of the passenger seat of the son, Robert's Studebaker. The son himself had been impaled by the steering column, his attempts to swerve out of the way of a stray animal had led to the sleek black beauty being wrapped around an oak tree.

  At least...

  That's what the investigation decided.

  Had death been preferable to the arranged marriage that awaited him the following year if he hadn't died? Had he wanted to run away with the "help" he had allegedly been having an affair with? Margaret Kuiper seemed to take some interest in the car itself, however whether the work she had helped pay for was altruistic or detrimental for young Robert and Loretta was up in the air.

  What drew the line for Jaime had been the fate of Dorothy Kuiper, who many had believed had been in poor health for years. Was it the blue blood that ran through her vein that made her suffer from the royal disease? Had it been an ungodly amount of fasting that the girl had undergone at her mother's behest? Whatever it was, it caused the poor girl to wither into an early grave at age twenty-two. Though her mother lamented this, Margret Kuiper admitted that she finally looked presentable.

  Hate for the old buzzard was stoked that day, but it didn't flare until the next day, when they would hear the bells again. This time, there would be severe reactions. If Jaime craned his neck, he could see the church on the corner. Though there had been a new coat of paint slapped onto it, there was still visible damage from that day.

  The congregation shuddered as the preacher Reynolds's name was announced through the town. Phillip Reynolds, aged 67, had been a very bad boy. Not only was he lying about visiting an infirm brother when he left town, but was visiting a place of ill repute, in which his crimes would include a number of girls around the age of thirteen. He made sure not to shit where he ate, but the news sent a fire through the town.

  Though no one came forth to admit they had been victim of the preacher's leering eyes, there was a desire to see some sort of justice. While Sheriff Billings was reporting to the neighboring county, Don Headley, a new deputy, had set to work leading a posse to smoke the preacher out of his hiding spot. They were successful, and the holy man was quickly chained to the bumper of Don's truck. By the time Billings returned the next day, he would see a streak across the roadway that would take months to properly clean up.

  It was then that Billings decided it was time to properly comb the forest. Work was slow and arduous. The sweeps for the source of the voice were slow and almost painful. Each search started with having to wait with bated breath for the sound of the bells, and deciding on the mountain and beginning at the base. All the while, they would have to listen to another truth that sent a chill down someone's back.

  Sometimes it was simple ones, explaining how Piper Sanders had been skimming money from the movie theatre to fund her moving to Raleigh, or that it was Jimmy Ballard who stole and crashed his father's car. Some were more concerning, as Polly Roach had a history of abandoning the newborn Joey to cry himself to sleep when she needed a 'break'.

  Sometimes they could feel a life shatter under the weight of the words. John Bell would experience this when the widow's voice told him his wife had hated the idea of bearing the child of an abusive drunk, and had it 'taken care of' while she was visiting family in Arlington.

  Bell would be sent away for ten years following his retaliation. The former Sarah Bell would bear the scars of what happened for years to come, but Jaime had heard she remarried a lawyer in Arlington. He hoped she was well, no longer losing sleep from the nightmare that was John Bell.

  It was past the point that the bells ding-dong-dinging had become routine. As far as Billings was concerned it was just damage control. Everyday, something new ran the risk of sparking another fire.

  Keith Loew had his kneecap shattered, when the widow's ghost announced that it had been him that knocked up Sammy Smith, but would not acknowledge the bastard for fear of his football scholarship being ruined. Her brothers responded accordingly.

  Wendy Pershing was an alcoholic in desperate need of intervention. Many agreed she should step down from her position as school bus driver.

  Brian Kripke was a habitual firebug, and had been the one to set fire to the Wilson home, when he thought no one was home. His scars would soon match those of the middle Wilson boy, who had been asleep in the living room when the house went up. The damage to his hands and throat would make identifying the culprit difficult.

  Even Dr. Kontos was not immune to Kuiper's ghost. Though he humored the old woman anytime she was convinced that she was dying- all decades too soon, it seemed- his practice was shutdown when his habit of writing fake prescriptions and his stash of vicodin found in his bathroom mirror.

  The streets became empty. Neighbors shied away from each other, only interacting to gather their essentials or go to work, and even then it was brief and strictly business. Several families cut their losses, moving before the widow could spill their dirty little secrets. The fear of these hidden truths getting out had become crippling. Even those tasked with tracking down the source were hesitant, as they too would have their names spoken by the almighty voice. It would take three long, agonizing years before they made any sort of progress, with each mountain offering its own challenges. Additionally, the winters were brutal, keeping searchs from continuing. All the while, Margaret Kuiper continued her speechs.

  Ellis Morris had stolen from the local charity drive.

