I keep the room dim and the lake loud. The bait shop’s refrigerator clicks off, and the silence throws a net over everything—my desk lamp, the locket on the cloth, the contact mic with tape like a bandage. I wake the laptop and open the freeware I trust when I can’t afford the fancy package: SpectraLite—ugly interface, dependable math. The program yawns to life in a grid of black, waiting for something to sing.
“Second Lives, working tape,” I murmur for the handheld recorder clipped to my monitor arm. “Spectrogram session on heart locket audio, copper-strip friction capture. Visualizing for harmonic structure.”
I drag the file in. The spectrogram spills open: time runs left to right, frequency runs floor to ceiling, and color maps loudness. My track begins as low blue snow, then climbs to gold where the bell overtone rises. Rungs settle at intervals like careful handwriting: a strong fundamental, a second and third overtone riding it, and a faint fourth that wavers, as if the room itself trembled.
“There you are,” I say, because I talk to pictures when they suddenly look back.
I scrub slowly across the scream moment, looping a half second. I lower my headphones around my neck to give my body a chance to breathe lake air instead of signal. The bait shop below grinds beans that smell like church coffee—thin, over-percolated, stubbornly proud. I pull the ear cups up again and hit play. Hiss rises like the prelude to storm. Then the overtone brightens and—there—the scream slivers under it, a shape notched in the color field like a small hook.
I raise a hand and hold it there, fingers splayed, a stupid instinct to signal “don’t move” to software. “Marker,” I whisper. I click into the DAW and drop a label: Scream Under Third. My fingertip trembles on the trackpad. Excitement lives in my joints, not my chest; it makes my elbows too light, my wrists eager. I pin my forearms to the desk until my bones remember they’re supposed to weigh something.
I lean closer. The overtone pattern is almost clean, like classroom textbook bells but dirtier—wet rope in the math. I measure the partials in the freeware’s frequency readout and jot them on the notebook by my keyboard. My handwriting looks borrowed from a steadier life. 330 Hz, 660, 990-ish. Ish, because the lake and time and whatever this copper strip has done to the sound have stretched things thin.
“Could be St. Brigid’s,” I say into the recorder, then stop, because I’ve already jumped a step. “Or any older bell with a similar foundry profile. Note to self: check bell foundry records before marrying this too hard.”
I take a picture of the screen and crop out the messy desktop icons, the grocery list stuck to my monitor with a strip of tape. The locket catches lamplight at the edge of the frame—the C and B winking, the copper strip curled like a secret tongue. I feel the pull to publish the screenshot with a breathless caption, to give the listeners something more than a promise. My thumb hovers over the trackpad like a gull that hasn’t decided whether the surface is water or sky.
“Don’t sprint,” I whisper, and scroll instead.
I open a browser tab and search “St. Brigid’s Ashgrove bells YouTube.” The top result is shaky phone video from a regatta christening three summers ago. I remember standing at the pier with plastic coffee, listening to the clappers thud and thinking rich people had found a way to buy the sky. I click the video and drag the resolution down because Ashgrove internet lives in the last decade. The sound is mono, clipped by the phone mic, but the bell’s body arrives anyway—broad and patient, the overtones shouldering wind. In the frame, pennants flap like the lake is telling secrets faster than tongues can.
I mute my external speakers and route the browser through the DAW. I drop a spectrum analyzer on the return channel and take a composite snapshot. The freeware draws new rungs. They don’t sit down on my numbers like twins, but they shake hands like cousins. The third overtone in the YouTube clip climbs slower, which I expect from the phone mic and angle, and the decay’s tail in the video curls differently, the way sound will when a reporter stands near a wall and turns a room into a bowl.
“Partial match,” I say. “Too rough to claim. Need field.”
My phone vibrates with a cranked-up cheerfulness that doesn’t belong to crime or bells. I glance at the notifications. Three DM requests on the show page: a username with “antiqueangel,” one with an American flag and too many numbers, and one from a local group I’ve muted twice and forgiven once. The swap group thread title reads: FOUND HEART LOCKET—WHOSE IS IT? My throat tightens like I swallowed a coin. I haven’t posted a thing yet.
