Behind the Veil: Making Chapter 15 — “The Orphan Bell
- Joshua Bish
- Dec 21, 2025
- 3 min read
Teaser
A school stands finished and proud. Brick gleams, windows shine, and the promise of learning hangs in the air. Only the bell is afraid, and the land remembers.
Quick recap (light spoilers in The Orphan Bell)
The spring of 1897 brings celebration and ceremony to Concord State Normal School. The buildings rise against the ridges of Appalachia. Students and townsfolk buzz with pride. Yet nested in the center of that hope stands the new bell tower, and something hung in its shadows. At night it tolls without rope, without hand. Echoes ripple deeper than sound alone. Beneath the tower, the soil blackens. Something waits. If you linger long enough, you might hear it call. And the Lady listens back.
Why this chapter matters (themes & tone)
Legacy as summons. This is where institutional optimism meets archaic dread, a place where a “gift” intended to mark time instead bends time and memory.
The voice of the church and mountain. Headmistress Mary Hanover embodies Enlightenment, confidence, reason, order, and doctrine, while the ridge answers in a language older than any seminary.
Threshold and echo. The bell does not ring so much as remember. It bridges the heights of scholarly aspiration and the depths of ancestral place.
Sound as an omen. The toll becomes a summoning drum, marking not the hour but the awakening.
Historical lens (grounding the horror)
The Orphan Bell & Campus Tradition
Bells have been symbols of learning and community across Western history: pealing in town squares and school towers alike to mark labor, worship, and instruction. In real places with Appalachian roots, including Concord University’s own heritage, local lore sometimes tells of bells being heard at distances farther than expected, particularly in still air or cold dawn hours. This can happen because temperature gradients in the atmosphere bend sound waves back toward the ground, effectively carrying low-frequency sounds farther than in normal conditions. A temperature inversion at night, when warm air overlies cooler air near the surface, refracts sound waves downward instead of letting them dissipate upward, allowing distant or unexpectedly loud bell peals to carry great distances.
This atmospheric trick, a kind of natural acoustic anomaly, has generated folk talk throughout rural and mountain regions: bells “heard on the wind,” trains rumbled through silent valleys, or church bells pealed at midnight across fields. While real physical science explains at least part of this, the feeling of sound arriving unbidden at strange hours has always carried a supernatural tinge in lore.
In The Lady in Flesh, the Orphan Bell is not a mundane campus artifact. It is a conjuration.
Forged in Philadelphia. Gifted from Charleston. Hung in Concord’s tower. Like many real historical bells, it bears inscriptions, scripture, vines, and names meant to bind its sound to civility and continuity. But in the Appalachians, sound does not obey the straight lines of design. The bell comes to speak to something older in the soil.
Lore connections & foreshadowing
The bell is called, not chime. Unlike conventional campus bells that mark lectures and meals, this one calls something else back from the deep places.
Night and inversion. In the world of The Lady in Flesh, the conditions that let bells carry farther quiet air, temperature inversions, become conditions in which the veil thins.
Memory over mechanics. The bell’s peal is not an event but a stain; it imprints itself on minds and ground alike. Its sound is remembered physically in teeth, in sleep, and metaphysically in the soil it awakens.
Behind the scenes (craft & intent)
Tone recipe. Lean into the acoustic: the metallic ring, the low thrum felt in bones, the way sound curves through valley and ridge alike. Anchor supernatural dread not in fear for its own sake, but in physiology — the uncanny sensation of sound where it should not be.
Set-piece design.
The wagon delivery: heavy bronze hauled through the ridge fog.
The tower assembly: hurried masonry and rope, the weight of bronze changing the very lines of architecture.
The toll at night: one stroke that becomes a lingering vibration.
Language control. Echo, peel, sink, carry, remember verbs that shift the reader from mechanics to perception.
Favorite line
“It didn’t echo. Sound didn’t carry. Instead, it sank.”
This captures the bell’s horror: not dispersal, but absorption — a sound that invades rather than escapes.
Content warnings
Bell ringing without human action, atmospheric phenomena linked to fear response, psychological dread, and supernatural suggestion.
Question for the comments
Do you think the bell summons the Lady, awakens her, or simply reveals what was already listening?
Call to action
If this chapter resonated with you, share the post with someone who loves atmospheric horror grounded in history and sensation. Leave a comment with your own eerie sound experiences. Have you ever heard something far off that shouldn’t be heard at all?
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