  Faiza Morgan had not, in fact, gone to college to pursue a medical degree, but instead gone to a mental hospital to cope with a horrifying heroin addiction.

  Chris Malloy had been the one to shoot the Freemans' dog, when he thought it was a deer when hunting out of season.

  The only respite was the dampening of the snow, making the booming voice ever so slightly quieter as she spoke, spilling secrets like dripping venom in the ears of the listener.

  John Follet had a healthy stash of playboys that he would dole out to his students if they paid the right price, or scored high enough on their tests.

  Bob Holland had taken out several credit cards in his son's name, using them to feign wealth as he scrambled for work.

  Thomas Fleck had been the one to deface the statue dedicated to the town's founder, and would later go on to tag the school with countless obsenities.

  The teams would start up their searchs again after the snow melted and the paths were less treacherous, now managing to bolster in numbers as the list of people whose names were spoken was vastly larger than those unspoken. Even Jaime wasn't off the hook.

  He liked to think he was one of the few that owned up to their confession, as the widow Kuiper had exposed something Jaime hadn't acknowledged in decades. Years ago, two days before he had said 'I do' to Audrey, he and the boys had taken a trip to Atlantic City, where he proceeded to have one last hurrah with a bottle blonde named Pixie for his bachelor party. Audrey, being the good Christian woman she was, had been outraged. However, Jaime was adamant in his disclosure. A mistake in youth that had not effected them or their family. That was why he knew she had her ear trained to the door. Though the wound had closed, the scar was still uncomfortable.

  It was a misty spring day when Arsdale heaved a collective sigh of relief. A small, concrete bunker had been located on the eastern side of a mountain that acted as a border marker between Virginia and its western cousin.

  Billings wrenched the door open with a pry bar, all but having to use it to fend off the swarm of men and women desperate to shut it up. A collection of gears and wires funneled into the horn of a massive speaker that reminded Jaime of the liberty bell. At Billings motion, the mass of townsfolk rushed in, ripping the machinery to pieces. Some used rocks. Others sticks. Some had brought tools, and some even used their bare hands to tear the machinery into scrap. It had been Chris Malloy that smashed the speaker with a hammer, striking it down like a savage attacking a piece of the encroaching new world. In a storm of violence and cursing, the widow's machine fell to parts that were cast to the wind.

  The day had the feel of a biblical revelation. There was cheers in the streets as the party returned. Women clapped. Children cheered. The town would find peace that night, and the night after as the voice was silenced.

  The streets began to fill again. Neighbors spoke, hoping to brush off the curse of the past. It had been as if the widow Kuiper had been killed all over again. Had they found a body, they would have paraded it through the street like that of a slain dragon.

  Arsdale had known peace once more.

  That is...

  Until they heard it again...

  The sound stopped the towns' collective heart as it rang out from the mountains. Ding-Dong-Ding!

  The bells.

  Those damned bells.

  Faces blanched as a familiar voice spoke up.

  "Good morning," it said. "This is Margaret Kuiper, and I'm here to report the news of our town."

  Eyes grew wide as the truth came out in a low, even tone. "Alyssa Perry is expecting a child," said the voice. "But Mr. Perry is not the father. Instead, he will be surprised to find the child has a more latin sensability, as Joseph Delgado is the real father. A bit young for such a responsiblity, wouldn't you say?"

  It was a struggle to determine which was more unsettling. They had destroyed the widow's machine. She had lost. The miserable bitch couldn't hold them anymore. Such thoughts were put to the wayside, as Ivan Perry looked down at his son, and collapsed into a heap, sobbing as his wife cried at their shame. Though Joseph Delgado would have been eighteen at the time of the boy's conception, the shock still resonated through the family. The town's librarian would have much to explain, while the Delgados quickly called their boy from his dorm at Virginia State.

  Peace at last, and it was broken just like that.

  How happy we had been that day, Jaime remembered, reaching the end of his cigarette.

  He sighed as he looked to the mountains that loomed over the town. There had been so many places that another machine could be. And if so, were there more, waiting for their predecessor to be dismantled? Had the widow planned that far ahead. Had her hatred for the people of her little Arsdale town been so deep that she wanted to ensure their suffering long after she had died.

  Billings called off the searchs. He was a defeated man, incapable of stopping the horde of families ready to escape. Some had family to stay with. Others didn't care. Those who stayed were the dyed in the wool Arsdaleans, who were born here and damned well would die there, to hell with the bells.

  Jaime chuckled as he heard them again. Ding-Dong-Ding! "Good morning," the widow said from her hidden machine. "I am Margaret Kuiper, and I'm here to report the news of our town."

  Yes, Jaime thought. Please, tell me.

  What could you possibly tell me about my town?

  What can you tell us we don't already know?

  You miserable bitch.