I open the thread with my eyes squinted, like light might pour out and stain me. Someone has snapped a locket in the Barn—not mine, but close enough—asking if “the Brighton family” wants it. Under it, a comment with three heart emojis and the sentence “good families keep their keepsakes.” I feel heat in my cheeks that has nothing to do with lamps or late nights.
I click away and pull my focus back to sound, where people can’t lie with their smiles.
I line the two spectrograms—my locket and the YouTube bell—side by side. My file’s overtone rises sharp; the YouTube’s blooms slower, thicker, probably people clapping and whooping in the frame. Still, the third partial lines up within a breadth of those “ish” numbers, and the decay tail in my file shows scalloping—small ripples in loudness—that looks like wind deflecting off stone ribs. I rub my thumb along the bridge of my nose and surprise myself with the church-dust smell left from the copper strip earlier—a hint of orange, metal, and skin.
“You’re in a tower,” I tell the waveform, and then I correct myself on tape. “You behave like you’re in a tower. Confirmation required.”
The bait shop door downstairs thunks, and the bell on the rope clacks with a smoker’s cough. The lake answers with that slow handclap seiche on the pilings. Sound takes the shortcut into my body, bypassing language to land in muscle memory. I breathe with it, steadying.
I click “Share” on the show’s account and select “Drafts.” The urge to tease is a living thing. I drop the cropped spectrogram image into a blank post and write: “Working a new object. Heard something hiding inside a room. More soon.” I stare at the cursor blinking after “soon.” My finger slides down to the “Post” button like a habit, then hovers a millimeter above the trackpad. The chapter of my life where I posted first and checked sources later burned through me and left a map of what not to do inked under my skin.
“What do we owe the dead?” I ask the recorder in a low voice. “To speak quickly so we’re first? Or to be right so we’re useful?”
My phone buzzes again. New email subject lines stack like dominoes: SUBMISSION: My Grandpa’s Bell Story; Audio Tip!!; Re: Your Last Episode Was Exploitative. I don’t open them. I open my calendar instead and block out “Field—St. Brigid’s—Impulse Tests.” Dawn slides in easy on calendars; the sexton drinks his first coffee facing the water like a priest, and if I ask before the city wakes, he’ll say yes or say nothing, which is Ashgrove for yes with limits.
I put both hands on the desk, palms down, and feel the grit I keep meaning to wipe from the mousepad. Grit is how a place declares itself on your skin. Diesel hangs faint in the air from early trucks near the pier, and somewhere a line of net dries that smells like salt that doesn’t belong to this lake. My mouth tastes like the coffee I shouldn’t have accepted from the bait shop last hour—thin, bitter, ritual.
I scrub deeper into the file to see if the scream repeats in a different posture. It does, shorter, like the person making it ran out of breath or joy or time. I set loop points around the second occurrence, solo it, and lower the volume until I only hear the curve of it, not the cruelty. Under the scream’s second edge, the overtone modulates by a hair—a tremor where wind or the ringer’s rope could have shifted between strikes.
“That scallop again,” I say. “Not an artifact. Environmental.”
I open four more YouTube clips: Christmas mass, funeral toll, test ring during repairs, and a guy filming his kid skateboarding past the church while the bell rings like it might jar loose a memory. I sample each, normalize levels, and layer their spectrogram snapshots over mine as transparent ghosts. The repair-day clip, filmed from the side alley, gives me the cleanest body; it lines up best with my file. The scream still sits under the third partial like a shadow that learned to peak where light is strongest.
“You’re under St. Brigid’s voice,” I say, and the words find weight as they pass out of my mouth.
Micro-hook—my phone thrums like a trapped fly. The show inbox has inverted from quiet to shouting. “My uncle rang bells there in the ‘80s,” one email preview says. “DM me—big fan—followed since the medal episode,” says another, which needles a tender place and makes my shoulders creep up toward my ears. Another: “Don’t you dare touch that family’s grief.” I press the phone face down on the desk and balance the locket on my palm to keep from typing back to a stranger that I’m trying not to.
I think about posting a ten-second clip with the ring and the rasp and the whisper of the scream, carefully low enough to keep voices from grabbing it and waterboarding it for content. I imagine the Facebook swap group making it into a morality thirst trap—their banners under the post, their cousins in the comments, men with last names on buildings tagging one another like a chain of blessings that never reaches the body of the blessed.
