第1章 第7節 知っている声
A Voice She Knows
Nora could not sleep, so she returned to the tape once more.
She wanted to find any sound she might have missed the first time.
Deep beneath her mother's voice, another voice had been buried.
It was , low, and clearly belonged to an old man.
The man who spoke had been standing far from the microphone.
Nora raised the level of that until the words grew clear.
The old man said that Marion should the bells carefully.
" the bells," he told her, "and you will know the day."
He said that the bells would never lie, whatever the town claimed.
Nora played it again, trying to place the voice that haunted her.
It was a voice which seemed to know her mother very well.
He spoke to Marion the way an old friend speaks after many years.
She wondered who he was and what the strange words could mean.
The bells that he mentioned belonged to no church she could imagine.
He told Marion that time in Saltmere was measured by sound, not clocks.
She could not tell whether it was , a , or a code.
The man added that she must trust only what the bells told her.
A wrapped inside a lullaby, left for a daughter to .
Nora wrote his words down exactly as he had spoken them.
"The bells will tell you what people never will," he had said.
Whoever this man was, he had known her mother's secret plan.
He was someone who had helped her hide these messages in sound.
Perhaps he was still alive in Saltmere, waiting near his bells.
Nora realised that the tape held not one voice, but two allies.
Her mother, and a stranger whose name she did not yet know.
" the bells," she repeated softly, and the words followed her into sleep.