“No,” I say, and the word is an exhale that scrubs the already-scrubbed air.
I record a safer thing instead: “Listener note,” I say, “I’ll post a still image of analysis to show process. No audio yet. Field test first. Consent conversations next. Please don’t send me stories you don’t have permission to tell.” I delete the last sentence and speak it again gentler, then delete that, too. I settle for, “Thank you for your patience.”
I publish the spectrogram image without the locket in frame. Within seconds, hearts and replies stack. “What is it?” “Ghost?” “I hear a harmonium under bells like that sometimes, could be that!” “Probably nothing.” “This gives me chills.” Someone with an anchor emoji writes, “St. Brigid’s bells are out of tune; I did a paper on it back in the day—message me.” I put my phone on Do Not Disturb before the tempo of attention writes my heartbeat for me.
I lay the locket back on its cloth. The copper strip blinks at me, innocent and indecent. The brass smells faintly like damp pennies and old polish. I hold it near my cheek and it’s cool, then warm in my skin’s shallow sun. I think about how brass keeps its secrets until you make it choose. How bells promise ceremony while their ropes burn palms.
“Field test, then,” I tell the recorder. “Impulse responses at St. Brigid’s nave and tower if allowed. Wind conditions: seiche today, forecast calmer at dawn. Bring clapboard, starter pistol, pillows, contact mics, permission letter, cash for donation box, and patience for gatekeepers.”
The word gatekeepers pulls Everett Crane into the room without his body. His foundation underwrote the tower repairs two years before I left for college. His name sits on plaques like a watermark that shows in certain light. I rub my forearms again, as if the thought left dust.
The window over my desk shows the lake shrugging into itself, then throwing that lazy surge back at the shore. I used to think seiche days were the lake’s yawn. I know now they’re more like a reset button nobody respects. Sound bends weird when the water sulks; voices carry too far or not at all; a whisper at the pier arrives as gossip in a kitchen. It matters for field work. I jot a note: “Control for seiche amplitude.”
I click into my calendar and send the sexton’s email a short message: “Question re: quick acoustic measurements in tower—noninvasive—donation made. Tomorrow at dawn? —Mara (Second Lives).” I don’t name the locket or the scream or the year scratched inside. I keep the circle small enough to manage, as if circles obey intention.
My stomach speaks up. It’s late enough that food turns into guilt in this town—one diner open, one bartender ready to hand me a sandwich with a sermon about panhandlers. I pull open the drawer where I hide better noodles and worse chocolate. The chocolate wins. I let it melt slow on my tongue until it tastes like a decision instead of a treat.
My inbox dings again—Do Not Disturb forgot to silence email because I told it not to once and it remembers. A subject line from a local domain reads: “Re: Bells.” I open it because I’m weak for specificity. Two sentences greet me: “You won’t find what you’re hunting in a file. You’ll find it where the dust doesn’t lie.” No signature, just an image attachment of a rope burned smooth where hands have needed friction.
“Cute,” I say to the empty room, but my hands go cold. I save the image to a folder named “Unverified” and mark the email as potential source or troll. The bait shop refrigerator kicks back on with a groan and pulls my attention to gravity.
I return to the spectrogram and blow it up until the pixels show their stair-step ancestry. The scream’s ridge sits under the third partial like a fish under a dock in high sun, moving when the light moves. I trace it with the cursor and feel, under and beside the fear and the urge to show my work to the world, a steadier thing: the knowledge that the room inside this noise has a roof I can stand under and a rope I can touch.
“Dawn,” I say, and the word steadies. “Tower.”
I shut down everything but the recorder. The locket clicks once in its bracketed hinge, a tiny vote for action. I cap the solvent, peel the contact mic gently from the brass, and hold the cloth around the heart like a nurse smoothing a sheet.
Outside, the lake handclaps again. Across the inlet, the regatta pennants dangle like tongues too tired to flatter. I picture the bell tower a few blocks inland, slate spine cutting gray sky, and I picture myself climbing its ribs while the town still thinks I’m teasing a trinket.
I lock the locket in the fireproof box under my desk and lay the key on top of my notebook, weight on weight. I stand there and listen to my room breathe.
The scream I captured never asks me for anything. It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the room that shaped it.
At dawn, I’m going to ask that room to speak.